This research examines China’s development in terms of the nation’s SOE reforms surrounding the two major milestones in China’s integration with neoliberalism, the accession to the World Trade Organization and the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). It considers the interlinking of the legal aspect of China’s SOEs reform with its economic development, and reinforces the economic argument that China has embraced both neoliberalism and state-capitalism in order to achieve its industrial development. This paper highlights the persistent logic of China’s SOEs reform which aims to approach international legal standards while keeping sight of the objectives of economic development. China’s semi-embrace of neoliberalism and its insistence on state capitalism, on the one hand, provide an alternative developmental model for other developing countries, while on the other hand, facing an increasingly deteriorating relationship with the US which cannot tolerate any rising power that challenges its hegemony, especially a power with a different ideology.

Professor Petersmann has developed a constitutionalization theory for IEL based on Western constitutionalism theory in conjunction with human rights law. However, there is a paradox in his theory considering that he stresses ‘legal pluralism’ on the one hand, while calling for a cosmopolitan conception of IEL on the other hand. The hypothesis of this paper is that there are no ‘universalizable’ principles and common constitutional principles that can guarantee the compatibility between the two. Petersmann’s three often-used keywords, ‘human rights,’ “principles of justice,” and “judicial protection of individual rights,” are clarified in the context of Chinese thought and China’s progressive integration into the world economy. This paper finds that Petersmann’s theory focuses on bottom-up individual struggles, whereas Chinese thought is characterized by top-down overall consideration. The value divergence between the goodness of human nature in Chinese thought and the evil of human nature in Western thought makes ‘legal pluralism’ an insurmountable obstacle to a cosmopolitan conception of IEL.