(Pix: The Lady and the Unicorn: À mon seul désir (Musée national du Moyen Âge, Paris))
The UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights has organized a
session that may be of interest to some readers. The Session, Building sustainable infrastructure: Lessons from the Belt and Road Initiative and other similar multi-state initiatives, will be chaired by Surya Deva, a Member, UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights. Session participants include Mohamed Athman (Save Lamu); Larry Catá Backer (Penn State University); Flora Sapio (Università degli Studi di Napoli “L'Orientale”); and Wawa Wang (Sustainable Energy). The Session will take place Tuesday, November 26 (16:40 - 18:00). We hope to see many of you there. The Session Concept Note may be accessed HERE.
I have taken the opportunity here to post the full text of the remarks I prepared for the session. The remarks are entitled: “Peaches and Plums do not Speak, but they are so Attractive that a Path is Formed Below the trees” [桃李不言，下自成蹊]: China’s Belt and Road Initiative and the United Nations Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights. As its title suggests, the remarks consider the points of necessary convergence between the emerging and robust system of global trade being developed by China through its Belt and Road Initiative and the normative framework of the UN Guiding Principle. I suggest points of convergence as well as challenges to both systems for the necessary task of building a win-win common future.Given the limited time available for presentation, I will only be able to deliver a much shortened version orally. But I thought some might find it useful to consider the full text. It follows below and may be accessed HERE, and may be downloaded HERE: Peaches and Plums do not Speak.
(Bottom Pix: The Hunt of the Unicorn; Cloisters Museum, New York)
Larry
Catá Backer
Remarks
delivered at the 8th United Nations Forum
for Business and Human Rights, 26 November 2019, Palais des Nations, Geneva
Switzerland.
Distinguished
members of governments, of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human
Rights, and of pubic international organizations; Esteemed members of the UN
Working Group for Business and Human Rights; Valued representatives of economic
enterprises, and of non-governmental organizations whose respective service to
the world order is acknowledged with deep appreciation; Colleagues from
academic institutions worldwide; Ladies and Gentlemen; Dear Friends:
At
the opening ceremony of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation,
held in Beijing May 2017, Chinese President Xi Jinping described China’s Belt and Road Initiative and the
international community’s subsequent support and involvement with a most astute
reference to the well-known Chinese saying: “peaches and plums do not speak,
but they are so attractive that a path is created below the trees” [桃李不言，下自成蹊]. President Xi might have meant to suggest
that there is no need to argue about the abstract merits of BRI; rather China’s
positive role in developing this new era global trade framework will naturally lead
other states to participate. And, indeed, since 2013 the world has been eager
to construct a path to China as a new global trading center and has
enthusiastically tasted the peaches and plums in China’s orchard. Yet President
Xi was wise enough in using that ancient expression to note that it speaks not
merely to peaches but also to plums, that is to the combination of good moral
merits and character. It is the combination of peaches and plums that together
produce an orchard rich enough to draw and sustain the world.
At
the same time, one of the ancient thirty-six stratagems reminds us, in its section on enemy
dealing strategies, that one should be prepared to “sacrifice the plum tree to
preserve the peach tree.” Here the garden of peaches and plums takes on a
different character—both are necessary but now distinct and complementary, and
where both are attacked it may be necessary to sacrifice one to preserve the
garden. And yet, while the peaches survive, the garden itself becomes far
poorer, and the path built to it may ultimately be abandoned.
And
that insight nicely describes the essence of my task here today: For in the global
garden of productive interaction, it is possible to suggest that the peach
orchard of the Chinese Belt and Road is made infinitely more productive, and
the path beaten to its precincts made substantially more sustainable, where the
peach trees of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative are planted firmly and
resolutely beside the great plums trees of the United Nations Guiding
Principles for Human Rights. Sacrificing plums to preserve peaches may be a
useful stratagem in some instances, it will threaten the success of a garden
dependent on both.
