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.