A New Chinese Economic Order?

Abstract

China is incrementally developing a new, decentralized model of trade governance through a web of finance, trade, and investment initiatives involving memorandum of understanding, contracts, and trade and investment treaties, supported by an indigenous innovation policy that is transnational in its reach. In this way, China could create a vast, Sino-centric, legal order in which the Chinese state plays the nodal role. It is a hub and spokes model, with China at the hub. In this article, we first examine China’s export of an infrastructure-based development model, implemented through Chinese state-owned and private enterprise investments and commercial contracts (Part B), before turning to China’s development of a complementary web of free trade and investment agreements (Part C), and an indigenous innovation policy (Part D). The paper theorizes and empirically traces how these Chinese initiatives shape the evolving ecology of the transnational legal order for trade.

The EU's strategic autonomy in times of politicisation of international trade: The future of commission accountability

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“…147 In parallel, China's Belt & Road Initiative has a geopolitical dimension in forging economic ties (and dependence) through Chinese trade, investment, and finance. 148 In this vein, the 2017 U.S. national security plan declared that "economic security is national security." 149 Conceptually, the position that all trade relations are also strategic ones may be true, but this truism does not inform policy choices over tradeoffs in different contexts.…”

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“…95 Scholars have opined that China is not setting up a completely new model, but is only impersonating and repurposing Western laws, since it borrows heavily from them. 96 The novelty in the Chinese model is its focus on coordination rather than strict commitment. Through its 'selective reshaping' 97 of international legal norms, China is setting up 'an alternative and parallel global institutional architecture' 98 to the post-war liberal order.…”