A new chinese economic law order?
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. |