Another post in our series on arbitration evolution in China. This post explores the question of how far should a system move toward internationally familiar arbitration norms while retaining domestic institutional choices?

China’s New Arbitration Law
Song Lianbin and Huang Yi

China’s first comprehensive rewrite of its Arbitration Law in thirty years changes more than technical rules. It expands party autonomy, gives formal recognition to the arbitral seat and online proceedings, cautiously opens the door to ad hoc arbitration, and broadens the preservation measures available while a dispute is pending.
The amended law was adopted on September 12, 2025, and took effect on March 1, 2026. The official text contains eight chapters and 96 articles. It moves Chinese arbitration toward several concepts familiar in international practice, but it does so incrementally. The combination of liberalization and continuing control is as important as any individual provision.
The previous post in this series examined China’s willingness to combine mediation and arbitration in ways that differ from practice in many other jurisdictions. The new statute presents the same broader design problem at the legislative level: how far should a system move toward internationally familiar arbitration norms while retaining domestic institutional choices? Five changes illustrate the balance.
1. “Seat” now has statutory meaning
Article 81 gives the seat of arbitration its first express statutory footing in Chinese law. Parties to a foreign-related arbitration may agree in writing on the seat. Unless they agree otherwise on the procedural law, the seat determines the law governing the arbitral procedure, the courts with supervisory jurisdiction, and the place where the award is deemed to have been made. This separates the legal seat from the physical location of the administering institution, a distinction that is fundamental in much of international arbitration but historically has been less clear in Chinese practice. The change should make the legal consequences of choosing China as a seat more predictable.
2. Ad hoc arbitration arrives cautiously
Article 82 permits ad hoc arbitration seated in China for the first time, but only in specified categories: foreign-related maritime disputes and foreign-related disputes between enterprises established in designated areas, including State Council-approved free trade pilot zones and the Hainan Free Trade Port. The parties may select qualified arbitrators and agreed rules without using a permanent arbitration institution, although the tribunal must report basic information to the arbitration association after it is constituted. Ordinary domestic commercial disputes remain institutional. The reform therefore opens a door rather than removing it.
3. Online arbitration gets a statutory default
Article 11 provides that arbitration may be conducted online unless the parties expressly object and gives online proceedings the same legal effect as offline proceedings. Chinese arbitration institutions had already invested heavily in digital case-management systems and virtual hearings. The statute now converts those practices from institutional experimentation into an express legislative default. From a dispute-design perspective, the choice is notable: the law does not require the parties affirmatively to opt into online proceedings; it permits them unless a party opts out.
4. Arbitration agreements become more resilient
Several provisions make it harder for jurisdictional disputes to derail an arbitration. Article 30 strengthens separability by providing that an arbitration agreement can survive disputes over whether the underlying contract was formed, modified, rescinded, terminated, or invalid. Article 27(3) permits the existence of an arbitration agreement to be recognized when, after being prompted by the tribunal, a respondent does not deny the agreement before the first hearing. Article 31 also permits the arbitral tribunal itself to rule on the validity of the arbitration agreement, although courts retain an important supervisory role. Together, these provisions move more threshold questions into the arbitral process and reduce opportunities for collateral delay.
5. Preservation expands, but tribunal power remains limited
The new law broadens China’s system of preservation measures. A party facing urgency may seek a court order requiring another party to perform, or refrain from performing, specified acts, and the law directs courts to handle preservation applications promptly. That is a meaningful expansion beyond traditional property and evidence preservation. At the same time, the law stops short of giving arbitral tribunals a general power to order interim measures themselves. Song and Huang view that omission as an important limitation, particularly in international cases in which enforceability across jurisdictions may matter.
Those five changes capture the direction of reform, but not the entire story. The amended law leaves other issues only partially resolved. Song and Huang point to the absence of a compulsory mechanism requiring third parties to cooperate in evidence taking, uncertainty about the supervisory role of the China Arbitration Association, and the continued distinction between domestic and foreign-related arbitration. The statute therefore modernizes the system without attempting to make Chinese arbitration identical to the legal regimes of other major seats.
For the broader ADR community, that incrementalism is itself worth watching. Legal reform in dispute resolution rarely consists of choosing between tradition and convergence in one step. China has instead adopted a mixture: recognize the seat, normalize online proceedings, strengthen arbitration agreements, expand preservation, and test ad hoc arbitration within defined boundaries. The next post looks closely at that last experiment—why China long required institutional arbitration and what may follow from allowing some parties to proceed without an institution.

About the authors
Song Lianbin is a professor at the China University of Political Science and Law. Huang Yi is a partner at Grandall Law Firm and a member of the ICC Commission on Arbitration and ADR.

This post draws on Song Lianbin and Huang Yi, “The Gains and Losses of the 2025 Arbitration Law: A Dual Perspective on Milestone Breakthroughs and Progressive Constraints,” in Richard Bales & Dan Xie, eds., The Cambridge Handbook of Arbitration in China (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming spring 2027). The submitted chapter is available on SSRN.