China is no longer shy or hesitant to talk about or to take a leading role in world affairs. The central plank to the construction of China’s vision of a new world is the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Unsurprisingly the BRI has attracted extensive attention worldwide, with numerous policy briefing and studies on it in general, its geopolitical and economic drivers, its impact on regional and global cooperation, and ways to make use of it to enhance local and regional development in particular.

This minicourse provides normative readings combined with legal analyses of the Initiative and the role of China in the global legal order. It discusses several important topics including the historic and normative foundations of the BRI, the Legal System for BRI, the Dispute Resolution Mechanism in BRI, the Credibility of the Chinese Judiciary and China International Commercial Court, the Impacts of BRI on Transnational Law Firms and Lawyers