Vertical Restraints, the Sylvania Case, and China's Antitrust Enforcement

We briefly review the relevant economic theories and legal treatment of vertical restraints, and especially focus on the 1977 landmark case of Sylvania and its possible influence on China's antitrust enforcement on vertical restraints. China's competition policy, and particularly its antimonopoly law, does not explicitly instruct on the enforcement approach (per se versus rule of reason) toward vertical restraints. But from an overview of China's recent antitrust cases, we find that there is a division in the approaches taken by public versus private enforcement --- even though the administrative enforcement is more inclined to applying per se prohibitions (or applying the EU-style prohibition-plus-exemption approach), it seems that rule of reason is the (increasingly) prevailing approach taken by the courts