EU-China negotiations for Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI) have the potential to become one of the most important developments in international economic law as well as in investment treaty policymaking area. The sides have already had 18 rounds of negotiations discussing all major parts of the new BIT, such as the definitions, substantive and procedural protection standards, and still there seems a relatively long way to go for finalizing the formulations of the clauses. The first part of this article puts the China-EU CAI negotiations in historical, political and economic context for giving a background for the concurrent negotiations. The second part of the article provides discussion on substantive investment protection standards found in China-EU28 bilateral investment treaties (BITs) that are currently in force, for assessing the shortcomings of their formulations and pointing out the importance of concluding a unified BIT between China and EU for providing a higher level of legal clarity and certainty to their investors without compromising the regulatory powers of the state.