The identification of subjects ‘foreign relatedness’ of civil legal relations from the perspective of cases

Abstract

During the trial supervision procedure, the judge did not specify whether the case was determined as a foreign-related case because the applicant had American nationality. Rather, the judge only explained the “service of process and periods” of the foreign-related judicial procedure. The judge believed that the applicant had a fixed domicile in China, which was involved in the case, where the heating fee and property fee were disputed so the legal provisions on foreign-related procedures without a domicile within the territory of the People's Republic of China did not apply to the “service of process and periods”. To further explain the case, the applicant completed the purchase contract in September 2004 and the property management service agreement in November 2004. The applicant completed the Oath of Allegiance and acquired its American nationality on November 28, 2006. The applicant owed the property fee and heating fee for the period from January 1, 2006 to December 31, 2016. In terms of time, the applicant had owed property fees and heating fees for nearly a year as a Chinese national and had owed property fees and heating fees for more than nine years as a US national, which means that during the period when the arrears of property fee and heating fee occurred, the nationality of the applicant changed from Chinese to American.