Trust is key if China’s international arbitration goals are to succeed, experts say

China’s international arbitration efforts have made significant progress, but more work is needed to attract foreign parties to arbitrate in China amid US-China rivalry, according to arbitrators and law scholars.

China’s newly revised Arbitration Law took effect in March, marking the most significant overhaul of the country’s commercial dispute framework since 1994, in a move to promote cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen to develop into international arbitration centres, competing with current global leaders like London and Singapore.

But a harder question for Beijing is not the amount of energy or resources poured in, but whether foreign parties, particularly Western ones, will actually choose mainland China as a seat, according to arbitrators and legal scholars.

The bottleneck is not legal design but trust, they said.

“An international arbitration centre should be a place that everyone chooses as a base for arbitration, even if it has no connection to their country,” said Tao Jingzhou, an independent arbitrator at Arbitration Chambers and one of China’s earliest international arbitrators.

Beijing’s drive to grow its arbitration capacity reflects more than a desire to attract a slice of a high-value professional services market.

  

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