This seminar was recorded on Friday 11 October at the Australian National University. Please do not reproduce without permission.

China is incrementally developing a new, decentralised 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. Chinese state-owned and private enterprises have now internationalised and integrated within Sino-centric global production chains. It is a hub and spokes model, with China at the hub. In this seminar, Gregory Shaffer will first examine China’s export of an infrastructure-based development model (Part A) before examining its creation of a complementary web of free trade and investment agreements (Part B), and an indigenous innovation policy (Part C). Gregory will then theorise and empirically trace how this forms part of the broader evolving ecology of transnational trade legal orders.

About the speaker

Gregory Shaffer is the Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Director of the Center on Globalization, Law, and Society at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. He writes theoretically and empirically on international economic law and law and globalization. His work is cross-disciplinary, addressing topics including transnational legal ordering, legal realism, hard and soft law, comparative institutional analysis, public-private networks in international trade, the rise of China and other emerging economies, and the ways trade and investment law implicate domestic regulation and social and distributive policies.