Enhanced enforcement against bid rigging in China: implications for the Belt and Road Initative

Against the backdrop of the continued advancement of the Belt and Road Initiative and the growing volume of cross-regional engineering projects and public procurement in China, collusion and corruption during the tendering stage no longer only impact the safety of individual projects. Their impact may spill over into contracting chains and funding arrangements, evolving into systemic governance challenges that span multiple jurisdictions. Accordingly, the regulatory efforts to combat collusive bidding are shifting from an internal supervisory issue within a single jurisdiction to a common risk-management challenge faced by cross-border engineering projects.

Recent enforcement trends to combat bid rigging in China

In recent years, China has continuously intensified its enforcement and governance efforts to combat bid rigging in the construction sector, gradually forming a governance framework characterised by high-pressure criminal enforcement activities, long-term retrospective accountability and the parallel use of technical regulation.

A significant increase in criminal enforcement

According to judicial statistics released by the Supreme People’s Court, while the total number of criminal cases nationwide in 2025 decreased by 12.8 per cent year-on-year, cases involving bid rigging increased by approximately 50 per cent contrary to this trend.[3] In terms of judicial practice, in addition to imposing fixed-term prison sentences and fines, courts have increasingly applied prohibition orders, expressly barring defendants from engaging in tendering-related activities during a set probation period, so as to prevent continued market participation through ‘shell-swapping’ operations. Criminal liability is also frequently imposed in parallel with administrative penalties and monetary sanctions, including the perpetrator’s inclusion on dishonesty blacklists, market access bans and even revocation of business licences, forming a multilayered and cumulative liability system.

Nationwide ‘retrospective review’ campaigns with broad coverage

Since 2024, more than ten provinces and municipalities have successively issued notices soliciting leads as part of special rectification campaigns in regard to the tendering and bidding process involving the construction sector, which have commonly adopted long-term retrospective review mechanisms. In some regions, the look-back period extends up to 13 years. For example, Jiangxi and Inner Mongolia have included tendering violations dating back to November 2012 within the scope of the review, while Shanghai’s Jinshan District has set the starting point of such a review as October 2012. This approach effectively removes temporal barriers, signalling that historical tendering conduct will not be automatically exempt from liability due to the passage of time. The practice of carrying out a 13-year retrospective review is closely linked to changes in the relevant institutional and technological conditions. Following the formal implementation of the Regulation on the Implementation of the Bidding Law of the People’s Republic of China in 2012, a comprehensive shift began involving China’s procurement system, which went from paper-based documentation to electronic procedures. Bid documents, evaluation records and decision-making processes have since been increasingly preserved through electronic records, providing a practical foundation for carrying out long-term retrospective enforcement activities. In effect, this approach overcomes traditional time barriers that usually limit the extent of enforcement activity that can take place involving historical conduct.

Regulatory models increasingly emphasise whistleblower incentives and technical detection

On the one hand, certain regions have strengthened their oversight by establishing high-value whistleblower reward mechanisms. For example, Hunan Province provides rewards of up to RMB 100,000 per case for informants who provide effective leads that are subsequently verified. On the other hand, artificial intelligence (AI) and Big Data technologies are being increasingly embedded within tendering supervision processes, enabling the identification of abnormal pricing, substantially similar bidding documents and affiliations among bidders. Zhejiang Province’s intelligent tendering supervision system has uncovered multiple cases of bid rigging and associated corruption. Mechanisms such as remote offsite evaluations and the separation of evaluation and award decisions have been continuously promoted, further reducing opportunities for human interference by tenderers and evaluators.

The continuous expansion of enforcement and regulatory targets

The regulatory focus has expanded from scrutinising traditional tenderers and bidders to including other key intermediaries, such as tendering agencies and bid evaluation experts. Agencies lacking proper registration, subject to frequent substantiated complaints or with histories of penalties or indicators of their involvement in major violations are placed on priority inspection lists. The credit performance and professional competence of agency personnel are quantitatively assessed, while mechanisms such as targeted inspections, industry bans, credit evaluations and ‘lifetime accountability’ aspects related to evaluation experts are progressively implemented. Together, these measures form a full-chain governance structure, covering the critical stages of the tendering, evaluation and award process.

