In Chinese civil law, a non-disclosure agreement obligates a party to refrain from disclosing information to a third party, and breach can impose civil or criminal liability.

To be effective, an NDA will need to describe the confidential information, the parties, duration of agreement, and liability; these agreements can bind one or both parties.

Terminology & Fictions
A Non-Disclosure Agreement is often translated word for word as a Confidentiality Agreement, however the law defines “confidentiality” to mean “non-disclosure“ for avoidance of confusion.

NNN Agreements

Some dishonest law firms have promoted services in so-called “NNN Agreements,” which they claim are specific to China, and the claim is made that unlike NDAs, an NNN has non-circumvention provisions. However, neither Chinese law nor practice recognizes any of that as true.
In practice, most NNN Agreements that appear in the courts were machine translated from English. Judges are unfamiliar with the NNN concept, and trial courts on several occasions have invalidated them. Based on a search of Chinese caselaw, there are no appellate cases where an NNN Agreement has been specifically upheld, in contrast to thousands of NDA cases.