On April 2, 2019, the government of Hong Kong and the Supreme People’s Court of the PRC signed the Arrangement Concerning Mutual Assistance in Court-ordered Interim Measures in Aid of Arbitral Proceedings by the Courts of the Mainland and of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (“the Mutual Arrangement”), which permits parties to arbitration proceedings conducted in Hong Kong or mainland China to file application for interim protection measures directly to the mainland China courts or the Hong Kong courts. This arrangement can be regarded as a special and favorable treatment towards Hong Kong arbitration because parties to arbitration seated in any other oversea jurisdictions are still not permitted to apply to mainland China courts for interim measures.

Since the Mutual Arrangement came into effect on October 1, 2019, the Hong Kong arbitration institutions have accepted 11 arbitration preservation applications filed by the requesting parties, of which 10 were property preservation applications and one was an evidence preservation application. As of December 24, 2019, at least four arbitration preservation applications had been approved by the People's Court of the Mainland, with a total preservation amount of approximately RMB 1.7 billion.