Introductory Remarks by David J. Devlaeminck
The twenty-first century has been referred to as the “Asian Century” for international law.Footnote 1 The Asia-Pacific is one of the most diverse regions, with different cultural traditions, religions, economies, environments, and styles of government. In spite of this diversity, some Asian states have a common experience of colonialism and interactions with hegemonic powers. They have also been characterized as having less engagement with international law, exhibited by preference for non-legal methods of state relations and limited representation at international institutions.Footnote 2 These experiences and ways of doing things are exemplified by some common principles, such as the Ten Principles of Bandung, which are reflected in the Charter of the United Nations.Footnote 3 New evidence may suggest that this is changing.Footnote 4 The role of culture is often overlooked in international law, but arguably plays an important role in a state’s perceptions and engagement with international law. As the region is a theater for some of most important international law issues of our day, this panel seeks to ask the question: How does the cultural diversity of the region impact state relations and its engagement with international law?
Is international law universal or does it, at least in part, vary by region?Footnote 1 It would be hard to deny that international law was itself shaped by particular regions: Europe provided the basic Westphalian grammar; Latin America contributed the idea of non-intervention; and Africa insisted on the principle of self-determination. There have long been claims, for example, that there exists a specific “droit international américain” in the words of Alexandre Alvarez,Footnote 2 and it is sometimes argued that European law has largely displaced international law in the relations between European partners.Footnote 3 The Asia Pacific region’s engagement with international law is perhaps harder to gauge. This is in part because the region, concentrating about half of humanity and increasingly its economic center of gravity, is so huge; it is also because it is so heterogenous; and it may be because the Asian continent remains relatively under-institutionalized, with little pan-Asian regional integration. For example, Asia is notoriously one of the few regions to not have a regional human rights court, although the possibility has been mooted academically.Footnote 4
Can there nonetheless be said to be an Asian specificity in international law? The question was most recently and explicitly raised by B. S. Chimni on the occasion of the creation of the Asian Society of International LawFootnote 5 and also connects to the long-term outlook of Yasuaki Onuma on the importation of international law in the Far East—particularly Japan but with a civilizational outlookFootnote 6—as well as more recent efforts to rediscover some of the roots of China’s engagement with international law.Footnote 7 The importance of culture to prevailing legal conceptions is a Weberian cliché and clearly the legal systems of Asian countries are as distinctive as any. It is not clear, however, that domestic distinctions necessarily translate neatly onto a regional distinctiveness when it comes to international law. Modern international law was gradually imported through colonization and its long aftermath into the Asia Pacific region where it displaced a variety of modalities of thinking about inter-communal relations that could not be described as Westphalian;Footnote 8 nonetheless, over time, that import has tended to produce its own self-sustaining reality, as states in the region embraced the idea of statehood with gusto. The idea of a specific “Asian way” is sometimes touted in international relations generallyFootnote 9 and in the context of human rights specifically.Footnote 10 It captures some genuine differences, but that debate has been at best inconclusive and at times problematic. Many of the claims about “Asian values” seem to rely on gross generalizations about a great variety of countries straddling different political systems (liberal/authoritarian), histories (colonized/not colonized) and beliefs (Islam/Buddhism/Confucianism/Communism) to name but a few. They also seem to overestimate the importance of “culture” as opposed to politics. And they are often suspected of being little more than a way of legitimizing certain regimes and their aloofness from international law.
