A New Chinese Economic Law Order? by Gregory Shaffer And
A New Chinese Economic Law Order? By Gregory Shaffer and Henry Gao 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 reflects a component of China’s internal development in the 2000s, which supplements economic reform and opening up with infrastructure development. It starts with the financing of infrastructure as part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, involving telecommunications networks, roads, airports, and ports, which Chinese companies build using Chinese standards. These projects enable China to export its excess capacity of steel, concrete, and other products. They also open new markets for Chinese products generally. China then complements this form of regional economic integration with a web of bilateral investment and free trade agreements that assure preferential access for Chinese goods, services, and capital. At the same time, it massively subsidizes technological innovation to reduce reliance on Western technology, while encouraging Chinese state-owned and private companies to acquire advanced technology abroad and luring Chinese scientists who study abroad to return to China. It implements these initiatives gradually to learn from trial and error, analogous to the country’s internal, pragmatic development model, reflected in the popular adage attributed to Deng Xiaoping — “crossing the river by feeling the stones.”1 But now, Chinese state-owned and private enterprises are internationalized and integrated within Sino-centric global production chains.
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