This article was shortlisted as part of the 2025 E-International Relations Article Award, sponsored by Edinburgh University Press, Polity, Sage, Bloomsbury, Manchester University Press, Palgrave Macmillan and Bristol University Press.
Two rooms, one question. In the first, sometime around 1900, a Shanghai magistrate presides with a foreign assessor at his side. Interpreters whisper into the ears of nervous litigants; clerks shuttle petitions across the bench; a consular officer watches from the gallery. The case seems ordinary, an unpaid debt, a contract gone awry, but the choreography is not. Authority is mixed and layered, the languages are plural, and every procedural step circles the same puzzle: whose rules rule in this space that is both China and not-quite-China? The institution is the Mixed Court of the Shanghai International Settlement, a juridical compromise that stitched imperial sovereignty to treaty-port exceptionalism. Its everyday craft was translation and accommodation; its effect was to manage frictions produced by foreign privilege within Chinese territory.
In the second room, today, parties file a cross-border commercial case through the Supreme People’s Court’s ‘one-stop’ platform, which integrates neutral evaluation, mediation, arbitration, and litigation under the umbrella of the China International Commercial Court (CICC). The court sits in Shenzhen or Xi’an; an International Commercial Expert Committee stands ready to advise; the intake is digital; the process is designed to channel disputes through interconnected doors rather than fragment them across institutions. The choreography is again hybrid, but the direction of travel is different. The platform is explicitly engineered to make China’s courts a central, convening venue for high-stakes cross-border disputes, and to do so in a way legible to international commercial actors.
This article argues that China’s BRI-era ‘one-stop’ dispute-resolution model, centred on the CICC, reverses treaty-port extraterritoriality by turning legal pluralism from an imposed constraint into invited jurisdiction through China-led venues. The claim is not that the CICC now dominates dispute resolution involving Chinese capital; it does not. Rather, the argument is that the institutional design and political logic of the ‘one-stop’ architecture recast a repertoire of hybridity that once diluted Chinese authority into a mechanism that projects it. The payoff is explanatory and predictive: if the inversion is real, we should see specific contractual and procedural signals in the next few years as parties experiment with the platform and as China deepens the connective tissue between courts, mediators, and arbitral forums.
Then: How the Mixed Court Made Extraterritoriality Work
The Mixed Court of the Shanghai International Settlement operated from the 1860s through the 1920s to handle cases involving Chinese residents of the Settlement and foreigners who lacked extraterritorial privileges. It sat a Chinese magistrate with a foreign assessor; it applied Chinese law while accommodating and being constrained by treaty-port arrangements; and it mediated between municipal governance in the Settlement and the Qing state’s judicial apparatus. In its very structure, it embodied legal pluralism not as a cosmopolitan preference but as a workaround born of unequal sovereignty. The court’s routines, how translators were used, how jurisdiction was asserted, how appeals moved through Chinese and foreign channels, were negotiated practices that kept commerce flowing while acknowledging foreign leverage.
Three characteristics made the Mixed Court’s pluralism durable. First, it normalised the idea that jurisdiction over cross-border commerce can be functionally split, even within a single urban space. The court’s authority was linked to geography but pierced by treaty rights; its cases lived at the seam of municipal by-laws, consular privilege, and Chinese law. Second, it habituated merchants to treating procedure as strategy. To choose where and how to bring a claim was to choose among interpreters, clerks, sitting assessors, and potential appeal routes; litigants learned to calculate time and language as forms of leverage. Third, it embedded foreign expertise and presence in the adjudicative setting itself. Assessment by a foreign official and visibility to consular actors made the courtroom into a site of international audience costs as well as local justice. These features made the Mixed Court controversial in nationalist memory; they also made it intelligible and sometimes useful to those trying to keep trade moving through a legally fractured city.
