Abstract
The narrative of ‘imposition’, whereby ‘international law’ is said to have been imposed by Western powers on China, was shared by both English and Chinese literatures, albeit each holding contrasting views on the meaning and consequences of such ‘imposition’. This paper seeks to highlight the nuances in the shared ‘imposition’ narratives and challenge many of its presumptions through a chronological re-examination. First, by tracing the ‘encounter’ back to the 16th century, the unity and diversity between the Sinocentric and Eurocentric orders were re-examined. Second, by comparing the Chinese and English text of the Opium War Treaties, this paper reveals how the Qing Empire also sought to accommodate the Eurocentric order in its own term from 1842 to 1860. Third, by seeing the ‘encounter’ as an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary process, this paper demonstrates how the concept of ‘China as a state’ evolved from the Celestial Empire’s ‘encounter’ with ‘international law’.
1 Introduction
Ever since Koskenniemi’s The Gentle Civilizer of Nations,1 there has also been a growing tendency within the circle of international legal scholars to review the structural biases of Eurocentrism in international law. As a result, the profoundly Eurocentric account on the history of international law was gradually replaced with the discourse of ‘encounters between different jurisdictions or civilizations’.2 Anghie also argued that international law, particularly the idea of sovereignty, cannot be seen as a mere geographical extension of the European concept, but was created through the encounter between the European and non-European societies.3 Similarly, d’Aspremont and Zhang stated that ‘the encounter of international law with China through the treaty port system cannot be limited to a mere exercise of force but should also be read as a foundational event that made international law what it is.’4 This view was also shared by Herrick, who believed that international law only became ‘international’ following the Treaty of Nanking.5 These accounts departed from Sinologist John K. Fairbank’s narrative, describing a transition from ‘the Tributary System’ to ‘the Treaties System’. In Fairbank’s model, the First Opium War was a collision between the ‘Tributary System’ and the ‘Westphalian System’, in which the latter triumphed over the former through the forceful conclusion of a series of peace treaties.6 As a result, the regional international order in East Asia was traditionally seen as static and reactionary, in which ‘China’ was further regarded as a passive actor, forced to transform into a ‘Westphalian’ state through series of ‘imposed’ treaties since 1842.
While trying to describe the encounter between the European and non- European societies as a two-way process, Anghie’s account was mostly based on the colonial experiences of Africa and Latin America. The specificities of the colonial encounter in Far East Asia, particularly, the existence of a stable, organized, and self-sufficient non-European ‘world order’ was not sufficiently considered. As influenced by Wang Tieya’s work, Anghie traced the ‘colonial encounter’ of ‘China’ from the Treaty of Nanking, the first ‘unequal treaty’.7 This account ironically resembles Fairbank’s description of the transition into a ‘Treaty System’,8 amounting to what d’Aspremont and Zhang described as the shared eventualization and narrativization of ‘imposition’ in the Chinese and English literatures.9 The ‘imposition’ thesis, unfortunately, ignored the long history of previous encounters between the Celestial Empires and the non-Anglophone Europe, in which the former remained active in assimilating the latter into the Sinocentric system until the mid-19th century. The misconstruction of the ‘impact-response’ paradigm was further pointed out by Svarverud, who theorized ‘international law’ not as a set of positive rules but also as a form of ‘world order’, in which ‘China’ was not merely a passive recipient but an active re-interpreter who entered this Euro-American dominated world order under her own terms and conditions.10
Another problem with the existing encounter discourse was overstating the importance of the Treaty of Nanking in 1842 as if it was a ‘Grotian Moment’. This article argues that ‘the turning point’ misconception partly resulted from the exclusive focus on the English text of the Treaty of Nanking. By offering a parallel reading of the Chinese text, which was equally authentic and authoritative as the English text, this article argues that the Treaty of Nanking sought to reconcile the two contrasting world views by offering two different interpretations of the nature of the First Opium War and its consequences. In what was traditionally seen as a mere interlude between the two opium wars, the Eurocentric and Sinocentric world orders11 fragilely co-existed. The need for a precise and identifiable ‘before’ and ‘after’ the encounter arguably arose from the false assumption of a stable concept of ‘international law’12 if not also ‘China’13 as the equivalent of any European state. The presumption of ‘China’ as a pre-determined historic ‘constant’, as in Fairbank’s model, has now been challenged by historians,14 including the New Qing History School.15 The singular evolutionary view of Chinese history was referred to by Duara as a ‘false unity of a self-same, national subject evolving through time’ as traditionally produced by ‘national’ reading of history.16 However, the fact that ‘China’ only arose out of the continuous interaction between the Celestial Empire and the European states, meant that any transition in East Asian regional order could only be a continuous instead of a revolutionary process.
By tracing the encounter of successive Celestial Empires with different European colonial states back to the 16th century, this article seeks to debunk this myth of the Treaty of Nanking as the identifiable turning point. Instead, this article illustrates how the transition was a long and continuous process, beginning from Jorge Álvares’ arrival in Tamão in 1514 until the signing of the Convention of Peking in 1860. Section 2 introduces the Sinocentric system as a regional international system that centered upon the cultural and moral superiority of the Middle State. Benefiting from recent research from Japan, Taiwan, and the New Qing History School, this article highlights the nuances not sufficiently addressed by Fairbank’s account. Section 3 proceeds to examine the encounter between different European states with the Celestial Empires, with an emphasis on the unity and diversity between the Eurocentric and Sinocentric systems. Section 4 combines a textual comparative analysis of two Opium War treaties in the context of the transformation of East Asia’s regional order. It is argued that the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, far from being a capitulation treaty of the Sinocentric system, sought to reconcile two different international orders to co-exist in East Asia, with experiences borrowed from Qing’s handling of the Inner Asian frontier. The current author places the turning point of any transition in the Convention of Peking in 1860, which forcefully put the Qing Empire into a subordinate position vis-à-vis European states in terms of the degree of civilization. The transformation of the Celestial Empire to the state of China was thereafter internalized through the utilization of Western languages of diplomacy and international law.
2 The Unity and Diversity of the Sinocentric and Eurocentric Systems
2.1 The Middle State, China, and the Qing Empire
Before this article proceeds to examine the structural difference of the international systems in East Asia and Western Europe, this article aims to highlight the differences between the concepts of the ‘Middle State’, ‘China’, and the ‘Qing Empire’. Amongst the three, the term ‘Middle State’ (
Despite their very different etymological differences, the three terms are often assumed to be interchangeable both contemporarily and historically. For instance, in Fairbank’s famous account of the Chinese World Order, the ‘Qing Empire’ was directly referred to as ‘China’ and ‘China’ was assumed to bear a reciprocal meaning of the ‘Middle State’. As Lydia Liu highlighted, translation between Chinese and foreign languages in the 19th century involved both linguistic and conceptual transfer, which made translation a creative rather than a pure interpretative process.24 The translation of the ‘Middle State’ was no exception. This article demonstrates that the translation of ‘China’ was more than a mere translation: the creation of equivalence between the three concepts began from the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689 and was further consolidated through Qing’s increasing diplomatic contact with Euro-American states, in which ‘China’, ‘Sina’, or ‘Chine’ began to assume the role of Qing Empire’s official designation in Indo-European languages, and hence, became the equivalence of ‘the Middle State’.25 The increasing interchangeable use of three concepts not only corresponded to the need for a fixed and common legal identity upon the arrival of ‘international law’26 but also reflected the subtle transition of how Qing Empire presented itself and thought of its position in the ‘community of nations’. Since this article aims to illustrate this transition from 1689 to 1895, ‘China’ is referred to with brackets for the purpose of distinguishing it from the contemporaneous understanding of China as the historically self-same nation state.
2.2 Fairbank’s Model of ‘Tributary System’
Despite the charges of over-simplification and many of its shortcomings, Fairbank’s model remained one of the most influential in describing the regional international system of Far East Asia before the 19th century. In Fairbanks’ model, the ‘Tributary System’ was based on the Sinocentric world view of ‘Tian-Xia’ (
An important feature of the Tributary System was that the Celestial Empire did not see itself as a ‘state’ within an international system but rather, it was responsible for ‘the administration of civilized society’ as a whole.33 Here, the distinction between ‘territory’ and ‘space’ was significant, as the very nature of Sinocentric order of ‘Tianxia’ was that political power was radiated from center to periphery in different gradients without clear demarcation. This was distinguished from the modern ‘Westphalian system’, in which nation states co-existed within demarcated ‘territories’.34 While it is hard to equate ‘rituals’ with the modern understanding of ‘international law’, several Japanese and Korean scholars saw ‘rituals’ as the law of nations in East Asia.35 Some of the important rituals are as follows:
The tributaries have to present tributes to the Son of Heaven according to the designated frequencies and routes (
朝貢 );36 The envoys of the tributaries have to perform the appropriate ceremonies at the Qing’s court, including the three kneeling and nine kowtows to the Son of Heaven (三跪九叩 );37 In return of the tributes, the Son of Heaven would present the envoys with gifts (回賜 )38 and would bestow upon the ruler the legitimacy to rule over their respective peoples.39 This ceremony was comparable to the modern law of recognition.40The Son of Heaven would not interfere in the domestic affairs of the tributaries so long as they preserve the peace and harmony of the Sinocentric World.41 Similarly, those foreigners residing in the Inner World, they would be governed by their leaders who were given commensurate government posts under extraterritoriality.42 However, foreigners who resided in the Capital would have to adopt the Chinese customs and cultures. They were also not allowed to communicate or return to their countries of origin;43
The tributaries were granted certain privileges of trade at the frontier outside of tributary missions or at the capital during the tributary missions (
朝貢 ).44 Mutual trade without tributary relationships is sometimes allowed at the designated ports such as Canton and Macau (互市 ).45 Nonetheless, states who failed to observe the Chinese customs were treated as barbarians (夷 ) and they were placed much lower in the hierarchy than the tributaries.46
2.3 Going beyond ‘the Tributary System’
What could be seen from the abovementioned examples is a strong connection between the domestic orders of the Celestial Empire with its system of external relations.47 However, the realistic concerns of the Celestial Empire were often underestimated, which undermined the power of Fairbank’s model in explaining the handling of Inner Asian affairs by the Manchurian dynasty.48 It was only until recently that the lack of attention toward Qing’s duality as the Inner Asia and Celestial Empire49 has been supplemented by the New Qing History School.50 As an example of the Celestial-Inner Asian duality, Qing’s relationship with Russia was not managed by the Department of Rituals (
Qing’s Inner Asia diplomacy exposed yet another shortcoming of Fairbank’s model: its exclusive focus on tributary relations with the European states, being only one part of Qing’s multiple diplomatic relations.52 To supplement the inadequacy in Fairbank’s model, historians from Japan and Taiwan began to reevaluate Ming-Qing’s regional order through the ‘China-centric approach’ since the 1980s.53 In 1990, Takesi Hamashita (
Based on a study of Qing’s official correspondence with different foreign states, Taiwanese scholar Liao Minshu (
2.4 The Westphalian Myth
Before international law attained its modern form and content, territorial entities including free cities, the estates of imperial nobles, and ecclesiastical domain, co-existed with ‘states’ even after the Westphalian Peace.60 Formal sovereign equality between different classes of rulers and entities remained largely mythical for a very long time after 1848. For example, around the same time period of Lord Macartney’s mission in Pekin, Britain also had no diplomatic legation in Vienna. This was because the Habsburg Kaiser refused to recognize the title of ‘His Majesty’ by the English King.61 As a result, the ‘Law of Nations’ that the Qing Empire encountered in the 19th century still resembled many medieval features, which are now commonly seen as pre-modern or non-Westphalian.