Indeed, when it comes to general international law, the risk is overstating the importance of culture to international law engagement. What could be distinctly “cultural,” for example, about Asia’s engagement with the law of the sea, the law of diplomatic representations or the law of investment? Still, it is not impossible to identify strands which, although they are hardly unique to the Asia Pacific region, have combined to create a broad configuration of international law there. These are political rather than strictly cultural. A first is perhaps the widely shared decolonial and anti-imperial experiences of the continent as laying the foundations of hard-won statehood there. From China’s secular effort to emancipate itself from unequal treaties with European powers to the Vietcong struggle against first the French and then the Americans, or from India’s long walk to independence to Indonesia’s hosting of the Bandung meeting, the struggle for independence and self-determination has been central to the emergence of the Asian continent as one in which sovereignty has been wrested, often by force of resistance, from imperial powers. Paradoxically, this emancipatory legacy coexists with its own hegemonic drives, most spectacularly with Japan’s conquests from the 1930s to the end of World War II. It is also evident in a rising China asserting its dominance on its neighbors as the uncontested power in the region and, indeed, a global superpower, potentially reconnecting to the tributary system that once characterized a Sino-centric world.Footnote 11 The combination of these trends has given rise to a particular international law sensitivity, seen elsewhere but perhaps particularly pronounced in the region, emphasizing the sacrosanct character of political independence and manifesting a very cautious approach to cooperation between states. One of the most original contributions to emerge from this crucible is, for example, Nehru’s Panchsheel or Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, as originally embedded in the 1954 Sino-Indian Agreement.Footnote 12
It is worth stressing that these legacies are static and that they leave plenty of space for dynamic resort to international law. International law has been invoked to settle simmering disputes, most notably the controversy over various islands in the South China Sea and beyond them over adjoining portions of the seas. The largely maritime character of these disputes reflects the settled character of most land borders (outside a few flashpoints, most notably Kashmir), but also the intensification of oceanic tensions about resources, passage and geopolitical control. The award by the Permanent Court of Arbitration has not been a resounding success, given China’s rejection of it and the issue has a continued air of irresolution.Footnote 13 International law’s winner-takes-all approach when it comes to settling sovereignty disputes may be partially at fault, given its inability to accommodate more elusive historic titles, although it is unclear that even an inter-temporal application of the law would have favored China’s case.Footnote 14 At the same time, forms of economic integration are progressing apace. The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership stands out, opening up free trade between Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and various partners (Australia, China, Japan, South Korea, and New Zealand). Covering about 30 percent of the world’s population and GDP, it is a momentous step forward. To this agreement must be added agreements with areas beyond Asia such as the EU-China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment or the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership. The reception of international law domestically is very uneven, suggesting a real wariness with some international norms, even when ratified, notably when it comes to human rights. Nonetheless, Asia is hardly alone in that respect. It is also at least worth pointing out that Cambodia has been subjected to a hybrid tribunal with a strong transitional justice component to judge the crimes of the Khmer Rouge, even as Japan and Korea have long engaged in their own efforts at dealing with the past.
It would be difficult to claim that these developments are entirely specific to the region. Asia is in many ways like much of the world when it comes to international law, just as the rest of the world is very much like Asia,Footnote 15 committed as it is to the dogma of sovereignty even as it experiences the inevitable frictions associated with that fiction. Much of international law has long been structured by exchanges and hybridization. A number of events have nonetheless contributed to cement a sense of shared challenges. One was the tsunami which created concerns about the feeble response of some states and lack of cooperation.Footnote 16 Another was the pandemic, which relied in part on ASEAN cooperation and raised common questions about civil liberties.Footnote 17 Perhaps the one issue that has most focused debates is how ASEAN should deal with Myanmar which has experienced a long simmering crisis. The preferred posture is showing some of the limits of a “hands off” approach characteristic of non-interference in a context where the conflict there is creating significant refugee flows and regional tensions.Footnote 18 The Five-Point consensus aims since 2021 to achieve a peaceful resolution and has led to the exclusion of junta representatives from high level meetings, but with little decisive success.