Read this way, the Mixed Court is not simply a relic of imperialism. It is an institutional answer to problems of scale, translation, and trust. A heterogeneous trading order needed a grammar for handling multi-legal disputes: multiple languages on the record, multiple authorities at the bench, and multiple pathways for disposition. That grammar, unpleasant in its politics but effective in its craft, becomes easier to trace forward once we stop treating the Mixed Court as an anomaly and start treating it as a repertoire of techniques for managing conflict where sovereignty is contested. The late-1920s ‘rendition’ of the Mixed Court, and the archival traces around it, help show how a controversial institution could nonetheless stabilise expectations about process.
The comparison that follows does not rest on a one-to-one mapping. The Mixed Court’s pluralism was born of coercion; the modern platform is a policy choice. But the relevant through-line is the use of institutional intermediation to stabilise expectations in cross-border commerce. In late-Qing Shanghai, intermediation meant accommodation to foreign privilege so that the city could function. In contemporary China, intermediation means connecting procedures and partners so that foreign-related disputes can be channelled through China’s judicial hub. The similar choreography, many doors, many tongues, many audiences, does not imply similar politics. It does imply similar craft.
Now: The ‘One-stop’ CICC and the Invited Jurisdiction
The CICC emerged in 2018 as a permanent adjudicative organ of the Supreme People’s Court, with two international commercial courts in Shenzhen and Xi’an and an explicit mandate to try international commercial disputes fairly and timely while fostering a rule-of-law business environment. From the start, the SPC situated the courts within a ‘one-stop’ diversified international commercial dispute resolution platform that allows parties to enter through neutral evaluation, mediation, arbitration, or litigation and to route cases among these doors under court oversight. The design ties the courts to an International Commercial Expert Committee and to partner institutions, to integrate rather than merely coordinate the modalities of dispute resolution.
The official Work Guidelines spell out mechanics that are far more specific than most general discussions acknowledge. They describe a platform that connects the CICC to multiple arbitral and mediation institutions; specify eligibility criteria keyed to dispute value and impact; and delineate procedural interfaces among mediation, arbitration, and litigation. At issuance and in subsequent updates, the Guidelines contemplated neutral evaluation, opt-in mediation with listed institutions or Expert Committee assistance, arbitration with recognised partners, and litigation in the CICC itself, with preservation of assets and evidence available via the courts. These rules translate the political ambition into docket management, sequencing, documentation, and online services.
Monetary thresholds and case-type filters work as practical gates. Read alongside the SPC’s provisions on establishing the CICC, these materials indicate that disputes over a high value, often signposted as those exceeding RMB 300 million, or those with significant influence, can be routed into the platform, with the CICC exercising central case management and judicial functions. In practice, an enterprise with an EPC contract or a supply-chain dispute can seek early neutral evaluation, move into mediation, initiate or support arbitration, and obtain interim measures through court channels without abandoning a single, curated digital case file. The promise to counsel is fewer hard forks and more managed junctions.
Two design choices deserve emphasis because they make the pluralism invited rather than imposed. One is the International Commercial Expert Committee, established in August 2018 with an initial cohort of Chinese and foreign specialists. The Committee lends comparative commercial expertise, facilitates mediation, and advises on questions of foreign law. Its mere existence signals that the court understands knowledge and legitimacy as transnational resources; its routinised role signals that those resources can be institutionalised rather than borrowed ad hoc. The other is the platform’s iterative governance. Since launch, the SPC has amended and clarified the CICC’s chartering provisions and issued detailed Guidelines, a pattern that communicates to practitioners that procedures are being tuned in response to use, not frozen at proclamation.
The ecosystem beyond the courtroom has started to reflect the same intent. In June 2022, the Hong Kong International Arbitration Centre became the first arbitral institution outside Mainland China to be included in the one-stop platform. That addition allows parties using HKIAC procedures to seek interim measures and enforcement support from the CICC on the Mainland, lowering the transactional friction of mixing a familiar arbitral seat with Mainland judicial power. For companies and counsel, the linkage transforms what used to be a jurisdictional fork into a corridor; for the SPC, it demonstrates that a Chinese-led hub can interoperate with non-Mainland institutions without ceding control of the adjudicative core.
