After the Hague Convention on Choice of Court Agreements: China’s role in the future world of international commercial dispute resolution

This dissertation will analyse the framework of international commercial dispute resolution in China after China signing the 2005 Hague Convention. Firstly, it will discuss the Hague Convention from a Chinese perspective and will explore potential conflicts between the Convention and Chinese law. Since China has not yet ratified the Hague Convention, the issues around the ratification of the Convention will also be discussed. Secondly, the dissertation will examine international commercial arbitration, which is an important and popular international commercial dispute resolution method in China. This part will not only discuss arbitration agreements, arbitration procedure and the effects of arbitration awards in China, but will also explore both the “international” and “Chinese” characteristics in arbitration law and practice. It attempts to answer the question of whether or not international commercial arbitration in China is a success. Thirdly, the dissertation will focus on the Chinese International Commercial Court (CICC) and will make a detailed examination of the essential elements of the CICC. It will assess its future role in international commercial dispute resolution. Then the dissertation will provide a number of recommendations based on Chinese legal reality and culture by analysing international commercial courts in other countries. Lastly, the dissertation will look into the future of international commercial dispute resolution in China. It is concluded that after the signature of the Hague Convention, some modification of Chinese legal framework should be made to apply the Convention. Although there has been a creation of numerous international commercial courts, including new China International Commercial Courts (CICC), it is still too early to tell whether CICC will become a genuine competitor of arbitration and a preferred venue of dispute resolution for parities in international commercial business

Spin-orbit interaction of light induced by transverse spin angular momentum engineering

We report the first demonstration of a direct interaction between the extraordinary transverse spin angular momentum in evanescent waves and the intrinsic orbital angular momentum in optical vortex beams. By tapping the evanescent wave of whispering gallery modes in a micro-ring-based optical vortex emitter and engineering the transverse spin state carried therein, a transverse-spin-to-orbital conversion of angular momentum is predicted in the emitted vortex beams. Numerical and experimental investigations are presented for the proof-of-principle demonstration of this unconventional interplay between the spin and orbital angular momenta, which could provide new possibilities and restrictions on the optical angular momentum manipulation techniques on the sub-wavelength scale. This phenomenon further gives rise to an enhanced spin-direction coupling effect in which waveguide or surface modes are unidirectional excited by incident optical vortex, with the directionality jointly controlled by spin-orbit states. Our results enrich the spin-orbit interaction phenomena by identifying a previously unknown pathway between the polarization and spatial degrees of freedom of light, and can enable a variety of functionalities employing spin and orbital angular momenta of light in applications such as communications and quantum information processing