Sovereignty in China

A Genealogy of a Concept since 1840

Maria Adele Carrai

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781108474191
• eBook ISBN: 9781108651318
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: International Law
• Index: Law

This book provides a comprehensive history of the emergence and the formation of the concept of sovereignty in China from the year 1840 to the present. It contributes to broadening the history of modern China by looking at the way the notion of sovereignty was gradually articulated by key Chinese intellectuals, diplomats and political figures in the unfolding of the history of international law in China, rehabilitates Chinese agency, and shows how China challenged Western Eurocentric assumptions about the progress of international law. It puts the history of international law in a global perspective, interrogating the widely-held belief of international law as universal order and exploring the ways in which its history is closely anchored to a European experience that fails to take into account how the encounter with other non-European realities has influenced its formation.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 International Law and the Sinocentric Ritual System: A Nineteenth-Century Clash of Normative Orders
• 2 Secularizing a Sacred Empire: Early Translations and Uses of International Law
• 3 China’s Struggle for Survival and the New Darwinist Conception of International Society (1895–1911)
• 4 China Rejoining the World and Its Fictional Sovereignty, 1912–1949
• 5 From Proletarian Revolution to Peaceful Coexistence: Sovereignty in the PRC, 1949–1989
• 6 Historical Legacies, Globalization, and Chinese Sovereignty since 1989
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index