Thammasat University students interested in law, history, China studies, political science, sociology, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 6 February Zoom webinar book talk on China and the transformation of international law.

The event, on Monday, 6 February 2023 at 11am Bangkok time, is organized by the Faculty of Law and Centre for Comparative and Public Law of the Department of Law, The University of Hong Kong (HKU).

The TU Library collection includes many books about different aspects of China and international law.

The speaker will be Assistant Professor Ryan Martínez Mitchell of the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Assistant Professor Mitchell is author of Recentering the World: China and the Transformation of International Law, which is accessible to TU students through the TU Library Interlibrary Loan (ILL) service.

Here is the description of the event from its faculty webpage announcement:

Event Details

Recentering the World recovers a richly contextual, detailed history of Western-imposed legal structures in China, as well as engagements with international law by Chinese officials, jurists, and citizens. Beginning in the Late Qing era, it shows how international law functioned as a channel for power relations, techniques of economic domination, as well as novel forms of resistance. The book also radically diversifies traditionally Eurocentric accounts of modern international law’s origins, demonstrating how, by the mid-twentieth century, Chinese jurists had made major contributions to international organizations and the UN system, the international judiciary, the laws of armed conflict, and more. Drawing on extensive archival research, this book is a valuable guide to China’s often conflicted role in international law, its reception and contention of concepts of sovereignty, property, obligation, and autonomy, and its gradual move from the ‘periphery’ to a shared spot at the ‘center’ of global legal order.

The webinar will be chaired by Assistant Professor Xia Ying of HKU

Students are invited to register at this link:

https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_regform.aspx?guest=Y&UEID=85840

For any questions or further information, please write to

pxto@hku.hk

In a blog posted online last year at the Legal Form site, Assistant Professor Mitchell noted, in part:

The formation of modern Chinese notions of sovereignty and statehood was intimately tied to international legal norms and structures, including those long predating the Boxer episode. The Preamble to the PRC Constitution of 1982 reads, in its second paragraph, ‘After 1840, feudal China was gradually turned into a semi-colonial and semi-feudal country. The Chinese people waged many successive heroic struggles for national independence and liberation and for democracy and freedom.’ This text embodies the official view that, despite a glorious 5000 years of history, China’s modern history began in 1840 with the crisis—eventually to be transcended by the heroic ‘nation’ as a Romantic protagonist—of the First Opium War.

More significant for the transformation of the Qing polity and its embedding into the ‘world system’ of Anglo-American commercial relations however, was the so-called ‘Second’ Opium War, or Arrow War, of 1858–1860. Systemically unequal economic relations were being continuously reinforced by assertions of dominance in productivity, trading agency, and financial capacity exercised in London and other imperial centres against peripheries, from the North American West to Central Asia, Africa, Australia, etc. While these had initially been expressed in China via the series of arrangements now remembered as China’s ‘unequal treaties’, by the 1850s, they came to take on the new form of multilateral treaty arrangements that more thoroughly subordinated their non-Western regulatory objects. The 1860 Convention of Beijing followed closely on the 1856 Treaty of Paris as a major step in the ‘constitutionalisation of international law’—a ‘constitution’ now imposed by the community upon vast non-Western spaces and their soil, water, bodies, and commodities.

Of course, since its Iberian-Dutch origins, European colonialism had long since involved processes of the sort that Marx described as ‘employ[ing] the power of the State, the concentrated and organised force of society, to hasten, hot-house fashion, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode’. However, the shift of state-backed primitive accumulation into a multilateral legal project for regulating non-European spaces reached a new phase in the ‘opening’ of Asia’s closed markets. Only now would the form of international law, and its community of jurists, take up a truly world-historical role in triangulating the shared interests of expanding commercial empires. And, only now as well, would non-Western polities find themselves enlisted as junior partners responsible for carrying out primitive accumulation in their own internal frontier zones.

From 1860 on, the Qing administration was already effectively internationalized as an extension of Eurocentric ‘global governance’. Foreign officials had earlier toyed with the idea of toppling the dynasty or supporting the Taiping rebel movement. Eventually, however, they decided instead to support the Manchu throne, and even proactively assist it in re-establishing its imperium throughout the entire Qing realm, provided that Western dominium rights would now be guaranteed. For example, the post-1860s Qing project of suppressing rebellions among ethnic Muslims in Xinjiang and formally incorporating the vast territory as a homogenized province was aided by loans from British lenders—secured against the tariff regime imposed in the Convention of Beijing—with interest payments collected by Western officials in the internationalized customs service and deposited at HSBC.8 The lessons about Western concepts of state sovereignty imparted by such arrangements were far more vivid than the dry, fairly muddled presentations of the idea in the era’s international law textbooks.

Sovereignty in Place of Agency

The term used for ‘sovereignty’ in today’s China, zhuquan, had a long history before 1840. Originally referring to the ‘authority of the ruler’, it was generally employed in contexts of corrupt ministers usurping imperial power, rather than applied to interstate relations. However, another notion, guoti, was indeed employed in connection with such interactions. Literally referring to the ‘body’, ‘form’, or ‘essence’ (ti) of the ‘state’ (guo), it was often employed to convey notions of the polity’s dignity as well as of its unique ‘national system’. It was this concept that was first used as a metric for appraising Western international law.9

Perhaps best translated in this context as ‘stateliness’, guoti could be interpreted different ways by different actors, but generally stood for both intersubjective forms of recognition—such as following courtly etiquette when receiving the ‘magnanimity’ of imperial officials granting favourable trade terms—as well as, for some of its interpreters, an insistence on the practical autonomy of the Qing state with respect to concrete policy issues. A unifying theme across various usages was Chinese agency in the differentiation of political and social spaces, whether those of the imperial centre, multi-ethnic border zones, or new ad hoc trade enclaves.

 (All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)