These issues may not altogether illustrate an entirely distinctive Asian way to international law. After all, they seem very familiar from outside the region as raising classic questions of sovereignty and cooperation. Nonetheless, they do suggest a specifically Asian process of adaptation to the exigencies of international law,Footnote 19 in a continent that remains deeply divided internally but occasionally speaks with one voiceFootnote 20 and is already leaving an imprint on modes of production of international law.Footnote 21
Since the establishment of the United Nations at the close of World War II, the international order has become increasingly legalized and institutionalized, not only across diverse fields ranging from human rights to trade and investment but across the various regions and sub-regions of the world. The growth of specialist and regional regimes, especially after the Cold War, has been of such a degree that the fragmentation of international law has been of some concern. The progress of the international legal order has naturally influenced the Asia-Pacific, which has seen its own inroads into international law. While it is true that in the past the Asia-Pacific has been cautious of and engaged less with international law as compared to other regions due to political and historical culture, with suggested reasons including anti-colonial sentiment, a less legalistic and formalized culture, and a preference to exercise strict sovereignty and autonomy, the Asia-Pacific’s attitude toward international law has warmed considerably due to pragmatic considerations of political relations and power in the global order and economic progress on the domestic plane.
From the early 2000s when members of the World Trade Organization were driving globalization, the Asia-Pacific has quietly embraced international economic law and participated in the growth of the global economy. In the current environment, as the global order experiences seismic shifts with the Asia-Pacific at the center of many these geopolitical tensions such the maritime claims in the South China Sea, realigning trade links and supply chains, as well as rising sea levels and climate change, the Asia-Pacific has, more than ever, relied on international law to ensure regional peace, security, prosperity, and economic development. Simply put, Asia-Pacific states have actively participated in the international legal order as well as developed their own multilateral regimes in the region for quite some time. The fact is, as international law is the vernacular of the global order, the Asia-Pacific has learned to engage with international law to safeguard interests.
Apart from the more evident international law engagement by Asia-Pacific states in global fora such as the United Nations, there is also the much less scrutinized issue of how Asia-Pacific regional organizations make and use international law to govern their regional relations. In previous work analyzing the seven main regional organizations across the entire Asia-Pacific, namely, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Eurasian Economic Union, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), and the Melanesian Spearhead Group, it was observed that the type of organization that Asia-Pacific states prefer is distinct from other regional organizations and other issue-specific multilateral institutions, in that they invariably begin as diplomatic organizations that exist to fulfill the members’ need to balance external powers, overcome poverty, have a regional forum to reduce suspicions and foster relationships, share information, and build intraregional confidence. In addition, it must be recalled that all seven organizations had very little recourse to international law in their earlier years and this forms the basis of their longstanding and continued regard for diplomatic engagement. Of course, in line with the increasing legalization and institutionalization of the international legal order, the Asia-Pacific regional organizations took steps over time to become more formalized and rules-based. At the same time, however, they remain comparatively less formalized as compared to European and Latin American regional organizations, develop relatively more soft law than treaty law to govern regional relations, and eschew dispute settlement mechanisms.Footnote 1
This has been ASEAN’s distinct legalization and institutionalization experience following the adoption of its 2007 constituent Charter that was intended to transform the organization into a more agile international actor in the face of external geopolitical and economic pressures. ASEAN’s soft laws (often in the form of declarations and blueprints) are the pre-eminent instrument of choice to operationalize the members’ diverse goals ranging from security and defense to resource-intensive socioeconomic developmental ambitions. To implement ASEAN’s soft laws and minimize cheating, frequent engagement and monitoring are the key means of enforcement. There is a robust hierarchy of intergovernmental and centralized institutions staffed by officials from member states’ governments and the ASEAN Secretariat who meet frequently to discuss work-in-progress. The secretary-general’s and Secretariat’s oversight competences have strengthened through using the World Bank’s Monitoring and Evaluation Framework. The accountability demanded by the more than 1,500 meetings annually and monitoring protocols facilitates transparency, prevents cheating, and enforces integration. Notably, members increasingly accept that such surveillance does not violate their sovereignty. Instead, effective implementation protects their interests, enabling them to enjoy integration outcomes.Footnote 2 Aside from ASEAN’s seminal experience, a similar phenomenon of heightening legalization is unfolding in respect to the non-binding Pacific Islands Forum Declaration on Preserving Maritime Zones in the Face of Climate Change-Related Sea-Level Rise (2021), which has sealed a “compact” among PIF members that maritime boundaries settled according to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea should not be reviewed after being deposited with the UN secretary-general.Footnote 3 Both ASEAN’s and PIF’s preferred modality of international law usage is increasingly acknowledged as being particularly suited to the political and historical exigencies of the two subregions.
