Although China began to sign bilateral investment treaties (BITs) in the 1970s, it refused to grant foreign investors the right to sue their host government in international arbitration tribunals. Few realize that China’s treaty negotiators have in fact abandoned this restriction in almost every Chinese BIT signed since 1998, including those with Latin America. Scholars have suggested that China reversed its policy in order to support Chinese overseas investors or to fit its general economic liberalization strategy. However, China’s BITs with Mexico, Peru, and Colombia as well as its arbitration case with Peru contradict these theories. I argue that China began signing open BITs to test the risks of granting open access to European countries and the United States, for whom open access is a key condition. China experimented gradually with open arbitration, just as it has experimented ...

The enormous rise in Chinese financial lending to major infrastructure and heavy industry projects has raised concerns regarding the environment. Over the past twenty years, civil society has pushed for the inclusion of social and environmental guidelines regional and government development banks’ guidelines. As a result, multilateral and Western banks have established a set of internationally agreed upon lending practices. These practices have shaped the rise of social and environmental protection within the developing world by tying the availability of loans to these policy conditions. China has been a relatively newcomer in establishing similar environmental guidelines for its development banks. Although China has made some significant progress, China still has a ways to go to meet internationally established environmentally responsible lending practices.