Dawn of a New Constitutional Era or Opportunity Wasted? An Intellectual Reappraisal of China’s Anti-Monopoly Law

Abstract

China’s nascent “competition law” legislation, the Anti-Monopoly Law, has piqued the interest of many an antitrust practitioner. This Article argues that the attention is well-deserved, but for the wrong reason. The AML, it argues, is far broader than a competition law, and one is already on a misleading track attempting to read it within an antitrust paradigm. Legislations work only within a certain constitutional context, and the Chinese one is particularly complex. An intellectual reappraisal is due. The Article aims to do three things: to reconceptualize the AML as promulgated and identify major policy ambiguities; to review official updates and developments since promulgation with an eye to clarify such ambiguities; and to place the AML in China’s intellectual tradition to ascertain what it signifies for the present and augurs for the future.