The first anomaly relates to the existence of corporate sovereignty of trading companies, including ius belli ac pacis (the right to conduct war and conclude peace) and ius legationis (the right to receive and send ambassadors). Grewe argued that the trade companies served as a buffer to ‘prevent the transfer of the concept of “state” to the non-European world’,62 which was highly relevant in the present encounter. The second anomaly was the concept of divisible sovereignty. Arising out of the feudal conception, which saw territories as nothing but the private property of one or multiple sovereign(s),63 the European practices of leasing territories through private contract64 continued to exist in Europe until the late 19th century.65 Eventually, private leases became an important legal method through which European powers establish certain rights in the designated ‘treaty ports’.66 Lastly, the medieval European practices of extraterritoriality and consular protection were asserted by European merchants in their dealing with the Qing Empire. Originated from the practices of the Hanseatic League in medieval Europe, consuls (consules maris) of the commercial league were posted to different commercial ports to protect their own merchants from extortion by the local rulers.67 In the Qing-British encounter, this role was performed by the British Superintendent of Trade.
Unlike the traditional account describing the Sino-European encounter as the clash between the irreconcilable ‘Tributary’ and ‘Westphalia’ systems, there were some degrees of unity and diversity between the two. On one hand, the European law of diplomacy clearly conflicted with the Sinocentric worldview and its rituals, with the performance of ‘kowtow’ by European emissaries before the Son of Heaven being one of the many examples. On the other hand, the concept of divisible sovereignty, as evidenced in the presence of corporate sovereignty, territorial lease, and extraterritorial jurisdiction coincided with the practices of successive Celestial Empires in establishing ‘foreign quarters’ (
3 Tian-Xia and the Barbarians
3.1 Portuguese and Dutch as Tributaries (屬國 )
The Portuguese were the first group of Europeans who arrived and settled in the Chinese maritime frontier. In 1513 AD, Portuguese explorer Jorge Álvares arrived in Tamão, a land he claimed to have ‘discovered’ for the Portuguese crown.72 The Portuguese encroachment had been surprisingly tolerated until 1521. When the Portuguese began to fortify Tamão without the Emperor’s permission, the Ming Empire eventually decided to evict all the Portuguese.73 Eventually, the Portuguese merchants acquired, through bribery, a lease of Macau, an island at the western side of the Canton River estuary.74 Despite being acquired through bribery, the lease was eventually recognized by the Ming authority and the rent of 20,000 taels was even reduced to 500, in exchange for Portuguese assistance in suppressing piracy.75 The payment of rent was arguably comparable to the annual tribute paid to the Emperors.76 At the same time, the mandarins from Canton retained the right to collect customs in Macau.77 In return, the Portuguese Jesuits were given exclusive access to the Ming Court. Here, the Portuguese failed to establish their own jurisdictional space within the Sinocentric order. Rather, the Portuguese presence was assimilated into the Sinocentric order, with Macau being the designated ‘foreign port’. Arguably, the position of the Portuguese in Macau was more akin to tenants rather than colonizers.
The Dutch did not go anywhere further than the Portuguese. Following the conquest of Formosa (Taiwan) by exiled Ming loyalist Koxinga, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) sought Qing’s assistance in retaking the island. The European law of diplomacy was brought to the attention of the Qing officials by the VOC employees from 1662 to 1690.78 Regardless, it appeared that such assertion did not alter any custom or ritual as habitually imposed on the foreigners by the Qing Court. Historical records showed that the VOC representatives performed ‘kowtow’ in front of the Qing Emperor in 166779 whereas the ‘Collected Statutes of Great Qing Empire’ also put ‘Holland’ as one of Qing’s many tributaries.80 There was no doubt that the Dutch recognized their acquiescence implied submission, but for the employees of the VOC, ‘profit not freedom of trade was their goal’.81 It could also explain why the differences in diplomatic ceremonies and rituals did not cause much trouble with the envoys of the VOC as compared to the British diplomatic missions in the 1830s.82
3.2 Russia as the Equal State (與國 )
Prior to the British, Russia was the only European state who successfully asserted its equal status with the Qing Empire. Mediated by Portuguese Jesuit Thomas Pereira, Qing and Russia signed the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 168983 to settle their territorial dispute over the Amur region. Pereira claimed that he had introduced to the Kangxi Emperor certain notions of ‘European public law’, such as sovereign equality and the meaning of signing treaties.84 While it was unclear whether such principles were accepted by Emperor Kangxi himself as ‘international’, the principle of sovereign equality was reflected in both the text and the formalities of the successive Qing-Russian treaties.85
The Treaty of Nerchinsk of 1689 was the first international treaty signed by the Qing Empire. It was also the first treaty that delineated Qing’s boundary with another state. In the subsequent Treaty of Kiakhta of 1727, Russia was further granted favorable terms of trade and the right to establish a religious mission with a language school in Peking.86 Both treaties mutually granted the right to exercise extraterritoriality to Chinese consuls in the Russian trading ports and Russian consuls in Peking.87 In 1729, Qing Empire dispatched the first ever diplomatic mission to Russia, in which the Qing envoy reportedly knelt before Tsarina Anna Ivanova.88 Fletcher reported that the Qing envoys even performed ‘kowtow’ in front of the Russian Tsarina in Moscow (1731) and Saint Petersburg (1732).89 Thus, before the Treaty of Nanking, Russia was the only state with whom the Qing Empire maintained treaty relations, the only ‘European’ state to which Qing sent diplomatic missions abroad, and the only foreign power that was granted religious, commercial, and educational privileges in the forbidden capital of Peking.90 Russia was never listed as a tributary in any of the five collections of ‘Collected Statutes of Great Qing Empire’.91 On this basis, Liao argued that Russia was the first equal state (
Since the Russo-Qing encounter was essentially an encounter between two empires, Qing’s concessions to Russia could be explained by the fact that Russian assistance was necessary for Qing to pacify the ‘space’ of Inner Asia,94 a frontier which was seen by the Manchu conquerors as strategically more important than the coast.95 Here, the Inner Asian nature of the Qing Empire must once again be re-emphasized. For instance, the Treaty of Nerchinsk was available in Latin, Russian, Mongolian, and Manchurian, but not in Chinese, the sole official language of communication in all tributary relationships.96 Notwithstanding, the Inner Asian experiences of the Russo-Qing diplomacy still proved useful in Qing’s future dealing with other European states arriving at the coast. This included the use of the self-referring term ‘the Middle State’ (
3.3 Britain as a Mutually Trading State (互市國 )
Compared to Portugal and the Netherlands, Britain was a relative latecomer.99 The East India Company (EIC) only started to trade in Canton from 1685.100 From the 1720s onwards, the Qing Empire limited all the non-tributary mutual trades to the port of Canton.101 This was a result of the James Flint’s incident (1759), in which an EIC employee broke Qing’s protocol by directly complaining to Emperor Qianlong about corruption and extortion in Canton.102 Under the ‘Canton System’, all interactions with British merchants were delegated to the Hong merchants (
The Canton System was seen by Britain as a trade monopoly and responsible for its growing trade deficits.105 Considering the inability of the EIC to change the unfavorable system in Canton, London decided to intervene by direct diplomacy.106 In 1793, George Macartney, the former British ambassador to Russia, took charge of the first British diplomatic mission to Peking.107 His instructions embodied nearly all the diplomatic objectives London sought to achieve through the two Opium Wars, which were in essence, to elevate Britain as an ‘equal state’ in the Sinocentric system:
(1) To obtain one or two cession(s) of territories near to the tea and silk- producing and woolen-consuming areas, where English traders might reside, and where English jurisdiction might be exercised;
(2) To negotiate, if possible, a commercial treaty for the opening of new ports under more favorable conditions than at Canton;
(3) To establish a permanent diplomatic mission at Peking;
(4) To abolish existing abuses and to obtain assurance that they would not be revived; and
(5) To promote sales of British manufactures in China.108
However, Macartney’s mission soon went into conflict with the Qing officials on the issue of diplomatic rituals. While both the Dutch and the Portuguese acquiesced to the ritual of ‘kowtow’, Earl Macartney insisted that he would only do so if a Qing official of the same rank performed kowtow before a portrait of King George III.109 After the meeting, Emperor Qianlong sent a letter the English King which, apart from thanking him for his ‘tributes’, denied all his requests.110 Qianlong explained that if such requests were granted, it would encourage other tributaries to follow, which would at the end, substantially alter the Sinocentric system.111 In 1816, the second British mission, led by Earl Amherst, was denied audience to the Emperor for Amherst’s refusal to perform ‘kowtow’.112 As a result, Britain remained a ‘mutually trading state’, which was not officially ‘recognized’ in the Sinocentric system.
