Unexpected Uses for China's New Antitrust Law

China Mobile Communications Corp. has settled an antitrust suit filed against it by a Beijing lawyer, Bloomberg reports.Zhou Ze, a lawyer with Beijing Wentian Law Firm, told the news service that China Mobile paid him 1,000 yuan ($146) to withdraw a suit alleging the company abused its market position to overcharge customers. China Mobile is the country's leading cellular phone service provider and the world's largest in terms of subscribers.A lawyer for the company, Xue Junfu of the Beijing Jinde Law Firm, acknowledged the payment but characterized it as an expression of gratitude for Zhou's suggestions, not reimbursement for overcharging.China's anti-monopoly law came into effect a little more than a year ago. Since then, many observers in the West have been primarily concerned with how the Chinese government will use the law to scrutinize global mergers and acquisition activity.But Peter Yuen, a Hong Kong partner at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, has been tracking a number of cases in which individual Chinese lawyers, many of them active in consumer rights issues, have used an article of the new law to bring private actions against large Chinese companies, including China Mobile, Baidu and China Netcom.Yuen thinks the proliferation of such cases may eventually require the Supreme People's Court to issue an interpretation of the anti-monopoly law. Though China does not have a common law system, Supreme Court interpretations are essentially binding on lower Chinese courts.Yuen says it's possible the Supreme Court could find that individual private actions are not permitted under the anti-monopoly law. In the U.S., private antitrust actions are typically brought by large companies or are filed as class actions by groups of plaintiffs.If individual private antitrust cases are permitted in China, Yuen figures the next step will be for lawyers to target major multinationals operating in China.