To
that end I take as inspiration President Xi’s reference, made during the course of his speech at
the 2nd Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in April 2019, to the
Chinese saying: “The ceaseless inflow of rivers makes the ocean deep.” In that
context he noted that “were such inflow to be cut, the ocean, however big,
would eventually dry up.” We can only agree. The rivers of international trade
flowing into China are fed by the great sources of its international normative
and human rights structures. Were these cut off, there would be little left to
feed an ocean with many inlets and no outlets.
In
this global garden of peaches and plums let us first consider our peach
tree–the Belt and Road Initiative.
BRI represents the framework through which
China and its vanguard, the Chinese Communist Party, rationalizes its trade,
security, cultural, and political policies. That rationalization seeks a
framework for the seamless and coherent connection between China’s internal and
external relations. It serves both as the outward expression of the core of the
Basic Line of the Chinese Communist Party as the leadership collective of the
nation, as well as the current manifestation of that Basic Line as the
principles of the “New Era” theory developed by the current leadership core of
the Chinese State and its Communist Party collective, which along with the
elements of the United Front, represents the collective of the Chinese
nation.
That representation extends beyond economics
to politics, culture, and societal cohesion. It represents the outward
expression of the Twelve Core Socialist Values and its implementation through
the five principles of Peaceful Coexistence: mutual respect for sovereignty and
territorial integrity, mutual non-aggression, non-interference in each other's
internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence. To
understand the BRI, it is first necessary to understand the central role of
Marxism in the construction of Chinese political-economy.
It is then necessary, as Xi Jinping stated
in a speech given at the
fifth collective study of the 19th Central Political Bureau on April 23, 2018,
to situate Marxism with
Chinese characteristics at the core of China’s global collective leadership. This
is a moral-political, as well as an economic project. As President Xi also
noted: The Communist Manifesto, with Chinese characteristics, “pointed out that
communism is not a narrow regional movement, the proletariat. To achieve
complete liberation, it is necessary to liberate all mankind and call on the
proletarians of the world to unite. This provides a scientific and theoretical
basis for Marxist parties to embrace the world, benefit mankind, and jointly
create a better world.”
Within this broader foundational outlook,
BRI is meant to be the manifestation of outbound cooperation in a number of key
areas. These areas have included, since 2015: policy coordination, facilities
connectivity, integrated transport infrastructure construction, connectivity in
energy infrastructure, communication infrastructure, investment and trade
cooperation, enhanced customs cooperation, and mutual recognition and
coordination of standard setting, the development of a united front in the
context of developing policy within the global trade community, coordinated
trade innovation, investment facilitation, cooperation in agriculture, forestry
and animal husbandry, and in the exploration of coal, oil, gas, metal minerals
and other conventional energy sources; as well as emerging renewable sources.
With this in mind it is possible to turn to
the legal, security, cultural, and infrastructure development aspects of the
formation of BRI.
The legal and operational characteristics
of BRI are then easy to describe.
As a legal construct, BRI can be understood
as the aggregation of an increasing number of bi-lateral and multi-lateral
trade, friendship, and cooperation agreements between foreign states and China.
BRI does not yet embrace such formal arrangements between foreign states
without China at the center. These formal arrangements are meant to make it
possible to manifest and work toward the fulfillment of the key aspirational
policies of BRI drawn from a 2015 National Development and Reform
Commission White Paper: “They should promote policy coordination,
facilities connectivity, unimpeded trade, financial integration and
people-to-people bonds as their five major goals.”
At the same time, these formal instruments
are augmented by a growing set of informal mechanisms. Prominent among them are Memoranda of
Understanding among China and her BRI partners. Lamentably, most are not
transparent. These contain, it is mostly surmised, a set of more specific
country to country framework arrangements for the operationalization of BRI
principles within a more specific context.
Internally, BRI is overseen in China by the
Leading Group for advancing the Development of One Belt One Road, formed in 2014.
Its steering committee reports directly into the State Council of the People's
Republic of China. Externally, China’s BRI partners have under the leadership
of China, undertaken a set of informal structures aimed at coordination. Beyond
that, little is known, though each individual state, in their relations with
China, is free to undertake its own approach to the internationalization of BRI
within their national territory.
