China’s Policy of Economic Sanctions: Legislation and Enforcement

This article aims at analyzing the People’s Republic of China’s sanctions policy. The authors put special emphasis on the review of the current Chinese legislation on countering foreign unilateral measures targeting China. The emergence of a legal anti-sanctions framework in China is a development of 2020–2021, driven by the growing number of sanctions against China imposed by the U.S. and its allies against the background of trade war and global strategic competition. At the official level, Beijing remains vocal in condemning unilateral and extraterritorial sanctions by certain countries as violations of international law. Despite that, even before the current large-scale confrontation with the U.S., Chinese policymakers have used restrictive measures against third countries, though they have been traditionally adopted in an informal and opaque manner. Those measures have mostly been used as retaliation for certain acts of other states viewed by China as threats to its sovereignty and territorial integrity, and they have been specifically refined to maximize the impact on the target country while minimizing the damage to the domestic economy. The growing number of anti-China sanctions by the U.S. and its allies based on special legal instruments prompted the PRC to follow suit and create its own framework for introducing countermeasures and blocking mechanisms, although their implementation procedures still largely remain intransparent. China’s first steps were to officially introduce individual restrictions, but the persisting confrontational trends in PRC’s relations with the West might bring about formal or informal broadening of Chinese restrictions to transnational corporations and sectors of economy and promote further formalization of sanctions regimes.