Some observations regarding the Asia-Pacific’s gradual transition in international law and regional law regimes need to be made. First, more attention should be paid to the increasing use of international law and intensifying participation in the international legal order by the Asia-Pacific. Despite increasing activity, the stereotype that the Asia-Pacific is less participative in the international legal order and less active in using international law persists. This perception will likely dissipate as the region becomes increasingly rules-based to counter the geopolitical tensions unfolding in its environment.
Second and a trickier issue is the phenomenon of Asia-Pacific regional organizations being relatively “weaker” in legalization and institutionalization than its European and Latin American (and sometimes even African) counterparts. This issue raises a few important questions. Why is there an (implicit) expectation that Asia-Pacific regional organizations should be as legalized and institutionalized as other regional organizations elsewhere? Is such an expectation reasonable? Surely, there must be salient reasons why Asia-Pacific states persist in keeping their regional organizations less formalized even as they engage more frequently in the international legal order. Another question, and arguably the more important one, is that Asia-Pacific regional organizations that are less legalized and institutionalized are deemed somewhat less “competent” than other more formalized regional organizations. The more formalized regional organizations actively use and develop their own regional laws, notably, treaties and dispute settlement mechanisms, which is largely how the international community understands how international law works effectively. In contrast, Asia-Pacific regional organizations tend to prefer making and using soft law and often eschew dispute settlement mechanisms in managing regional relations. As a result, Asia-Pacific regional organizations have been described as “talk-shops” or generators of rhetoric and portrayed as less effective.
It cannot be overlooked that Asia-Pacific states may prefer less strictly legalized and institutionalized regional organizations because these may serve their purposes better. The effectiveness of Asia-Pacific regional organizations depends on the political dynamic of the region, the external factors, the capacity of the organization and the collective determination to achieve common objectives. A diplomatic organization with little reliance on law and institutions can be useful to its members, even if it is deemed ineffective by external observers. While the levels of efficacy are variable among the Asia-Pacific regional organizations—and the reality is that there will always be Asia-Pacific regional organizations that do not appear to achieve any of their stated goals—these Asia-Pacific regional organizations have not dissolved but continue to exist and hold regular meetings that undergird regional stability. The assumption that more formalized legalization and institutionalization make superior regional organizations may be overstated. There should be a broader understanding that Asia-Pacific states use and participate in their regional organizations somewhat differently than the more legalized structures seen elsewhere. It should also be recognized that no matter the type of regional organization, soft cooperation modalities continue to be constructed and used on more sensitive issues that impact upon security and foreign policy, and this is seen to some extent even in the world’s most formalized international and regional organizations.
In sum, the cultural impact of politics and history on the Asia-Pacific’s gradual transition in international law is significant. As the Asia-Pacific increasingly engages with international law, the international legal discourse would benefit by taking a more plural and expansive view of how the region employs it.
The panel addresses the question of “What is ‘culture’ and what role does it play in international law and the engagement of Asia-Pacific States with the international legal system?”
Part of my research focuses on secondary states in the Asia-Pacific, that is, states who are not the major power players in the international legal order. The research makes three claims. First, peripheral states, by virtue of historical experience and a deep awareness of their non-dominant natures, hold fundamentally different vision and use of international law from big powers.Footnote 1 Second, one way that peripheral states exercise this different vision of international law is what I call “legal hedging,” which pays homage to the rich international relations literature on hedging pioneered by, among others, scholars Cheng-Chwee Kuik and Evelyn Goh.Footnote 2 Finally, to speak to the diversity of Asian states, both democratic and non-democratic states can adopt legal hedging strategies, albeit in different ways that reflect individual countries’ historical, ideological, and domestic concerns.
