Abstract:  Under the background of China-US trade war, many Chinese enterprises are sanctioned by the United States.Sanctions imposed on Chinese enterprises by the United States, from macroscopic perspective, have greatly harmed China’s state interests and Chinese enterprises’security of supply chains. From the microcosmic perspective, it is essential to come up solutions to the impediments to contractual performance caused by international sanctions. In international commercial transactions, how will it be identified under the governing law of a contract if a party cannot perform its contractual obligations due to the enforcement of sanction measures?How to allocate the risks of impediments to contractual performance caused by international sanctions between the two parties through prior arrangement of contract terms? How to deal with the impediments to contractual performance caused by international sanctions under Chinese legal framework? These issues are worth pondering. In view of this, based on categorization analysis, the article examines in a comparative perspective whether impediments to contractual performance caused by international sanctions constitute excuses for non-performance, discusses the differences in the application effects of those force majeure clauses, liability exemption clauses and compliance commitment clauses related to international sanctions that are widely applied in practice, and presents some ideas on how to deal with impediments to contractual performance caused by international sanctions under the framework of Chinese laws.

Key words:  international sanctions, impediments to contractual performance, impossibility of performance, force majeure, Civil Code