The Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area Rule of Law Forum (2026) was held in Huangpu, Guangzhou. The forum’s essay competition, an integral part of the event, also moved into its final stage. Organized by the Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan Law Research Association of the Guangdong Law Society and the Foreign-Related Rule of Law Research Base of the Guangzhou Law Society, the competition opened in April 2026 and drew an active response from legal scholars and practitioners nationwide, receiving 258 submissions. After expert preliminary and second-round review arranged by the organizing committee, 30 papers were selected for first, second and third prizes and excellence awards, and an awards ceremony was held at the forum’s closing session.
Chen Gonghui, a senior partner at Beijing Longan (Guangzhou) Law Firm, and Ma Fangting, a lawyer at the firm, received second prize in the competition for their paper “Law Enforcement Cooperation and Mutual Legal Assistance in Cross-Border Money Laundering Crimes: An Institutional Examination Based on the Echo App Cross-Border Money Laundering Case”.
Taking the Echo App cross-border money laundering case as its starting point and grounding itself in the Greater Bay Area’s “one country, two systems, three jurisdictions” framework, the paper examines new forms of money laundering offences arising in virtual currency, cross-border payment platform and social livestreaming settings. It points to a structural imbalance between strong law enforcement and comparatively weak judicial cooperation among the mainland, Hong Kong and Macao in tackling money laundering, and to difficulties in converting cross-border evidence and recovering criminal proceeds. In response, the paper proposes a dual-track evidence system based on “domestic evidence collection as the foundation and cross-border evidence collection as reinforcement”, and calls for institutionalizing inter-regional criminal judicial assistance, improving emergency preservation procedures, activating mechanisms for whistleblower participation and protection, and strengthening supervision of cross-border payment platforms and full-chain prosecution, offering an institutional reference for integrated governance of cross-border money laundering crime in the Greater Bay Area.
The award reflects the professional grounding and applied research capability of Longan Guangzhou’s lawyers in foreign-related rule of law, anti-money laundering, criminal compliance and cross-border judicial cooperation. Longan Guangzhou said it will continue to work on rule of law development in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area and to support the region’s high-quality development and higher-level opening-up with high-quality legal services.