Wuxi prosecutors provide all-round safeguards for local firms expanding overseas　

Binhu district of Wuxi, East China's Jiangsu province, is home to over 500 foreign-invested enterprises, including more than 20 invested by Fortune Global 500 companies. The district focuses on cutting-edge, high-tech industries, demonstrating a distinctive profile of high-quality agglomeration and technological leadership. 

In recent years, local enterprises in emerging industries such as advanced manufacturing, biomedicine, deep processing of agricultural products, and new energy have been expanding overseas at a rapid pace. To facilitate this trend, the Binhu District People's Procuratorate, responding to the district's need for high-level opening-up, has built a comprehensive foreign-related judicial protection system, offering full-chain legal safeguards for local enterprises going global.

The procuratorate has strengthened coordination in response to the rapid growth of cross-border trade by conducting regular visits and maintaining a regular presence in cross-border e-commerce industrial parks, bringing procuratorial services such as legal lectures and on-site legal support to the frontline of cross-border trade. The park now serves as a hub for cultivating cross-border e-commerce talent, a technology transfer and incubation hub for college students' innovation and entrepreneurship, and a Belt and Road cross-border e-commerce cooperation center. It has helped more than a dozen university start-ups go global, especially in Africa with its platform's operations spanning 20 African countries and connecting over 600,000 local merchants.

To address enterprises' concerns over the lack of access to foreign-related legal information, the procuratorate has extended the reach of its procuratorial services through multi-party collaboration. In the first half of this year, the procuratorate partnered with other departments to issue collaborative protection implementation guidelines at Wuxi's intellectual property liaison office and set up a foreign-related legal consultation think tank comprising lawyers and experienced prosecutors.

The think tank offers tailored guidance to foreign-oriented enterprises on frontier legal issues including overseas domain name protection, cross-border intellectual property risk control for AI-generated works, and design infringement of smart devices, providing legal support for enterprises expanding into overseas markets.

The procuratorate has found that trademark infringement and cross-border contract fraud are among the most common legal risks facing enterprises engaged in overseas business. Simply securing criminal convictions is often insufficient to recover economic losses or safeguard the credibility of China's foreign trade.

To address this issue, the procuratorate has improved the mechanism for recovering illicit gains and compensating losses in criminal cases, and established an all-round recovery system integrating punishment, legal interpretation, urging restitution and compensation, and dispute resolution, in order to recover assets throughout the entire process of investigation, prosecution and trial proceedings.

To ensure sustained and effective legal support, this year the procuratorate established a dedicated brand and issued implementation guidelines and action plans to strengthen foreign-related procuratorial work. It has also established regular collaboration mechanisms with multiple departments for transfer of leads, case consultation, data sharing and joint training.

The procuratorate has made full use of its digital legal supervision command center to improve mechanisms for integrated and comprehensive handling of foreign-related cases. Through this digital platform, the procuratorate integrates functions such as case lead transfer, centralized review and coordinated case handling, improving the quality and efficiency of handling foreign-related cases.

The procuratorate has also strengthened oversight over foreign-related civil and commercial litigation and enforcement by building a multi-faceted supporting mechanism integrating legal supervision, rights protection and dispute resolution.

Supervision over foreign-related administrative acts has been enhanced to protect the legitimate litigation rights of parties to foreign-related administrative lawsuits and administrative counterparts as well as the operational autonomy of business entities.

In addition, the procuratorate is exploring ways to bring procuratorial public interest litigation into the field of foreign-related rule of law. It has issued administrative public interest litigation recommendations to relevant departments regarding inaccuracies in translations of exhibits and cultural heritage information at several cultural venues across the district, calling for systematic standardization of translations for landmark cultural relics and heritage across Wuxi.

Going forward, the Binhu District People's Procuratorate will continue to refine its integrated foreign-related prosecution model covering case handling, comprehensive services, social governance and theoretical research. It will also continuously optimize the delivery of foreign-related legal services and advance the sustained and steady development of the district's opening-up with solid procuratorial performance.