The details on the total number of financial disputes in the Chinese courts in 2018 are unknown (perhaps to be revealed in Supreme People’s Court President Zhou Qiang’s upcoming report to the National People’s Congress), but several recent white papers by Shanghai courts provide a glimpse into some of the issues in 2017 and 2018 (and in Pudong, with further historical data).  Local Shanghai judges comment that the caseload is likely to increase in in 2019.  Those white papers are a bilingual white paper on financial dispute resolution, published by the Shanghai Higher People’s Court late in 2018, and two white papers by the Pudong District Court, one on consumer financial cases and the other surveying the past 10 years of financial cases (full text of this report has escaped me, per my earlier blogpost).

Some of the facts and figures from Shanghai are:

There were many fewer second instance (appeal) cases. One of the many reasons is that court performance indicators discourage appeals.

According to the Shanghai Higher People’s Court, the largest proportion of cases were credit card disputes (149,609) year-on-year growth of 52% (83% of financial disputes); 16,528 financial loan contract disputes, (9.2%) up 14.5% year-on-year；4,319 financial lease  disputes (1.6%), with the year-on-year growth of 45.17%； 2,927 insurance disputes, up by 30.6%；and 1,246 securities and futures disputes.  Credit card cases are not under the jurisdiction of the new financial court and the judges attributed the increase in disputes in the large increase in the number of credit cards issued.

On P2P cases, those rose from 315 in 2015 to 663 in 2016 and 1508 in 2017.  I surmise that those numbers are likely to have gone up in 2018.

The Shanghai Financial Court reported that they accepted 1897 cases during calendar year 2018.

In their report, the higher people’s court judges noted that in 2017, a total of 49 bond defaults occurred, of which 29 were public bonds and 20 were private bonds, of which 11 ended up in litigation, all of which were actions brought by institutional investors against bond issuers. Some bondholders sued the issuers for anticipatory repudiation and required the issuers to pay principal and interest, raising new issues for the courts. The judges noted that with the economic “deleveraging” policy, market liquidity will tighten further,  which they predicted will further trigger bond default disputes.

Tao Xiuming, a law firm partner and member of ICC China, who contributed to a 2016 study that the ICC issued on financial institutions and international arbitration. wrote (with several colleagues) a chapter on financial dispute resolution in the Beijing Arbitration Commission’s Commercial Dispute Resolution in China: An Annual Review and Preview (2018) (2018)  (for some reason the book does not seem to be on the publisher’s website).  He commented that not only was 2017 the starting year for tighter financial risk control, it also coincided with a marked increase in the number of defaults and bankruptcies, leading to many disputes and that the government’s change in national macroeconomic policy has an impact on the adjudication of financial disputes.
Tao noted that to facilitate the Central Government’s macro policy on tighter control on financial risks, the Supreme People’s Court issued Several Opinions on Further Strengthening Financial Trials and that “the Chinese courts can and will adapt to the ever-changing macroeconomic policies to align to the activities of modern commerce.” He does not mention the reason is that the courts must serve the greater situation (服务大局), as emphasized by the latest judicial reform plan.