Over the past few decades, Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) have proliferated globally. Such proliferation of RTAs created a renewed sense of urgency for the WTO to take action in order to avoid the fate of being eclipsed into irrelevance. There are several options for coping with the challenge....

This article takes as its starting point the characterization of T. O. Elias as a representative of a ‘weak' form of anti-colonial scholarship. Elias had sought to show that the ancient African kingdoms had participated in international legality with European states on an equal footing. The...

Twenty years on Myanmar has come full circle, repeating the events of 1988. Myanmar's Saffron Revolution has come to a brutal halt amidst public outrage worldwide. Violent repression, where the State turns its guns on its own citizens, has come into twenty-first century news screens, uniting...

In contrast to early predictions during its accession, China has not sought to play a leadership role in the Doha Round negotiations, or to rewrite WTO rules in a systemic manner. However, China’s role in the negotiations came into prominence during the “mini-ministerial” held in Geneva in...

This article focuses on Chinese contractual practice in the energy sector and related sectors — principally in China’s inbound and outbound investments in the petroleum sector as well as in other energy-related financing and infrastructure construction contracts. Its concern is with the...

An East Asian view about how trade dispute settlement systems should be designed is slowly emerging. This paper argues that democratically-inspired trade law scholarship and cultural explanations of the international law behaviour of the Southeast and Northeast Asian trading nations have failed...

Data regulation has become a key issue in today’s world. For various reasons, however, it has been challenging to understand data regulations in China, home to the largest e-commerce market in the world. This paper traces the evolution of data and Internet regulation in China, from the early...

Global Value Chains (GVCs) rely on division of labor within and beyond borders to minimize production costs and build regional and global value chains. Since starting its economic reform four decades ago, China has been highly successful in integrating its economy into regional and global value...