Current Chinese approaches to a global history of international law (original) (raw)

Reviews of Books: The Rise of China and International Law: Taking Chinese Exceptionalism Seriously. By Congyan Cai

The British Yearbook of International Law, 2021

Reviews of Books Congyan Cai makes an important contribution to the ongoing debate about the nature of China’s engagement with international law and what this may mean for the future of the international legal order. The Rise of China and International Law: Taking Chinese Exceptionalism Seriously draws on papers published in the European Journal of International Law, the American Journal of International Law, and the Chinese Yearbook of International Law, as well as on Cai’s experience as a senior fellow with the Berlin-based KFG Research Group on the International Rule of Law – Rise or Decline. This volume provides an accessible entry point for those wishing to engage with research on China’s approach to international law.

Histories of International Law in China. All under Heaven

The global upsurge of interest in historical studies of international law has resulted in a substantial and rapidly expanding body of literature on the history of international law. Notable examples include the "Series in the Theory and History of International Law" by Oxford University Press (OUP) and "Studies in the History of International Law" by Brill. However, much of the work still takes Eurocentric perspectives. While there has been excellent pioneering scholarship on Chinese perspectives of international law, the literature on the history of international law in China remains limited. To achieve a truly "global" history of international law, it is crucial to incorporate China's unique historical, political, and cultural experiences, as well as contributions made by Chinese scholars and practitioners to the development of international law.

China and Comparative International Law: Between Social Science and Critique

Chicago Journal of International Law, 2021

This Essay brings Abebe, Chilton, and Ginsburg's Lead Essay into conversation with the literature on comparative international law to ask whether the social scientific approach to international law is "international." In particular, this Essay takes the case of scholarship on international law in China to examine why or why not particular methodological and theoretical perspectives on international law may gain traction in certain jurisdictions' legal academies. There are a number of linguistic, pedagogic, institutional, and, ultimately, political reasons why the Chinese scholarship that uses social science to understand international law is still nascent. At the same time, critical approaches to international law in the Chinese literature are ascendant. This Essay explains these divergent trends through a sociology of knowledge lens and offers provisional thoughts about future trajectories for the study of international law in a period during which China's influence on the international system will most likely grow.  Associate Professor of Modern Chinese Studies, Member of the Law Faculty, and Associate Research Fellow of the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Oxford. The author thanks Liu Yiqiang, Wang Chenguang, and Yang Liu for their help in conducting research for this Essay, and Liu Sida for reading an earlier draft. Chinese names are provided with surname first per Chinese language convention. All errors and all translations are the author's. This work is part of the "China, Law and Development" project, which has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (Grant No. 803763).

China and international law: Two tales of an encounter

Leiden Journal of International Law

This article examines how the encounter between China and international law is narrated in the English-speaking and Chinese literature and sheds light on the politics thereof. It particularly shows that the English-speaking and Chinese-speaking literature diverge as to the order of meaning in which the encounter between China and international law is registered. It demonstrates that the divergences between these bodies of literature are everything but innocent.

Chinese Conception of International Law as the Response to the Challenges of Today

Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, 2015

The article analyses different interpretations of the norms and principles of international law by subjects of international law, which represent different cultures, makes it impossible to effectively solve the problems, confronting the world community. The clash of civilizations, which the United Nations is trying to solve through the dialogue of the last decade speaks about different for many cultures perception of human values, which is reflected in approaches to the interpretation of the principles of international law. The authors raise the question about the possibility of perception as ideas of problem solution of other, non-Western, i.e., non-Christian cultures, represented by subjects of international law, occupying more and more leading positions in selected regions. The article analyzes the Chinese concept of international law, the basic principles which are used in other Asian countries (

Heavenly Principles? The Translation of International Law in 19th-century China and the Constitution of Universality

European Journal of International Law, 2016

Modern international relations are established on the acceptance of international law as the rules of conduct. But how does this legal order, which originated from European jurisprudence, acquire its universality? How did this legal order in the time of European colonial expansion interact with other systems of law, which formed the socio-political foundation of non-Western powers, such as China? These are the two main problems addressed by this study, which focuses on the translation of Western writings, particularly those by American jurist Henry Wheaton, and legal documents on international law in China from the late 19th century. This article, which takes a legal comparative perspective, argues that the clashes between China and European colonial powers by nature were disputes between the jurisdictions. The clashes reflect the realpolitik struggles between two powers as well as the limitation of 19th-century international law based on the acceptance of a Eurocentric universalism.

