Pandemics have a history of interrupting civilisations. From the Greeks and Romans to the British Empire, pandemics have eroded political authority and caused economic instability. The twenty-first century has been hailed as the ‘Asian century’, with China's ascent as central to a reconfiguration of global capital and power. The COVID-19 pandemic, that began in 2019 and still rages as of this writing, started in China and was exacerbated by initial repression by the local government authorities before the central government could implement appropriate disaster response. Since then, COVID-19 has been one of the most devastating pandemics in the history of globalisation. Its mortality has been coupled with regulatory responses which at times have been debilitating to national economies, no less is this true for China's own regulatory response which has been anomalous across the world. This Special Issue explores the impact the COVID-19 pandemic has had on Chinese overseas direct investment and the concomitant forms of capital (symbolic, social, and political). It features collaborative research and writing by early career experts from throughout the world, as part of the ‘China, Law and Development’ project, based at the University of Oxford. It examines how China, its trade partners, and transnational orders have responded to the pandemic through law and regulation across an array of fields: dispute resolution, legal services, immigration law and policy, digital surveillance, global health governance, and democratic fragility.

The unprecedented global pandemic has shaken the world's foundations – upending legal institutions, toppling established principles of transnational governance, and limiting mobility between nations. In the People's Republic of China (the PRC or China), one of the most significant legal developments is the major reconfiguration of the state's labour and capital policies oriented towards its economic partners with emerging economies and economies in transition. These policies have changed dramatically, especially given the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on lower-income states. China's domestic situation and its need to meet evolving transnational demands also contribute to the reformation of these economic ties, and perhaps precede further changes to be implemented in the future. To provide much-needed insight into this ongoing transformation, this Article investigates how China's labour and capital policies towards its key international partners have developed in response to the pandemic. Drawing on three case studies, we use a socio-legal approach to analyse the status of migrants from African countries in China, labour immigration to China from its southwestern border regions, and the emigration of Chinese nationals to Serbia and the Balkans for the purposes of labour and investment. Through these representative developments, this Article unveils new trends in China's post-pandemic labour and capital policies, including enhanced responsiveness; a security-centric approach to border management; and an improving regulatory approach to ordinary migration channels.

This article analyses China's global health governance (GHG) practices and GHG legal infrastructure in the wake of COVID-19. It posits that China has pursued a mix of bilateral and multilateral strategies during the pandemic to promote global cooperation and domestic regulation to shape an effective GHG response. It demarcates China's proactive role in norm-setting to respond to the global health crisis. It first considers China's responses to COVID-19 and its interaction model with multilateral institutions including WHO and GAVI. It then examines China's bilateral health strategies, taking its interactions with African countries as an example, before analysing and comparing existing norms and practices on the ‘right to regulate’ under the rules of the World Trade Organisation and treaties that China participates in that call for more regulatory recognition. The article then proceeds to examine China's new initiatives in shaping GHG strategy during COVID-19. Finally, it concludes and calls for a coordinated multilateral approach to handle global health crises.

China's rising influence in parts of the developing world has raised concerns among the US and its allies. In the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak, the provision of vaccines and aid to countries in the Global South have further heightened anxieties over the potential for diffusion of China's ideals. China's investments are thought to promote the diffusion of its perspectives of rule of law and democracy, posing a challenge to the global dominance of Western liberal democratic values. Nonetheless, few studies have examined how the diffusion of China's ideals may occur through its investments and infrastructure projects in young democracies such as Malaysia whose governance and legal system significantly outperform China's according to various global indexes. This article investigates the increasing engagement with China and the reasons for this trend against the backdrop of Malaysia's legal and political institutions inherited from the West. It considers how young democracies like Malaysia are vulnerable to China's influence, intentional or unintentional, through investment. The analysis sheds light on the mechanisms that give rise to such vulnerability, exploring how the electoral system and rule of law may facilitate and amplify the impact of Chinese investment, with broader implications. Shared tacit understandings, such as the instrumentality of law and the nexus between state and business, which facilitate cross-country cooperation are also examined.

The COVID-19 pandemic is reshaping the landscape of Chinese dispute resolution. The aim of this article is to outline China's various approaches to such development in times of global pandemic. The article primarily examines the features of online arbitration in China with a special focus on the significance of party autonomy and the authority of the tribunal in handling virtual hearings. This trend prompts the question as to whether virtual hearings and the use of digital technology ensure the protection of data and privacy. Further, the article analyses the impacts of online dispute resolution on litigation and different sets of new rules adopted in China to handle online hearings. It concludes that China successfully addressed most of the raised questions in terms of data and privacy protection, and that the processes through which dispute resolution becomes increasingly digitalised seems to be an irreversible trend that warrants further research into its consequences.

Countries across the world expanded digital surveillance strategies in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As the pandemic occurred contemporaneously with a global trend toward greater digital repression, commentators advanced the notion that China would use the health crisis to promote a technology-enabled form of authoritarian governance abroad. This article surveys the evidence for these claims by first examining the literature on the increase of digital surveillance associated with China and then presenting three case studies from developing countries with varying responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The selected countries – Brazil, South Africa and Vietnam – used surveillance technology as part of their pandemic response and have either been influenced by Chinese approaches or adopted Chinese technology in recent years. Examining these case studies allows us to better understand claims regarding China's role in the general spread of digital surveillance and the interplay between Chinese state objectives and local political environments. Crucially, we illustrate how China's engagement in digital governance abroad is heavily contingent on domestic environments. Against a backdrop of China's growing influence in global digital governance, the effects observed in these case studies of Chinese surveillance models and technology proliferating through pandemic management are diffuse and contextualised by local factors.

The narrative that banks, government departments and state-owned enterprises are the foremost protagonists in shaping China's outbound capital flows has been a commonplace view. This article seeks to expand the focus to include other under-scrutinised players: lawyers. With reference to exporting industries (such as shipping and natural gas), this article explains how lawyers – in tandem with China's governmental and judicial organs – have shifted from enabling outflows to postponing them, as a result of China's Covid-19 force majeure regime. Even with capital on pause, Covid-19 has also kept lawyers busy, prompting them to think about how to maximise their firm's proximity to the clients they have and to new clients that they want to win. Accordingly, this article also provides an overview of the techniques used by predominantly Anglo-American law firms to gain access to new legal markets during Covid-19, with a view to winning more work from Chinese capital-exporters and their foreign counterparties.