A note on terminology is due before diving in deeper. As a definitional matter, when it comes to categorizing states, concepts such as “peripheral,” “small,” and “secondary” are highly contested.Footnote 3 Asia’s cultural diversity is evident in the range of population, land mass, GDP, among other measures. Here, because the aim is to theorize how less powerful states use international law and institutions to navigate bigger players in the system, relationality, rather than precise categorization, is the relevant frame to analyze the comparative power dynamics among states.Footnote 4 I thus use terms such as “small,” “peripheral,” and “secondary” interchangeably to denote states who are not the primary players in the international legal order. Along the same logic, I do not attempt to distinguish categories such as “middle powers” and “small powers.”Footnote 5 As relationality is the relevant frame, even middle powers can become primary actors when interacting with smaller countries, and so on.
First, what is legal hedging and how does it relate to Asian states’ cultural traditions and historical experiences? Hedging colloquially means “to protect oneself from losing or failing by making transactions on the other side.”Footnote 6 In international relations discourse, hedging refers to state behaviors that feature a mix of cooperative and confrontational elements to manage risks.Footnote 7 A state hedges by offering a mix of cooperative and confrontational elements toward their subject, so as to advance a policy goal of “strategic ambiguity.”Footnote 8
Legal hedging, then, is about the use of law and international institutions to execute hedging policies. It does so by combining two seemingly contradicting behaviors, that is, power acceptance and power rejection conducts.Footnote 9 On the one hand, hedging states acknowledge the realpolitik of relational power dynamics; on the other hand, they don’t just acquiesce but also to advance nuanced resistance through available tools, some of which are provided by international law. In some ways, legal hedging is a complementary to what legal scholar Detlev Vagts called “hegemonic international law,” that is, the ability of a hegemon to “unapologetically” exercise its might.Footnote 10 For less powerful Asian states, legal hedging is a form of legal pragmatism—a way to balance these states’ understanding of the importance of international law and institutions with the keen awareness that law has to be understood with power sensitivities. Such pragmatist attitude toward law is shaped in no small part by Asian states’ historical and contemporary experience as former colonies, proxy sites of Cold War conflicts, outsourcing sites during globalization, and now as frontiers of great power rivalry.
Second, how do Asian states exercise legal hedging, most relevantly against the impressive People’s Republic of China (PRC)? Consider, as initial examples, Vietnam and Cambodia. Despite sharing an ideological root with China, Vietnam’s historical struggles against foreign domination and strong emphasis on economic development led to its eagerness in deepening ties with multiple economic partners while remaining highly sensitive about territorial borders and sovereignty. Cambodia is regarded as one of China’s “client states”; yet even it strives for some degree of autonomy in fear of domestic discontent. These two countries thus display a range of hedging abilities and behaviors, highlighting the complex interactions among domestic, regional, and transnational interests.
Under the legal hedging framework, a state may combine “power acceptance” and “power rejection” conducts toward a bigger power to avoid overreliance. Power acceptance refers to laws and policies that, to varying degrees, signal the hedging state’s acquiescence of the external influence, while power rejection refers to laws and policies that advance resistance. This can be done directly through confrontation or denouncement (for example, the Philippines’ litigation against China on the South China Sea dispute), but often it is done in more subtle ways. In the South China Sea context, rather than directly utilizing the international institution, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, as the Philippines did, Vietnam tried to work through the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to craft a joint statement that reaffirmed the principles of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). This occurred against the backdrop of Cambodia’s 2012 ASEAN chairmanship. It had come under fire then for thwarting Vietnam and the Philippines’ push for a unified regional position on the South China Sea issue, resulting in ASEAN’s first-in-history failure to produce a joint statement at the Foreign Ministers’ Summit and sparking criticism of the organization’s waning relevance.Footnote 11 ASEAN’s 2020 joint statement, crafted by Vietnam but endorsed unanimously by other member states, including Cambodia, was thus seen as a major step for the region to unite against the PRC’s nine-dash line proclamation. The statement explicitly affirmed, for the first time, that “UNCLOS sets out the legal framework within which all activities in the oceans and seas must be carried out.”Footnote 12 Though it sounded rather mild and without direct reference to the Philippines v. China arbitration, the joint statement marked ASEAN’s hard-won unified rejection of China’s maritime territorial claim.
