Law: An End to Chinese Inscrutability,the country's legal code goes public

After years of secrecy, the country's legal code goes public

An American lawyer in Beijing, Timothy Gelatt, met with Chinese officials earlier this month to discuss the taxes on a joint venture involving one of his U.S. clients. As the conversation progressed, an official suddenly - produced a document Gelatt had never seen. "I said, 'Oh, what's that?' " he recalls. The document was a ruling directly related to the taxing of joint ventures, but it had never been published openly. To foreign attorneys and many Chinese as well, the incident was typical. Says Gelatt: "We are constantly finding out by accident things that are relevant to what we're doing."

China's...

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