A new Chinese economic law order?

• Main Authors: SHAFFER, Gregory, GAO, Henry
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2020
• Subjects: China; Economic policy; Government policy; trade governance; Asian Studies; International Trade Law
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sol_research/3256; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5211&context=sol_research
• Institution: Singapore Management University

China is incrementally developing a new, decentralized model of trade governance through a web of finance, trade, and investment initiatives involving memorandum of understandings, contracts, and trade and investment treaties. In this way, China could create a vast, Sino-centric, regional order in which the Chinese state plays a nodal role. Chinese state-owned and private enterprises have now internationalized and integrated within Sino-centric global production chains. It is a hub and spokes model, with China at the hub. In this paper, we first examine China’s export of an infrastructure-based development model (Part A) before turning to its creation of a complementary web of free trade and investment agreements (Part B), and an indigenous innovation policy (Part C). The paper theorizes and empirically traces how this forms part of the broader evolving ecology of transnational trade legal orders.