November 8, 2021
Made in China Journal: Volume 6, Issue 2, 2021.
A new article by Matthew Erie focusing on Pakistan-China Legal Relations. Available here.
Introduction
"One of the meta questions in the study of contemporary China is whether the Government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is building its own international legal order. Some experts argue China is causing a turn to ‘authoritarian international law’ (Ginsburg 2020). Others, however, contend that while China is introducing change to the international legal order, it is mainly doing so within preexisting frameworks—namely, those of multilateralism, which may limit the nature of that change (Alter, forthcoming). The question about China and the international legal order is particularly regnant at the intersection of law and the study of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), where scholars view a ‘big bang’ Chinese approach to international law through an explosion of soft-law agreements and memorandums of understanding between member states coupled with China’s promotion of its international commercial arbitration, the training of judges on cross-border dispute issues, and even construction of bespoke courts to take on international disputes. Yet, like much BRI scholarship, observations may illustrate the problem of presentism that can elide the deeper histories of the PRC and what used to be called the ‘Third World’ and is, more currently, known as the ‘Global South’, including their legal dimensions."
This article appears in the May-August 2021 issue of the Made in China journal on Archaeologies of the Belt and Road Initiative which also includes an article by CLD Researcher Irna Hofman on In the Interstices of Patriarchal Order: Spaces of Female Agency in Chinese–Tajik Labor Encounters and one by CLD Research Associate, Maria Adele Carrai, on The Chronopolitics of the Belt and Road Initiative and Its Reinvented Histories.