A second, less noticed vignette underscores the scope of this corridor. Consider a commodities-supply dispute where the parties have opted for HKIAC arbitration with Chinese law as the governing law and have identified Mainland assets at risk. Under the one-stop system, counsel can pursue preservation of assets in China through the CICC while the arbitration proceeds, can mediate with a platform-listed institution to narrow issues, and can return to the court for enforcement. If the court’s digital case management, Expert Committee involvement, and published guidance create the expectation that interim measures will be swift and intelligible, contract drafters will start to write those expectations into standard templates and playbooks.
The platform’s logic also sits within a broader diplomatic story. In May 2025, dozens of countries signed the convention establishing the International Organisation for Mediation in Hong Kong, an intergovernmental body meant to institutionalise mediation at the global level. Whatever its eventual reach, the project aligns rhetorically with the SPC’s emphasis on diversified dispute resolution and positions Hong Kong as a node in a Chinese-supported architecture of non-adjudicatory settlement.
Continuity and Inversion
Placing the Mixed Court next to the CICC can invite easy contrasts that miss the point. The important continuities are not cosmetic. In both settings, procedural hybridity is the instrument for attracting or holding cross-border commerce. Both centre the merchant’s calculus about time, predictability, enforcement, and language. Both rely on outsiders in structured ways: in Shanghai, it was foreign assessors and consular involvement; in the CICC, it is expert committees, partnered mediators and arbitrators, and the tacit acceptance of common commercial norms. The grammar of multi-legal adjudication, multiple doors, multiple tongues, multiple audiences persists.
The inversion lies in who convenes and to what end. The Mixed Court stabilised an unequal distribution of sovereignty by accommodating foreign leverage in an urban enclave; its pluralism was imposed and managed to limit the reach of Chinese authority. The CICC and its one-stop platform convene plural modalities under Chinese judicial leadership to extend the reach of Chinese authority into controversies that travel across borders. The courtrooms are in Shenzhen and Xi’an; the doors can open in Hong Kong or beyond; the procedural interfaces are curated by the SPC. The pluralism is invited and curated to pull cross-border disputes into a hub designed and branded as Chinese.
The inversion does not require that every Belt and Road contract or dispute land in the CICC. It requires only that enough parties perceive a credible pathway through the one-stop architecture, and that the court’s decisions, interim measures, and interactions with arbitral institutions become part of the contracting imagination. This is how jurisdiction grows: not by proclamation, but by routinisation. On this reading, a handful of well-publicised recognitions, a trickle of preservation measures tied to foreign-seated arbitrations, and a steady stream of expert-supported opinions can alter the default settings of counsel drafting the next engineering, procurement, and construction contract.
Treating pluralism as projection also clarifies what success would not look like. If the platform remained formally elaborate but functionally obscure, if its online services proved clumsy, if Expert Committee consultations looked ceremonial, if interim measures were unpredictable, then a stylish architecture would mask a thin current of cases. The comparison with the Mixed Court helps resist caricature at both poles. Hybridity is a tool, not a talisman. It worked in Shanghai because it stabilised expectations about process in a fractured setting; it will work in Shenzhen and Xi’an only if it stabilises expectations about process in a globalised one.
Two Walk-throughs: How the One-stop Doors Can Work in Practice
Imagine a state-linked EPC contract for a port expansion in Southeast Asia. The parties, wary of purely domestic venues but mindful of enforcement and interim relief on the Mainland, include a dispute clause that contemplates HKIAC arbitration with the possibility of applications to the CICC for asset preservation and conduct preservation orders. The project runs into trouble; invoices are contested; delays accumulate; political noise rises around sovereign guarantees. Under the one-stop mechanism, counsel can seek early neutral evaluation to narrow issues or test settlement options; they can move into mediation with a listed institution or with the assistance of members of the Expert Committee; and if the case proceeds under HKIAC rules, they can still ask the CICC to preserve assets within China or to enforce an award. If settlement fails and the parties choose to litigate in the CICC, the collegial panel of SPC-appointed judges hears the case in a forum designed to handle complex foreign-related commercial disputes, with English as a working language where appropriate and the Expert Committee available on questions of foreign law. The point is not triumphalism; it is to show how the platform turns fragmentation into a managed corridor.
