Recommended Citation
Gregory C. Shaffer and Henry Gao, A New Chinese Economic Law Order?, 23 J. Int'l Econ. L. 607 (2020).
Abstract
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. This model mirrors China’s internal development strategy. But now Chinese state-owned and private enterprises are 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 its 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