PDFs for Sale

PDFs of our articles and translations of Chinese cases are available for purchase. For details, please contact us via contact@sinotalks.com or the following form:





    Chinese Courts’ Inconsistent Applications of a Guiding Case on Food Safety: Problems & Solutions
    Chinese Courts’ Inconsistent Applications of a Guiding Case on Food Safety: Problems & Solutions

    The Supreme People’s Court has established an impressive framework to facilitate the use of Guiding Cases but has not given clear guidance on how to handle inconsistent applications of a Guiding Case by Chinese courts. In this article, the authors analyze the inconsistent applications of Guiding Case No. 60 by several important courts in China, discuss potential problems associated with such inconsistency, and propose solutions to these problems.


    Guiding Case No. 60

    In May 2016, the Supreme People’s Court of China released Guiding Case No. 60 to provide guiding principles regarding, inter alia, the interpretation of certain food safety standards. This piece explains why these principles still have guiding value even though the food safety standards involved in this case are no longer effective.


    Guiding Case No. 92

    Guiding Case No. 92 provides guidance on an important issue frequently encountered in cases involving infringement of rights to new plant varieties: how to determine whether two plants are of the same variety, when the related DNA fingerprinting test result cannot provide a clear answer.  According to this Guiding Case, when this happens, the allegedly infringing party, i.e., the defendant, has the burden to prove that the allegedly infringing plant is different from the plant for which variety rights have been granted.  How did the court justify the shifting of the burden to the defendant?