Heavenly Principles? The Translation of International Law in 19th-century China and the Constitution of Universality (original) (raw)
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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.
Current Chinese approaches to a global history of international law
Storica, 2016
The recent resurgence of global history has also affected international law. One of the objectives of the emerging global history of international law is to broaden its scope in an attempt to overcome Eurocentrism. In this context, China, not only as an emerging global power that can in uence the creation of the normative principles grounding the future world order, but also with its own history of international law, offers a counter-teleology to the classic narrative of progress of international law understood as a scholarly discipline. This article presents a critical overview and analysis of a selection of Chinese scholarly approaches towards the history of international law. Current debates seem to be closely linked to a new conception of modernity that no longer corresponds with the Western conception. The Chinese perspective, in this sense, can contribute to broadening the history of international law, especially when it claims to be global.
English monograph: Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes: Sovereignty, Justice, and Transcultural Politics (Columbia, 2016), 2015
This book investigates how the dominant images of China or Chinese law were created and how and why they acquired extraordinary and lasting power in the context of Sino-Western encounters from approximately the 1740s through the 1840s. By studying a series of pivotal moments of Sino-Western contact and conflict during this period that culminated in the famous First Opium War, I examine the formation and transformation of Western knowledge and perception of Chinese law and society over time. I argue that the resulting Western discourse of China or Chinese law was not only central to many of the disputes that structured the trajectory of Sino-Western relations but also a key site at which the cultural or national boundaries were constructed or negotiated. Unlike many earlier studies, this book concentrates on the century-long period of Sino-Western, especially Sino-British, encounters before 1840, a formative century that has profoundly shaped modern Sino-Western relations but has received only scant attention among scholars of China since the 1930s. Moreover, instead of studying this period as a diplomatic, intellectual, or literary history, this book provides an integrative, critical analysis of the archival, popular, intellectual, and political dimensions of the Sino-Western encounter to historicize the processes of knowledge production and transcultural boundary making in the age of empire. A central concern of the study is to find out whether such a multidimensional interdisciplinary study may shed new light on the history of Sino-Western contact or other transimperial encounters. This book does not seek to offer a comprehensive coverage of this period. Rather, by using a combination of case studies and selected themes and events to slice through history temporally and spatially, it hopes to illustrate the complex power dynamics in the contact zones of empire that have created some of the still influential ideas of Sino-Western difference, identities, and modernities at a time when these ideas remained seriously underdeveloped, contradictory, or contested. This book builds on critical scholarship in multiple disciplines to explore the intersection of the discourse of Chinese law and society, Euroamerican modern transformation, and imperial ideology and practice. Table of contents: Introduction Chapter 1. Imperial Archives, History, and Origin Myths of Extraterritoriality Chapter 2. Cultural Translation of the Qing Code and Start of Comparative Chinese Law Chapter 3. Chinese Law and Society in the Formulation of European Modernity Chapter 4. Sentimental Imperialism and the Global Spectacle of Chinese Punishments Chapter 5. Law and Empire in the Making of the First Opium War Conclusion Bibliography Index The five substantive chapters of this book are organized around the interrelated archival, intellectual, popular, and official domains of the production, circulation, consumption, and codification of the knowledge of Chinese law mostly from the 1740s to the 1840s. It begins by examining the imperial archives of Sino-Western legal disputes to reinterpret the origins of foreign extraterritoriality in Chapter 1 before moving on to explore how such disputes led to the production of Western knowledge of Chinese law and society in the next chapter. Chapter 3 then analyzes the reception and multifaceted influence of such knowledge on European debates about the ideals of modern law and government in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Related to such archival and intellectual discourses was the rise of popular and sentimental representations of Chinese judicial punishments that came to redefine Chinese and Western law and subjectivity in the nineteenth century, which is the subject of Chapter 4. Chapter 5 illustrates the influence of these archival, intellectual, and popular discourses of Chinese law and society on the decision making of British diplomats, traders, and politicians in waging the First Opium War, which then established by force extraterritoriality and the credibility of earlier narratives of Chinese law. The short conclusion will provide a detailed summary of the major arguments of the book and offer reflections on the subsequent Chinese efforts to engage with the Western discourse of Chinese law and culture in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Keywords: cultural boundaries, Orientalism, contact zone, imagine community, emotional community, Chinese law, international law, imperialism, Opium War, sovereignty, Sino-Western relations, Chinese punishments, modernity, transnational relations, humanism, liberalism, sentimentalism, sympathy, spectacle, extraterritoriality, Canton,
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.