Following the end of the EIC’s monopoly, the change of diplomatic representation from the EIC to the Superintendent of Trade increased the importance of reciprocity even at the local level. Instead of relying on the monopoly of a trade company, the British commercial interests in Canton were jointly represented by the Chief Superintendent of Trade (
The Anglo-Qing relation was further complicated by Britain’s legally and morally problematic opium trade in Canton, a ‘solution’ proposed to cure Britain’s trade deficit with the Qing Empire. When Peking decided to completely ban opium import in 1800, the decree was ignored by both the British government and the EIC. From Qing’s perspective, while the decree was initially not strictly enforced, ‘foreign opium’ (
Carrai argued that Lin already developed an embryonic idea of sovereign rights (which Lin translated as
The murder of a Chinese villager Lin Weixi by drunk British sailors in Kowloon and the subsequent attempt by Elliot to shield the suspects from Qing’s jurisdiction by trying them on a British flagship,126 were arguably adding insult to injury. From the perspective of modern Chinese nationalists, Eliot’s action would be seen as the first exercise of ‘extraterritoriality’ which encroached upon Chinese absolute and indivisible jurisdictional sovereignty.127 Liao nonetheless stated that such a view was arguably modern anachronism. She argued that extraterritorial jurisdiction was a privilege long granted to recognized states. In the absence of Britain’s recognition as either an ‘equal state’, which Qing withheld, or as a ‘dependent state’, which Britain refused to accept, the status of British officials was not recognized. In the absence of any competent official governing British subjects, Qing’s law should by default apply to ‘non-recognized’ barbarians based on territorial jurisdiction.128 This is the Sinocentric version of Lin Zexu’s arguments.
If the Qing-British encounter could be described as a conflict between ‘non-Westphalia’s’ and ‘Westphalia’s’ international law, by insisting on absolute and indivisible sovereignty, Lin Zexu’s letter represented a surprisingly ‘Westphalian’ understanding of territorial-based sovereignty as an exclusive form of political authority.129 This new understanding was based on the logic of European nation-states and would be inherited by Qing’s modern successors in denouncing extraterritoriality as a violation of Chinese sovereignty.130 Ironically, it was Britain, a European power, who argued vividly in favor of the medieval concept of ‘divisible sovereignty’ and special privileges of the consules maris in the port of Canton. The fact that Lin Zexu pursued a more Westphalian understanding of sovereignty than Britain gave rise to a completely reversed and switched picture as traditionally depicted: It was not the non-compatibility of ‘the Tributary System’ with the Westphalian system that led to the First Opium War. Here, what we witnessed was something more complicated: Britain attempted to achieve formal equality in the Westphalian sense, but without acknowledging Qing’s complete and indivisible sovereignty in its territories as a right pertaining to all ‘nation states’. Rather, Britain wished to preserve and widen its spatial extension of power through the non-exclusive form of authority, as recognized in the Sinocentric practices of ‘foreign quarters’ and ‘extraterritoriality’. Thus, the diplomatic objective of Britain was more accurately described as obtaining the status of an ‘equal state’ in the Sinocentric system. Reversely, Qing Empire’s objective was to preserve the existing system of Sino-British mutual trade, in which the Qing Empire could keep the status of Britain as ‘unrecognized’ and exert criminal jurisdiction over British subjects, albeit justifying it in the Westphalian legal languages of ‘territorial sovereignty’. In other words, both parties wished to ‘reform’ instead of ‘rebuild’ the Sinocentric system in opposite directions by invoking Westphalian legal concepts to their own benefit.
4 From the Celestial Empire to the State of China
4.1 One Treaty Two Orders: A Re-Visit of the Treaty of Nanking
Without a declaration of war, Britain justified the armed expedition as ‘armed reprisals’ against the incarceration of British nationals in their factories and the expropriation of ‘opium’ by force. Following the success of the British military expedition in the Yangtze River, the Qing Empire was forced to negotiate for peace with the British outside Nanking.131 On 29 August 1842, the Treaty of Nanking (
The Treaty of Nanking consisted of thirteen articles, with two versions in English and Chinese. The Treaty itself did not specify which language shall prevail in case of inconsistency. That allowed the co-existence of two depictions of the First Opium War, and in fact, two contrasting world views and ideologies, to co-exist in one treaty. For instance, the English version of the preamble stated that ‘Her Majesty the Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and His Majesty the Emperor of China, being desirous of putting an end to the misunderstandings and consequent hostilities which have arisen between the two Countries, have resolved to conclude a Treaty for that purpose.’ War was not specifically mentioned. In the Chinese text, ‘the desirous of putting an end to the misunderstandings and consequent hostilities’, was translated as ‘desirous of explaining the recent showing of discord and putting an end to the provocation’ (
Regarding the designation of the two sovereigns, the Emperor of the Da Qing in the Chinese text (
The English version of article 1 of the Treaty stated: ‘There shall henceforward be Peace and Friendship between Her Majesty the Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and His Majesty the Emperor of China, and between their respective Subjects, who shall enjoy full security and protection for their persons and property within the dominions of the other.’ The Chinese translation was relatively accurate except the Chinese text only mentioned ‘eternal peace’ between two sovereigns and ‘friendship’ between the two peoples:
Article 2 stated that ‘His Majesty the Emperor of China agrees, that British Subjects, with their families and establishments, shall be allowed to reside, for the purpose of carrying on their mercantile pursuits, without molestation or restraint, at the cities and towns of Canton, Amoy, Foochowfoo, Ningpo, and Shanghai.’ The word ‘agrees’ in English was, however, translated as ‘graciously allows’ (
Article 2 of the treaty explicitly recognized the official status of British Superintendents, or Consular Officers, and their rights to reside at the ‘foreign quarters’ and to be the medium of communication between the Chinese Authorities.’ The recognition of British officials conferred them the right to exercise extraterritoriality over British subjects residing in the five treaty ports. While acknowledging the grant of extraterritoriality is non-reciprocal, Liao argued that the Qing Empire did not foresee the possibility of Chinese residing in Western Europe137 at a time when emigrating oversea was still a crime punishable by death under Qing’s law.138 This contrasted with Russia, with whom Qing shared a long common border. In the relatively equal Treaty of Nerchinsk, it was stated that the Russian consuls shall have personal jurisdiction over Russian in China, whereas Chinese consuls shall have personal jurisdiction over Chinese in Russia.139 Similarly, in the 1871 Sino-Japanese Treaty, a treaty whose terms were dictated by the Qing Empire, extraterritoriality was also mutually granted.140 These examples weakened the arguments that extraterritorial jurisdiction was a feature of capitulation or ‘unequal treaties’ imposed by the West.141
Article 11 further provided perfect equality in communication between the British High Officers and their Chinese counterparts, under the term ‘Communication’ (
In addition to the creation of ‘foreign quarters’, where the foreign traders could reside and trade, article 3 required the Qing Empire to ‘cede’ the Island of Hong Kong to Britain, which had the effect of forfeiting Qing’s jurisdiction in Hong Kong completely: ‘It being obviously necessary and desirable, that British Subjects should have some Port whereat they may careen and refit their Ships, when required, and Keep Stores for that purpose, His Majesty the Emperor of China cedes to Her Majesty the Queen of Great Britain, the Island of Hong-Kong, to be possessed in perpetuity by Her Britannic Majesty, Her Heirs, and Successors, and to be governed by such Laws and Regulations as Her Majesty the Queen of Great Britain, shall see fit to direct.’ Here, the concept of cession, which describes the assignment of territory between two formally equal states, was non-existent in the Chinese language. Under the Sinocentric worldview, there is no sovereign who is equal to the Son of Heaven. As the Son of Heaven has the sole mandate to rule over all land underneath Heaven, it was unimaginable that he would alienate a part of his dominion in favor of another ‘equal’ sovereign. Thus, the alienation of Hong Kong Island had a different nature than the delineation of boundaries as in the Treaty of Nerchinsk, in which the word ‘belongs to’ could be used with reference to the natural boundaries identified.143 To accommodate the non-existence of such concept in the Sinocentric world view, ‘cession’ was translated into ‘imperial grant’ between the Emperor and the British Monarch,144 as could be seen from the Chinese version. There, article 3 stated that the ‘Great Emperor permits the Island of Hong Kong to be granted to the Great British Monarch’ (
