For the past forty years China has been developing its network of international investment agreements. While initially China followed the template set by contracting partner countries, it has increasingly adopted its own approach towards investment protection in treaty negotiations, in an attempt to translate its rapid economic growth into greater political and negotiating power. This aspiration is also visible in China’s domestic policy initiatives concerning inward investment, in particular its enactment of the Foreign Investment Law and its implementation of related measures, including exemptions from tax liability for certain reinvestments. China’s continued shaping of investment treaties in accordance with its own bespoke needs has the potential to influence the future development of international investment law worldwide. This chapter first summarizes the history of China’s investment treaty practice and its domestic policies concerning inward investment. It then looks at issues that have arisen in investment treaty arbitrations involving China (as a respondent) or its nationals (as claimants). Finally, it analyzes China’s proposals for international investment law reform.

It examines the role of the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) in investor–state dispute settlement. After briefly introducing the creation of the ICSID, it argues that ICSID dispute settlement is one of the mechanisms available should disputes arise under the BRI, and the ICSID’s special attributes will make it a particularly effective vehicle in this context. Further, it introduces ICSID’s efforts to modernize its rules.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, there was no tacit or express global agreement to reduce or eliminate dual nationality. In fact, dual nationality has proliferated since the 1970s. While the erosion of coverture globally has, for the most part, eliminated the problems faced by married women with regard to their nationality, little other progress has been made on the subject. In the postwar world, the international legal system shifted away from nationality and protection by states – embracing instead an individualist paradigm. As Eduard Benes said, ``The protection of minorities in the future should consist primarily in the defense of human democratic rights.’’ And so, alongside the Charter of the United Nations was born the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. René Cassin, one of the drafters of the Universal Declaration, like Benes, was dubious and, at times, scornful of the minorities regime. The Universal Declaration as a set of legal norms and principles, thus, should be read in the context of the rejection of group-based rights systems – particularly those dependent upon nationality as a legal status. In its place emerged a system of individualized international rights.

While politicians, scholars, and lawyers argued about whether individuals ought to be subjects of international law and bear rights within the international order, commercial organizations, like the International Chamber of Commerce, began to advocate for the protection of property and investments at the international level. Investors, they argued, ought to be able to hale a state before a neutral tribunal in order to defend their property rights. While refugees did not have access to international courts or tribunals to defend their rights in the interwar period, commercial organizations increasingly did.