Data Compliance: Challenges To Foreign Companies - Doing Business In And Relating To China

Data means information in electronic and non-electronic forms, and often refers to personal data. Data protection has since become a popular legislative subject, with the GDPR of the European Union (the Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Director 95/46/EC (General Data Protection Regulation)), effective as of May 25 2018, as the best known of all. The Chinese data protection legislations, although they transplant many ideas contained in the GDPR, form a different regime for data protection. Further, the Chinese data protection laws apply not only to foreign companies doing business in China, but also to those doing business relating to China in other countries. Data compliance is now a challenge.