Different from peace treaties as signed between ‘civilized’ European states in the 19th century, it is acknowledged that the Treaty of Nanking had two unusual features.147 First, while it was common for victorious powers to impose heavy indemnities to punish the vanquished following the 19th century’s ‘legal wars’,148 article 6 of the Treaty of Nanking required the Qing Emperor to account of the Expenses incurred resulted from the British Expedition ‘to demand and obtain redress for the violent and unjust Proceedings of the Chinese High Authorities.’ The British were, however, not required to compensate for the destruction and death caused to the Qing Empire.149 In contrast with ‘indemnifications’ in ‘legal wars’, which were not based on any attribution or acceptance of unilateral responsibility of the war,150 the account for military expenses fell under the language of ‘just war’, where a distinction was drawn between an unjust and just belligerent.151 In other words, by accepting article 6 of the Treaty of Nanking, the Qing Empire implicitly conceded to British justa causa and thus forfeited its own status as just belligerent. In this regard, the Treaty of Nanking was one of the rare instances in which the logic of ‘just war’ applied to the reparations prior to article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.152 The utilization of ‘just war’ languages in the Treaty arguably related to the nature of the use of force, which was termed by Britain as an armed reprisal, a remnant from the ‘just war’ era. It corresponded to the fact that no declaration of war had ever been issued by Britain against the Qing Empire.153 Second, article 10 of the Treaty of Nanking (and its Supplementary Treaty) fixed a tariff on the Qing Empire. Treaties signed between European states rarely involved the fixation of a certain tariff, which was widely considered as one of the sovereign affairs. A rare exception was the Strangeford Treaty of 1810 between Britain and the Portuguese government-in-exile in Brazil, in which Portugal agreed to a tariff favorable to Britain in exchange for the protection of Brazil by the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic War. The Strangeford Treaty was, however, widely viewed as putting Brazil in an inferior position.154
However, these deviations were carefully masked and concealed by the Qing’s mandarins when drafting the Chinese text of the Treaty of Nanking by downplaying the hostilities between Qing and Britain as a regional dispute between the British and the Viceroy of Canton, as arbitrated by the Qing Emperor. In the Chinese version of article 6 of the Treaty of Nanking, the term ‘violent and unjust Proceedings of the Chinese High Authorities’ was creatively translated as ‘the unjust and forceful action by the Imperial Commissioner’ (
This idea of ‘legal war’ had its foundation in the 19th century’s idea of legal positivism and it presupposes sovereign equality, both of which were absent in the Sinocentric system. Compared to the English version, the Chinese text resembled rather a judgment rendered, in which the Emperor sits as the supreme arbitrator and heard the ‘appeal’ from the British against the ‘unjust and forceful action by the Imperial Commissioner’. As a result, he ‘allowed’ a certain amount of compensation to be paid for the cost incurred by the British in sending the soldiers before the Emperor. For the fixing of tariff in article 10, the Chinese text of article 10 also omitted the part that ‘the Emperor of China agrees’ to establish a fair and regular Tariff of Export and Import Customs and other Dues. Rather, the Chinese text stated, with passive voice, that such tariff ‘shall be negotiated on a fair and just basis’ (
Through a careful comparison between the Chinese and the English text of the Treaty of Nanking, it was clear that both languages depicted two very different accounts of the Opium War. The English text sought to emphasize that Britain had the justa causa in resorting to armed reprisals against the violation of British nationals by the Chinese High Authorities, after which, the ‘Chinese Emperor’ agreed to a set of conditions proposed by Britain (emphasis added). The Chinese version, however, described a series of ‘discord’ (
4.2 An Experience from Kokand Rebellion in 1830
The Qing Empire learned from its experience in governing the Inner Asian frontier that proper concessions granted to the ‘disgruntled barbarians’ were necessary to maintain and reaffirm the Sinocentric system. In this regard, Herrick and Fletcher both noticed the striking similarities between the Treaty of Nanking of 1842 and Qing’s concessions with the Khanate of Kokand in the 1830s, 10 years before the First Opium War.157 Similar to the position of Great Britain in the maritime world, the Khanate of Kokand was a superior trading and military power that dominated the caravan trade in the steppe,158 who equally did not see itself as a mere ‘vassal state’ of Qing.159 In order to punish Kokand for harboring Muslim rebels, the Qing Empire arrested and expelled all Korkandian traders and confiscated their goods in 1828, similar to Lin’s action in Canton against Elliot, who harbored the English opium traders.160 In response, Kokand raided Yarkand and Kashgar in 1830,161 similar to British military expeditions against the Canton and Yangtze estuaries. Having failed to contain the Kokand incursion, the Qing Empire offered Kokand in 1832 a resumption of trade with the following term:162 (1) creation of extraterritoriality, (2) an indemnity to a foreign state, (3) negotiated tariff and direct foreign contact with the customs collectors, (4) the MFN treatment; (5) the freedom to trade with all comers without monopoly and (6) the opening of treaty ports.163 Using Liao’s analytical framework, this concession symbolized the elevation of Kokand from ‘mutual trading state’ to ‘equal state’.164 Coincidentally, ever since the course of the First Opium War turned unfavorable, Qing replaced most of the coastal commanders with those who had experienced in the Inner Asian affairs. The replacement of Lin Zexu with Yang Fang (
The Qing court’s decisions to ‘pacify’ the British and Kokandian were consistent with its Sinocentric worldview. In the Sinocentric system, the Son of Heaven was not merely the monarch of one state but the supreme ruler of the civilized world. His legitimacy to rule came directly from the Mandate of Heaven, which carried an inherent moral appeal including graciousness and impartiality. As long as the disgruntled barbarians did not attempt to challenge Emperor’s legitimacy, they were seen as merely misguided and had the right to appeal to the Emperor for the mistreatment they suffered at the hands of local officials. Given that it was part of the Mandate of Heaven to preserve peace and order amongst all civilized subjects, the Emperor had a moral obligation of impartiality.166 For example, the Qing Emperor had intervened in the Tay Son rebellion in Vietnam and decided to recognize the rebel king on the ground that the Le dynasty had lost its mandate of Heaven.167
At the same time, local officials shared the responsibility of preserving the harmony of the imperial realm by pacifying the barbarians locally. However, if their actions escalated local incidents and thereby directly threatened the harmony and tranquility of Tianxia, such officials would be seen as ‘incumbent’ and must be punished. The discharge and forced exile of Lin Zexu and Qishan thus related to their failures to contain the British in Canton and let the situation escalate to the Yangtze River. In contrast to Lin’s iron-fist approach, being gentle with distant people and lenient to barbarians is in line with the practices of the Celestial Empire, and this is also consistent with the image of the Emperor being benevolent and gracious not only to his subjects but also everyone who lives ‘underneath the Heaven’.
Unlike what Fairbank has claimed, the Treaty of Nanking and the opening of five ports arguably did not mark the turning point for the transition from the Tributary System to the Treaties System. On the other hand, the impact brought by the Europeans was carefully contained in the treaty ports, where tariffs and customs were still collected by the Qing’s mandarins.168 In this sense, the ‘granting’ of ‘treaty ports’ was comparable to ‘foreign quarters’, a common practice of ‘mutual trade’. Thus, the signing of the Treaty of Nanking merely elevated the status of Great Britain from a state of mutual trade’ (
From 1842 to 1856, two international world orders co-existed under the system of ‘the mutual trade of five ports’ (
4.3 The Convention of Peking and the Capitulation of the Sinocentric System
In April 1858, the Anglo-French forces forced the Qing Empire to sign the Treaty of Tien-tsin180 with Britain, France, the US, and Russia in June 1858.181 There, the Qing Empire agreed to open up ten more ports to foreign traders,182 to abolish the use of the word ‘barbarians’ (
With the Capital occupied and the Emperor forced into exile, the Qing Court had no other choice but to accept whatever terms proposed by Britain.192 Due to the unequal standings of the two negotiating parties and the conviction that the Qing Empire was a ‘barbarian nation’ who ‘conducted warfare in uncivilized ways’,193 the terms of the Convention of Peking of 1860194 were tiled way more in favor of the British than the Treaty of Nanking. For instance, article 1 of the Convention forced the Qing Emperor ‘to express his deep regret at the misunderstanding [referring to the attack of the ratification convoys] so occurred’(
Finally, the Convention of Peking abolished the remaining rituals of the Sinocentric order in favor of the Eurocentric ‘Law of Nations’.195 It was stated in article 2 that ‘Her Britannic Majesty’s Representative will henceforward, reside, permanently, or occasionally, at Peking, as Her Britannic Majesty shall be pleased to decide’. Compared to the Treaty of Tien-tsin, a territorial cession was added by the British at last minute.196 Article 6 further required the Qing Empire to cede to Britain the land of the Kowloon Peninsula in perpetuity.197 There, instead of using the word ‘permitted … to be granted’, the Chinese text adopted the words ‘
Similar to modern international law, in which some principles are seen as more fundamental than the others (jus cogens), Mitchell theorized that there were certain core sets of ‘rituals’ relating to how the Sinocentric order operated that were so central in de-fining the order itself, known as ‘stateliness’(
4.4 China as a ‘State’ in the ‘Society of Nations’ and the End of the Sinocentric World Order
The Convention of Peking in 1860 substantially altered the Sinocentric system as well as how the Qing Empire perceived its own position in the world. First, the once Celestial Empire was forcefully opened to most if not all existing states, who began to sign treaties with the Qing Empire and thereby acquired equal status.204 Amongst others, Qing’s former tributary of Japan also concluded a treaty with the Qing Empire, albeit on an unequal footing favoring Qing in 1871.205 Second, foreigners were no longer confined to the five designated ports but were allowed to visit, to trade, and to preach throughout the Qing Empire including the most sacred capital of Peking.206 Lastly, as a result of the Convention of Peking 1860, the Qing Empire was reduced from a Celestial Empire to the ‘state’ of China. As a semi-civilized state, the Qing Empire had to learn and to achieve ‘the European ideal’ of ‘civilization’207 before it could be fully admitted into the rank of ‘the international community.’208