Now reverse the vantage point. Picture a Chinese manufacturer supplying critical components to a European buyer under a long-term framework agreement that names Chinese law and provides for CICC litigation, but permits the parties to attempt mediation first with a recognised institution. When supply disruptions and foreign export controls destabilise deliveries, the Chinese firm files in the CICC seeking a declaratory judgment on force majeure and an order preserving receivables held by a Mainland affiliate. The buyer, hoping to keep relations intact, requests mediation under the platform’s auspices while instructing foreign counsel to prepare for recognition and enforcement issues in Europe. Whether or not the case settles, the sequence of court filing, interim preservation, mediated adjustment, possible judgment, and a paper trail designed for recognition abroad exemplifies what the SPC’s Guidelines are trying to make routine.
What is most visible in both examples is not power in the abstract but plumbing: entry routes, handoffs, orders, and documents that travel. In each, the court is not simply a building but a conductor. The one-stop idea treats the court as a switchyard that moves cases among mechanisms without losing institutional memory. If that switchyard works, if the train keeps its number, if the cargo is trackable, then the court can credibly claim to reduce coordination costs in disputes that would otherwise require parties to juggle multiple filings in multiple places with no connective tissue.
Constraints and Competitors
A sceptical reader may object that the centre of gravity in international commercial dispute resolution remains firmly in London, New York, Singapore, and Hong Kong, and that counsel will default to seats and institutions that minimise enforcement risk and maximise familiarity. This is true in the aggregate and likely to remain true for many disputes. The reason it does not defeat the inversion claim is that the one-stop platform is structured for interoperability rather than isolation. The HKIAC pathway is illustrative: it lets parties keep a familiar arbitral seat while pulling interim-measure and enforcement functions into a Mainland court configured to liaise with that seat. The competition is not court versus court; it is bundle versus bundle, a Chinese court plus connected mediation and arbitration partners with defined preservation tools, versus a foreign seat plus New York Convention enforcement and ad hoc Mainland strategies. The bundle that best lowers expected coordination costs for a given fact pattern will win that case.
Real obstacles remain. Perceptions of neutrality and transparency will continue to weigh heavily, especially for private parties not beholden to Chinese financing. Language is a practical constraint; using English as a working language does not erase the nuance of legal drafting or the friction of translation. Counsel expertise is sticky; lawyers draft in the idioms they know, and institutional muscle memory is hard to rewire. Enforcement practice evolves slowly and unevenly; an adverse recognition decision abroad can loom larger than a dozen routine successes. The platform’s longevity will therefore depend on the slow accumulation of track record, publicly visible decisions, orders, and mediated outcomes that give practitioners a reason to default to the corridor the SPC has built.
There is another constraint that sounds technical but is strategically central: time. If a ‘one-stop’ pathway adds days to interim relief or months to enforcement, its integrative elegance will not matter. The Guideliens, by committing to online intake and coordinated case management, implicitly recognise this. The practical test will be whether the court can publish reliable statistics or exemplars that allow counsel to infer timelines. Nothing in the logic of the platform guarantees speed; everything in its ambition requires it.
What to Watch between Now and 2030
If the inversion is real, three developments should become visible. The first is diffusion in contract drafting. We should see more dispute-resolution clauses in state-linked infrastructure and EPC contracts that expressly contemplate recourse to the CICC for interim measures or litigation while naming a non-Mainland arbitral partner, especially HKIAC. Some of these clauses will never be triggered; their presence in templates and negotiated deals will matter more than their absolute use because they reflect counsel’s expectation that the corridor exists. Client alerts already track the consequence of the HKIAC inclusion; the next step is the quiet normalisation of hybrid clauses.
The second indicator is recognition and enforcement practice, both within China and abroad, that cites CICC judgments or orders, including preservation orders granted in aid of foreign-seated arbitrations. A gradual uptick in published decisions that reference the one-stop platform’s interfaces will have outsize signalling power. Even a limited stream of decisions will do work if the cases are representative and the reasoning is legible to foreign courts. Counsellors do not need perfect predictability; they need documented pathways that reduce surprises.
