Chinese Supreme Court rejects avoidance of CISG contract involving machines

The Chinese Supreme Court decided C&J Sheet Metal Co. Ltd v. Wenzhou Chenxing Machinery Co. Ltd on 30 April 2014. The decision's full text, originally written in Chinese, has now been translated into English by Yanxu Sima, who is a senior at East China University of Political Science and Law (ECUPL). We are very grateful for his translation that can now be accessed via the case presentation about CISG-online no. 3983 (below).

The case concerned the sale of a five-metre and an eight-metre numerical-control bending machine by a Chinese company to a buyer in the USA. When the machines broke down several months after delivery, the buyer refused to have the seller repair them and declared the contract avoided. For several reasons, all courts involved rejected the buyer's claim based on the alleged avoidance. Among them was the conclusion that the buyer had not sufficiently proven the break-down to have been due to a non-conformity of the machines.