In the contemporary moment, discussions of international law are difficult to disengage from questions regarding the role of China. Some cast China as a new, revolutionary force set to upend or hasten the demise of the post-World War II order. Others cast China as a binding force for exactly the same order, especially in contrast to the noticeable retreat of its dominant architect, the United States. Moreover, the Chinese Communist Party actively brands its particular engagement with international law as a defining part of its own system of governance—often casting itself in equally contradictory terms as both stalwart and revolutionary.
Such diverse viewpoints draw upon their own versions of the history of international law, both in and outside of China. Ryan Mitchell’s Recentering the World lays out this history—and its relationship to many of these contemporary claims—with China center stage in the development of international law since the mid-19th century. Mitchell does so by synthesizing novel multilingual archival research with a global view of cutting-edge international legal scholarship.
Mitchell works incisively to bring the Chinese historical experience with international law out of a state of exception and into the main narrative of international legal history. In the modern revisionist tradition of Arnulf Becker Lorca’s Mestizo International Law or Jennifer Pitt’s Boundaries of the International, Mitchell aims to correct any impression that China “rejected” international law. Instead, he establishes how Chinese actors engaged in a process of reinterpretation and reappropriation first within their own historical tradition of international law and later as a powerful constitutive element within the evolution of the modern international legal order.
Starting in the mid-19th century, Recentering the World lays out this project in three parts, each containing three chapters: “Stateliness” 1850-1894, “Asserting Sovereignty” 1895-1921, and “Internationalisms” 1922-2001. In each era, Mitchell puts his multilingual fluency to work tracing the iterative re-workings of Chinese language translations of key terms of Western international law. His linguistic focus helps him relate a discourse truly situated locally in the Chinese context, but also in its regional relationship with Japan. As such, Chinese language terms permeate the book’s chapters as they are reinterpreted over time based on domestic, regional, and transnational struggles.
Yet, Mitchell’s history unfolds not purely through shifts in terminology, but also through a lively narrative told largely through the biographies and ambitions of various Chinese actors pursuing their ambitions—personal and national—through the apertures presented by the rapidly shifting geopolitical and domestic arenas of the 19th and 20th centuries. The nexus points for Mitchell’s histories are key moments of international negotiation and institutional formation in which these actors develop their strategies for righting China’s subordinated status in the international legal order. From the 1850s onward, Mitchell narrates this dynamic process with a fine-grained attention to the local disputes they engendered, the specific provenance and contents of various texts’ translations, and the role of foreign interlocutors who developed a keen interest in China’s engagement with international law.
Herein, Mitchell’s ability to work with Japanese and German materials shines through, as he is able to deploy the same linguistic sensitivity and sensibility to Japanese interpretations of Western international law concepts, and then in return plausibly relate their interaction with Chinese choices and stratagems. Some of this occurs interpersonally—through the direct interaction of people and texts—and some of this occurs geopolitically as Japan increasingly frames its regional hegemony through international law itself. In particular, Chapter 3 of Recentering the World has to be considered a masterwork in multilingual archival international law historiography.
It is the driving force of Western commercial empire, especially the elevation of property rights as a counterweight to national sovereignty, which is the most consistent thread in Recentering the World. The mutually constitutive relationship of capitalist expansion and international law is well-recognized today, but Mitchell places the Chinese experience at the center of this dynamic—not just in some receiving “periphery.” From describing the public-private hybrid British Maritime Customs Service founded in the 1850s to the forced creation of Chinese state debt to finance foreign-led military interventions, Mitchell shows how the imperium of Qing state authority was often circumvented by the dominium of Western commercial interests grounded in the language of private property rights to rationalize foreign commercial interests. Notably, Mitchell is able to show how the United States was particularly important in this process, as American actors ground their actions in the asserted mutualism of political liberalism and capitalist development for China’s own putative improvement—most notable in the aftermath of the 1899 Boxer Rebellion.
The importance of China in this process of dual reconciliation was not lost on Chinese participants, who wrote openly of how colonial militarism and commerce work in tandem to subvert local sovereignty. The global interconnection and importance of the Chinese experience is perhaps most fascinatingly related for American international and constitutional scholars when Mitchell discusses how Native Americans were described at “America’s Red Miao” to analogize their status to non-Han people in Yunnan.
