Beginning in the 1950s, Japan’s Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) has been an important instrument for Japanese diplomacy.  However, this cold war strategy has evolved over the past two decades, in large part due to the rise of China, to include both national security challenges and the promotion of universal values.  How will Japanese ODA policy respond to the current challenge of striking a balance between promoting universal values and avoiding offense to recipient governments?  Can Japan play a special role as the developed world’s “ambassador” to the Global South? 

Private law scholars have viewed Anglo-American common law as the core infrastructure of modern capitalism the world over. But what happens when rising powers like China with very different legal and political systems begin investing abroad on a vast scale? Our speaker, Matthew Erie, associate professor at the University of Oxfordr esponded to this question by launching a six-year project, called China, Law, and Development, and inviting scholars around the world to participate in gathering empirical evidence about the legal underpinnings of China’s worldwide investments, and whether or how China has disrupted prior assumptions about the relationship between law and development. In this talk, he will introduce the concept of “law as infrastructure” to make sense of the strategies and challenges of the People’s Republic of China. Rather than a “clash of civilizations” or a world remade in China’s image, law as infrastructure points to a process of layering, assembling, and bundling different laws and legal regimes including new law that is integrated within existing frameworks, epistemic communities, and institutions, as well as the creation of new infrastructures in emerging sectors such as renewable energy.

Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping has recently started highlighting the importance of promoting “foreign-related rule of law,” a new category of law that knits together Chinese and international law to govern China’s offshore activities. One place to look for foreign-related rule of law in action is in Chinese-invested overseas special economic zones, which some foreign scholars view as extraterritorial zones under Chinese power and law.

Many debates exist about the nature of China’s engagement with the international “rule-based” order and whether the arrangements underpinning the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) will be formalized into hard laws. Our speakers will demonstrate how China’s provincial governments re-interpret the BRI to generate a new international economic agenda largely driven by regional interests.