One order, two ministries
China's justice ministry, acting jointly with the commerce ministry, told Chinese organisations and individuals on Wednesday that they may not implement or assist the investigative measures the European Commission is applying to JD.com under the bloc's foreign subsidies regulation. The statement describes those measures as undue extraterritorial jurisdiction and accuses the Commission of arbitrarily demanding extensive and unnecessary information held in China. It is the second time Beijing has reached for a blocking order in a foreign-subsidies case, after one issued in May over the airport scanner maker Nuctech.[1]
What the order leaves alone is the review itself. The Commission opened an in-depth examination in May of JD.com's 2.5 billion dollar bid for Ceconomy, Europe's largest electronics retailer, to test whether Chinese state support would distort the internal market. The regulation works by obliging a company under investigation to produce large volumes of information on short deadlines, and Beijing's order binds the parties who would produce that information. The authority that asked for it sits outside the list of addressees.[1]
Silence is what carries the penalty
That is where the cost of the order settles. Handing the file to Brussels would breach the Chinese prohibition, and withholding it lets the Commission treat JD.com as having failed to cooperate and draw inferences against the company, an outcome the Substack newsletter Geopolitechs set out when the order appeared. Beijing has protected the data and left the deadline running, so the pressure moves off the information request and onto the transaction that request was meant to test. Read the other way, the order may be aimed at Brussels as a bargaining signal inside the wider trade talks both sides are trying to calm, and may be expected to slow the examination while leaving the bid's fate to the Commission.[1]
The court record gives the company little to lean on. Nuctech sued the Commission in 2024, arguing that dawn raids on its Dutch and Polish premises had damaged its reputation and that the disclosure demanded would force it to violate Chinese criminal law; the challenge did not succeed. Last month the EU's General Court turned down a request from the wind turbine maker Goldwind to suspend its own foreign-subsidies case on the ground that the information sought went beyond the investigation's scope, calling the claim too speculative. Two firms have now tested whether a European court will trim the reach of these requests, and neither has moved it.[1]
The gate, and now the file
On 5 August this column argued, in 'Only one of the three measures changes what happens at the factory gate', that the widest-reaching part of that package was the certification decision, because it moved the inspection required for entry to the Chinese market outside the United States. The instrument in play here works on the same joint. Brussels made disclosure of information held in China a condition of clearing a European transaction, and Beijing's answer forbids that information from leaving. The argument is about where inspection may take place, and each capital is claiming the same authority in the other's direction.[1], [2]
If the pattern from Nuctech and Goldwind holds, the Ceconomy bid will be settled by the Commission's own decision or by JD.com withdrawing, while the blocking order leaves the scope of Brussels's requests where it is. By the end of 2026 the observable test is what the Commission publishes on the case and what JD.com tells the Hong Kong Stock Exchange about the bid. A narrower question is worth watching alongside it: whether Beijing now issues a blocking order in every foreign-subsidies case that reaches a Chinese acquirer, or keeps them for transactions it is willing to lose.[1]