Departures Podcast: Doing Business in the New Chinese World Order

Over the course of the last few weeks, Robert Amsterdam has traveled to Toronto, Washington, and London to review the business and legal implications of China’s deepening role in the global economy with fellow legal and public affairs professionals.

On the sidelines of the Washington segment of this panel series, Amsterdam had the pleasure of hosting Australian lawyer Chris Flynn, partner at Gilbert + Tobin in Sydney, on our most recent episode of Departures.

In this program, we’re offered a better understanding of Australia’s unique commercial and diplomatic relationship with China. Calling upon his expertise in the business and geopolitics of the Asia-Pacific region, Flynn reminds us that Australia’s 27-year-long marathon of annual economic growth is due in large part to its commercial integration with China.

Our guest then directs our attention away from the familiar and widely criticized anti-competitive policies of China, and helps break down the increasingly likely legal and business implications of a global economic system with China at the head of the table.

“Any multilateral framework under China—to the extent that you could actually call it a multilateral framework—would be very different in the way it operates from the type of thing we’ve become accustomed to in the postwar era, through the Bretton Woods framework,” says Flynn. “The Chinese have a very different concept of international law and international relations, in that it’s embedded deeply in China’s own view of the world and China’s civilization, its ancient civilization.”

In this episode of Departures, Amsterdam and Flynn’s conversation goes beyond a general audit of China’s present and future global activity, and goes on to explore Australian relationships in the region, Canada’s prospective FTA with China, and much more.