China academic and legal expert Donald Clarke has posted the following to the China Law Discussion list
Here’s a really interesting development in the Chinese legal system that, at least at first glance, looks pretty much all positive to me: the Supreme People’s Court has developed a public database of all those who have yet to comply with a court judgment against them (over 6 million cases, but cases in military courts are excluded). This is a great step forward not so much for transparency in the legal system, but rather for improving information on creditworthiness and related information. If you can figure out who’s untrustworthy before you do business with them (instead of having to find out through experience), that reduces the load on the legal system and reduces wasteful friction in transactions generally. Those in the due diligence business should pay particular attention; henceforth, not to check out this database would I think amount almost to malpractice.
He also writes
I’ve blogged about it (with links) here (outside the Great Firewall) http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/china_law_prof_blog/2009/04/china-establishes-public-database-of-judgment-debtors.html and here (inside the Great Firewall) http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_5bc42a990100ckoa.html .
Here’s a screen shot also provided by Clarke
