China's Unequal Treaties

China's Unequal Treaties
Author: Dong Wang
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2005
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780739112083

This study, based on primary sources, deals with the linguistic development and polemical uses of the expression Unequal Treaties, which refers to the treaties China signed between 1842 and 1946. Although this expression has occupied a central position in both Chinese collective memory and Chinese and English historiographies, this is the first book to offer an in-depth examination of China's encounters with the outside world as manifested in the rhetoric surrounding the Unequal Treaties. Author Dong Wang argues that competing forces within China have narrated and renarrated the history of the treaties in an effort to consolidate national unity, international independence, and political legitimacy and authority. In the twentieth century, she shows, China's experience with these treaties helped to determine their use of international law. Of great relevance for students of contemporary China and Chinese history, as well as Chinese international law and politics, this book illuminates how various Chinese political actors have defined and redefined the past using the framework of the Unequal Treaties.

Mestizo International Law

Mestizo International Law
Author: Arnulf Becker Lorca
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 421
Release: 2015-01-01
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1316194051

The development of international law is conventionally understood as a history in which the main characters (states and international lawyers) and events (wars and peace conferences) are European. Arnulf Becker Lorca demonstrates how non-Western states and lawyers appropriated nineteenth-century classical thinking in order to defend new and better rules governing non-Western states' international relations. By internalizing the standard of civilization, for example, they argued for the abrogation of unequal treaties. These appropriations contributed to the globalization of international law. With the rise of modern legal thinking and a stronger international community governed by law, peripheral lawyers seized the opportunity and used the new discourse and institutions such as the League of Nations to dissolve the standard of civilization and codify non-intervention and self-determination. These stories suggest that the history of our contemporary international legal order is not purely European; instead they suggest a history of a mestizo international law.

The Thin Justice of International Law

The Thin Justice of International Law
Author: Steven R. Ratner
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 497
Release: 2015
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0198704046

Offering a new interdisciplinary approach to global justice and integrating the insights of international relations and contemporary ethics, this book asks whether the core norms of international law are just by appraising them according to a standard of global justice grounded in the advancement of peace and protection of human rights.

International Law and Japanese Sovereignty

International Law and Japanese Sovereignty
Author: Douglas Howland
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2016-11-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1137567775

How does a nation become a great power? A global order was emerging in the nineteenth century, one in which all nations were included. This book explores the multiple legal grounds of Meiji Japan's assertion of sovereign statehood within that order: natural law, treaty law, international administrative law, and the laws of war. Contrary to arguments that Japan was victimized by 'unequal' treaties, or that Japan was required to meet a 'standard of civilization' before it could participate in international society, Howland argues that the Westernizing Japanese state was a player from the start. In the midst of contradictions between law and imperialism, Japan expressed state will and legal acumen as an equal of the Western powers – international incidents in Japanese waters, disputes with foreign powers on Japanese territory, and the prosecution of interstate war. As a member of international administrative unions, Japan worked with fellow members to manage technical systems such as the telegraph and the post. As a member of organizations such as the International Law Association and as a leader at the Hague Peace Conferences, Japan helped to expand international law. By 1907, Japan was the first non-western state to join the ranks of the great powers.

Sovereignty in China

Sovereignty in China
Author: Maria Adele Carrai
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2019-08
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1108474195

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.

Revolution, State Succession, International Treaties and the Diaoyu/Diaoyutai Islands

Revolution, State Succession, International Treaties and the Diaoyu/Diaoyutai Islands
Author: Tseng Hui-Yi
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2017-05-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1443893684

Dynamism in Sino-Japanese relations, of which the Diaoyu/Diaoyutai Islands dispute constitutes a major part, has greatly overshadowed not only prospects of positive collaboration between China and Japan, but also regional order in East Asia. On the surface, the essence of the dispute focused on sovereignty, which entails competition for maritime resources development and strategic access to the adjacent waters as a critical transportation and military route. What lies at the crux, however, is the conflict between different sets of values, which lead and shape their interpretations of international treaties, changes of governments, and impacts of this upon these Asian states’ attitudes toward how “sovereignty” and “territory” should be understood in contemporary Asia. The Diaoyu/Diaoyutai Islands dispute has lapsed into dormancy, since intense discussions in the period from 2010 to 2012. However, the disagreement is far from being resolved. This book draws on structural issues underlying the on-going dispute, along with the concomitant, multifaceted challenges that need to be investigated. At a juncture when the prospect of the Sino-Japanese relations remains gloomy, this book provides conceptual and practical insights invaluable to the field of law, history and politics, shedding light on the refinement of relevant international law and rules of engagement in a normative sense.

International Law

International Law
Author: Vaughan Lowe
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2007-09-27
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0191027286

International Law is both an introduction to the subject and a critical consideration of its central themes and debates. The opening chapters of the book explain how international law underpins the international political and economic system by establishing the basic principle of the independence of States, and their right to choose their own political, economic, and cultural systems. Subsequent chapters then focus on considerations that limit national freedom of choice (e.g. human rights, the interconnected global economy, the environment). Through the organizing concepts of territory, sovereignty, and jurisdiction the book shows how international law seeks to achieve an established set of principles according to which the power to make and enforce policies is distributed among States.

International Law

International Law
Author: Malcolm N. Shaw
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 1452
Release: 2003-09-25
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9781139438643

This fifth edition of Malcolm Shaw's bestselling textbook on international law provides a clear, authoritative and comprehensive introduction to the subject, fully revised and updated to Spring 2003. Basically preserving the structure which made the previous edition so successful, a new chapter on Inter-state Courts and Tribunals considers the role of the International Court of Justice and the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea, and there is a new chapter on international humanitarian law. Also examined are arbitration tribunals and the role of international institutions such as the WTO in resolving conflicts. The prosecution of individuals for violations of international law is examined. Additional coverage of events in Kosovo and Iraq analyses the questions of humanitarian intervention and the role of the UN. Written in a clear and accessible style, setting the subject firmly in the context of world politics and the economic and cultural influences affecting it, this book remains a highly readable and invaluable resource for students and practitioners alike. The scope of the text makes this essential reading for students of international law, international relations and the political sciences. The book is also valuable to professionals and governmental and international civil servants.