Civilisation on Pause – Introduction to special issue ‘China's Global Capital and the Coronavirus: Views from Comparative Law and Regulation’

Abstract Pandemics have a history of interrupting civilisations. From the Greeks and Romans to the British Empire, pandemics have eroded political authority and caused economic instability. The twenty-first century has been hailed as the ‘Asian century’, with China's ascent as central to a reconfiguration of global capital and power. The COVID-19 pandemic, that began in 2019 and still rages as of this writing, started in China and was exacerbated by initial repression by the local government authorities before the central government could implement appropriate disaster response. Since then, COVID-19 has been one of the most devastating pandemics in the history of globalisation. Its mortality has been coupled with regulatory responses which at times have been debilitating to national economies, no less is this true for China's own regulatory response which has been anomalous across the world. This Special Issue explores the impact the COVID-19 pandemic has had on Chinese overseas direct investment and the concomitant forms of capital (symbolic, social, and political). It features collaborative research and writing by early career experts from throughout the world, as part of the ‘China, Law and Development’ project, based at the University of Oxford. It examines how China, its trade partners, and transnational orders have responded to the pandemic through law and regulation across an array of fields: dispute resolution, legal services, immigration law and policy, digital surveillance, global health governance, and democratic fragility.