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Research on Corporate Commercial Bribery Offenses from a Criminal Compliance Perspective
Against the backdrop of expanding global economy and intensifying market competition, corporate commercial bribery has become increasingly prevalent. This illegal act severely undermines the fair market competition order, tarnishes corporate reputations and destabilizes society. Violating laws as well as business ethics and integrity, commercial bribery has evolved into a major barrier to sound corporate development and sustained socioeconomic progress. It is therefore urgent to figure out effective ways to curb and prevent such crimes. As an innovative concept and management tool for modern enterprises, criminal compliance has drawn growing attention for its role in preventing and cracking down on corporate commercial bribery. By establishing and refining compliance systems to standardize corporate operations, criminal compliance ensures business activities abide by legal rules and ethical norms, and effectively lowers legal risks for enterprises. This paper discusses the current situation, causes, characteristics and harms of corporate commercial bribery crimes from the perspective of criminal compliance. Combined with domestic and foreign real cases, it analyzes the functions and practical applications of criminal compliance in preventing and governing commercial bribery. The study also puts forward targeted strategies and suggestions for crime prevention, aiming to provide practical references for enterprises to build robust criminal compliance systems. Governments, enterprises and all sectors of society need to make joint efforts to tackle corporate commercial bribery. Through tighter legal supervision, improved institutional arrangements and enhanced corporate culture, we can work together to build a market environment featured with integrity, fairness and good order.
Copyright (c) 2026 Mengyuan Liu, Xia Yang, Yujie Chen http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Legal Research on the Freedom of Navigation of Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships in the Exclusive Economic Zone
Driven by the global tide of maritime intelligent transformation, the widespread application of Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships (MASS) technology—an inevitable product of integrating artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and big data into the maritime domain—poses a substantial challenge to the rules regarding the freedom of navigation in the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) established by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). In regulating MASS, the current international legal framework presents three prominent dilemmas: the “hollowing-out” of flag State jurisdiction and the subsequent rupture of the accountability chain; the structural contradiction between the traditional freedom of navigation and the national security imperatives of coastal States; and the profound technical difficulties in algorithmically quantifying and objectively fulfilling the conventional obligation of “due regard.” Faced with these normative conflicts and theoretical disputes, China, strategically positioned as a prominent coastal State with a vast EEZ and cutting-edge maritime technological prowess, should advocate for a “systemic jurisdiction” framework within the global ocean governance architecture. This entails establishing a classified navigation notification mechanism and promoting the evolutionary interpretation of the “due regard” obligation. Such approaches ensure that the integration of AI into maritime navigation remains consistent with the fundamental principles of UNCLOS, while effectively safeguarding national security and marine ecological interests, ultimately contributing Chinese legal perspectives to the refinement of international maritime rules.
Copyright (c) 2026 Yifan Xu http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Heterogeneous Effects of Global Value Chain Participation on Economic Growth: An Empirical Study of Fifteen Asian Countries
Based on panel data from 15 Asian countries from 2001 to 2022, this study examines the impact of global value chain (GVC) participation on economic growth from a value-added trade perspective. Using data from OECD-TiVA and the WDI, this paper constructs indicators of overall, forward, and backward GVC participation and estimates their effects with a two-way fixed effects model. The results show that overall GVC participation has a significant negative effect on economic growth. After further decomposition, forward participation exhibits a more significant and robust negative effect, while backward participation does not show stable significance in the baseline regression. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that the growth effect of GVC participation varies across stages: it shows some growth-promoting effects in the low-participation group, whereas negative effects are more pronounced in the high-participation and high-capital-formation groups. Mechanism tests suggest that trade openness and import openness have certain dynamic explanatory power, as their one-period lagged values both exert positive effects on economic growth. The findings suggest that deeper GVC participation does not necessarily lead to better growth outcomes; rather, its growth effect depends on the mode of integration, position in the division of labor, and domestic capacity for value creation.
Copyright (c) 2026 Maolin Shi http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Legal Dilemmas in the Protection of Agricultural Interests under Free Trade Agreements: A Case Study of Korean Agriculture
Korean agriculture faces persistent structural challenges under the framework of agricultural trade liberalization, reflecting a growing tension between international trade rules and the protection of domestic agricultural interests. The World Trade Organization Agreement on Agriculture and the Korea-United States Free Trade Agreement have progressively constrained the policy space available for traditional agricultural protection through binding provisions on market access, tariff reduction, subsidy discipline, and broader trade liberalization commitments. These legal frameworks have redefined the permissible scope of state intervention in agricultural markets, limiting the effectiveness of conventional border protection instruments. However, the existing rules provide insufficient responses to key domestic concerns, including farmers’ livelihoods, the sustainability of vulnerable agricultural sectors, and broader social stability. Against this backdrop, agricultural conflict increasingly reflects a structural legal imbalance between global trade obligations and domestic welfare responsibilities. Therefore, the legal design of agricultural trade liberalization should establish a clearer and more functional balancing mechanism between market opening and the protection of domestic agriculture, ensuring that trade governance remains compatible with social and distributive justice objectives.
Copyright (c) 2026 Yinuo Gu http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Legal Characterization and Liability Allocation in Minor Live-Streaming Tipping in China
With the rapid development of China’s live-streaming economy, legal disputes arising from minors’ tipping behavior on live-streaming platforms have been increasing. Related issues mainly focus on the legal characterization of tipping behavior, the validity assessment of minors’ declarations of intent, and the allocation of responsibility among platforms, streamers, and guardians. Under the current framework of the Civil Code of the People’s Republic of China, significant interpretive tensions remain regarding these issues. In particular, as algorithmic recommendation mechanisms increasingly intervene in user decision-making, the traditional assessment approach centered on civil capacity has revealed certain limitations in application. Through normative analysis and a review of typical cases, combined with platform governance and algorithmic influence mechanisms, this paper reconstructs the legal relationship structure of live-streaming tipping behavior. The study finds that judicial practice has gradually tended to characterize live-streaming tipping as an online service contract relationship rather than a pure gift relationship. However, in the context of minors, reliance solely on capacity rules cannot fully explain the authenticity of declarations of intent, as algorithmic recommendations and immersive interactions significantly strengthen behavioral inducement effects. Meanwhile, the boundaries of responsibility between platforms and streamers remain relatively ambiguous in practice, and existing youth modes and identity verification mechanisms are easily circumvented, resulting in limited effectiveness in risk prevention. Based on this, from the dual perspectives of institutional and technical governance, this paper proposes strengthening platform algorithmic governance and risk control obligations to improve protection rules for minors’ online consumption and provide theoretical support for regulatory policies.
Copyright (c) 2026 Wangtianxi Huang http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0