2017
The present collection of five critical essays is a companion volume to the republication of the rare 1812 Italian translation of the Da Qing lü li (Ta Tsing Leu Lee in the English original transliteration), the Qing ‘penal code’, which was first translated into English by the British Sinologue and East India Company employee George Thomas Staunton in 1810. Staunton’s text served as the basis for later European translations, including the Italian one. The digital reprint of the 1812 Italian edition is a publishing enterprise undertaken by EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, the Trieste university press. Staunton’s translation and the later versions in other European languages can no longer be considered reliable tools for understanding Chinese imperial law, as demonstrated by specialized translation studies. All these translations nevertheless belong to a crucial phase of Western discourse on China’s institutions, law and civilization, which is the main reason for the present reprint and the accompanying critical essays. This volume is intended to encourage an interdisciplinary dialogue and to contribute to a better understanding of institutions and the law as central to the discourse on China in comparative law and in the history of ideas and cultural history. It tries to achieve this by assuming both a European and a Chinese perspective and moving from eighteenth-century perceptions and representations to the reform initiatives and theoretical discussions that continue to this day. The final result is hopefully an enhanced awareness of the extremely important role that Sino-Western encounters and comparisons have played, not only at a cultural level in global history over several centuries, but also in today’s global politics and economics in which we are coping daily with concrete, pressing issues of reciprocal understanding in our efforts to achieve an enduringly peaceful and fruitful coexistence. Contetnts: - Guido Abbattista, Chinese Law and Justice: George Thomas Staunton (1781‑1859) and the European Discourses on China in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries - Li Xiuqing, Nineteenth-Century Western Perspectives on Chinese Justice: An Analysis of The Chinese Repository (1832-1851) and The China Review (1872-1901) - Zhang Lihong and Dong Neng, The Great Qing Code in Comparative and Historical Perspective - Marina Timoteo, Of Old and New Codes: Chinese Law in the Mirror of Western Laws - Giulia Iannuzzi, The Cruel Imagination: Oriental Tortures from a Future Past in Albert Robida’s Illustrations for La Guerre infernale (1908)
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.
Law, Justice and Codification in Qing China. European and Chinese Perspectives. Essays in History and Comparative Law edited by Guido Abbattista, 2017
George Thomas Staunton’s 1810 translation of the so-called ‘Qing penal code’, the Ta Tsing Leu Lee (in the coeval transliteration), represented a major chapter in the history of Sino-European relations, particularly the evolution of British presence and activities in China. It was, at the same time, an important development in Sinological learning and Western knowledge of China in terms of understanding how to manage commercial relations that had been strained for over a century and were undergoing crucial changes at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It also represented a decisive step forward in a longstanding European discussion about the Chinese empire and its institutions, society, culture and civilization that attributed particular importance to the subject of law and justice and their place within the Chinese state. The first and second parts of this essay retrace the most significant moments of this ebate in the European culture and experience, with a special focus on the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment period, when admiration for and even an idealization of China reached their peak, only to decline quite quickly and irreversibly at the turn of the century. While demonstrating that contradictory opinions about China always coexisted in European opinion, this essay proceeds to present Staunton’s interpretation of the Chinese legal and judicial system and to clarify its particular meaning with regard to previous and current debates and the political-economic context of Sino-British relations. The last two parts deal with the discussions prompted in Europe by the English publication of the Qing code and the first two translations in French and Italian. In so doing, the essay shows that Staunton’s intention to promote a favourable view of Chinese institutions and a respectful attitude towards them did not correspond to the development of mainstream European, and especially British, opinion. Indeed, in the decades following its publication, under the pressure of free trade and Protestant missionary opinion, British public opinion became increasingly negative, including the adoption of severely critical mental attitudes and intrusive policies towards China, thus preparing itself for the military aggression known as the First Opium War.
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.