But the most obvious hedging strategies for Vietnam, and for other ASEAN states, have been leveraging and linking economic issues with security issues. Vietnam, like others, has aggressively sought to diversify its economic partnerships. It is a member of two mega multilateral trade agreements—the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) and Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP)—and has also signed a trade and investment agreement with the European Union. Vietnam has deeply enmeshed supply chain architectures with major Asian economies—China but also Taiwan and South Korea, whereby major companies in these economies, including Samsung, Foxconn, LuxShare, and Goertek (electronic equipment), Yue Yuen (footwear), Jinko, Longi and Trina (solar) all have satellite factories in Vietnam.Footnote 13 In the latest news, it was among the first states, just behind the United Kingdom and the PRC, to (maybe) strike a deal with the United States after the second Trump administration’s “liberation day” tariff announcement.Footnote 14
Deeper and more nuanced analysis is needed, but to conclude this short essay, the model of legal hedging described above offers some preliminary takeaways on the roles of less powerful Asian states. First, in tandem with the region’s economic rise and eagerness to take part in shaping a changing international landscape, we are seeing increasing participation and innovation in Asian states’ use of international law. This echoes recent studies on “legal heterodoxy” and “autochthonous law” that highlight smaller states’ and Global South states’ legal innovations as distinct from those originating from developed countries.
Second, less powerful Asian states, not unlike other secondary states, prefer a pluralist vision of international law, even if they may at times embrace the alternative model offered by big authoritarian powers such as China. This instinct to stay embedded in multiple legal orders stems from these nations’ wariness of being overdependent on any single outside force. These states thus have an important, perhaps under-appreciated, role in preserving the pluralist international legal order and mitigating big powers’ hegemonic tendencies in international law.
At the same time, as Cold War history has taught, multipolarity did not necessarily result in a robust pluralist order. Instead, tensions that impede cooperation can narrow the space for states to exercise autonomy, resulting in de facto segregated unipolarity and segregated spheres of influence.
Ultimately, as great power competition between the United States and China is remaking the current global order, providing space for Asian states to embrace aspects of both orders where possible, rather than pressuring them to take sides, would increase opportunities for continued engagement. Legal hedging, perhaps in a paradoxical way, thus also serves to reinforce agency as a core value of international law.
I. Introduction: Culture and Its Relevance to International Law
Culture, long recognized as a foundational element of social life, remains a complex and contested concept. In sociolegal scholarship, it is commonly understood as encompassing both cognitive frameworks—schemas, categories, interpretive logics—and normative structures, such as values, moral codes, and expectations about appropriate conduct. Culture serves not only to guide behavior but also to shape the meaning individuals and institutions assign to legal norms and institutions.Footnote 1 Within international law, the significance of culture has received growing scholarly attention. Legal norms do not operate in a vacuum. Their interpretation, implementation, and contestation are deeply embedded in national legal traditions, institutional structures, and cultural values.Footnote 2 The concept of “legal culture,” referring to prevailing beliefs, practices, and institutional habits surrounding law, offers important explanatory power for understanding how international legal norms are localized, resisted, or reconstituted. Culture, in this sense, mediates both compliance with and resistance to international law, and shapes the perceived legitimacy of legal obligations across jurisdictions.