The implication of ‘becoming civilized’ was that any transformation from the Qing Empire to ‘the state of China’ must go beyond the mere use of official designation but also be ‘internalized’ in its social and political structures.209 While the strategy of the Qing reformists was to ‘treat the Chinese learning as the core while to utilize Western learning as an instrument.’ (
However, the downgrading of Qing from a Celestial Empire to ‘the state of China’ did not mean that China ‘ceased to have an independent existence; … and only tenuously connected to its own identity’.214 Rather, Qing was conscious to re-label the existing Sinocentric system into the western model of imperium, by reinterpreting tributary relations as one of suzerainty (
5 Conclusion
A careful comparison of the English and Chinese texts of the Treaty of Nanking revealed also two different narratives over the same encounter: While the English version of the tale was popularly known through the shared ‘imposition’ narrative, the Chinese text of the Treaty recounted a story of how the Qing Emperor mediated a conflict between the disgruntled English barbarians with the Imperial Commissioner, in which he offered to properly place Britain within the Sinocentric system as concessions. In contrast with the modern nationalistic re-interpretation of the Treaty of Nanking as an ‘unequal treaty’ imposed upon by the British, the Chinese version of the treaty resembled a judgment or an award rendered by the Qing Emperor, as the neutral and innocent arbitrator sitting in the Middle State. In his judgment, the responsibility for the ‘discord’ and ‘provocation’ were attributed to Qing’s Imperial Commissioner (
From the perspective of an international lawyer, the ‘imposition’ account at least suffered two major inadequacies. On one hand, the narrative of describing ‘China’ as a passive and reluctant recipient of international law corresponds to the charge of Orientalism by post-colonial scholars.226 This article, by tracing the encounter back to the arrival of the Portuguese in the 16th century, demonstrated that for almost four centuries, the Celestial Empires had been active in ‘assimilating’ the European states into the Sinocentric world order, amongst which, Russia successfully obtained the status of ‘equal state’. The Russo-Qing relationship challenged the basic presumption that equal recognition between two empires was incompatible with the Sinocentric worldview. It further undermined the British justification that war was necessary to forcefully procure equal treatment of Western states by ‘China’. This article further demonstrates that extraterritoriality was mutually granted amongst ‘equal states’ in the Sinocentric system. This deviated from the dominating narrative that ‘extraterritoriality’ was ‘created’ by the Europeans to deprive the non-European states of their full sovereignty. Rather, the separate administration of subjects belonging to different ‘civilizations’ based on personal jurisdiction, was a unity between the Sinocentric and Eurocentric systems before 1860. What changed thereafter was the creation of a need for ‘civilizational change’ within ‘China’, when the Chinese civilization was no longer ‘separate but equal’ but rather subjected to the European civilization as the only applicable standard in the international system. Thereafter, the Hobbesian understanding of indivisible and absolute sovereignty was internalized by ‘China’ and became the goal ‘China’ strived for from the late 19th to early 20th century.
On the other hand, the imposition narrative strengthened the victim position portrayed by Chinese nationalists and antagonized ‘international law’ as the ‘law of bandits’ forcefully ‘imposed’ by Western imperialists. Corresponding to this view was the discourse of ‘unequal treaty’, which argued that the 19th century treaties were imposed by the West on ‘China’, in which the latter had little or no control over the terms and provisions of the treaties.’227 This view was based on the anachronistic re-imagination of the Qing Empire as ‘China’, who was held to the same standard according to the ‘Westphalian’ idea of sovereignty as Qing’s modern successors. It largely overlooked the perspective of the Qing Empire at the time of the encounter, including its attempt to reconcile the Opium War with the Sinocentric worldview and by reverting to the unity between the two systems to preserve harmony. It also underestimated the voluntary utilization of ‘Western’ legal languages by Qing imperial agents. The period of 1860 to 1895 demonstrated that international law was not always a tool exclusive to the Western power, but it could be utilized in the same way as Western science and military technologies by the Qing officials in defending the Great Space of Qing’s imperium.
Finally, departing from the traditional presumption that ‘China’ was a stable, pre-established subject, this article showcases how international law and its encounter with ‘the Celestial Empire’ played a transformative role in Chinese state-building. Considering the active internalization and utilization of international law in the incorporation of the frontier regions of Tibet and Xinjiang, which closely resembled the western notion of ‘civilization mission’,228 it bears the question: to what extent should the need to address colonial injustice also consider the ‘internalization’ of Western colonial languages and strategies by the pre-colonial empires in their post-colonial nation-building. While the current account does not intend to cast any ‘final word’ on China’s encounter with international law, it wishes to challenge the depiction of international law as either ‘benign’ or ‘malignant’, which arose from the shared narrative of ‘imposition’ in the English and Chinese literature. Rather, the current account seeks to provide a narrative foundation in which future depictions of China’s encounter with international law could depart from the tendency to identify a perfect pair of ‘villain’ and ‘victim’, and to rescue Qing’s history from the nationalistic anachronism.229
Bibliography
Anghie, Anthony. Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
d’Aspremont, Jean and Zhang Binxin. ‘China and International Law: Two Tales of an Encounter’. Leiden Journal of International Law 34 (2021) 899–914.
Backhouse, Edmund and John O. P. Bland. Annals and Memoirs of the Court of Peking: From the 16th to the 20th Century (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1914).
Bodiford, Andrew. ‘Cities in International Law: Reclaiming Rights as Global Custom’. City University of New York Law Review 23(1) (2020), 1–37.
Carrai, Maria Adele. ‘Learning Western Techniques of Empire: Republican China and the New Legal Framework for Managing Tibet’. Leiden Journal of International Law 30(4) (2017), 801–824.
Carrai, Maria Adele. Sovereignty in China: A Genealogy of a Concept since 1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
Carroll, John M. A Concise History of Hong Kong (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007).
Carroll, John M. ‘The Amherst Embassy to China: A Whimper and a Bang’. Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 48(1) (2020), 15–38.
Cassel, Pär K. Grounds of Judgment: Extraterritoriality and Imperial Power in Nineteenth-Century China and Japan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
Chau, Ju-kua. The Chinese and Arab Trade in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (St Petersburg: Printing Office of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, 1912).
Coleman, Andrew and Jackson N. Maogoto. ‘“Westphalian” Meets “Eastphalian” Sovereignty: China in a Globalized World’. Asian Journal of International Law 3(2) (2013), 237–269.
Danjo, Hiroshi. ‘明清時代の天朝体制と華夷秩序’ (‘The System of Celestial Empire and Hua Yi Order in the Ming and Qing Periods’). 京都女子大学大学院文学研究科研究紀要. 史学編 12 (2013), 147–185, available at: http://lib.kyoto-wu.ac.jp/opc/recordID/handle/11173/194 (last accessed on 16 January 2024).
De Lisle, Jacques. ‘China’s Approach to International Law: A Historical Perspective’. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting (American Society of International Law) 94 (2000), 267–275.
De Sousa, Trigo, Regional Integration and Differentiation in a Globalizing China: The Blending of Government and Business in Post-Colonial Macau (University of Amsterdam, PhD Thesis, 2009), 69, available at: https://dare.uva.nl/search?identifier=bad60d4a-4d70-4368-9dbc-37eca7e3cdce (last accessed on 16 January 2024).
DeWitt, John W. Early Globalization and the Economic Development of the United States and Brazil (Westport: Praeger, 2002).
Detter, Ingrid. ‘The Problem of Unequal Treaties’. International and Comparative Law Quarterly 15(4) (1966), 1069–1089.
Dicks, Anthony. ‘Treaty, Grant, Usage or Sufferance? Some Legal Aspects of the Status of Hong Kong’. China Quarterly 95 (1983), 427–455.
Dirlik, Arif. ‘Born in Translation: “China” in the Making of “Zhongguo”’ (29 July 2015), available at: https://www.boundary2.org/2015/07/born-in-translation-china-in-the-making-of-zhongguo/ (last accessed on 16 January 2023).
Duara, Prasenjit. Questioning History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
Duus, Peter. The Abacus and the Sword: The Japanese Penetration of Korea, 1895–1910 (Oakland: University of California Press, 1998).
Eitel, Ernest J. Europe in China: The History of Hongkong from the Beginning to the Year 1882 (London: Luzac & Company, 1895).
Esherick, Joseph W. ‘How the Qing Became China’, in Empire to Nation: Historical Perspectives on the Making of the Modern World, eds. Joseph W. Esherick, Hasan Kayali and Eric Van Young (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006), 229–259.
Fairbank, John K. Chinese World Order (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967).
Fairbank, John. K. and Merle Goldman. China: A New History, Second Enlarged Edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).
Fisch, Jörg. Krieg und Frieden im Friedensvertrag: Eine universalgeschichtliche Studie über Grundlagen und Formelemente des Friedensschlusses (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1979).
Fletcher, Joseph. ‘The Heyday of the Ch’ing Order in Mongolia, Sinkiang and Tibet’, in The Cambridge History of China, ed. John K. Fairbank (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 351–408.
Fogel, Joshua. A. ‘New Thoughts on an Old Controversy: Shina as a Toponym for China’ Sino-Platonic Papers 229 (2012), 2157–9679.
Frank, V. S. ‘The Territorial Terms of the Sino-Russian Treaty of Nerchinsk, 1689’. Pacific Historical Review 16(3) (1947), 265–270.
Guo, Weidong. ‘晚清中外条约作准文本探析’ (‘An Analysis of the Authorized Text of Sino-Foreign Treaties in the Late Qing Dynasty’) 历史研究 (Historical Research), 5 (2019) 61–74.
Grewe, Wilhelm G. The Epochs of International Law (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2000).
