China's New Sanctions Regime and the Problem of Mimetic Unilateralism

Over the last few years, the People's Republic of China has adopted a comprehensive new sanctions regime to regulate the intersection of foreign relations, global commerce, international law, and national security. In doing so, Beijing has pursued a dual-pronged strategy, on the one hand formalizing longstanding ersatz practices of economic intervention while, on the other hand, innovating new tools and methods. Meanwhile, the Communist Party under Xi Jinping has consistently framed these initiatives as a 'response' to sanctions placed on China by the United States and its allies. This Article argues that, while primarily originating in Sino-US rivalry, Beijing's new approach has major implications for global governance and for understanding the legal aspects of economic coercion among great powers.To this end, the present Article undertakes a detailed examination of the new Chinese sanctions framework, including its conceptual history, role in Beijing's overall lawfare strategies, and transnational legal processes. Situating these developments against an original exploration of sanctions in decision-theoretic terms, it constructs an account of 'mimetic unilateralism' as a theory of the legalistic encoding of coercive enforcement tools by mutually-emulating rivals pursuing myopic security-maximizing agendas. Notably, Washington's example has informed not only the methods of Chinese sanctions–e.g., tit-for-tat asset freezes, visa restrictions, or unreliable entities lists–but also their quasi-black hole status in domestic law, instrumentalization of international law, and inclination towards escalation. Analyzing mimetic dynamics helps show how sanctions and other unilateral behaviors put global legal order at risk, and how they may best be addressed