II. Chinese Legal Culture and Dispute Resolution
China presents a particularly instructive case for examining the relationship between legal culture and international law. Rooted in Confucian traditions that emphasize social harmony, moral suasion, and hierarchical order, Chinese legal culture has historically viewed litigation as a last resort—socially disruptive and morally inferior to mediated or negotiated settlement.Footnote 3 In contrast to adversarial legalism prevalent in Anglo-American systems,Footnote 4 Chinese dispute resolution has traditionally privileged relational, informal, and consensus-oriented methods.Footnote 5 This orientation continues to shape both state policy and individual disputing behavior. Empirical research shows that Chinese parties frequently avoid formal litigation, preferring informal negotiations or strategic invocation of legal rules to pressure for private resolution.Footnote 6 Courts themselves routinely compel mediation to reduce caseloads and preserve social stability, consistent with long-standing cultural preferences.Footnote 7
Chinese interpersonal relations are governed by enduring informal norms that discourage direct confrontation and favor indirect, relationship-preserving strategies. Even amid rapid market reforms and growing internationalization, these normative preferences continue to shape both institutional and individual approaches to legal disputes. Of course, China’s size and diversity give rise to enormous regional variation. Empirical research has indicated that in certain Chinese regions dispute resolution practices resemble those found in European legal cultures.Footnote 8 Nonetheless, the dominant normative and cognitive frameworks that guide China’s elites, especially those who interact with foreign parties in transnational contexts, remain grounded in a complex amalgam of Confucian ethics and Sinicized Marxist ideology.Footnote 9 This elite legal culture plays a critical role in shaping China’s behavior on the international legal stage.
III. Cultural Logics and China’s International Legal Engagement
China’s culturally informed approach to dispute resolution extends to its behavior in international legal fora. Although China has become an active participant in the World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute settlement mechanism,Footnote 10 it has generally confined the filing of formal disputes to high-profile conflicts with the United States and the European Union,Footnote 11 and has shown considerable restraint in pursuing disputes against other states, even when trade tensions arise.
While the Chinese government frames this reticence as a gesture of solidarity with developing countries, its reluctance also extends to developed nations with shared Confucian traditions—most notably Japan and South Korea.Footnote 12 Because of the cultural affinity, officials from these East Asian countries interpret dispute escalation in similar ways, and major decisions along all the key stages of dispute transformation are shaped by shared norms, which provide both a cognitive framework for interpreting state behavior and a normative one for proper conducts.Footnote 13 As a result, trade disputes among East Asian countries often avoid adversarial forums, relying instead on informal channels or diplomatic negotiation rooted in mutual cultural expectations, despite evidence of changes in certain fields over time.Footnote 14
China has also undertaken institutional initiatives to promote dispute resolution mechanisms that reflect its cultural preferences. A key development is the creation of the International Organization for Mediation (IOMed) in Hong Kong, intended to offer professional and flexible mediation services for both state-to-state and commercial disputes. While framed as a complement to existing mechanisms such as investor-state arbitration and the International Court of Justice, IOMed clearly reflects Chinese preferences for consensual, non-adversarial modes of legal ordering.Footnote 15 Closely linked to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, IOMed seeks to project China’s normative preferences globally while offering an ostensibly neutral platform. It exemplifies China’s dual strategy of adapting to prevailing international legal frameworks while simultaneously promoting culturally congruent alternatives. In doing so, China seeks to institutionalize a distinctive vision of legal engagement grounded in relational governance, flexibility, and moral persuasion.
IV. Conclusion and Future Research Directions
Culture plays a constitutive role in shaping state engagement with international legal institutions. In China’s case, the enduring influence of Confucian values and hierarchical social structures continues to inform both domestic legal policy and international legal behavior. Although China has increasingly participated in established legal fora, it simultaneously seeks to reshape aspects of the international legal order to reflect its normative commitments. This dual dynamic—adaptation to and projection of legal-cultural preferences—raises important questions for future inquiry. Can culturally distinct legal traditions exert lasting influence on international legal norms? How do informalist preferences interact with formal structures of global legal governance? Under what conditions might institutions like IOMed gain legitimacy and institutional traction in a fragmented international legal landscape? More broadly, this brief note underscores the importance of integrating cultural analysis into international legal scholarship. Legal institutions are not culturally neutral constructs. Rather, they are embedded in distinct normative and interpretive systems that shape their operation and legitimacy. Empirically assessing how these systems influence international legal behavior remains a pressing challenge. While sociolegal research has convincingly shown that culture matters within national legal systems, understanding precisely how—and to what extent—it shapes international law remains a central question for future research.