Overall, the governance of bid rigging in China is shifting from a model centred on ex-post accountability to a more integrated approach that emphasises risk prevention at an early stage and process-based controls. Beyond the intensified enforcement and supervision activities, China has also developed more institutionalised practices aimed at translating criminal risks into identifiable and operational compliance requirements for market participants to adhere to during the bidding process.

The prevention of criminal risks related to bid rigging: the contractor bidding operational guidelines

Against the backdrop of efforts related to high-intensity enforcement and long-term retrospective accountability, enterprises, relevant authorities and industry organisations have increasingly prioritised the institutionalisation of ex ante risk prevention mechanisms. The group standard Operational Guidelines for Preventing Collusive Bidding in Contractor Project Bidding, which came into effect on 1 January 2026, represents a practical tool developed in this context. The Guidelines were developed following systematic research and multiple rounds of expert review. Rather than reiterating existing legal norms, the Guidelines focus on high-risk segments of bidding practice and set out actionable and verifiable operational requirements.

Assigning bidding responsibilities to specific roles and processes rather than abstract corporate obligations

The Guidelines do not merely impose generic requirements in order to achieve ‘corporate compliance’. Instead, they emphasise the importance of senior management awareness and attention and clearly delineate the key roles and responsibility boundaries expected during bidding activities, distinguishing among legal representatives, the actual controller, the project leader and bidding officers in terms of the scope of their authority and decision-making nodes. By requiring traceable records on decision-making, multi-person reviews and tiered approval mechanisms, the likelihood that bid rigging risks will arise during the tending process due to individual dominance or internal collusion is reduced.

Establishing pre-bidding screening rules for high-risk scenarios rather than post-incident remediation

Risk identification under the Guidelines is concentrated on recurrent high-risk scenarios in practice, including consortium bidding, simultaneous participation by affiliated enterprises, abnormal pricing formation and substantial similarities found within bidding documents. Enterprises are required to conduct affiliation screening and pricing reasonableness assessments prior to bidding, rather than providing passive explanations during subsequent investigations.

Translating compliance requirements into verifiable operational records rather than principled commitments

Given the judiciary’s emphasis on the existence of objective evidence in practice, the Guidelines require enterprises to maintain full-process records for key stages of the process, such as regarding the making of bidding decisions, price formulations and document preparation, which should be preserved through electronic and blockchain-based means. Documents such as consortium agreements, anti-collusion undertakings and subcontracting arrangements must undergo defined internal review procedures, enabling enterprises to demonstrate the independence and rationality of their bidding conduct during investigations, rather than relying solely on ex-post statements.

Pre-designing response pathways for abnormal situations instead of passive after-the-fact reactions

The Guidelines do not assume that bidding processes will always operate in full compliance with the relevant rules and regulations. Instead, the Guidelines require enterprises to establish abnormality detection and emergency response mechanisms. For example, upon discovering the existence of abnormal pricing, unusual competitor behaviour or improper contact between internal personnel and external parties, enterprises should have operational pathways to suspend the bidding process, initiate internal investigations or proactively adjust their bidding strategies. Its practical significance lies in providing institutional exit options for timely loss containment, preventing risks from being amplified during the bidding stage and, ultimately, offering a path for issues to be escalated into criminal proceedings.

