Associate Professor Weihuan Zhou

I have great interest in the field of international economic law. My research focuses on the laws of the World Trade Organization (WTO), Customs law especially trade remedies, free trade agreements, Chinese commercial law, China’s regulations of international trade and investment, China’s integration into the international and regional economic order. I have published widely on these topics in a range of top international and domestic journals such as American Journal of International Law, Journal of International Economic Law, World Trade Review, Journal of World Trade, International & Comparative Law Quarterly, Leiden Journal of International Law, the China Quarterly, Melbourne Journal of International Law, the World Economy, Australian Law Journal, Chinese Journal of Comparative Law, and Tsinghua China Law Review. My work has been cited widely, including in European Parliament briefings, reports of the Parliament of Australia, Australia’s Productivity Commission, US Congressional Research Services and World Economic Forum as well as by leading scholars in my field.

At UNSW Law & Justice, I am Director of Research and Co-Director of the Herbert Smith Freehills China International Business and Economic Law (CIBEL) Centre. The CIBEL Centre is a university funded long term and strategic initiative to enhance research strength in the areas of international business and economic law of relevance to China in the twenty-first century. The CIBEL website is here: http://www.cibel.unsw.edu.au/. Globally, I am currently Co-Secretary of the Society of International Economic Law (SIEL), one of the world’s leading organisations for academics and academically-minded practitioners and officials in international economic law: http://www.sielnet.org/. I am also a member of the editorial board of the World Trade Review, one of the top journals in my field established at the initiative of the WTO. 

Prior to joining UNSW Law in 2015, I was a trade and commercial lawyer at a top-tier Australian law firm in Sydney. In that capacity, I advised the Government of China (represented by China’s Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM)), Chinese industry associations, and numerous major producers and exporters from different countries in various trade remedy investigations in Australia. I also acted for major Chinese state-owned enterprises and private companies in a number of cross-border transactions including major Chinese investment into energy and resources, agriculture and property in Australia. Before that, I conducted research at the Faculty of Law, University of Sydney. My unpublished Ph.D thesis, completed in 2012, was on “Adjudicating De Facto Discrimination under the GATT National Treatment Rule: The Role of Regulatory Purpose”. Before that, I was a consultant at the WTO Secretariat. In that capacity, I developed two of the major online courses of the WTO including: “The Multilateral Trade Agreements” (554 pages) and “Market Access for goods and Non-Agricultural Market Access (NAMA) Negotiations” (382 pages), amongst other responsibilities. Currently, I continue to consult for leading Australian law firms on foreign trade and investment matters. I am a qualified lawyer in Australia.