Cunzhen Huang

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The following is part of our annual publication Selected Issues for Boards of Directors in 2026. Explore all topics or download the PDF.

Antitrust in 2025 was marked by policy developments and antitrust enforcement that, while remaining aggressive, became less overtly anti-business. The U.S. continued a number of cases from the Biden administration, but became more open to settlements, while continuing implementation of the new and more burdensome HSR merger notification form and of the more aggressive and less economically focused 2023 Merger Guidelines. The European Commission conducted a series of DMA enforcement actions and launched a broad-sweeping consultation on the Merger Guidelines. The UK CMA continued a tack toward a more restrained approach to enforcement, taking greater account of growth and suggesting it would allow greater flexibility in merger remedies. The Chinese State administration for Market Regulation started to intervene in transactions below the filing thresholds and continued to keep antitrust in its toolbox for tackling geo-political tensions.

On January 9, 2025, the Ministry of Commerce of the People’s Republic of China (“MOFCOM”) released its decision in a trade and investment barrier investigation into the European Union’s Foreign Subsidies Regulation (“FSR”).

On September 14, 2024, China’s SAMR published streamlined notification and publicity forms for cases reviewed under its simplified merger review procedure (“Simple Cases”).  The revised forms will take effect as of October 12, 2024.

More than one and half year after the amendments to China’s Anti-Monopoly Law (the “AML”) came into effect, the State Council of China approved on December 29, 2023 and published on January 26, 2024 revisions[1] to China’s merger control notification thresholds (the “State Council Order”).[2]

On July 15, 2022, China’s antitrust authority SAMR announced a three-year pilot program beginning August 1, 2022 to delegate the review of certain simplified-procedure merger filings that the agency currently handles on its own, to five of its local branches (“AMRs”) in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong, Chongqing, and Shaanxi.  Each of the five local AMRs will be responsible for a specific geographic area (“Territory”) within China.  This is the first step to implement China’s “categorized and classified” merger control review regime under the new Anti-Monopoly Law.[1]

Antitrust enforcement in labor markets has become a focus of the U.S. antitrust regulators in recent years, with particular scrutiny on agreements between employers not to recruit or solicit each other’s employees—so-called “no poach” agreements.  In a recent decision, a court in China held no‑poach and employee compensation-fixing agreements to be illegal, the first such court decision in the country.  The court’s decision, however, reveals the difficulties in analyzing no-poach agreements within China’s existing antitrust regime and analytical framework.  This article provides an overview of the Chinese court’s reasoning in its recent decision and a comparative assessment to the approach in the United States.…