From the 1904 Code to the Foreign Investment Law. The new Chinese company legal system as the last piece of a secular history

Chinese law is unique – especially because of the influence of Confucianism – and has been created quite recently: the first Chinese Company Law was adopted in 1904, but all private companies went public after 1947, becoming either a State-owned enterprise or a collectively–owned enterprise. During the Seventies initiated the process of merging a socialist market with Western business models, and in 1979 passed the first of the “three enterprise laws”, which outlined organizational models to help China to open up to the world; then, the 1993 Company Law and 1997 Partnership Law outlined models eligible by Chinese people. Today the Company Law is increasingly important, as it will codify all companies incorporated in China, according to Foreign Investment Law (FIL). This paper attempts to piece together the evolution of Chinese company law and to forecast the impact of the FIL. It is extremely difficult to evaluate that reform as a whole, but undoubtedly further evolution of the Chinese company law is still needed