As a set of security arrangements, BRI is
connected to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. But the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is
merely meant to be one of many mechanisms that enhance multilateral
cooperation. These entities tend to layer the policies, principles and
objectives more broadly conceived in BRI but targeted to the specific context
for which they were created.
As a mechanism for bringing people closer
together, BRI is also understood to be the framework within which China and her
partners develop closer ties. It is understood to fall within several distinct
categories.
The first includes people to people
exchanges with the objective of enhancing BRI economic and political
cooperation. These have included since 2015 “cultural and academic exchanges,
personnel exchanges and cooperation, media cooperation, youth and women
exchanges and volunteer services, so as to win public support for deepening
bilateral and multilateral cooperation.”
The second includes a series of measures
designed to enhance intra-BRI tourism
The third includes scientific and technical
cooperation. These include the
development of joint research centers. It also includes integration of programs
in aid of economic development, including entrepreneurship and the like.
The fourth includes broad array of
mechanisms for enhanced political communication. The objects of these projects include
political parties, legislative bodies sister city programs and the like.
Finally, and most importantly, BRI serves
as the conceptual framework around which the core objective of enhancing
regional connectivity and development may be furthered. It consists of a series
of evolving mechanisms for developing and financing infrastructure projects.
But infrastructure projects are merely to be understood as the necessary first
stage of the larger project of bringing like-minded groups of states together by
solving the world’s infrastructure gap. The elimination of those gaps forms the
heart of the infrastructure-centered development of what are popularly called
the Silk Roads from and through China. These include the Land Silk Road
connecting China through Asia to Europe; the Maritime Silk Road that connects
states along ancient sea routes between Asia, Africa and Europe—along with the
Americas. An ice silk road anticipated
over the North Pole region, and perhaps even a space and internet road also may
be included within the BRI’s goals.
These projects, then, serve as the physical
manifestation of the Silk Road envisioned by President Xi publicly since
2013. They are manifested by a series of
development and financing arrangements between China and its BRI partners. But such activity is also internationalized
within the Asia Investment and Infrastructure Bank (AIIB). The initial focus
has been infrastructure investment, education, construction materials, railway
and highway, automobile, real estate, power grid, and iron and steel. Some
already estimate that total Belt and Road Initiative projects are among the largest
infrastructure and investment projects in history.
And now we add the plum trees.
Just as the BRI has been intended to help
bridge a critical infrastructure gap, the U.N. Guiding Principles for Business
and Human Rights represents a concrete and globally embraced effort to bridge
an equally important gap—a governance gap between national and international
regulatory structures, between public and private law systems; and within
increasingly unified chains of production and supply that themselves manifest
the global regulatory silk roads.
The UN Guiding Principles are well known
enough to spare me the need for more careful description. However, it is worth remembering a number of
key points.
First, the UN Guiding Principles were endorsed unanimously in
2011. That endorsement included China
and the United States. It must be acknowledged that the UN Guiding Principle
are not strictly speaking international law, nor have their principles been mandated
under international law mechanisms, nor, indeed, have they been involuntarily
transposed into the domestic legal orders of states. All the same, the UN
Guiding Principles themselves were consciously crafted, and thus endorsed, to
reflect the key operational doctrines essential and universally embraced for
framing issues of duty, responsibility and obligation of all actors touched by
economic activity.
Second, the UN Guiding Principles have developed two principal
framing strategies for the key actors in economic activities—states and
economic organizations.
With
respect to states, the UN Guiding Principles reaffirm the essence of State
sovereignty within the global order. States acknowledge their already existing
duties to protect human rights within the letter and spirit of their own
engagement in international law and norms.
With respect to enterprises, including
instrumentalities of state engaged in economic activities, the UN Guiding
Principles described a private law based and coordinated system of
responsibility unified both by a core set of norms, the International Bill of
Human Rights and certain ILO Conventions, as well as by the mechanisms of human
rights due diligence. These apply with equal vigor to all enterprises anywhere
in the world and are either tied to or restricted by the choices made in the
construction of the domestic legal orders of the states in which they may
operate.