The third is platform growth, measured not by slogans but by connective tissue: new institutional partners, expanded functions for the Expert Committee, refinements in the Guidelines that codify successful practice, and a thicker set of explanatory materials in English. The SPC’s pattern of iterative issuance since 2018 suggests this is the direction of travel. It also suggests that the court understands reputation as a cumulative asset.
A complementary lens comes from the governing law in outward finance. Analysis of ‘extraterritorial observance’ in Belt and Road loans argues that legal regimes compete not just through seats and courts but by becoming the default in the paperwork of cross-border finance. If Chinese law and dispute-resolution mechanisms appear more often in loan and project agreements, the one-stop platform may be both cause and effect: a reason to choose Chinese law and a beneficiary of that choice. Watching how template clauses travel, and whether the SPC’s initiatives show up in drafting advice across jurisdictions, will tell us whether the inversion has purchase beyond litigation headlines.
A related development to monitor lies outside the CICC but within the same strategic family: the International Organisation for Mediation in Hong Kong. If IOMed matures into a venue that states and state-linked actors actually use, its existence will reinforce the idea that Chinese-supported dispute resolution is not one door but many rooms under one roofline. However, the institution evolves, its launch confirms a preference for building institutions that channel disputes toward hubs in which China has agenda-setting power, whether judicial or mediational.
The Broader Intellectual Payoff
The Mixed Court/CICC pairing directs attention to governance by intermediation, how states manage cross-border commerce by building conduits among institutions rather than by insisting on a single, monopolistic door. In late-Qing Shanghai, that intermediation was an accommodation to foreign privilege; today, it is a feature of legal statecraft aimed at channelling disputes through venues designed and led by Chinese courts. What travels here are organisational forms and political incentives that many jurisdictions have explored multi-door courthouses, international commercial courts, and court-connected online platforms, but which take on distinctive meaning when mobilised to underpin a global commercial footprint as large and politically salient as the Belt and Road.
For practitioners, the message is practical. If your contracts or supply chains touch the Mainland, the one-stop platform expands your strategic set. It is now possible to imagine a triage in which neutral evaluation reduces factual sprawl before mediation; in which a partnered arbitral institution keeps the case in a familiar groove while the CICC supplies interim measures or an enforcement forum; and in which the Expert Committee’s involvement makes a hearing on foreign law more predictable. The more the court routinises the paperwork of interoperation standard forms, guidance on translations, and examples of preservation orders, the more counsel will treat the corridor as part of the default playbook.
For scholars of international relations, the frame helps discipline debates about lawfare by foregrounding the institutional choices that enable legal power to travel: the cultivation of expertise at the boundary of the bench, the creation of corridors among procedures and partners, and the iterative stabilisation of expectations through published guidance and recognisable casework. It also supplies a tractable falsification test: if the platform fails to attract cases that matter, if its preservation and enforcement assistance do not become part of counsel’s default playbook, if the Expert Committee’s advisory role remains symbolic, then the inversion claim is wrong or overstated.
Returning to the Two Rooms
In the Mixed Court’s chamber, pluralism kept the peace of commerce by acknowledging external constraint. In the CICC’s architecture, pluralism is being redeployed to pull transnational disputes into a hub curated by the Chinese judiciary. The language of one-stop is deceptively simple; in practice, it means an attempt to make multiple doors into a corridor whose walls are built by the Supreme People’s Court. Whether that corridor becomes a main thoroughfare or remains a specialised passage will depend on the indicators outlined above. If more contracts include CICC-compatible clauses, if recognition and interim-measure practice accumulate, and if the platform’s partnerships deepen, then the inversion will have more than narrative force. It will have behavioural consequences we can see.
The Mixed Court was born in the twilight of a wounded sovereignty; the CICC is a child of an assertive, globally networked economy. Between them lies not just a century of political change but a shift in how the Chinese state understands the uses of hybridity. In one room, pluralism constrained jurisdiction; in the other, it is a way to extend it. If you care about how legal institutions translate power into outcomes across borders, watch what happens in that second room over the next five years.
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