CONTEMPORARY EURASIA VIII (2) ContEurVIII2 | Page 20

CONTEMPORARY EURASIA VIII (2) Conclusion The Belt and Road Initiative is the largest infrastructure development plan in modern history that seems to create a robust financial and trade cooperation network. In this study, we emphasize the importance of Armenia’s active participation for boosting its trade and investment realities with China and BRI countries. The BRI places Armenia in a fundamentally different geo-economic environment, which can be very fertile for attracting foreign investments. While the BRI has not yet crystalized or made a profound impact for Armenia, we argue that these key integration processes increase the relevance of investor rights protection in Armenia. Legal certainty and sound investor rights protection guarantees provided to foreign investors can increase the Chinese investor's willingness to invest in Armenia. In this article, we discussed improvements that can be made in the Armenia–China investment treaty, considering that Armenia needs to intensify its efforts to attract Chinese investments and the BIT has considerable limitations that need to be corrected. The article focused on the substantive treatment standards and the investor-state dispute settlement clause of the bilateral investment treaty. We broke through legal matters, placing them in the context of Chinese BIT making policy and suggested that the parties need to update the BIT, which will provide a higher level of protection to investors originating from those countries. The existing BIT is restrictive and provides a considerably low level of protection to foreign investments originating from Armenia and China.      20