This chapter first gives an overview of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), including its background and content. It then examines how major Western powers are responding to the BRI by proposing alternatives, thus illustrating its geopolitical and geo-economic implications. Following this, it deconstructs the legal framework of the BRI and explains the approach with which China is putting the BRI into practice. Finally, it explores what the BRI may bring about in the international legal order and the Chinese legal order. Through the prism of the BRI, this chapter will help appreciation of how China, as it becomes a leading state, exerts influence on the international order, which is experiencing a tremendous transformation.

This chapter explores the social, political, and legal implications of irony use. People do not simply employ irony for the sake of expressing ironical meanings alone, but use irony, especially in public spheres, to communicate a variety of pragmatic, or perlocutionary, messages. Many verbal ironies convey meanings that are strategically negotiated to affect different social, political, and legal outcomes. Irony often has significant, concrete consequences in real-life discourse contexts. Simpson presents various attested examples to exemplify how irony may be differently enacted in private and public spheres of communication, but can also be readily transferred, and sometimes transformed, from private conversations to larger public discussions. He appeals to critical discourse analysis as one possible approach to uncovering the social work that irony often accomplishes (e.g., power and ideology), and outlines some of the perils and pitfalls of irony in different discourse contexts (e.g., public sports conversations, legal discourse, politics, twitter). Simpson ends with a fascinating exploration of whether irony may be “the last refuge of the scoundrel,” a place inhabited by some politicians who appear to use irony as an option in any difficult situation where they must “apologize-or-deny-or-ironize.”