Enforcing a mainland Chinese arbitral award in the United Kingdom: a practitioner's note

The first thing a client with a CIETAC, SHIAC or SHAC award in hand usually wants to know is whether it can be enforced against assets in London. The short answer is yes. The fuller picture is that English enforcement of a mainland Chinese arbitral award is governed by a treaty framework that does most of the work, qualified by a closed list of grounds on which the award can be resisted, with a handful of practical considerations that determine whether the enforcement actually delivers the money. The short answer is therefore correct but, on its own, not very useful.

The framework

The United Kingdom is a signatory to the New York Convention 1958 — the Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards. So is the People's Republic of China, which acceded in 1987 with the standard "commercial matters" and "reciprocity" reservations. The Convention is implemented in English law by sections 100 to 103 of the Arbitration Act 1996 (with section 104 acting as a saving provision), and the substantive question on enforcement is essentially the question Article V of the Convention asks: can the award debtor make out one of a limited list of grounds for refusal? The list is closed; the threshold is meaningful; and the case law on each ground has had three decades to develop.

The UK Arbitration Act 2025 received Royal Assent on 24 February 2025 and principally amends Part I of the 1996 Act; it leaves the New York Convention enforcement machinery in Part III substantively intact, so the framework set out above continues to apply.

The grounds for refusal — at the level a non-specialist reader needs — include the incapacity of a party at the time of the agreement, the invalidity of the arbitration agreement itself, failure of proper notice or other fundamental procedural deficiency, the award going beyond the scope of what was submitted, improper composition of the tribunal, the award not yet being binding (or having been set aside in the seat), subject matter not being arbitrable under English law, and enforcement being contrary to English public policy. Each of those has its own evidential demands, its own English authority, and its own pattern of when it tends to bite and when it does not. That is the territory in which the real work happens; this article is not the place to elucidate it.

The institutions

For mainland Chinese awards, the institutions whose work we see most often in English enforcement proceedings are:

• China International Economic and Trade Arbitration Commission (CIETAC, 中国国际经济贸易仲裁委员会). The oldest and largest mainland institution by foreign-related caseload, headquartered in Beijing with sub-commissions across the country.
• Shanghai International Arbitration Center (SHIAC, 上海国际仲裁中心). Emerged from the CIETAC Shanghai Sub-Commission following the 2012 institutional split with CIETAC; formally renamed SHIAC in April 2013. Legacy jurisdictional questions over agreements that nominated the pre-existing "CIETAC Shanghai Sub-Commission" were resolved by the Supreme People's Court's 2015 Reply (Fa Shi [2015] No. 15). Now an independent institution with a particular focus on cross-border commercial arbitration.
• Shanghai Arbitration Commission (SHAC, 上海仲裁委员会). Established in 1995, originally domestic-focused but increasingly active in foreign-related commercial work since the rule changes of 2014.
• Beijing Arbitration Commission / Beijing International Arbitration Center (BAC / BIAC, 北京仲裁委员会 / 北京国际仲裁中心). A leading commercial institution often selected for its English-language procedural offering and its arbitrator panel.
• China Maritime Arbitration Commission (CMAC, 中国海事仲裁委员会). Specialist maritime institution; the awards we encounter from it tend to be in disputes with a shipping, charterparty, or marine-insurance complexion.

There are others. The list above covers the bulk of what English enforcement practitioners actually see. None of these institutions changes the substantive English-law analysis at the enforcement stage — that analysis is institution-agnostic — but each has its own procedural records, certification practices, and conventions for issuing the original award and the seal-bearing duplicate that will eventually be lodged in court here.

What clients underestimate

A few practical points recur in cases where clients come to us late.

Translations of the arbitration agreement and the award itself need to meet a standard that English courts will accept; ad-hoc bilingual versions produced by the parties in the underlying transaction are usually not enough.

Service of the enforcement application on a counterparty located in the PRC engages the Hague Service Convention and the PRC's specific reservations to it, which materially affect how, when, and through which channels effective service can be achieved. We have seen enforcement applications stalled for months because this question was not addressed at the outset.

The freezing-order and asset-tracing toolkit that English law provides to a successful enforcement applicant is a separate exercise from the enforcement application itself, and one which is often best run in parallel rather than sequentially. A worldwide freezing order obtained at the right moment can, by itself, transform the commercial calculation between the parties.

On the PRC side, where a lower court is minded to refuse enforcement of a foreign arbitral award, that decision is subject to a prior-reporting and approval process up to the Supreme People's Court. The practical effect is that refusal of enforcement, when it does occur, has typically passed through more scrutiny than the equivalent first-instance decision in the United Kingdom.

Finally, the question of whether the award is "binding" for English-law purposes interacts with whatever parallel mainland-court process may be on foot — a set-aside application before the Intermediate People's Court in the seat, for example. That interaction is not always obvious from a reading of the headline case law.

Award creditors should also be aware of the six-year limitation period under section 7 of the Limitation Act 1980 for actions on a foreign arbitral award (National Ability v Tinna Oils [2009] EWCA Civ 1330).

Two groups of client

The clients who come to us with a Chinese arbitral award in hand tend to fall into two groups. The first is the award-creditor: a Chinese or international party that has won at CIETAC, SHIAC, BAC or one of the other institutions and wants to be paid out against the debtor's UK assets. The second is the award-debtor: a UK-based party that has received notice of an enforcement application here and needs to take a view on whether to resist, and on what grounds. Both groups warrant proper advice. The grounds that look promising on a first reading tend to be unhelpful when interrogated against English authority; the ones that look unpromising occasionally have life in them. We have acted for both.

What the firm brings

Two things, in plain terms. First, the substantive English-law practice on the New York Convention and Arbitration Act 1996 framework — like any specialist English commercial dispute resolution practice. Second, the bilingual capacity to read the underlying arbitration agreement in Chinese, follow the Chinese-language procedural exchanges where they are relevant, communicate directly with counsel and parent-firm colleagues in Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong and elsewhere, and conduct client conversations without an interpreter in the room. For a Chinese award-creditor, the consequence is that we are one of relatively few practices that can run the matter end-to-end in either language. For a UK-based award-debtor whose underlying transaction was negotiated and performed in Chinese, the consequence is the same in reverse — we can read what was actually agreed without working through someone else's translation.

I will write again on related themes — the parallel position on UK-seated arbitral awards being enforced in mainland China; the position on Hong Kong awards under the separate UK-Hong Kong arrangements; and the choice-of-seat decision when a UK-China commercial contract is first drafted.

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Jackson Ng MCIArb is a Partner and Barrister at Duan & Duan UK LLP and a member of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators. He is available to act as counsel in commercial arbitration proceedings and on the enforcement and challenge of awards. This commentary is general in nature and does not constitute legal advice on any specific matter; readers should obtain advice tailored to their own circumstances.