Abstract:

The drafting and promotion of international commercial standard form contracts represent a key pathway through which international organizations and institutions participate in the international economic and trade rule-making. It facilitates the cultivation of discursive subjectivity among non-state actors, leverages commercial autonomy frameworks to achieve implicit institutionalization of discourse, and innovates discursive content by circumventing political bargaining barriers inherent in traditional international law-making. China’s primary challenge in the competition to supply standard form contracts lies in the institutional inertia of established standards. This inertia is reinforced by a dual-mechanism: first, the slow institutional evolution driven by the market’s spontaneous tendency toward standardization, and second, the discursive strategies of first-movers that solidify the existing institutional landscape. The competition over standard form contracts is essentially a process of institutional selection resulting from interest-based bargaining among various commercial entities. The competitiveness of any supply mechanism for these contracts depends on four key factors: the size of its current user base, users’future expectations, first-mover advantages, and the differential development between established and new standards. A comparative analysis of Chinese and international

practices reveals that, in the new era, China’s supply mechanism for standard form contracts should be enhanced by prioritizing four areas: establishing a more specialized organizational framework, ensuring fair and legitimate drafting procedures, providing full life-cycle support mechanisms, and developing scientificallygrounded competition strategies.

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