Genealogies of Chinese Sovereignty Since 1492

UC Berkeley presents Teemu Ruskola's talk to consider China's place in the world as a matter of the changing politics of sovereignty, space, and time.

Colloquium: Center for Chinese Studies

Speaker/Performer: Teemu Ruskola, School of Law, Emory University

Global China Colloquium IV

How did the multiethnic Qing empire (1644-1911) on the eastern edge of the Eurasian landmass become an “international legal person” with the proper name “China”—that is, a sovereign nation-state in a world of other, formally equal nation-states? Historically the law of nations emerged as the constitution of Europe: a set of constitutive norms that governed the relationship among the so-called “Family of Nations.” As this historically specific legal order has become globalized by means of colonialism, it has become effectively the constitution of the world.

Where is China in the world made by modern international law? The growing literature on the colonial origins of international law is concerned with the juridical implications of the “discovery” of the New World. The chief legal justifications for European domination that emerged from the collision with the Americas worked reasonably well in other places so long as Europeans were dealing with peoples they could characterize to their own satisfaction as “barbarians” or “savages” (say, the inhabitants of Africa) or peoples whose political existence could be denied altogether (say, the indigenous people’s of Australia whose land was deemed uninhabited terra nullius). Yet ancient Oriental civilizations such as China were more difficult to dismiss. Chinese culture was evidently very different from Europe’s, but it had all the markers of a “high” civilization even as defined by Europeans themselves, thus causing a catachresis in crude binaries such as civilized/savage and sovereign/colonizable.

The Orient, in the historical sense of the term, thus demands a theoretical account of its own, no less than America, and so does China as the dominant Oriental civilization on the eastern end of Eurasia.