Xiamen facilitates construction of Maritime Silk Road Central Legal District

Xiamen of East China's Fujian province has intensified measures to comprehensively facilitate the construction of the Maritime Silk Road Central Legal District (MSRCLD) since the district's establishment on Nov 5, 2021.

Building an international legal service system

Xiamen has introduced relevant policies with corresponding special funds in support of MSRCLD construction to provide a platform for high-end legal service institutions and outstanding legal talents.

To date, a total of 77 legal service and pan-legal service institutions have settled in Xiamen, which will help to continuously improve the city's legal ecosystem and enhance its legal services.

To cultivate more outstanding legal talents, a group of key projects such as the LLM Programme on Taxation by China in collaboration with the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development have been implemented in Xiamen, creating a tiered international legal talent training system with multiple categories and channels through which over 110 business trainings have been held so far.

Creating a dispute resolution system for international commercial and maritime affairs

Facing a new round of opening-up, Xiamen has strived to promote reform and innovation of foreign-related judicial trial mechanisms and systems and intensified efforts to enhance its strategic layout of foreign legal work and strengthen foreign-related judicial trials and arbitrations.

In the meantime, the city has also participated in formulation of international commercial and maritime laws and regulations to further facilitate relevant construction and build itself into a leading city in resolving international commercial and maritime disputes.

Since this year, the international commercial court, foreign-related maritime court and international resolution center on commercial and maritime disputes have been successively established in the city.

A representative office of the International Commercial Dispute Prevention and Settlement Organization (ICDPASO) has also been set up in Xiamen.

The city's court has included the Xiamen Arbitration Commission in its "one stop" diversified resolution platform on international commercial disputes and plans to formulate a special regulation on maritime arbitration in line with international standard practices in collaboration with the Silk Road Maritime alliance, which helps resolve international commercial and maritime disputes. 

Statistics show that the city's intermediate court, maritime court and arbitration commission have handled 821 cases involving international commercial and maritime disputes this year.

Fostering a high-quality law-based business environment

In addition, as a city with strong potential in foreign trade, Xiamen has stepped up efforts to create a high-quality law-based business environment for enterprises going global.

The MSRCLD has explored foreign trade compliance services of innovated enterprises, and introduced relevant measures such as establishing a digital enterprise compliance center and conducting public training on enterprise compliance to help enterprises guard against foreign trade compliance risks.

Furthermore, since this year, the MSRCLD has also accelerated efforts to enhance cooperation with the BRICS Partnership on New Industrial Revolution, introduced ten measures targeted at BRICS countries' legal service mechanisms, and selected high-quality law firms to provide legal services for BRICS and BRICS+ countries.