Promulgated by: National People’s Congress Standing Committee (14th NPCSC, 19th session).
Document No.: 主席令第六十七号 (Presidential Decree No. 67).
Adopted and issued December 27, 2025. Effective March 1, 2026.
DCC summary. The Foreign Trade Law is a general trade statute; DCC summarizes the provisions relevant to technology and data flows rather than translating the full text.
Structure
The 2025 text keeps the eleven-chapter architecture of the 2004 law but grows from seventy to eighty-three articles: I General Provisions (Arts. 1–10); II Foreign Trade Operators (11–15); III Import and Export of Goods and Technology (16–26); IV International Trade in Services (27–31); V Protection of Intellectual Property Related to Foreign Trade (32–35); VI Foreign Trade Order (36–40); VII Foreign Trade Investigations (41–43); VIII Foreign Trade Remedies (44–55); IX Foreign Trade Promotion (56–70); X Legal Liability (71–79); XI Supplementary Provisions (80–83). “Foreign trade” is defined in Article 2 as the import and export of goods, the import and export of technology, and international trade in services. The competent foreign trade department of the State Council (国务院对外贸易主管部门, i.e., MOFCOM) administers the law nationwide (Art. 4). A foreign trade operator is any individual or organization that has completed business-entity registration or other practice formalities and engages in foreign trade in accordance with the law (Art. 11); the pre-2022 filing requirement is gone.
Technology import and export (Chapter III)
Goods and technology are freely importable and exportable unless a law or administrative regulation provides otherwise (Art. 16). Freely traded technology is subject to contract filing and registration with MOFCOM or its delegate (Art. 17(3)); failure to file draws an order to correct, a warning and, on refusal, a fine of up to RMB 50,000 (Art. 72). Article 18 lists twelve grounds on which the State may prohibit or restrict the import or export of goods or technology, opening with national security, public interest and public morals; Article 19 authorizes “any necessary measures” for fissile and fusion materials, arms and munitions, and in wartime or other international emergencies. MOFCOM, with other departments, publishes catalogues of prohibited and restricted goods and technology (Art. 20) and may, with State Council approval, impose temporary prohibitions or restrictions on items outside the catalogues. Restricted technology is administered by license (Art. 21). Exporting prohibited technology, or restricted technology without a license, is punished under the applicable sector law where one exists and otherwise by MOFCOM: an order to correct, confiscation of illegal gains, and a fine of one to five times illegal gains of RMB 500,000 or more (up to RMB 500,000 otherwise), with a one-to-three-year ban on the relevant import-export activity (Art. 73). Article 15 requires operators to submit trade-related documents and materials to the authorities on request and obliges those authorities to keep trade secrets.
International trade in services (Chapter IV)
The State encourages trade in services by all four modes of supply: cross-border delivery, consumption abroad, commercial presence and movement of natural persons (Art. 27). Article 29 mirrors Article 18 for services, again led by national security, and Article 30 mirrors Article 19. Article 31 codifies a negative-list system for cross-border trade in services (跨境服务贸易负面清单) by overseas service providers using the three modes other than commercial presence; MOFCOM issues and adjusts the list. Commercial-presence supply is left to the Foreign Investment Law and its security-review apparatus (see the Measures for the Security Review of Foreign Investments). Article 74 penalizes prohibited or unlicensed restricted services on the same scale as Article 73.
National security, trade order and countermeasures
Three provisions carry the security weight. Article 10 preserves the country-level reciprocity clause: discriminatory prohibitions or restrictions against China may be met with corresponding measures. Article 38 — new in this revision — requires foreign trade operators to comply with customs supervision, foreign exchange and data security protection rules in their trade activities, the statute’s only express bridge to the DSL and CAC data-export regime. Article 40 lets MOFCOM prohibit or restrict overseas individuals or organizations from trade in goods, technology or services connected with China where they endanger China’s sovereignty, security or development interests, interrupt normal transactions with Chinese parties in breach of market principles, or discriminate against Chinese parties; any person who provides agency, freight, delivery, customs declaration, warehousing, third-party trading platform or similar support to circumvent such measures is itself in breach. Article 76 penalizes dealings with listed persons or circumvention services (confiscation, fines of one to five times illegal gains, a one-to-five-year trade ban), and Article 77 adds financial blocking: during a ban, customs will not clear the goods and the PBOC, foreign exchange authorities and financial institutions will not process settlement, receipts, payments or cross-border RMB settlement. Article 41 lists “matters concerning national security interests in foreign trade” among the subjects of a MOFCOM trade investigation, and Article 53 mandates an early-warning mechanism for goods, technology and services trade to protect economic security.
Investigations, confidentiality and penalties
Parties must cooperate with foreign trade investigations (Art. 43), and officials may not leak or unlawfully provide State secrets, work secrets, trade secrets, personal privacy or personal information learned in the course of an investigation; Article 78 makes such leakage a ground for sanction or prosecution. Article 79 preserves administrative reconsideration and litigation against foreign trade administrative acts.
What the 2025 revision changed
On DCC’s reading of the revised text against the 2004 law as amended in 2016 and 2022, the following are new or materially expanded: the purpose clause now cites high-level opening-up and sovereignty, security and development interests (Art. 1); a trade-policy compliance mechanism aligned with international rules, with mandatory compliance assessment of new trade measures (Arts. 6–7); the statutory cross-border services negative list (Art. 31); the data-security compliance duty (Art. 38); entity-level countermeasures with an anti-circumvention clause (Art. 40) and their financial enforcement (Art. 77); trade adjustment assistance (Art. 55); express support for cross-border e-commerce, digital trade and digital trade documents (Arts. 59–60), green trade (Art. 61) and multi-channel dispute resolution (Art. 66); higher fine thresholds and longer activity bans in Chapter X; and an explicit deferral of dual-use items, military products and fissile materials to their own statutes (Art. 80).
How it fits the regime
For overseas counsel the Foreign Trade Law sits one layer above the Export Control Law: it supplies the general power to catalogue, license and ban technology exports and trade in services, while dual-use, military and nuclear items are carved out to the export control statutes (Art. 80). Its data significance is indirect but real. Technology exported under a filed or licensed contract is often data in practice — drawings, source code, process parameters — and the same technical data, if export-controlled, is excluded from the pilot free trade zone data-export negative lists and sent back through export licensing rather than the Cross-border Data Flows Provisions. Article 38 confirms that trade compliance and data-security compliance are cumulative, and Article 40’s entity-level measures give MOFCOM a trade-side lever that runs parallel to the CAC’s data-side controls.