Journal article: "Universalism and Equal Sovereignty as Contested Myths of International Law in the Sino-Western Encounter," Journal of the History of International Law / Revue d'histoire du droit international 13, no. 1 (2011): 75-116. A Chinese translation was published in 2016.

Abstract: Contrary to the relevant traditional historiography, this paper argues that early modern Sino-Western conflicts were to a great extent attributable to the sustained contestation between China and the Western empires (particularly Britain) over their competing claims to sovereignty in China. It shows that the Western empires’ demand for extraterritoriality and natural rights to freely trade, travel, and/or proselytize in China originated in their assumption of universal sovereignty in the non-Christian world. The early Sino-Western encounter illustrates how the discourses of sovereign equality and universal justice, as two origin myths of modern international law and diplomacy, were constructed, deployed, challenged, and adapted in the course of Western expansion in the age of empire. Lack of critical reexamination of these historical contingencies and contradictions has caused a lot of misrepresentations and problematic narratives in the traditional historiography of Sino-Western relations in particular and in the historiography of modern international law and diplomacy in general.

The Politics of History in the Late Qing Era: William A. P. Martin and a History of International Law for China

In the light of 19th-century attempts to universalize history and international law, the purpose of this article is to show how the theory of an Ancient Chinese international law matured and disseminated within one politics of history and helped generate another at the end of the Qing Dynasty. On the one hand, the middleman William Alexander Parsons Martin, who as part of his Christian mission and in order to make international law more acceptable to the Chinese, translated systematically international law into Chinese and attempted to universalize it by finding a proto-international law in Ancient China. On the other hand, Chinese scholars and officials sought to use Martin's theory to universalize Confucianism and rectify international law according to what they believed to be their own superior morality and history.

Tracing the Civilizational Influences in the Construction of Chinese and Russian Approaches to International Law

Torun International Studies, 2020

This article seeks to examine the rigor of civilizational values in modern international law as a crucial factor and how historically different civilizational values have inculcated different approaches to international law. While critiquing the civilizational rhetoric built by European nations in creating Eurocentric international law, this article illuminates how international law has been perceived by China and Russia following their historical complexities as unique states. The results emerging from this paper will demonstrate the diversity in international law in across different countries.

Review of "Chinese Law in imperial Eyes" by Dr. Bradly Reed (Associate Professor of History at the Univ. of Virginia) in Journal of Chinese History (2017)

In this ambitious study, Li Chen excavates the early formation of European characterizations of China as the " quintessential oriental despotism " over the roughly 150 years preceding the First Opium War. By then, the stereotype of Chinese law as irredeemably brutal and unjust had emerged as a dominant narrative with sufficient strength to underwrite western demands for extraterritorial privilege. While a growing number of scholars have of late begun to deconstruct this orientalist discourse, Chen's contribution begins with a disarmingly simple question the answer to which is usually merely assumed: precisely how did this particular discursive formation acquire such normative and epistemic authority as to eclipse alternative historical narratives and continue to shape western views of China for the next two centuries? Chen's answer to this question is an empirically as well as theoretically masterful study that revisits divergent and often competing discursive formations beginning with the first publication of Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws in 1748 to the Opium War. Chen begins with a critique of the once paradigmatic narrative that Sino-western conflict grew inevitably from a clash of incommensurable cultures. By itself, this is not particularly new or insightful. What sets Chen apart is his challenge to revisionist historians, including Edward Said, who presume a pre-existing internal coherence and " totalizing hegemony " of colonial power and discourse. With an abundance of archival documentation , Chen demonstrates that from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, the position of western nations vis-à-vis the Qing Empire was manifestly not marked by strength or hegemony but, rather, by precarious vulnerability and anxiety. The discursive structures of Euro-American dominance did not spring full-blown into existence but were instead very much constructed in a process of cultural, racial, and national boundary-making within the " contact zones " of empires. Throughout his study, Chen uncovers the multiple voices, competing interests and internal contradictions at the emergence of universalizing discourses of liberalism, humanitarianism, international law and, indeed, modern civilization. Chen sets forth his arguments over the course of five roughly chronological case studies, each of which can be read alone but which nonetheless build upon each other to form a satisfying whole. He begins with a reexamination of the Lady Hughes case of 1784, wherein a gunner aboard a British ship anchored near Guangzhou fired in salute to a departing Dutch ship, hitting a Chinese vessel and killing one of its crew. Several days later, the gunner was turned over to Chinese authorities, tried and executed.