CHINA Trends and Developments Contributed by: Greg Hallahan, Amanda Rasmussen and Kristine Kwok, Secretariat
UnionPay Co Ltd; (c) account balances at the WeChat Pay, Tenpay and Alipay platforms; (d) assets bought and sold through the JD Fi - nance platform; (e) information about funds registered with the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Com - mission; (f) securities holdings disclosed to the China Se - curities Regulatory Commission; (g) individual and company outbound investment registered with the State Administration for Market Regulation; (h) individuals who receive subsistence payments via the Ministry of Civil Affairs; and (i) tax registration, payment and recovery recorded by the State Taxation Administration. • Property information, including: (a) land use rights, housing and forestry owner - ship registered with the Ministry of Natural Resources; (b) fishing vessel and other shipping information held by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Af - fairs and the Ministry of Transport; and (c) vehicles listed in Ministry of Public Security records. • Personal information, including: (a) marriage registration and membership of non- profit or community organisations accessible through the Ministry of Civil Affairs; (b) an individual’s PRC ID number, held by the Na - tional Citizen Identity Information Center, and individual and entity social credit codes held by the National Organization Unified Social Credit Code Data Service Center; and (c) travel document (likely passport) numbers held by the Ministry of Public Security. Asset-tracing research outside of Mainland China Where assets held locally are encumbered or unidenti - fied, a multi-jurisdictional asset tracing investigation may be helpful. Obtaining start-up identifiers from China-sourced information is still critical at this stage. Public records and media reports in most overseas jurisdictions ren - der Chinese character names in pinyin or other rom - anised scripts. It can be challenging (or impossible),
therefore, to disaggregate false positives overseas, especially for names already very common in China. It is important to conduct public record reviews and Chinese language media research to understand the background and profile of subject/s, and to obtain key identifiers such as corporate affiliations, types of business activities and operations, as well as personal information (in relation to individual subjects) about business associates, family members and potential proxies. Outside of mainland China, the most common juris - dictions to examine for assets in cases involving Chi - nese debtors are:
• Hong Kong; • Singapore; • the United States; • Canada; • Australia; and • the United Kingdom.
These jurisdictions have several advantages given: • there is substantial cross-border trade and invest - ment between China and these countries, so Chinese entrepreneurs and businesses often have a presence there; • high net worth Chinese individuals show a prefer - ence for sending their children to study and set up their family in these jurisdictions, even while they are primarily engaged in China; • asset-related publicly available information is rela - tively transparent and straightforward to retrieve; and • all are common law jurisdictions that have previ - ously recognised PRC legal judgments and are sig - natories to the Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards adopted by the United Nations in 1958 (“the New York Conven - tion”). Available asset-related information in the key jurisdictions The following types of asset-related information can be identified from public databases maintained by
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