Driven by market, consumer preferences and recent climate change discussions, the usage of ‘sustainability’ standards has over the last decade gained ground worldwide. Sustainability standards are largely voluntary, non-mandatory and an increasingly important component of the green economy. While on the one hand the usage of sustainability standards helps achieve several economic and environment objectives, on the other hand they can potentially act as barriers to trade in particular for small producers. This paper examines the potential trade and commercial aspects of sustainability standards in terms of their diversity, cost of incorporation and interaction with supply chains. It considers the compatibility of sustainability standards with the existing trade architecture of the World Trade Organization, drawing on relevant case law developments. Finally, it recommends the usage of international platforms such as the UNFSS and ITC Standards map, to enable product/ service specific information sharing, conformity assessment and business networking.

In 1999, Professor Philip Nichols argued that FCPA-style home country laws are efficient in combating transnational bribery, unlike host country regulation and corporate selfregulation. Observing feeble results obtained in 15 years of OECD Anti-bribery Convention, we find arguments for amending this assertion; home countries, aside from enforcing their own laws banning foreign bribery, should reconsider the classical ways of fighting transnational corruption, by helping host governments in their anti-corruption efforts and by encouraging their own corporations to join international dialogic webs. After presenting an original analysis of the reasons behind the limited impact of FCPA-style action, we would then further argue for the two alternative solutions backed by home states, looking respectively at the spectacular results of the anti-corruption campaign in Romania with US support, and at China’s recent position that her corporations should adhere to international private standards on foreign bribery.

Three foreign investment laws of China were enacted when she was mainly a capitalimporting state. The main purpose of these laws was to boost the Chinese economy with the capital, technology and management of foreign investors. Many preferential treatments, rather than national treatment, were given to foreign investment especially before the country joined the WTO. Following the reform of market economy, fair and equal treatment to foreign investors are replacing the preferential treatments. A new draft of Foreign Investment Law was released in the spring of 2015 to reform the governance of foreign investment by granting national treatment to foreign investors in both admission and operation. The restrictions to foreign investment will be subject to the categories of special administrative measures, which are composed of forbidden and restrictive categories. This is going to be China’s biggest reform on the legal system of foreign investment since 1980s.

Phenotypic traits (physiological characteristics and somatic incompatibility) and genotypic traits (target region amplification polymorphism TRAP) were used to survey the diversity in Chinese Auricularia auricula systematically, which consisted of 32 main cultivated strains. The 27 important and stable physiological indexes were evaluated; somatic incompatibility test (SIT) reaction was described from three aspects: type, pigment, and intensity while intensity clustering alone revealed the phenotypic diversity among the 32 strains;16 pairs of TRAP primer combinations produced 535 unambiguous and reproducible DNA fragments, of these 524 (97.9%) were polymorphic. The phylogenetic trees were constructed by Unweighted Pair-group Method with Arithmetic Averages (UPGMA), which distributed the test strains into four to six major groups respectively. The principal coordinate analysis (PCO) of the three methods (physiological characteristics, SIT intensity and TRAP) exhibited highly similar clustering patterns, revealing that all the test strains can be divided into three groups considered significantly correlated with geographical regions. Results revealed the occurrence of relatively low diversity of A. auricula in the study. The cultivated strains in the same region are more similar physiologically and some strains are suspected to be synonymous. This study suggests that the value for estimating diversity are represented by TRAP＞SIT reaction intensity＞physiological characteristics in A. auricula, and PCO analysis can provided more effective and visible information than the UPGMA clustering dendrogram. Our finding will facilitate future germplasm resources management and breeding program of A. auricula in China.