The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a new model of international cooperation and new platform for global governance under contemporary international law. The Initiative will promote basic principles of international law, playing the mediating role of preventing disputes and resolving various risks in the process of establishing a new pattern of global governance. The Initiative is in line with the new trend of international cooperation and development in the 21st century, representing a new round of the process of reforming international political economy. It is a useful attempt to enhance China’s contribution to economic co-prosperity and political stability among the countries along the Belt and Road. This paper tries to understand the BRI under contemporary international law. Part two will discuss the status of the BRI. Part three will investigate the influence of the BRI. Part four will analyze the function of contemporary international law for co-building the Belt and Road.

Considering the large number of civil, commercial and investment disputes that arise between Chinese investors and their counterparts along the Belt and Road, it is necessary to establish a dispute settlement mechanism. The open, cooperative and non-institutionalized features of the Belt and Road Initiative require the reform and improvement of China’s domestic dispute settlement mechanism for foreign civil, commercial and investment disputes; and bilateral and multilateral dispute settlement mechanisms between or among China and the Belt and Road countries should be strengthened. When appropriate, China may propose the establishment of a multilateral dispute settlement mechanism that is especially designed for the Initiative. The status quo of dispute settlement mechanisms between China and the Belt and Road countries necessitates the establishment of a preset mechanism that uses arbitration as the primary approach, litigation as the secondary approach, and mediation as an alternative.

Brassinosteroids (BRs) control virtually every aspect of plant growth and development. BRs act alone or with other exogenous and endogenous signals including auxin and light. To screen for the novel player involved in BR signaling in Arabidopsis, we employed cDNA overexpression strategy. We created a cDNA library to be expressed under the 35S overexpression promoter, and introduced into a weak brassinosteroid insensitive 1 (bri1) mutant. The mutant dubbed bri1-5 with long petiole (blp) was identified to display bigger stature especially in hypocotyl and petiole length relative to bri1-5. Sequence analysis of the rescued transgene revealed that blp consisted of a chimeric DNA consisting of a 3’ half of PHYB, 2 bp insertion, and a part of a chloroplast ribosomal RNA. Re-introduction of chimeric DNA into bri1-5 recapitulated blp phenotype. The blp phenotypes being similar to phyB mutants led us to examine both the PHYB transcript and protein levels in the blp 35Spro:PHYB doubly homozygous line. Lower levels of both transcripts and proteins of PHYB suggested that introduction of the chimeric gene interfered with the stability of PHYB transcripts. Our results highlight that overexpression mutagenesis facilitates functional genomics to decipher a function of Arabidopsis genome.