Theoretical Challenges to TWAIL with the Rise of China : Labor Conditions Under Chinese Investment in Pakistan

This Article challenges the presumptions of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) scholarship by examining the rise of China, a “non-European” country, in the global economic order. Is Chinese capital separate from structurally-entrenched global capital often considered Western? Is China going to use the already established hegemony of “universal” and “positivist” international legal regimes to further global exploitation, marginalization, and exclusion? Will the dependent state and local elite of the Third World countries resist such exploitation? This Article reflects on these questions by addressing labor conditions under Chinese investment in Pakistan. It is evident from labor conditions research under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) in Pakistan that China, along with coercion, exploitation, and active avoidance of the established legal regime also uses the logic of international legal regimes for its legitimacy. This Article posits that resistance to CPEC will not come from the parasitic military-bureaucratic state of Pakistan, but if at all, from the working class itself in its embryonic form. Indeed, this Article argues that working-class representation in the dependent state is insufficient to provide distributive justice from international legal regimes. Thus, while this Article retains the theoretical propositions of “Third World” and “state,” I argue that the point of resistance must be shifted from the “state” to the working people of the Third World