The U.S.-Asia Law Institute will hold an event to hear Professor Kun Fan from the University of New South Wales to present her co-authored work in progress: “From Structure to Actors: Unveiling Belt and Road Dispute Resolution through the Eyes of Participants.” 

Please RSVP by sending an email to cy663@nyu.edu before Oct. 1, 2024 and you will receive a copy of Professor Fan's paper.   

Solving Disputes on the Belt and Road

Monday October 7
4 pm-5:30 pm ET
Location: Wilf Hall, 3/F conference room  

China’s massive Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has been vilified as a form of “debt-trap diplomacy” and praised as a paradigm-changer for the developing world. Our guest speaker, Professor Kun Fan of the University of New South Wales, is among a small cohort of legal scholars who are examining how the BRI is actually implemented and its legal underpinnings. Drawing on primary materials and semi-structured interviews with participants in BRI projects, in a new paper Professor Fan examines how Chinese enterprises design dispute resolution clauses in BRI contracts and how they resolve BRI disputes in practice. She finds that – contrary  to popular beliefs that BRI dispute resolution is dictated by the Chinese side or by top-down policy directives – dispute resolution arrangements under the BRI are influenced by a mix of pragmatic, political and cultural factors. More broadly, she finds that participants in the BRI, especially Chinese state-owned enterprises, are not merely passive policy receivers but actively shape the processes of BRI dispute resolution.  

Kun Fan is associate professor of law at the University of New South Wales and a member of the school’s China International Business and Economic Law Centre. She previously taught at McGill University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her teaching and research focus on alternative dispute resolution (ADR), comparative legal studies, and law and society. She is the author of Arbitration in China: A Legal and Cultural Analysis (Hart Publishing), and has published widely in academic journals. Professor Fan also has extensive experience in ADR practice, having worked as counsel, legal expert, secretary for the arbitration tribunal, and arbitrator in a number of international arbitrations and domain name disputes. She oversaw more than a hundred arbitrations administered by the ICC International Court of Arbitration while working at its Secretariat in Paris. She is a member of the New York Bar, and serves as a Domain Names Panelist for CIETAC, HKIAC, ADNDRC, an arbitrator for a few institutions, including BAC, SHIAC, eBRAM and is an accredited mediator of HKMAAL. Her PhD is from the University of Geneva, her LLM from New York University and her LLB from the China Foreign Affairs University.