With respect to individuals, the UN Guiding
Principles have taken a great step toward the development of a global system of
liability for harm designed to protect individuals and vulnerable communities
from the effects of economic activity.
This harm principle is framed in the Western language of human rights
but of its essence is aligned strongly with Marxist principles of the
fundamental obligation of the vanguard party in asserting its leadership
role.
Third, as a consequence, it is useful to understand the UN Guiding
Principles as the first truly global Belt and Road Initiative. Its silk road is paved with the principles
developed by the community of nations in its multilateral organizations
reflecting their mutually advantageous vision of win-win cooperation. It is paved with the blood and sacrifice of
the global working class, with respect to whom both free market and Marxist
political systems have long recognized obligations.
Fourth, the UN Guiding Principles have developed a set of key markers
that are implicitly embedded into the principles of BRI, whose development
ought to be welcomed in the spirit of BRI win-win cooperation and respect for
the five principles of Peaceful Coexistence.
In this context it is important to underline that the relationship
between the substantive norms of BRI and the UN Guiding Principles are not
constructed as a one-way street. It is
as important for the Guiding Principles to embed within its interpretive scope
the important cultural and moral framework of socialist values, as it is for BRI
frameworks to be sensitive to the role of the UNGP in the legal and economic organization
of its partners. For China and BRI, it
is error to conceive of the UN Guiding Principles as a species of “unequal treaties.”
At the same time, it is error for those who have responsibility for the UNGP to
view them as a means of for excuse for orcing the transformation of Marxist
Leninist political-economic systems and their forms of governance.
Fifth, the necessary alignments between the BRI and UN Guiding
Principles are easy to identify. These
extend beyond the First Pillar principles applicable to states. Let me
highlight a few:
· Guiding Principle 4 (the State-Business
Nexus) provides a strong foundation for developing the moral and normative
framework for the operation of BRI state owned enterprises especially when they
engage in economic activity outside of their home state;
· Guiding
Principle 4 also serves as the foundation for incorporating appropriately
framed human rights obligations of states into the working style of the great
financial institutions that help drive BRI, including but not limited to the
AIIB;
· Guiding Principle 6 (Public Commercial
Transactions) serves as a foundation for the transposition of UN Guiding
Principles sensibilities in developing relationships of integrity between the
State and its enterprises. In this way China might demonstrate the way that its
advanced elements of core socialist principles are compatible with the Guiding
Principles. In consciously leading by doing, China can both embrace the UN
Guiding Principles but help shape its meaning.
· Guiding Principle 7 (Conflict Zones) may
serve as an essential template for enhancing rights based BRI activities in
conflict areas. These exist within the
overland and maritime Silk Roads. Again,
this is an area in which BRI can by fusing its approach with the UN GP principles,
can lead in the further development of both.
· Guiding Principle 8 (Ensuring Policy
Coherence) can serve as the foundation for BRI development by ensuring that its
core principles conform internally to the great Chinese principles and obligations
to protect from harm and at the same time respect the rights based structure of
such harm protections within the systems of most of its BRI partners. As the Commentary to Principle 8 suggests, “To
achieve the appropriate balance, States need to take a broad approach to
managing the business and human rights agenda, aimed at ensuring both vertical and
horizontal domestic policy coherence.”
· And perhaps most importantly, Guiding
Principle 10 which reminds states, including BRI states, that “when acting as
members of multilateral institutions that deal with business related issues, they
should ensure the embedding of the great principles of the UNGP throughout the
scope of the work of those institutions.
There is no better place to affirm the close connection between the
principles of BRI and UNGP than through the elaboration of UNGP sensitive BRI
policy, and practice. As Principle 10(c)
instructs: states should draw on these Guiding Principles to promote shared
understanding and advance international cooperation in the management of
business and human rights challenges.” BRI provides a great opportunity for
capacity building of the conjunction of human rights principles with Chinese
characteristics alongside those embraced in the UNGP, respectful of the
sensitivities of all BRI states within BRI production chains.
