Evolution of Non-discriminatory Standards in China's BITs in the Context of EU-China BIT Negotiations

The European Union (EU) and the People's Republic of China (PRC or China) in January 2014 decided to launch negotiations on a bilateral treaty addressing the promotion and protection of investment between the two parties. This article mainly examines the legal positions from which the parties will proceed their negotiations in terms of the non-discriminatory standards, that is, the national treatment and the most-favored-nation treatment, which are said to be the cornerstone of foreign investment protection, by focusing on the evolution of non-discriminatory standards in China's BITs against the same standards in the EU BITs, in particular, the EU's recently concluded three important treaties regulating, among other things, foreign investment, namely with Canada, Singapore and Vietnam. Domestically, the reference value of BITs signed by China in the 1980s and 1990s has been significantly affected by the dynamic economic reform and market development in the past four decades. Essentially, globalisation has fundamentally lifted China's foreign investment standards up to international standards. As a result, while the market anticipates the difficulties in the ongoing negotiations, the gap between the EU and China, as argued in this article, should be noticeably slight when the EU and China come to negotiate the non-discriminatory standards.