I was honored to be invited to moderate the opening session for the 21st annual Timothy A Gelatt Dialogue at NYU Law on “Due Process for Foreign Business in China?” on November 12, 2015.

Here’s a quick summary the program (November 14, 2015):

There were presentations on intellectual property (by me/Mark Cohen), antitrust, human rights, detention and release of foreigners, and cybersecurity.

As several speakers noted business people have human rights too, although these interests are often ignored by the human rights community in favor of non-commercial issues. Another speaker also suggested that the current division between human rights and commercial law made little sense, and that human rights advocacy should pick up commercial concerns, while commercial concerns should also not ignore human rights issues.

In listening to various anecdotes, it became apparent to many of us that no matter how cautious, expert or how much of a “China hand” one is, one (or one’s client) may not be immune from detention, arrest or arbitrary proceedings, and that these legal proceedings may be initiated out of spite and well distanced from any kind of legal accountability. One speaker suggested that in the current environment, China has neither rule of law nor rule by laws, but rule by agency in a range of fields.

I gave a presentation on due process concerns for foreigners, noting that there were increasing concerns about national treatment and differential procedures and remedies for foreigners in IP litigation, including detention during the pendency of a disputed legal matter, extended time periods for civil litigation, delays in evidence gathering and extra-territorial reach of the courts. I also briefly discussed how foreign courts were handling disputes that involved concerns over handling of matters by Chinese courts or enforcement agencies (notably Gucci and Vringo). Some speakers also expressed concern about an increasing extraterritorial reach of the Chinese courts.

Regarding antitrust and intellectual property, one expert in the field asked a question about whether Chinese practices were mercantilistic/outliers, or simply reflected the interests of “implementers” vs innovators.  I noted that I had heard these perspectives expressed previously, but I wondered if China was in fact proposing a different kind of question: whether antitrust law demanded any proportionality with IP protection as it seemed to me that imposing nearly one billion dollars in damages (in the Qualcomm case) is disproportionately high in a country where average patent damages are 20 to 30,000 dollars, and even injunctive relief can be difficult to enforce.

There appeared to be widespread support regarding the Xi/Obama outcome on establishing a dialogue on cybersecurity. Some speakers noted that cybersecurity had widely different concepts in the United States and China, with the Chinese focus on cybersecurity referring to the overall control by the state of the Internet and related infrastructure.  The Chinese government was also interested in direct regulation of the Internet with more government controls.

Several speakers saw an important relationship amongst cyberespionage, innovation policies and antitrust as calculated efforts by China to develop its technological edge. In addition, several speakers from a range of disciplines noted that China and Chinese officials were now increasingly engaged in efforts to advance its own perspectives in areas such as human rights, cybersecurity/internet governance and antitrust, which may increasingly challenge the United States’ role as a global norm setter.

Altogether, it was a great group of thought leaders with divergent backgrounds but convergent and deep interests in China. My congratulations to Jerome A. Cohen, Ira Belkin and NYU’s Asian law Institute.