Hamashita, Takeshi. 近代中国の国際的契機—朝貢貿易システムと近代アジア (Modern China’s International Opportunity: The Tribute and Trade System and Modern Asia) (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1990).
Hamashita, Takeshi. 朝貢システムと近代アジア (The Tribute System and Modern Asia) (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2013).
Hanes, Travis W. and Frank Sanello. The Opium Wars: The Addiction of One Empire and the Corruption of Another (Naperville: Sourcebooks, 2004).
Hansen, Valerie. ‘Silk Road Cities and Their Co-Existing Legal Traditions’, in Handbook on International Law and Cities, eds. Helmut P. Aust and Janne E. Nijman (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2021).
Harrison, Henrietta. ‘The Qianlong Emperor’s Letter to George III and the Early- Twentieth-Century Origins of Ideas about Traditional China’s Foreign Relations’. American Historical Review 122(3) (2017), 680–701.
Hayton, Bill. The Invention of China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020).
Herrick, Kevin. ‘The Merger of Two Systems: Chinese Adoption and Western Adaptation in the Formation of Modern International Law’. Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law 33(3) (2014), 685–703.
Hevia, James L. English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).
Horn, David B. The British Diplomatic Service, 1689–1789 (London: Clarendon Press, 1961).
Hsü, Immanuel C. Y. ‘Russia’s Special Position in China during the Early Ch’ing Period’. Slavic Review 23(4) (1964), 688–700.
Jin, Guoping. 西力東漸: 中葡早期接觸追昔 (From the West to the East: Early Contact between China and Portugal) (Macau: Macau Foundation, 2000).
Kawashima, Shin. ‘China’, in The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law, eds. Bardo Fassbender and Anne Peters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 452–474.
Kim, So Yeon. ‘Making International Law Truly “International”?: Reflecting on Colonial Approaches to the China-Vietnam Dispute in the South China Sea and the Tribute System’. Journal of the History of International Law 24(2) (2021), 227–258.
Koskenniemi, Martti. The Gentle Civilizer of Nations. The Rise and Fall of Modern International Law 1870–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Kwok, Ting-yi. 近代中國史綱 (An Outline of Modern Chinese History) (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 1979).
Lesaffer, Randall. ‘Aggression before Versailles’. European Journal of International Law 29(3) (2018), 773–808.
Liao, Minshu. 清代中國對外關係新論 (A New Theory on Qing Dynasty’s China Diplomatic Relations) (Taipei: NCCU Press, 2017).
Liu, Lydia. The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).
Luo, Zhitian. ‘From “Tianxia” (All under Heaven) to “the World”: Changes in Late Qing Intellectuals’ Conceptions of Human Society’. Social Sciences in China 29(2) (2008), 93–105.
Matten, Marc A. Imagining a Postnational World: Hegemony and Space in Modern China (Leiden: Brill, 2016).
Millward, James A. Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity, and Empire in Qing Central Asia, 1759–1864 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016).
Millward, James A., Ruth W. Dunnell, Mark C. Elliot and Philippe Forêt. New Qing Imperial History: The Making of Inner Asian Empire at Qing Chengde (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004).
Mitchell, Ryan M. Recentering the World: China and the Transformation of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).
Morita, Yoshihiko. ‘Sino-Japanese Amity Treaty and the East Asian World Order: The Triangle Relationship and Dual Visions, 1862–1871’. International Relations 139 (2004), 29–44.
Neff, Stephen C. Justice among Nations: A History of International Law (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014).
Neff, Stephen C. War and the Law of Nations: A General History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Oh, Si Jin. ‘Resolving the Misunderstood Historical Order: A Korean Perspective on the Historical Tributary Order in East Asia’. Journal of the History of International Law 21(3) (2019), 341–377.
Onuma, Yasuaki. ‘When Was the Law of International Society Born? – An Inquiry of the History of International Law from an Intercivilizational Perspective’. Journal of the History of International Law 2(1) (2000), 1–66.
Pankenier, David W. Astrology and Cosmology in Early China: Conforming Earth to Heaven (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Peters, Anne. ‘Unequal Treaties’, in Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law, ed. Rüdiger Wolfrum (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 1, available at: http://opil.ouplaw.com/view/10.1093/law:epil/9780199231690/law-9780199231690-e1495 (last accessed on 16 January 2024).
Perdue, Peter C. ‘The Tenacious Tributary System’. Journal of Contemporary China 24 (96) (2015), 1002–1014.
Polachek, James M. The Inner Opium War (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Centre, 1991).
Pritchard, Earl Hampton. The Crucial Years of Early Anglo-Chinese Relations, 1750–1800 (London: Octagon Books, 1970).
Rech, Walter. Enemies of Mankind: Vattel’s Theory of Collective Security (Leiden: Brill Nijhoff, 2013).
Ruskola, Teemu. ‘Legal Orientalism’. Michigan Law Review 101(1) (2002), 179–234.
Said, Edward. W. Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
Said, Edward. W. Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1994).
Sebes, Joseph and Pereira, Tomás. The Jesuits and the Sino-Russian Treaty of Nerchinsk (1689): The Diary of Thomas Pereira (Rome: Institutum Historicum SI, 1962).
Skeldon, Ronald. ‘Migration from China’. Journal of International Affairs 49(2) (1996), 434–455.
Strauss, Michael J. Territorial Leasing in Diplomacy and International Law (Leiden: Brill, 2015).
Svarverud, Rune. International Law as World Order in Late Imperial China: Translation, Reception and Discourse, 1847–1911 (Leiden: Brill, 2007).
Teng, Ssu-yü and John K. Fairbank. China’s Response to the West: A Documentary Survey, 1839–1923 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979).
Tomuschat, Christian. ‘The 1871 Peace Treaty between France and Germany and the 1919 Peace Treaty of Versailles’, in Peace Treaties and International Law in European History: From the Late Middle Ages to World War One, ed. Lesaffer, Randall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 382–396.
Tsang, Steve. A Modern History of Hong Kong (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007).
Wang, Dong. China’s Unequal Treaties: Narrating National History (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005).
Wang, Tieya. ‘International Law in China: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives’. Recueil des cours de l’academie de droit international de La Haye 221 (1990), 195–369.
Wang, Wensheng. White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirates: Crisis and Reform in the Qing Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014).
Welsh, Frank. A History of Hong Kong (New York: Harper Collins, 1997).
Yanagihara, Masaharu. ‘Significance of the History of the Law of Nations in Europe and East Asia’. Recueil des cours de l’academie de droit international de La Haye 371 (2014), 273–435.
Yang, Nianqun. ‘“天命” 如何转移: 清朝 “大一统” 观再诠释’ (‘How “Mandate of Heaven” Transfers: Reinterpretation of Qing Dynasty’s concept of “Grand Unity”’) 清华大学学报 (哲学社会科学版) 35(6) (2020), 21–46.
Yang, Nianqun. ‘“天命” 如何转移: 清朝 “大一统” 观的形成与实践 (‘How “Mandate of Heaven” Transfers: The Formation and Practice of Qing Dynasty’s concept of “Grand Unity”’) (Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Publishing House, 2022).
Zarrow, Peter. G. After Empire: The Conceptual Transformation of the Chinese State, 1885–1924 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012).
Zhao, Gang. ‘Reinventing China: Imperial Qing Ideology and the Rise of Modern Chinese National Identity in the Early Twentieth Century’. Modern China 32(1) (2006), 3–30.
Zhu, Yuan Yi. ‘Suzerainty, Semi-Sovereignty, and International Legal Hierarchies on China’s Borderlands’. Asian Journal of International Law 10(2) (2020), 293–320.
See Koskenniemi, Martti. The Gentle Civilizer of Nations. The Rise and Fall of Modern International Law 1870–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
See d’Aspremont, Jean and Zhang Binxin. ‘China and International Law: Two Tales of an Encounter’. Leiden Journal of International Law 34 (2021) 899–914.
Anghie, Anthony. Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 4–5.
d’Aspremont / Zhang, ‘Two Tales’ 2021 (n. 2), 905.
Herrick, Kevin. ‘The Merger of Two Systems: Chinese Adoption and Western Adaptation in the Formation of Modern International Law’. Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law 33(3) (2014), 685–703.
See Fairbank, John. K. Chinese World Order (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 257–276.
Anghie, Imperialism 2005 (n. 3), 72–73.
For the similarities with the transition account, see, e.g., Wang, Tieya. ‘International Law in China: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives’. Recueil des cours de l’academie de droit international de La Haye 221 (1990), 195–369, 251.
d’Aspremont / Zhang, ‘Two Tales’ 2021 (n. 2), 913.
Svarverud, Rune. International Law as World Order in Late Imperial China: Translation, Reception and Discourse, 1847–1911 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 16–18.
This article uses the word ‘Eurocentric’ and ‘Sinocentric’ systems to denote the world order that evolved and developed from essentially European and Chinese origins respectively. It seeks to avoid classifying one system as ‘international’ over the other prior to and during the encounter, which reinforces the belief that international law was a pre-established concept created in one geographical area and extended somewhere else in space. See ibid.
d’Aspremont / Zhang, ‘Two Tales’ 2021 (n. 2), 910.
I use ‘China’ to denote the evolving concept of ‘China as a state’ throughout the encounter.
Some recent examples are, Dirlik, Arif. ‘Born in Translation: “China” in the Making of “Zhongguo”’ (29 July 2015), available at: https://www.boundary2.org/2015/07/born-in-translation-china-in-the-making-of-zhongguo/ (last accessed on 16 January 2024); Hayton, Bill. The Invention of China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020). Similarly, the concept of ‘the West’ is also fluid and situational dependent. For example, Russia and Japan were often included and excluded as part of ‘the West’ in Chinese discourses. In this article, ‘the West’ is connotated to mean only Western Europe and the United States of America.
