By Sun Jin (Marlow), April 2, 2024

In Chinese civil laws, there is a concept called “the statute of limitations on filing a complaint in a Chinese Court” or “time limitation of action” (hereinafter referred to as “time limitation”), which means after contractual opponent breached the contract, or someone infringed your legal rights including but not limited to all kinds of civil rights, or intellectual property rights, and so on, you need to take legal actions against the opponent within a certain period, which is 3 or 4 years now, otherwise, China court will not protect your legal rights of debt any more.

The legal actions could include some official demand letter, or simply raise your claims of compensation via phone call or email or face to face talking, or even a litigation or arbitration case. Of course, for the sake of evidence saving on procedure law, it’s recommended to raise your claim via some traceable way, for example, emails, when you will keep a copy of email after sending it to opponent; and it will be better if opponent can reply your email, when this means your email had been received by the opponent. The understand the reason of this doing, need you to understand another law concept in China, the rule of burden of proof in Chinese civil procedure law, which is, these who claim must evidence his/her claims, when the opponent is not obliged to evidence your claims, so this is very different from the “disclosure of evidence” in common law.

The purpose of this law concept is to urge the victim parties to exercise their legal rights in time, instead of let their legal rights asleep.

Before Chinese Civil Code came into effective, the time limitations could be one or two years in different situations, after the Civil Code was become effective, the time limitation of domestic cases were unified into 3 years. But there is one exception, for international trade dispute mainly international cargo sales contract dispute, the time limitation is still 4 years, as this time limitation of 4 years was established by some international conventions, which could not be altered by Chinese Civil Code.

While in middle of these time limitation 3 years or 4 years, they could be interrupted and restarted by claim actions.

This is a complicated law concept in Chinese civil law, and above is just a simple introduction. What you need to have in your mind, is that when you have some dispute with someone, as the victim party, you need to treat your legal rights with due urgency and take your legal actions in time, and the purpose of this article is gained.