"Aggressive Legalism" is defined as a strategy whereby a WTO Member uses the substantive rules of the WTO to counter what it deems to be the unreasonable acts, requests and practices of its major trading partners. When they first joined the GATT, both Japan and Korea were reluctant to use the...

China has long been hailed as the biggest success story in economic development through integration into global value chains, especially since its accession to the WTO 20 years ago. It is much less well known, however, how China refitted the global value chain narrative to influence economic...

“How to deal with China?” This is the biggest question confronting US trade policy, or we can even say its entire foreign policy, today. Over the past few years, the debate on this important issue has benefited from the contributions from many trade law scholars, with those by Wu, Hillman,...

Twenty years after it became a Member of the WTO, China’s image in popular perception has shifted from the biggest success story of the world trading system to its biggest challenge. In the past few years, tons of research have been conducted on what other WTO Members should or could do to...

Energy governance at the international level is fraught with difficulties due to the “competition among purposes” between different bodies of international law. In this paper, we extend the thesis to argue that the same tension may be found in domestic energy governance. Drawing from...

This paper examines the legal rules in the investment chapter in the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). It starts with an overview and summary of the main provisions in the chapter, followed by an assessment of the rules by comparing established free trade agreements (FTAs),...