Shanghai's future as an international legal capital

During his recent inspection tour of Shanghai from November 28 to December 2, President Xi Jinping underlined the city's strategic objective of accelerating its ambition of developing into a socialist, modernized international metropolis.

He stressed that Shanghai must maintain its position as an international economic hub and expand its influence over global economic governance. This includes modernizing financial institutions, optimizing infrastructure for global integration, enabling high-standard financial openness, supporting real economic objectives, technological innovation, and the Belt and Road Initiative.

To realize this grand vision, Shanghai must establish comprehensive global leadership – economically, technologically, culturally, and crucially, legally. In other words, Shanghai must set its sights on evolving into a foremost international legal capital (or city) – a key yet often overlooked objective, on par with other leading legal hubs such as New York, London, the Hague and Singapore.

The role of international legal capital has become increasingly pivotal in the 21st-century landscape of globalization and interconnectedness. Cities that have successfully transitioned into such hubs demonstrate how legal excellence can amplify a city's soft power and meaningfully elevate its contribution to national interests on the world stage. These cities have risen to become thriving centers of legal thought leadership, innovation and arbitration while also influencing international standards and best practices.

They host premier legal institutions as well as arbitration tribunals, in addition to magnetizing the sharpest legal intellects. This agglomeration of multifaceted legal heft enables their influence to extend well beyond economic might, with legal firepower harnessing additional soft power benefits to shape international policies and dialogue.

Aspiring to this rarified stratum would concordantly lift up both its own global position and China's international status. Moreover, it would strategically enable Shanghai to employ legal perspicacity as an instrumental asset in international diplomacy and influencing policymaking.

Elevating Shanghai in the global legal arena also aligns with China's broader ambitions of cementing itself as a steering participant in international rule-setting across law, governance and development sectors.

Shanghai's unique fusion of both splendid Eastern heritage and cosmopolitan openness to absorbing Western influences puts it in an advantageous position to serve as the springboard for this next elevation as a guiding light for international law and legal modernity.

Becoming an "international law city" entails more than simply embracing legal standards and best practices established abroad. Rather, it translates to proactively interpreting, shaping, and pioneering legal reforms, as well as furthering international rule-making itself.

This role envisages spearheading legal innovations, assuming keystone positions of leadership over evolving dimensions of global legal governance, and propagating regulatory frameworks that symbiotically reinforce Shanghai's eminence on the world stage while also meaningfully uplifting collective frameworks of global jurisprudence.

It harmoniously combines President Xi's emphasis on bolstering foreign-related rule of law capabilities with Shanghai's transition to becoming an international legal hub.

While Shanghai's existing economic strengths and globally enmeshed urban character serve as a stimulus for leapfrogging into an international legal nerve center, this ambitious endeavor also poses significant multi-dimensional challenges.

Reconciling aspects of China's socialist governance ecosystem with international legal precepts, upholding benchmarks for judicial independence, greatly diversifying the depth of homegrown legal talent, and ingraining institutional transparency across civic culture and legal processes together are monumental undertakings that necessitate coordinated orchestration between government policymakers, judicial authorities, the legal professional class, academia, and wider civil society stakeholders.

Shanghai must begin by crystallizing its strategic vision and cogently interweaving it with its larger urban planning blueprints and developmental policy infrastructure in order to decisively address the numerous challenges inherent in this metamorphic transition towards an internationally eminent legal capital.

This process necessitates encompassing critical domains such as arbitration processes, legal research productivity, legal education scale-up, talent acquisition and homegrown capability building, ethical integration of legal norms and practices, and next-generation governance capacities.

Shanghai can delineate the milestones to calibrate its odyssey by meticulously developing a detailed legal capital developmental roadmap. This blueprint must also objectively identify the unique challenges Shanghai faces in reconciling domestic legal traditions with international standards, as well as highlight the city's unique opportunities to bridge Eastern and Western legal philosophies while elevating its voice in shaping global legal discourses.

Another pivotal step involves methodically aligning Shanghai's existing legal policies and regulations with widely embraced international norms. This harmonization process entails certifying that its municipal legal codes are fully compatible with international pacts, treaties, and conventions already ratified by China.

It also necessitates voluntarily embracing institutional best practices advocated by bodies like the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, and others helming international law. Such purposeful consensus synergies significantly boost Shanghai's credibility and dependability in the eyes of international judiciaries, businesses, and investors.

Moreover, it broadens opportunities for more seamlessly participating within global legal communities, which in turn enables Shanghai to positively shape international legal norms while concurrently accelerating its positional leverage and prestige as a leading voice in the emerging world.

Pioneering and promulgating innovative legal frameworks addressing pressing 21st-century challenges also offers Shanghai an opportunity to tangibly demonstrate global thought leadership within international rule-making.

Shanghai can demonstrate its nuanced leadership capabilities beyond strictly transactional contexts by driving efforts to develop modern legal solutions and balancing complex tradeoffs around volatile issues such as digital economy oversight, or cyber risk monitoring.

Equally importantly, nurturing such a vibrant culture of legal innovation resting on cutting-edge research demands proactively investing in its academic and intellectual ecosystems.Aside from attracting superior legal talent, sustained efforts to incubate legal ingenuity by encouraging research and constructive dialogue between scholars and industry practitioners can help Shanghai establish itself as a true cradle of legal innovation with global repute.

Establishing an internationally accredited arbitration center with global esteem represents another milestone for Shanghai's modernization blueprint. Shanghai can distinguish itself as a preferred hub for fairly resolving international disputes through ethical arbitration practices by incorporating best-in-class standards embraced by the most eminent global arbitration venues while also investing in advanced facilities, legal foresight, and technical infrastructure.Its success can propel Shanghai as a neutral and judicious forum for conveniently resolving cross-border disagreements.

Finally, a key prerequisite for Shanghai's legal advancement involves the development of world-class legal research and educational capabilities with global renown. Beyond just attracting internationally decorated legal experts, Shanghai needs to proactively enable academic institutions to foster multifaceted collaborations with legal industry practitioners and policymaking authorities.

Enabling excellence through generous support and close integration of intellectual perspectives between academia and industry will be instrumental in elevating Shanghai as a true hotbed of legal thought leadership.

By resolutely progressing on these avenues, Shanghai can significantly advance its developmental trajectory toward becoming an undisputed international legal capital.

At the same time, it strengthens China's leadership credentials in positively shaping a collective future for the world founded on legal excellence and ethical governance. As President Xi himself observed, Shanghai represents both the window permitting global engagement and the bridge enabling international cooperation. Thus, by consummating its modern legal metamorphosis, Shanghai can bolster moral bridges that bind global progress.

(The author is a research fellow with the School of Law, Chongqing University.)