The Roots of The Chinese Leniency Policy: A journey in time and space from the Ancient Chinese legal instititution of the Tzu-Shou or Zi shou to the US model

The PRC competition law is composed of two main tools: the Law of the PRC for Countering Unfair Competition (which entered into vigor on December 1, 1993) and the Anti-Monopoly Law of the PRC (AML) (adopted and promulgated on August 30, 2007) which deals with anti-competitive practices and merger control. This article focuses on the very damaging anti-competitive practices for consumers, the "cartels". To implement the AML, the Chinese legislator chose an administrative model with three competition authorities. Two of them had jurisdiction for cartels: the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) for monopolistic conducts based on prices, and the State Administration for Industry and Commerce of the PRC (SAIC) for monopolistic practices not dealing with prices and abuses of dominant market position. The two authorities developed their own leniency program for fighting more efficiently against cartels. Since April 2018 the two competition authorities merged into one single competition authority called the State Administration for Market Regulation. With that merger comes the trending notion of reform. The leniency policy concept was born in the USA in 1978. It was successfully improved in 1993 and 1994 by Ann Bingaman, Assistant Director General of the US DOJ Antitrust Division at that time. It became a high-performance model which generated followers throughout the world. This paper presents the PRC leniency policy and its roots in time and in space. Through this paper, the author attempts to answer the question of the consistency between the RPC leniency policy and the ancient Chinese legal institution of the 自首 Tzu-Shou or zì shǒu.