Recentering the World
China and the Transformation of International Law

A comprehensive new account of China's entry into the global legal order and its role in helping to reshape it.

Ryan Martínez Mitchell (Author)

9781108498968, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 3 November 2022

250 pages
25 x 17.6 x 2.3 cm, 0.76 kg

'An excellent conceptual history of how China engaged with Western-made international law in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Mitchell moves fluidly between domestic and transnational spheres of thought, and between different layers of conceptual meaning as they are constantly reconstructed during this era.' Taisu Zhang, Professor of Law, Yale Law School and author of The Ideological Foundations of Qing Taxation (2022)

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.

Introduction: 'In the Nineteenth Century, There was No International Law'
Part I. Preserving Stateliness, 1850–1894: 1. Universal Prosperity
2. Synarchy
3. Vast Imperium
Part II. Asserting Sovereignty, 1895–1921: 4. The Public Law of Planet Earth
5. The Problem of Equality
6. Reconstituted Hierarchies
Part III. Internationalisms, 1922–2001: 7. Changing Circumstances
8. New Orders
9. Perpetual Peace
Conclusion: From Object to Subject? – China in a World of Institutions
Glossary of Chinese and Japanese Names
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Political geography [RGCP], Public international law [LBB], Political parties [JPL], Political science & theory [JPA], Asian history [HBJF]