On April 30, 2019, the U.S. Department of Justice issued an updated version of its Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs. The guidance document sets forth a list of common questions that prosecutors may ask in evaluating corporate programs in a criminal investigation. Compared with the 2017 version, the 2019 updated one is more pragmatic and practical. Although the document does not explicitly indicate “right” answers to such questions, the questions clearly reveal the components of an effective compliance program to enterprises.  We translated the document into Chinese for reference.

Based on the successful cooperation between Baidu and GAC at the high-precision map level, the cooperation between them in Level-3 autonomous driving and other products will also be carried out gradually.  We look forward to the GAC vehicle model’s early realization of the leap from the scientific research results to the mass production.  In the future, more and more autonomous driving solutions with "Apollo gene" will become the standard configuration for traditional automobile companies’ AI upgrades, which will also bring about another revolution to the human travel.

Boao Forum for Asia (“BFA”) was held on March 26 to 29, 2019. Its sub-forum — 5G: The achiever of Internet of Things — talks about the 5G development.  The participants of this forum believed 5G development should be open, cooperative, globally unified and integrated with existing industrial facilities.

Miao Wei, the Minister of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (“MIIT”), said at BFA that the MIIT and Ministry of Transport (“MOT”) had reached a consensus that the government would devote itself to promoting the research on vehicle networking, and speeding up the intelligent and digital revolution on the highways in China.

China passed the Foreign Investment Law ("FIL").  Among many excitements to Chinese and non-Chinese investors, there is a great news or heart balm that the FIL did not illegalize the “variable interest entity” structure or VIEs as the Foreign Investment Law (draft) suggested.  VIEs have been the investment structure of choice for foreign investors to navigate through the grey areas of PRC law on foreign direct investment for over two decades.   It remains to see that many VIEs will be continuously structured to turn around the areas not available for non-Chinese investors, and if the Chinese government will illegalize them in China.  The article is not legal opinion and for registered members only.  

The Foreign Investment Law reflects a win-win resolution from the Sino-US trade friction.  With the adoption of the draft Foreign Investment Law, there will be a new gold rush attracting all different kinds of foreign investors coming into the Chinese market.

When talking about the important part of national security, like science and technology, Xi pointed out that China should pace up with launching of preemptive alerting and monitoring system for science and technology security.  Especially, he called on fast-tracking the law-making in AI, gene editing, medical diagnosis, autonomous driving, unmanned aerial vehicles, service robots and other fields.