Beyond these, BRI serves as an excellent
workshop for the development of socialist human rights due diligence
systems. These might combine the core
socialist values developed by a Chinese core with the collective premises of
due diligence and its sensitives derived from the Guiding Principles’ 2nd
Pillar.
There is much more, of course. But even this small listing provides
substantial evidence of the rich possibilities when the Chinese peach tree is
grown alongside the UN Guiding Principles plums.
Sixth, these alignments between BRI and the UN Guiding Principles
present for China and the BRI community the same challenges that the BRI
presents for non-BRI trading and cooperation systems. And yet, the challenges are made easier to
meet through a process of contextual embedding.
This involves the translation of the UN Guiding Principles into the
language of the political principles of adhering states and its firm and
resolute adoption both by BRI states and by those enterprises operating within
it.
Seventh, it is then possible to conceive of a Marxist-Leninist context
for the elaboration of the principles of the UN Guiding Principles. It is also possible to align the effects and
practices in ways that make such transition compatible with the application by
the global community of states and enterprises as a whole. For China, the project might well start with
the alignment of BRI with the principles already announced by the Central
Committee of the Communist Party of China in October 2019 in its Outline of the Implementation of the
Construction of the Moral Citizen in the New Era.
Eighth, the opportunity to carefully and consciously align BRI with
the UN Guiding principles presents China and the BRI community the opportunity
to lead by example. The natural
connection between the high principles of BRI and the framing principles of the
UNGP can produce a model for multi-lateral activity that substantially advances
the great objectives of both. Together, each is stronger than apart.
And ninth, my last and perhaps most important point.
The development of BRI is at a crucial stage of development. It finds itself at
the point where its expression of scientific Marxist universalism, as Xi
Jinping noted, as a “theoretical basis for Marxist parties to embrace the
world, benefit mankind, and jointly create a better world.” (Xi, Learning the basic theory of Marxism is a
compulsory course for communists) must be aligned with the Enlightenment
rational scientific development of law expressed in international human rights
instruments. That alignment is essential
where BRI operates in the world and in the territories of others. This presents
an important opportunity for China to practice its high ideals proactively in
its development of Marxist universalism compatible with the deeply held norms
of the people with which it interacts. And that alignment will come willingly
or not. Cases such as Chandler v Cape plc [2012] EWCA Civ 525 and Lungowe v Vedanta Resources plc
[2019] UKSC 20 already suggest the emerging framework through which the
activities of BRI enterprises might well be reached, eventually perhaps into
the Chinese heartland. The better
strategy might be to cultivate these within BRI rather than to be engulfed by
them, or worse, to try to root them out through oppositional political
action.
Dear Friends
China is leading the way in advancing a set
of the normative principles of respect, cooperation, win-win result and
sustainability through which to engage in activities of global concern. The 2018 Chinese BRI Statement on China’s Artic Policy, issued January 2018 nicely frames them in
terms of respect:
Respect should be
reciprocal. It means all States should abide by international treaties . . . as
well as general international law. They should respect the sovereignty,
sovereign rights, and jurisdiction enjoyed by the Arctic States in this region,
respect the tradition and culture of the indigenous peoples, as well as respect
the rights and freedom of non-Arctic States to carry out activities in this
region in accordance with the law, and respect the overall interests of the
international community in the Arctic.
These principles of respect, cooperation,
win-win result and sustainability are also at the heart of the UN Guiding
Principles.
Like the peach and plum trees in our global
garden, BRI and UNGP must be planted together, grow together, and lean on each
other to ensure that the global community will find them so attractive, in a
sustained and sustainable state of reciprocal and respectful win-win
cooperation, that they will together help form the path beneath these trees. To
that end it is necessary both to avoid the stratagem of sacrificing the plum to
save the peach, and to be mindful that such sacrifice might well cut the ocean
from the many streams from which it feeds.
It is in that spirit that both BRI and the UNGP will grow together to
forge the sort of socialist win-win respectful alternative to which President
Xi, and the friends of the UNGP, have both embraced.
Thank you.
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