• DOI:10.1017/S0272503700055956
• Corpus ID: 159187569

China’s Approach to International Law: A Historical Perspective

@article{Delisle2000ChinasAT,
  title={China’s Approach to International Law: A Historical Perspective},
  author={Jacques Delisle},
  journal={Proceedings of the ASIL Annual Meeting},
  year={2000},
  volume={94},
  pages={267 - 275}
}

• Jacques Delisle
• Published 2000
• Political Science
• Proceedings of the ASIL Annual Meeting

In recent years, China has been expanding its engagement with the international legal order. The PRC has obtained or sought entry into the major multilateral institutions in the international legal economic order, including the IMF and the WTO. It has expanded its roles in the principal regimes for security and political matters, including joining major conventions on weapons of mass destruction, and participating in regional security fora. In the twenty-plus years of the reform era, the People's Republic has become a party to a rapidly increasing number of agreements, addressing matters ranging from intellectual property to chemical weapons to human rights to telecommunications. During the same period, Beijing has grown more willing to address many of its most important external concerns in international legal terms and through international legal means. The PRC has signed Joint Declarations governing the reversion process and post-reversion orders for Hong Kong and Macao. While it has continued to favor bilateral negotiations, Beijing increasingly has accepted international law as relevant in settling territorial disputes over islands in the South China Sea and areas along China's land boundaries. With its White Papers and other steps, the PRC's leadership has moved from a sharp rejection of international human rights law as irrelevant to a position that, in principle, accepts the existence of universal human rights and, in practice, addresses Western criticisms. At the same time, China has become more assertive in seeking to shape international legal rules to better reflect its interests and preferences. Principal recent examples include support for human rights relativism and strong notions of national sovereignty, and opposition to prospective doctrines permitting intervention on humanitarian or pro-democracy grounds. As China's interest and participation in international legal regimes has increased, so too have the pressures on the international legal system and its participants to take seriously such PRC positions. The PRC's emergence as at least a prospective great power and a large, rapidly developing and increasingly open economy are giving China the ability, as well as the will, to become a more significant actor in the international legal system. With China's greater involvement and influence also has come increasing international concern about the bona fides of Beijing' s commitments, the degree of its compliance with the rules it has nominally accepted, and the systemic consequences of Chinese actions that arguably flout international law. Under these circumstances, it becomes important to understand Chinese approaches to international law and obligations. Here, history surely matters. It has special force with respect to international law, where authoritative rules and sovereign-like institutions remain few and weak, and where individual states' deep-seated interpretations therefore retain central importance. It has special force with respect to China, where the past casts a long shadow. In Chinese leaders' recorded ruminations, historical analogies occupy a prominent place, as in Mao Zedong's fondness for comparing himself to Qin Shi Huangdi (the emperor who unified China over two millennia ago) and in Deng Xiaoping's insistence, when demanding Hong Kong's return, that he would not be another Li Hongzhang (the nineteenth-century official forever tainted by his role in the territory's cession). The history that matters is not narrowly legal. Current Chinese discussions look back— sometimes explicitly—to China's past experiences with international law, and especially to unhappy encounters with the Western-created system during the last century and a half.