The PRC–Hong Kong mutual enforcement arrangements in practice: three years of data

The arrangements on reciprocal recognition and enforcement of civil and commercial judgments between the mainland and Hong Kong opened a route to cross-border realisation that did not previously exist. Three years on, how it is actually used deserves examination.

The route is genuinely being used

On the publicly available information, applications under the arrangements have grown steadily, concentrated in commercial contract and equity disputes. That matches the design expectation: parties to those disputes commonly hold assets or operating entities on both sides, so demand for two-way enforcement is real.

But the friction sits in a few specific places

The main obstacles in practice are not judicial reluctance to accept filings. They cluster instead in technical steps: the two sides read the test for finality of a judgment somewhat differently; authentication and service take longer than expected; and public-policy objections, while rarely successful, are enough to extend proceedings materially.

For a funder, that means pricing each friction point separately at underwriting rather than treating the existence of the arrangements as equivalent to smooth enforcement. Our practice is to obtain local opinions on both sides during assessment, and to build document-transit time into the cash-flow model.

Implications for strategy

One counter-intuitive conclusion: where the respondent holds assets on both sides, filing simultaneously usually beats filing sequentially. Concurrent attachment pressure changes settlement appetite materially, whereas a sequential approach hands over a window for dissipation.