See Millward, James A. Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity, and Empire in Qing Central Asia, 1759–1864 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), 18; Esherick, Joseph W. ‘How the Qing Became China’, in Empire to Nation: Historical Perspectives on the Making of the Modern World, eds. Joseph W. Esherick, Hasan Kayali and Eric Van Young (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006), 229–259.
Duara, Prasenjit. Questioning History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 4. For the history of how ‘Chinese history’ was being used to facilitate Chinese nation-building, see Hayton, Invention of China 2020 (n. 14), 101–127.
Zhao, Gang. ‘Reinventing China: Imperial Qing Ideology and the Rise of Modern Chinese National Identity in the Early Twentieth Century’. Modern China 32(1) (2006), 3–30, 6.
The original meaning of the ‘Middle State’ could be derived from the rubbing and transcription of He Zun (
Zhao, ‘Reinventing China’ 2006 (n. 17), 6.
Ibid., 14.
There are different theories on Cina’s etymology, see Hayton, Invention of China 2020 (n. 14), 15–16.
However, the Japanese toponym of Shina (
See the debates amongst late Qing intellectuals about the proper translation of ‘China’ in Hayton, Invention of China 2020 (n. 14), 22–33.
Liu, Lydia. The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 36.
Hayton, Invention of China 2020 (n. 14), 22, 34.
Zarrow, Peter G. After Empire: The Conceptual Transformation of the Chinese State, 1885– 1924 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 93–94.
Fairbank, Chinese World Order 1967 (n. 6), 5.
Ibid., 8.
Ibid., 7.
Ibid., 13.
Ibid., 7–8.
Ibid., 6.
Ibid., 63.
Matten, Marc A. Imagining a Postnational World: Hegemony and Space in Modern China (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 32–33.
See Kim, So Yeon. ‘Making International Law Truly “International”?: Reflecting on Colonial Approaches to the China-Vietnam Dispute in the South China Sea and the Tribute System’. Journal of the History of International Law 24(2) (2021), 227–258, 239; Oh, Si Jin. ‘Resolving the Misunderstood Historical Order: A Korean Perspective on the Historical Tributary Order in East Asia’. Journal of the History of International Law 21(3) (2019), 341–377, 347; Yanagihara, Masaharu. ‘Significance of the History of the Law of Nations in Europe and East Asia’. Recueil des cours de l’academie de droit international de La Haye 371 (2014), 273–435, 298.
Fairbank, Chinese World Order 1967 (n. 6), 10–11.
Ibid., 10.
Ibid., 10.
Ibid., 10.
Kawashima, Shin. ‘China’, in The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law, eds. Bardo Fassbender and Anne Peters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 452–474, 455.
Ibid., 454–459.
Ibid., 454–459.
See ‘Emperor Qianlong: Letter to George III, 1793’ cited in Backhouse, Edmund and John O. P. Bland. Annals and Memoirs of the Court of Peking: From the 16th to the 20th Century (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1914), 324–325.
Fairbank, Chinese World Order 1967 (n. 6), 11.
Kawashima, ‘China’ 2012 (n. 40), 456.
Herrick, ‘Two Systems’ 2014 (n. 5), 693–694.
De Lisle, Jacques. ‘China’s Approach to International Law: A Historical Perspective’. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting (American Society of International Law) 94 (2000), 267–275, 270.
Fairbank, Chinese World Order 1967 (n. 6), 224.
Ibid., 73.
See Millward, James A., Ruth W. Dunnell, Mark C. Elliot and Forêt, Philippe. New Qing Imperial History: The Making of Inner Asian Empire at Qing Chengde (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004).
Fairbank, Chinese World Order 1967 (n. 6), 72–73.
Perdue, Peter C. ‘The Tenacious Tributary System’. Journal of Contemporary China 24(96) (2015), 1002–1014, 1007.
Liao, Minshu.
See Takeshi, Hamashita.
Danjo, Hiroshi. ‘
Yang, Nianqun. ‘“
Liao,
Ibid., 23–24.
See Onuma, Yasuaki. ‘When Was the Law of International Society Born? – An Inquiry of the History of International Law from an Intercivilizational Perspective’. Journal of the History of International Law 2(1) (2000), 1–66; Kim, ‘Making International Law’ 2021 (n. 35); Oh, ‘Misunderstood Historical Order’ 2019 (n. 35).
Bodiford, Andrew. ‘Cities in International Law: Reclaiming Rights as Global Custom’. City University of New York Law Review 23(1) (2020), 1–37, 16–20.
Horn, David B. The British Diplomatic Service, 1689–1789 (London: Clarendon Press, 1961), 204–208.
Grewe, Wilhelm G. The Epochs of International Law (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2000), 302–304.
Strauss, Michael J. Territorial Leasing in Diplomacy and International Law (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 45, fn. 191 and 192.
Ibid., 54–58.
Ibid., 62–63, 70.
Ibid., 67–69.
Grewe, Epochs 2000 (n. 62), 59.
Chau, Ju-kua. The Chinese and Arab Trade in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (St Petersburg: Printing Office of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, 1912), 9–10.
Ibid., 16–17. Similar practices were also seen in the Silk Road cities, see Hansen, Valerie. ‘Silk Road Cities and Their Co-Existing Legal Traditions’, in Handbook on International Law and Cities, eds. Helmut P. Aust and Janne E. Nijman (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2021), 17–28.
Liao,
Ibid., ii, fn. 1.
Jin, Guoping,
Ibid., 1.
Strauss, Territorial Leasing 2015 (n. 63), 58, fn. 262–264.
Ibid., 59.
Wang, Wensheng. White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirates: Crisis and Reform in the Qing Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 230.
De Sousa, Trigo, Regional Integration and Differentiation in a Globalizing China: The Blending of Government and Business in Post-Colonial Macau (University of Amsterdam, PhD Thesis, 2009), 69, available at: https://dare.uva.nl/search?identifier=bad60d4a-4d70-4368-9dbc-37eca7e3cdce (last accessed on 16 January 2024).
Fairbank, Chinese World Order 1967 (n. 6), 248.
Ibid., 237.
Ibid., 11.
Ibid., 249.
Ibid.
Treaty of Nerchinsk, 7 September 1689, 18 CTS 503.
Sebes, Joseph and Pereira, Tomás. The Jesuits and the Sino-Russian Treaty of Nerchinsk (1689): The Diary of Thomas Pereira (Rome: Institutum Historicum SI, 1962), 115–120.
Kawashima, ‘China’ 2012 (n. 40), 457; Fairbank, Chinese World Order 1967 (n. 6), 224.
Hsü, Immanuel C. Y. ‘Russia’s Special Position in China during the Early Ch’ing Period’. Slavic Review 23(4) (1964), 688–700, 695.
Liao,
Ibid., 697.
Fairbank, Chinese World Order 1967 (n. 6), 224.
Hsü, ‘Russia’s’ Special Position 1964 (n. 90), 689.
Ibid., 696.
Liao,
Matten, Postnational World 2016 (n. 34), 64–65, 124.
Hsü, ‘Russia’s Special Position’ 1964 (n. 89), 689.
Fairbank, Chinese World Order 1967 (n. 6), 82.
Frank, V. S. ‘The Territorial Terms of the Sino-Russian Treaty of Nerchinsk, 1689’. Pacific Historical Review 16(3) (1947), 265–270, 265–269.
In the authentic Latin copy of the Treaty of Nerchinsk (n. 83), the Qing Emperor was referred to as Sancti Sinarum Imperatoris, the use of Sinarum was in genitive sense and Imperatoris was in Dative. It could mean ‘Emperor of / over / in China’. In the Russian text, the Qing Empire is translated as
Hayton, Invention of China 2020 (n. 14), 20–21.
Tsang, Steve. A Modern History of Hong Kong (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), 5.
Pritchard, Earl Hampton. The Crucial Years of Early Anglo-Chinese Relations, 1750–1800 (London: Octagon Books, 1970), 114.
Kawashima, ‘China’ 2012 (n. 40), 457.
Liao,
Carroll, John M. A Concise History of Hong Kong (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007) 11.
Liao,
Fairbank, John. K. and Merle Goldman. China: A New History, Second Enlarged Edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 196.
Wang, White Lotus 2014 (n. 76), 234.
Ibid.
Pritchard, Crucial Years 1970 (n. 100), 307.
Peyrefitte, Alain. The Immobile Empire (New York: Vintage, 2013), 169–170.
Translated in Teng, Ssu-yü and John K. Fairbank. China’s Response to the West: A Documentary Survey, 1839–1923 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 19.
See Harrison, Henrietta. ‘The Qianlong Emperor’s Letter to George III and the Early- Twentieth-Century Origins of Ideas about Traditional China’s Foreign Relations’. American Historical Review 122(3) (2017) 680–701.
Carroll, John M. ‘The Amherst Embassy to China: A Whimper and a Bang’. Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 48(1) (2020), 15–38, 15.
Tsang, History of Hong Kong 2007 (n. 99), 7.
Liao,
Eitel, Ernest J. Europe in China: The History of Hongkong from the Beginning to the Year 1882 (London: Luzac & Company, 1895), 56.
Polachek, James M. The Inner Opium War (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Centre, 1991), 109–110.
Ibid., 123–125.
Ibid., 125.
Teng / Fairbank, China’s Response 1979 (n. 110), 266–269.
Carrai, Maria A. Sovereignty in China: A Genealogy of a Concept since 1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 49–50.
Ibid., 48–49.
