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Agreements and Dispute Settlement in China–Africa Economic Ties

Unencumbered by a history of an intrinsically hierarchical relationship, contemporary China–Africa economic ties appear to have the benefit of being on balance politically horizontal, economically reciprocal, and systemically transactional. A corpus of credible evidence now demonstrates that overall the economic ties of the last couple of decades in the areas of trade, investment, and other types of commercial relations have been remarkably successful. The trajectories also appear optimistic. Beginning from ancient times, political boundaries notwithstanding, commercial relations have always been ordered by law. The existing post-colonial modern world order is, however, largely formalistic and moderately harmonized. It expects formal rules and institutions for the ordering of economic affairs of the scale and complexity represented by China’s contemporary relations with Africa. This chapter identifies and critically appraises China–Africa’s use of agreements to order their economic relations, and the mechanisms of dispute settlement that these agreements envision.