Justice, Equity, and Respect? China’s International Engagement after Versailles

The Fairbank Center at Harvard University presents Alison Kaufman on China's International Engagement after Versailles.

Speaker: Alison Kaufman

The period immediately following World War I is often remembered as a failure in China’s quest to achieve international “justice, equity, and respect for sovereignty." China’s wartime alliance, and the peace conference that followed, were viewed by ROC leaders at the time as a vital opportunity to upgrade their nation’s status. But the Treaty of Versailles instead became another “humiliation” that, to China, confirmed the continued unwillingness of strong powers to treat weak ones as equal members of the “family of nations.” Yet in the 1920s and 1930s, China sought to expand and diversify its international engagements, not to withdraw from them. What did the leaders of the Republic of China (ROC) believe was the utility of the League of Nations and other multi- and bi-lateral engagements for China? How did they assess the results? Drawing on preliminary research on China’s activities in the League, Dr. Kaufman will explore China’s international engagement during the interwar period as one episode in modern China’s pursuit of foreign relations to secure national sovereignty and status.

Alison Kaufman is on leave from the China Studies Division of the Center for Naval Analyses in Alexandria, Virginia, where she has worked on issues related to PRC’s foreign and security policy, China’s and Taiwan’s military culture, and cross-Strait relations. Dr. Kaufman received her BA in East Asian studies from Harvard University and her PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. Her PhD dissertation examined the impact of foreign models on late Qing constitutional thought. Her current research focuses on the historical roots and subsequent evolution of Chinese foreign policy thinking throughout the twentieth century. As a postdoctoral fellow in the Princeton-Harvard China and the World Program, she has been examining China’s foreign relations in the interwar period.