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China's Participation in the Second Hague Conference and the Concept of Equal Sovereignty in International Law
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 October 2021
Abstract
Despite the Qing Empire's formal inclusion as a member of the Eurocentric community of states by the turn of the 20th century, its lack of full sovereign status was frequently reasserted in practice. This included proceedings where legal norms were unilaterally applied to it as an object of regulation, provoking a pursuit of agency. In particular, the unprecedented foreign occupation and administration of China after the Boxer crisis of 1899–1901 spurred efforts in pedagogy, legal reform, and diplomacy. Several such efforts subsequently overlapped at the Second Hague Conference in 1907. There, Qing diplomats for the first time influenced multilateral negotiations, and discovered a nascent solidarity with other “weak” states in Latin America and Asia. Joint struggle against great power initiatives sparked new conversations about the equality of states, however, major questions about the implications of sovereign status for genuine agency, and the contingent forms of international legal “progress,” remained unresolved.
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References
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72. Ibid.
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75. Ibid.
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77. Ibid.
78. Ibid., at 115.
79. WJDA: 02-21-002-03-051 (海牙保和會列中國為三等國請修明法律以保主權由 [The Hague Conference listed China as a third-class state. We request enlightened law reform in order to preserve sovereignty]).
80. Ibid.
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82. Ibid.
83. Ibid.
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85. For critical appraisals of the role of state sovereignty in such (later) discourses of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), see, e.g. Mohsen al ATTAR, “Subverting Eurocentric Epistemology: The Value of Nonsense When Designing Counterfactuals” in Kevin John HELLER and Ingo VENZKE, eds., Situating Contingency in International Law: On the Possibility of Different Legal Histories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021) at 160–76; for a perspective focusing on how the state, like other legal forms, can serve as a site of “relative autonomy” reflecting struggles over agency and distribution between social actors, see Umut ÖZSU, “The Necessity of Contingency: Method and Marxism in International Law” in ibid at 75–92.
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104. Ibid.
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110. Walther SCHÜCKING, Die Organisation der Welt (Leipzig: Kröner, 1909); Walther SCHÜCKING, Das Werk vom Haag, Erster Band: Die Staatenverband der Haager Konferenzen (Munich and Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1912) at 81. See discussion in Martti KOSKENNIEMI, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) at 216–18.
111. Cf. Samuel MOYN “From Situated Freedom to Plausible Worlds” in Heller and Venzke, supra note 85 at 532–41.
112. See BECKER LORCA, supra note 35 at 158, 179.
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