Integrating bidding compliance with continuous adjustment mechanisms rather than one-off institutional designs

The Guidelines emphasise the importance of carrying out periodic updates to internal bidding systems in light of judicial precedents, regulatory developments and typical cases, as well as targeted training to enhance frontline personnel’s ability to identify bid rigging risks. This arrangement aims to continuously shape a company’s compliance culture, while addressing the practical issue of companies having ‘systems that personnel do not know how to use’, ensuring the sustained usability of front-end prevention mechanisms. It also encourages enterprises to participate in external co-governance through industry associations, credit platforms and the adherence to multilateral rules, fostering a wider form of consensus on compliance within the industry and reducing passive exposure to risks arising from implicit competitive practices.

Implications for the Belt and Road Initiative

According to the Corruption Perceptions Index 2024 published by Transparency International,[4] Belt and Road Initiative partner countries exhibit a high degree of divergence in terms of their integrity scores, ranging from relatively high-scoring jurisdictions to many with lower scores. Against this backdrop, bidding and tendering activities involving projects that are part of the Belt and Road Initiative often encounter a complex situation wherein multi-jurisdictional supervision, the application of multilateral rules and corruption risks are intertwined. The following are some initiatives and suggestions to strengthen anti-corruption within the Belt and Road Initiative.

Using anti-corruption rules as an entry point to achieve coordinated governance against bid rigging

In cross-border construction projects, the maintenance of a tendering order cannot rely solely on the criminal or administrative regulation of a single jurisdiction. Rather, while respecting national sovereignty, legal systems, religions and commercial practices, governance should align with international anti-corruption and fair competition frameworks, such as the United Nations Convention against Corruption and the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), promoting regulatory convergence through soft law and industry standards. By embedding anti-bid rigging requirements into anti-corruption compliance systems and establishing cross-checks at key points within the process, such as in regard to benefit transfers, abnormal contacts and fund flows, the opportunities for the co-existence of bid rigging and bribery can be compressed at the source.

Strengthening institutional coordination and credit constraints through cross-border rules

To reduce regulatory uncertainty, it is necessary to promote the establishment of regional policy and regulatory databases that dynamically track changes in market access conditions, compliance requirements, taxation, environmental protection and digitalisation rules. At the same time, efforts should be made to develop bid rigging prevention guidelines with cross-regional applicability and to coordinate the relevant sanction links, appeal channels and remedial mechanisms. Through the use of credit governance tools, the establishment of a Belt and Road Initiative tendering credit platform may be promoted and linked with multilateral development bank blacklisting systems, enhancing front-end governance through the imposition of unified and transparent credit constraints.

Leveraging digital tools to identify bid rigging risks

Practice has shown that the sole reliance on manual review processes is increasingly insufficient to timely detect concealed and technically sophisticated bid rigging behaviour. Tenderers may introduce AI-assisted bid evaluation tools, they may use natural language processing (NLP) to conduct similarity comparisons and perform anomaly detection within bidding documents, thereby enhancing the identification of substantially similar submissions and abnormal pricing. Bidders themselves should also establish electronic information management platforms to maintain full-process records of document preparation, pricing formation and internal approvals, providing an objective evidentiary basis for demonstrating bidding independence.

Moving consortium bid management forward to the institutional design stage

Consortium bidding has become a common feature of Belt and Road Initiative construction projects. However, information asymmetry and dispersed responsibilities among consortium members make it a high-risk area for bid rigging. In practice, it is necessary to conduct the systematic screening of consortium members prior to bidding, assessing the relevant business qualifications, performance capacity, compliance records and potential country risks. Consortium agreements should clearly define the member roles, decision-making mechanisms and responsibility boundaries, in order to reduce the risk of internal collusion or passive involvement in unlawful conduct at the institutional level.

Enhancing the professional capacity of personnel

The effective operation of front-end prevention mechanisms largely depends on personnel deployment and professional competence. Construction tendering personnel must not only understand domestic legal norms, but also grasp the legal systems, regulatory policies and basic commercial practices in the host country. Enterprises may deploy specialised teams familiar with the local rules in key regions or engage external legal and compliance support to address the knowledge gaps within cross-jurisdictional projects, thereby reducing the risks that may arise from misinterpretations or regulatory misunderstandings.