In November 2024, an email reported to come from BYD’s passenger car division asked suppliers to cut prices by 10 percent from January 1, 2025.
Li Yunfei, BYD’s head of brand and public relations, answered that “annual price negotiation with suppliers is an industry practice.” He said the 10 percent target was “not compulsory” and “negotiable.” The report put the industry’s usual annual cut at about 5 percent.
Chinese suppliers announce price rises to their customers with a 涨价函, a price increase letter. When chip prices rose at the end of 2020, the chip maker Huiding (Goodix) raised its dollar prices by 30 percent from January 1, 2021. Xinjieneng (NCE Power) told customers that the new prices would also apply to unpaid orders already in its system.
讨价还价 To ask a price and return a price. To bargain. Also to argue over terms when negotiating or accepting a task.
杀价 To kill the price. To push a price down hard.
变卦 To change the hexagram. To go back on a decision already made. The word comes from divination, where a second reading gave a different result from the first.
Article 533 of China’s Civil Code covers a contract whose basic conditions change in a major way that the parties could not foresee and that is not a commercial risk. If continued performance would be clearly unfair to one party, “the party adversely affected may renegotiate with the other party.” Only if they fail to agree within a reasonable time may either party ask a court or an arbitration body to change or end the contract.
In one reported case, a court refused a request for higher rent based on rising prices.
In April 2020, the Supreme People’s Court issued guidance on civil cases related to the epidemic. Where the epidemic or the measures against it only made a contract harder to perform, “the parties may renegotiate. Where performance can continue, the people’s courts shall strengthen mediation and actively guide the parties to continue performing.”
The same guidance said that courts would not support a request to end a contract only because performance had become difficult.
In Ming and Qing land sales, a seller could come back after the sale and ask the buyer for more money. The custom was called 找价, “seeking the price,” or 加找. A seller could claim that “the price was not enough.” The historian Cao Shuji found that after the Qianlong era, 加找 became a standard contract form.
A 2012 study in the law journal The Jurist cites the finding that repeated 找价, even after a deed of final sale, was “a very common custom.” Qing law later limited it. Where a deed of final sale did not mention extra payments, none were allowed.