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What might the emerging competition regimes learn from more established ones? One would think that after 100 years, the goals of antitrust would be clear both in the United States and around the world. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Competition law systems (including the United States') may have a number of complementary or even contradictory goals. Although for developed countries the main driving force of their competition law is the efficient allocation of resources, this is not always the case. Efficiency concerns may be at odds with goals such as employment, poverty alleviation and the empowerment of previously marginalized groups. The transplantation of competition law to a developing country setting may pose challenges to the traditional understanding of competition law and its role/function in public policy.

This chapter commences with a discussion of the essential features of competition law, focussing upon the law’s prohibition upon anti-competitive agreements and abuse of a dominant position. It then moves on to toidentify a selection of the key competition issues that arise in practice in different phases of oil and gas operations. The difficulties inherent in identifying the relevant market in the context of, e.g., a proposed agreement to transport oil or gas is a particular focus of the chapter, which also discusses the distinction between vertical and horizontal agreements.

This chapter explores a more recent example of informal cooperation: the International Competition Network (ICN). This is an informal organization that arose in the early 2000s to address global antitrust issues. It is widely viewed as successful, and functionalist theorists believe that they can explain its emergence quite well. Not so. In fact, there was considerable disagreement over whether antitrust issues are best addressed in an informal forum, like the ICN, or should be delegated to a formal organization: the World Trade Organization (WTO). This difference is somewhat puzzling for the two-step theory, because independent agencies on both sides of the Atlantic were the primary actors involved. But the chapter shows that this puzzle dissolves once one considers patterns of politicization: where politicization was greater, actors embraced formality; where it was lower, a preference for informality was maintained. Ultimately, power was essential for determining whose preference held sway.

This chapter explores ‘competitiveness’ as an important object of governance. It asks how competition is integrated into state projects and practices and what are the discursive and material dimensions of competition considered as a social construct and social constraint. It examines the representations of competition in liberalism and neo-liberalism in terms of economic, political, and ideological imaginaries and the limits to their reproduction in terms of the complexities of capitalist social relations. It then explores the complexities of competition and their role in differential accumulation. It considers competition law and the competition state as efforts to steer competition. It identifies limits to competition relative to other modes of governance and ‘metagovernance’ as a response to these limits. Finally, it shows how the fetishization of competition subsumes society under the logic of capitalism.

China’s anti-corruption legislation prohibits both official corruption and commercial bribery. China is a civil law country. It does not have a uniform national anti-corruption law yet, and the relevant anti-corruption legal provisions are mainly in the PRC Criminal Law and the PRC Anti-Unfair Competition Law. In addition to these two key legislations, there are also regulations and judicial interpretations issued by relevant government agencies and Supreme People’s Court to address implementation issues under the law. Since China’s president, Jinping Xi, came to power in 2012, China has launched an anti-corruption campaign. The 19th CCP Congress in 2017 continues to send strong signals to fight against corruption.