China’s State-Led Capitalism and the Liberal International Economic Order: Geo-economic Competition, Managed Interdependence and the Future of International Economic Law

While it is one thing to seek to draw boundaries around neoliberalism-informed international trade and investment rules to ensure that they do not become a mechanism for the global projection and entrenchment of a single form of state-market relations, it is another thing to recognize that China’s state-led development model has not only caused serious friction with the rule-based liberal international economic order (LIEO), but also raised fundamental questions about whether China’s state-led capitalism will replace the Western model of modernization, and ultimately trigger a clash of civilizations.  

The coexistence, interaction and competition between China’s state-led capitalism and liberal capitalism bring forth a host of challenging ideological, conceptual and practical issues to the LIEO. There is a grow perception that the current international trade and investment norms are not conceptually and practically coherent to tackle heterodox institutional forms like China’s state-led economy. The simmering tension has culminated in the ongoing US- China trade/technology war, only further aggravated by the Covid-19 pandemic. This talk intends to explore this question: how should international trade and investment law respond to the new geoeconomic competition and manage interdependence between China and liberal capitalism states?  

Professor Ming Du is Professor in Chinese Law and the Director of Centre for Chinese Law and Policy at Durham Law School. Prior to joining Durham in September 2019, he was Professor in Chinese & Comparative Law at University of Surrey from April 2016, and Reader in International Business Law at Lancaster University from September 2013. He was raised in China and completed his Chinese law training at Tsinghua University School of Law in Beijing. He holds an LLM from Harvard Law School, where he was a Victor and William Fung Fellow and a DPhil from University of Oxford (Brasenose College) where he was a Clarendon Scholar.

Discussant: Dr Mimi Zou, Associate Professor in Law, University Reading

Dr Mimi Zou is Associate Professor in Law at Reading Law School and Director of Studies in Law at Regent's Park College, Oxford. She is also the co-founder of the Oxford Deep Tech Dispute Resolution Lab. From 2017 to 2020, she held the first post in Chinese law at the University of Oxford as Fangda CDF in Chinese Commercial Law, St Hugh's College. Dr Zou obtained her DPhil in Law and BCL with Distinction from St John's College and Christ Church, Oxford on a Commonwealth Scholarship and an Oxford Australia Scholarship. She graduated with first-class honours degrees in Law, Economics, and Social Sciences (University Medal) from the University of Sydney, Australia.