Law Commons^™

The "Race To The Bottom" Returns: China's Challenge To The International Labor Movement, Stephen F. Diamond

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Petrochina Syndrome: Regulating Capital Markets In The Anti-Globalization Era, Stephen F. Diamond

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The 'Race To The Bottom' Returns: China’S Challenge To The International Labor Movement, Stephen F. Diamond

Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers

China is now, and increasingly, an integral player in the global economy and in international relations. Economic and political restructuring in China today is affecting the lives of millions, yet only a small number of top bureaucrats and wealthy regime-backed entrepreneurs are making the basic decisions about the outcome of this process. This bureaucratic and entrepreneurial class resists fiercely any serious attempt to build independent and democratic institutions such as trade unions.

This article will consider four areas of concern. First, the structural changes underway in the Chinese economy are creating both domestic and international imbalances that are exacerbating inequalities …

Agricultural Biotechnology In China: An Unreachable Goal?, Stanley P. Kowalski

Law Faculty Scholarship

Recently there has been much discussion about the People’s Republic of China’s (PR) investment in and commitment to agricultural biotechnology (agri-biotech). Rapid economic expansion, population growth and technological development are changing the PRC; accompanying these changes is increased demand for high-quality food and fibre. Agri-biotech is optimistically viewed as an important way to meet these demands. Whereas Chinese technological capacity in agri-biotech has advanced significantly over the past decade, it may be unable to meet these challenges. Even when this capacity is combined with good intentions, enlightened policy and large capital outlays, accelerated development of agri-biotech may nevertheless be precluded. …

Sequencing, Acoustic Separation, And 3-D Negotiation Of Complex Barriers: Charlene Barshefsky And Ip Rights In China, Rebecca Green, James K. Sebenius

Faculty Publications

Taking the perspective of the lead U.S. negotiator, Charlene Barshefsky, this article details and analyzes the negotiations that took place in the mid-1990s between the United States and the People's Republic of China over intellectual property rights (IPR). Employing a "negotiation analytic" methodology, Charlene Barshefsky's actions are interpreted to suggest a number of promising approaches to managing the daunting complexities of trade and other negotiations: recognizing the multiparty aspects of apparently bilateral dealings and capturing them in a "deal diagram;" carefully assessing "barriers" to agreement; sequencing to build a winning coalition and overcome potentially blocking ones; "acoustic separation" of issueframes; …

Book Review: East Meeting West In The Mediation Marketplace, Nadja Alexander

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

China is now ‘all the rage’. Everyone is either learning Mandarin or tripping off on a conference to Beijing or a business trip to Shanghai. Commercial concerns are busy establishing trade links with Chinese partners to prepare for the emergence of the biggest marketplace in the world. The business of ADR is no exception.

Empirical Research Into The Chinese Judicial System, Donald C. Clarke

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

The last few years have seen a proliferation of programs by Western states and international agencies designed, in broad terms, to promote reforms in the Chinese judicial system. What is not clear, however, is whether there has been systematic thinking about the precise goals to be sought in these and other projects, whether these goals are appropriate, and indeed whether their achievement can even be ascertained in some measurable way. This paper is an attempt to think about what we know, what we might want to know, and what we can know about China's judicial system, broadly defined.

A key …

Puzzling Observations In Chinese Law: When Is A Riddle Just A Mistake?, Donald C. Clarke

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Understanding the Chinese legal system is not simple because it is (probably) very different from a Western one. The understanding of the Chinese legal system that results from any study will depend crucially on the selection of a paradigm with which to define what counts as an observation and against which to measure and assess the observations, either descriptively or normatively. This is not to say that the selection of a paradigm will make the difference between understanding and not understanding. It will, however, make a difference between understanding in one way and understanding in another way. Whether one of …

Competition, Corporate Responsibility, And The China Question, Jospeh Vining

Other Publications

"Corporate responsibility" is not a peripheral matter. It is at the core of all decision-making on behalf of business corporations under American law. This paper examines the effort to add an exemption for "business" in corporate form to the exemptions from ordinary responsibility that are seen in other areas of activity - e.g., for the military, for lawyers in adversarial litigation, or for investigators in scientific research. It looks at a number of well known cases and points to the often neglected relevance of both the criminal law applicable to corporations as such, and the evolving professional responsibility of corporate …

China's Legal System And The Wto: Prospects For Compliance, Donald C. Clarke

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

The impact of WTO membership both on China and its trading partners, both for good and for ill, has been greatly overstated. WTO treaty obligations and Dispute Settlement Body rulings will not become part of Chinese domestic unless specifically incorporated by Chinese legislation. Moreover, the WTO does not require a perfect legal system of its members; instead, it requires a degree of transparency and fairness in certain limited areas. Although some of China's WTO commitments will be difficult for it to fulfill, even non-fulfillment will not result in the predicted flood of WTO dispute settlement proceedings, since such proceedings can …

Corporate Governance In China: An Overview, Donald C. Clarke

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Corporate governance (gongsi zhili) is a concept whose time seems definitely to have come in China. Chinese definitions of corporate governance in the abstract tend to cover the system regulating relationships among all parties with interests in a business organization, usually spelling out shareholders as a particularly important group (e.g., Liu, 1999; Yin, 1999). But Chinese corporate governance discourse in practice focuses almost exclusively on agency problems and within only two types of firms: state-owned enterprises (SOEs), particularly after their transformation into one of the corporate forms provided for under the Company Law,1 and listed companies, which must be companies …

Economic Development And The Rights Hypothesis: The China Problem, Donald C. Clarke

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

An important school of thought in institutional economics (the "Rights Hypothesis") holds that economic growth requires a legal order offering stable and predictable rights of property and contract because the absence of such rights discourages investment and specialization. Without the security of expectations offered by such a legal order, according to the Rights Hypothesis, the risks of a great number of otherwise beneficial transactions far outweigh their expected return, and as a result such transactions simply do not occur. Society is mired in an economy of short-term deals between actors bound by non-legal ties such as family solidarity which by …

Taiwan And The Wt0, Steve Charnovitz

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This paper is about Taiwan and the World Trade Organization. It discusses the history of Taiwan's involvement in the world trading system and the accession to the WTO. The paper then notes some unique features of Taiwan's membership and discusses the current political tension with China in the WTO. The paper ends with a discussion of the implications of Taiwan's membership in the WTO for potential Taiwanese membership in other international organizations.

Teaching Adr In The Labor Field In China, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Articles

The editors have asked us to be quite personal in our ruminations on the future of comparative labor law and policy. For me, over the past several years, the focus has been on China. My first visit to China in 1994, purely as a tourist, was almost by accident. In late September of that year I attended the XIV World Congress of the International Society for Labor Law and Social Security in Seoul, South Korea. In the second week of October, I was scheduled to begin teaching a oneterm course in American law as a visiting professor at Cambridge University …