The situation
Our clients' mother, a Chinese citizen, died in Shenzhen, leaving an apartment in Futian District and some bank savings. Their father had died years earlier. There was no will. The three children had emigrated decades ago; two had become Canadian and Australian citizens, and one held a US green card. None of them could easily take weeks off to deal with Chinese paperwork, and they had heard that inheriting property in China was almost impossible from abroad.
It was not impossible, but it did need care. Under Chinese conflict rules, succession to immovable property is governed by the law of the place where the property is located, so Chinese law applied to the apartment regardless of the heirs' nationalities. With no will and no surviving spouse, the three children were the first-order statutory heirs, and the mother's own parents had died before her.
What we did
- Mapped the heirs and documents. Proving who the heirs are is the core of any Chinese succession. We gathered the mother's death certificate, the parents' marriage records, the father's death record, the children's birth and household records, and evidence linking their old Chinese names to their current foreign passports.
- Handled the foreign documents. Each sibling signed a power of attorney and declarations before a notary in their home country. Because Canada, the US and Australia are parties to the Apostille Convention, and it has been in force for mainland China since November 2023, each document needed only an apostille, followed by a certified Chinese translation.
- Agreed the outcome in advance. The siblings wanted to sell and divide the proceeds equally. We documented this agreement so that the succession would proceed smoothly, without disputes surfacing halfway.
- Completed the succession and title transfer, working with a Shenzhen notary office and the real estate registration authority to transfer the apartment into the heirs' names, and dealt with the mother's bank accounts at the same time.
- Supported the sale, reviewing the sale contract and coordinating with the heirs on currency conversion and remittance of proceeds abroad under the applicable foreign exchange rules.
The outcome
The apartment was transferred into the three heirs' names and then sold, with the proceeds divided equally as they had agreed. None of the siblings travelled to China. The process took about seven months from first consultation to completion of the sale.
Results depend on the specific facts of each matter; past outcomes do not guarantee similar results.