The true material heart of these broader themes in Recentering the World’s chapter remains the cohorts of international law-engaged Chinese actors who came to serve successive Chinese regimes after the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911. While Mitchell gives great attention to the import of China’s pre-1911 cohort, his energies for the mid- to late chapters chiefly focus on the ambitions and aspirations of a relatively set, and socially homogenous, group of international law experts now members of a growing set of their own interrelated educational and professional international law institutions.
It is in these chapters that you can feel the sympathies underlying Mitchell’s reconstructive projects. Two members of this cohort, Wang Chonghui and Gu Weijun (known in English as Wellington Koo), take up star roles as each carried with them the emblematic hope that their efforts would help restrain Western imperialism and begin China’s path back to global political equality. Yet, Mitchell shows how the individual brilliance of each man, among others, crashed against the shores of the national interests and suffered personal indignities of racial discrimination overt and covert. Beyond retelling their formal accomplishments, even high-status appointments to international legal bodies, Mitchell relates the public and private praise of their Western interlocutors, revealing even some of the more private shame felt by those who acknowledged that Wang and Koo were undermined by a system which should have validated their intelligence.
Mitchell’s generational approach shifts in the 1920s to emphasize the place of international law in the tumults of domestic Chinese politics dominated by the Guomindang (GMD) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—in particular the drive to end the practice of foreign extraterritorial jurisdiction. A more radical generation of Chinese international legal thinkers emerged who more forthrightly embraced fundamental critique of the international legal system and the never-reached promise of relinquishing extraterritorial privileges based on Chinese self-reform. Here, Mitchell notably excavates pan-Asian and other sentiments of transnational solidarity that he sees as presaging Third-Worldism, or even as precedents for the more contemporary emergence of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL). Sentiments all of which are bound together by rejection of the primacy of property rights or trade over political equality and territorial integrity—or the guise of formally equal and legalized dispute resolution that intensify national subordination.
The driving force that quickens Mitchell’s final chapters is the victory of the CCP in 1949. The Chinese Civil War had already sparked quite substantial divergences among the generations of once relatively united international law scholars and practitioners. Many of the younger generation stayed to work within the CCP and many of the older generation moved with the GMD to Taiwan. Chapter Nine outlines how the CCP, initially a formal outcast from the international legal system, worked after 1949 to find its place in this system while attempting to articulate for itself a vanguard role in challenging Western colonialism and the interventionist logics to which many post-colonial states were still subject to. We are then treated to a quick outline of China’s post-1978 proactive engagement with international law now as a central node in the global economy.
Mitchell’s wide-ranging but linguistically and biographically sensitive history leaves us to contemplate exactly the meaning of his revisionist undertaking. Throughout, we see a discourse on international law more authentically grounded in the Chinese context, and clearly substantiating of a far more materially important role for China in the historical development of international law itself. But we also see legal brilliance orthogonal to actual outcomes, and the centering of Chinese national interest—rather than some truly cosmopolitan sentiment. Does Mitchell’s re-centering then simply provide further fuel for the cynical conclusion that international law is ever an epiphenomenon of power asymmetries? At one point he notes, after detailing once again the deft maneuvers of various Chinese practitioners, that “more radical changes would later come via war and revolution, not conferences.” (P. 156.) It has always been notable that even the United States only ended its extraterritorial privileges in China—after decades of public and private conferences, reports, and judicial studies—when the strategic realities of World War II demanded it. Moreover, were these individually brilliant voices ever something that resonated domestically anywhere beyond the most elite strata of Chinese society?
This returns us to the title of the review, cribbing from Anthea Roberts’ Is International Law International? The history Mitchell relates is most legibly human—a subordinate people use all the tools available to them to achieve their emancipation. And he does find plausible moments of Third World solidarity. Yet, moments where such is strategically consonant with, never sacrificing of, national rejuvenation. As such, this history does then forthrightly make sense of China’s post-1978 active embrace of international institutions from a position of rapidly diminishing asymmetry, especially with Japan and the United States. Mitchell expresses a pang of regret here at a radical opportunity lost, but this type of inherent strategic opportunism is the one true constant of the history of national rejuvenation he relates. We are left then to consider whether today’s “Chinese international law” is something truly different, or simply the recalibration any rising power would pursue.
Ultimately, Recentering the World falls into the category of required reading for both the history of international law and Chinese legal history. If anything remains less explored, it is the synergy of this work with the larger, explosive surge in Chinese legal history of recent decades, which has worked to correct and complexify the manifold mischaracterizations of Chinese law present in many historiographical arenas. Nothing more could be asked of a scholar’s first book.
