This article focuses on China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as a potential cause of trade, investment, financial, maritime, energy trade and intellectual property disputes. In so doing this contribution discusses the increasing “systemic rivalry” among authoritarian, neoliberal and ordo-liberal conceptions of international economic law and the resulting legal problems in the settlement of BRI disputes inside the EU countries, whose courts may not recognize arbitration awards by Chinese arbitration institutions and may hold Chinese investors accountable for disregard for human and labor rights in their BRI investment inside the EU countries.

As the most frequent and most successful user of the dispute settlement system of the WTO, the US has welcomed judicial clarifications by WTO dispute settlement bodies whenever they confirmed legal claims of the US. Yet, the Trump administration increasingly rejects judicial findings against the US trade restrictions as violating the WTO prohibitions of “add(ing) to or diminish(ing) the rights and obligations provided in the covered agreements.” This contribution criticizes the illegal US ‘blocking’ of the WTO Appellate Body and the underlying, hegemonic nationalism and protectionist interest group politics. It suggests that reasonable and responsible citizens benefitting from the WTO trading, legal and dispute settlement systems must resist illegal power politics, for instance, by supporting a WTO Adjudication@me.too “enlightenment campaign” pressuring democratic institutions and governments to protect rule of law and judicial remedies in international trade as prescribed by parliaments when they approved the WTO Agreement.

In their recent article titled Pluralism or Cosmopolitanism? Reflections on Petersmann’s International Economic Law Constitutionalism in the Context of China, Tao Li and Zuoli Jiang have criticized the alleged ‘paradox’ that my publications “stress ‘legal pluralism’ on the one hand, while calling for a cosmopolitan conception of IEL on the other hand.” This short comment aims not only at clarifying conceptual misunderstandings due to our different “constitutional law perspectives,” but also explaining why China should embrace a ‘dialogical’ rather than “exclusive legal perspectivism” by continuing to implement its international legal obligations (e.g., under the UN/WTO law) in good faith and assuming more leadership for the global public good of the rules-based world trading system, with due respect for its underlying ‘legal pluralism’ and often indeterminate ‘basic principles.’ My Chinese critics’ emphasis on the reality of authoritarian Chinese “top-down conceptions” of law and governance neglects China’s obligations under international law and China’s compliance with the WTO, investment and commercial adjudication.