China NNN Agreements: How to Get Them Properly Signed and Executed

By Dan Harris


This post is nothing more than described in the title. It focuses on what you typically should do by way of contract signing formalities for your China NNN Agreement. It answers the following question we frequently get from our blog readers and from our own clients: What exact steps should I take to get a China NNN Agreement signed?

The below is the typical response from our China lawyers:

The next step is to send this bilingual agreement to the Chinese side for review. If the Chinese side accepts all terms you should sign, date and then submit the contract to the Chinese side. Then don’t do anything — and especially do not send any confidential information regarding your product or your molds — until the Chinese side returns with a fully executed version, that it has signed, dated and chopped. You will want to make sure the exhibit listing your confidential information is properly filled out and dated, signed and chopped by the Chinese side. And you want to make sure of this not only at the time of first execution, but also every single time a new product item or a new mold item is entered onto the record. For your own protection, you will want to make sure you in the end hold on to at least one original, fully executed agreement.

Please note that though the above says “bilingual agreement,” the official portion of the agreement is strictly in Chinese. The English language portion is strictly a translation for the benefit/convenience of our clients. I am careful to make this distinction because nearly all of the contracts we draft call for Chinese as the official language and we never draft contracts where more than one language is the official language. For why this distinction is so crucial, I urge you to read Silly Rabbit, The Chinese Language Contract Is What Matter and Dual Language China Contracts Double Your Chance Of Disaster.