Scope of the book and a definition of China

So said the late President Wilson about the linkage of concentrated economic and political power some ninety years ago, in the context of the United States of America. These were the same concerns that had prompted the passage of the Sherman Act 1890 to control the giant industrial trusts that developed in late nineteenth-century America and appeared to many to threaten democratic institutions.

This text will seek to demonstrate that Wilson's observation is still relevant today in considering law and policy development concerning economic competition in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Each jurisdiction exhibits facets of the posited relationship between economic and political power in those jurisdictions’ differing approaches to competition policy making and the adoption of a comprehensive law to enforce the political choice of a pro-competition policy. In China, the political monopoly of the Chinese Communist Party previously led to a complete state monopoly of economic power. This economic policy was effectively abandoned in 1978 and the following discussion of competition policy and law in China results directly from that seismic shift. China now appears to have decided that a set of rules is needed to regulate the socialist market economy.