For Vattel’s understanding of sovereignty, see Beaulac, Stephane. ‘Emer de Vattel and the Externalization of Sovereignty’. Journal of the History of International Law 5(2) (2003), 237–292.
Tsang, History of Hong Kong 2007 (n. 99), 7.
Ibid.
Ibid., 10–11.
Hanes, Travis W. and Frank Sanello. The Opium Wars: The Addiction of One Empire and the Corruption of Another (Naperville: Sourcebooks, 2004), 61–62.
See also, Neff, Stephen C. Justice among Nations: A History of International Law (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 317; Peters, Anne. ‘Unequal Treaties’, in Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law, ed. Rüdiger Wolfrum (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 1, available at: http://opil.ouplaw.com/view/10.1093/law:epil/9780199231690/law-9780199231690–e1495 (last accessed on 16 January 2024).
Liao,
See Matten, Postnational World 2016 (n. 34), 66–67.
See Coleman, Andrew and Jackson N. Maogoto. ‘“Westphalian” Meets “Eastphalian” Sovereignty: China in a Globalized World’. Asian Journal of International Law 3(2) (2013), 237–269.
Welsh, Frank. A History of Hong Kong (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 122.
Treaty between China and Great Britain, 29 August 1842, 93 CTS 465.
Treaty of Peace, Amity, and Commerce Between the United States of America and the Chinese Empire, 3 July 1844, 8 Stat 592.
Treaty of Friendship, Commerce and Navigation between China and France, 24 October 1844, 97 CTS 375; Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Commerce between China and Sweden- Norway, 20 March 1847, 100 CTS 445.
See Carrai, Sovereignty in China 2019 (n. 120), 51.
Peters, ‘Unequal Treaties’ 2018 (n. 127), 17–18.
Liao,
Skeldon, Ronald. ‘Migration from China’. Journal of International Affairs 49(2) (1996), 434–455, 435.
Liao,
Ibid., 381–383.
Anghie, Imperialism 2005 (n. 4), 85; Wang, ‘International law in China’ 1990 (n. 9), 195.
Liao,
See article I in Treaty of Nerchinsk (n. 83).
Dicks, Anthony. ‘Treaty, Grant, Usage or Sufferance? Some Legal Aspects of the Status of Hong Kong’. China Quarterly 95 (1983), 427–455, 445.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Neff, Stephen C. War and the Law of Nations: A General History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 230.
Tomuschat, Christian. ‘The 1871 Peace Treaty between France and Germany and the 1919 Peace Treaty of Versailles’, in Peace Treaties and International Law in European History: From the Late Middle Ages to World War One, ed. Randall Lesaffer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 382–396, 391.
Neff, War and the Law of Nations 2005 (n. 147), 239; Fisch, Jörg. Krieg und Frieden im Friedensvertrag. Eine universalgeschichtliche Studie über Grundlagen und Formelemente des Friedensschlusses (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1979), 187.
Tomuschat, ‘1871 Peace Treaty’ 2004 (n. 148), 391.
Lesaffer, Randall. ‘Aggression before Versailles’. European Journal of International Law 29(3) (2018), 773–808, 789; Neff, War and the Law of Nations 2005 (n. 139), 100, 115, 118.
See Fisch, Krieg und Frieden 1979 (n. 149), 208–211; Lesaffer, ‘Aggression before Versailles’ 2005 (n. 151), 789 (re Second Treaty of Versailles in 1757), 803–805 (re the major debates during the Paris Peace Conference on the question of Germany’s full reparation).
Neff, War and the Law of Nations 2005 (n. 139), 103–104, 108 (re the requirement for the declaration of war), 226 (re general reprisals), 230 (re First Opium War).
DeWitt, John W. Early Globalization and the Economic Development of the United States and Brazil (Westport: Praeger, 2002), 96–98.
Dicks, ‘Treaty, Grant’ 1983 (n. 147), 442.
Guo, Weidong. ‘
Herrick, ‘Two Systems’ 2014 (n. 5), 701–702; Fletcher, Joseph. ‘The Heyday of the Ch’ing Order in Mongolia, Sinkiang and Tibet’, in The Cambridge History of China, ed. John K. Fairbank (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 351–408, 383.
Fletcher, ‘Ch’ing Order’ 1978 (n. 157), 351, 375.
Ibid., 367.
Ibid., 367–368.
Ibid., 368–370.
Ibid., 377–379.
Ibid., 383–384.
Liao,
Fletcher, ‘Ch’ing Order’ 1978 (n. 157), 383.
Fairbank, Chinese World Order 1967 (n. 6), 260.
Ibid., 167, 172–173.
Welsh, History of Hong Kong 1997 (n. 131), 127.
Liao,
Ibid., 380–382.
Welsh, History of Hong Kong 1997 (n. 131), 175.
Kwok, Ting-yi.
Liao,
Tsang, History of Hong Kong 2007 (n. 99), 15.
Ibid., 29; Welsh, History of Hong Kong 1997 (n. 131), 203.
Tsang, History of Hong Kong 2007 (n. 99), 15.
Ibid.
Ibid., 28.
Ibid., 29.
Peace Treaty between the Queen of Great Britain and the Emperor of China, 26 June 1858, 119 CTS 163 (‘Treaty of Tientsin’).
Tsang, History of Hong Kong 2007 (n. 99), 33.
Carroll, History of Hong Kong 2007 (n. 103), 47.
Treaty of Tientsin (n. 180), art. LI.
Tsang, History of Hong Kong 2007 (n. 99), 33.
Carroll, History of Hong Kong 2007 (n. 103), 47.
Wang, Dong. China’s Unequal Treaties: Narrating National History (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005), 17.
Tsang, History of Hong Kong 2007 (n. 99), 33.
Hevia, James L. English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 39.
Hevia, English Lessons 2003 (n. 188), 45.
Welsh, History of Hong Kong 1997 (n. 131), 227.
Hevia, English Lessons 2003 (n. 188), 47–48.
Tsang, History of Hong Kong 2007 (n. 99), 36.
Rech, Walter. Enemies of Mankind: Vattel’s Theory of Collective Security (Leiden: Brill Nijhoff, 2013), 112–127.
Convention of Friendship between China and Great Britain, 24 October 1860, 123 CTS 73 (‘Convention of Peking’).
Detter, Ingrid. ‘The Problem of Unequal Treaties’. International and Comparative Law Quarterly 15(4) (1966), 1069–1089, 1075–1076.
Tsang, History of Hong Kong 2007 (n. 99), 35–46.
Ibid., 35.
Dicks, ‘Treaty, Grant’ 1983 (n. 147), 446, fn. 70.
Mitchell, Ryan M. Recentering the World: China and the Transformation of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 13–15.
Ibid., 29, 33.
Ibid., 14, 27, 33.
Luo, Zhitian. ‘From “Tianxia” (All under Heaven) to “the World”: Changes in Late Qing Intellectuals’ Conceptions of Human Society’. Social Sciences in China, 29(2) (2008), 93–105.
Mitchell, Recentering 2022 (n. 199), 43, 54–55, 58–59, 72.
See Carrai, Sovereignty in China 2019 (n. 120), 57, fn. 39.
See Morita, Yoshihiko. ‘Sino-Japanese Amity Treaty and the East Asian World Order: The Triangle Relationship and Dual Visions, 1862–1871’. International Relations 139 (2004), 29–44, 40–42, available at: https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/kokusaiseiji1957/2004/139/2004_139_29/_article/-char/en (last accessed on 16 January 2024).
Welsh, History of Hong Kong 1997 (n. 131), 210.
Anghie, Imperialism 2005 (n. 3), 37.
See also Detter, ‘Unequal Treaties’ 1966 (n. 195), 1075; Fisch, Krieg und Frieden 1979 (n. 149), 474, fn. 74.
Anghie, Imperialism 2005 (n. 3), 86.
Carrai, Sovereignty in China 2019 (n. 120), 59–60. Tsungli Yamen (
Ibid., 65–66.
Ibid., 65.
Ibid., 65.
Anghie, Imperialism 2005 (n. 3), 104.
Carrai, Sovereignty in China 2019 (n. 120), 74–77, 79–80.
Kim, ‘Making International Law’ 2021 (n. 35), 242.
Duus, Peter. The Abacus and the Sword: The Japanese Penetration of Korea, 1895–1910 (Oakland: University of California Press, 1998), 54.
Cassel, Pär K. Grounds of Judgment: Extraterritoriality and Imperial Power in Nineteenth-Century China and Japan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 103–105.
Ibid., 135–141 (re Nagasaki Incident).
Carrai, Sovereignty in China 2019 (n. 120), 77.
Ibid., 78–79.
Svarverud, International Law as World Order 2007 (n. 10), 16.
Mitchell, Recentering 2022 (n. 199), 81, 97.
Carrai, Sovereignty in China 2019 (n. 120), 84–85.
Carrai, Maria A. ‘Learning Western Techniques of Empire: Republican China and the New Legal Framework for Managing Tibet’. Leiden Journal of International Law 30(4) (2017), 801–824, 814.
For the concept of Orientalism, see Said, Edward. W. Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979); Said, Edward. W. Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1994). For a legal critic on orientalism, see Ruskola, Teemu. ‘Legal Orientalism’. Michigan Law Review 101(1) (2002), 179–234.
Wang, ‘International Law in China’ 1990 (n. 8), 251; Peters, ‘Unequal Treaties’ 2018 (n. 127), 10.
See Zhu, Yuan Yi. ‘Suzerainty, Semi-Sovereignty, and International Legal Hierarchies on China’s Borderlands’. Asian Journal of International Law 10(2) (2020), 293–320; Carrai, ‘Learning Western Techniques’ 2017 (n. 225), 803.
See Duara, Questioning History 1998 (n. 16).
