The Evolution And Solution Of Sustainable Development Clauses In China’s BITs

It is widely considered that the concept or principle of sustainable development is a general rule of economic development and international communication. Under the background of the Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT), the sustainable development is a concept of win-win and it is clearly explained as a win-win goal of the contracting parties in many treaties. After the slow change of sustainable development clause in several generations, China’s BITs began a more cautious exploration. What’s more, the close contact with developed countries also contributed to China’s BIT practice to open a transformation road of high standard.With the change of China’s economic status in the world market, China is not only the world’s largest foreign capital-importing country, but also one of the largest capital-importing countries.So, the objective of the new generation of China’s BIT is to achieve the promotion and protection of international investment and achieve the goal of sustainable development. However, in terms of sustainable development in existing BITs, there are some problem including the lack of unified protection to all provisions, the poor attention of the public interest and blurred substantive provisions relating to sustainable development. This paper aims to systematize China’s BITs, refer to BIT popular trend, and make a new generation of sustainable-development-friendly BIT. Therefore, the article is divided into four parts.In the first part, it analyzes sustainable development clauses of BITs, including defining "sustainable development" in different contexts and the usual form of sustainable development clauses.In the second part, through combing the BIT in force, it analyzes the evolution of sustainable development clauses in China’s BITs, which mainly shows covering sustainable development in the preamble of investment treaties, starting protecting the host country from protecting investors and investment only and becoming increasingly concerned about the public interest from ignoring the public interest.In the third part, the new trend of the sustainable development clauses of China’s BIT is discussed. China is accelerating the process of negotiations with the European Union and the United States, and has made substantial progress in BIT.The fourth part analyzes how to carry on the designing of sustainable development clauses in China’s BIT. China’s dual status of capital importing and exporting country promote us a particularly cautious road in terms of clause-designing. Improving traditional provisions and adopt ing new forms are two ways.