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19 December 2022

BOOK: Ryan Martinez MITCHELL, Recentering the World: China and the Transformation of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 250pp, ISBN 9781108498968, £95

 

(image credit: Cambridge University Press)

Book description:
Recentering the World recovers a richly contextual, detailed history of Western-imposed legal structures in China, as well as engagements with international law by Chinese officials, jurists, and citizens. Beginning in the Late Qing era, it shows how international law functioned as a channel for power relations, techniques of economic domination, as well as novel forms of resistance. The book also radically diversifies traditionally Eurocentric accounts of modern international law's origins, demonstrating how, by the mid-twentieth century, Chinese jurists had made major contributions to international organizations and the UN system, the international judiciary, the laws of armed conflict, and more. Drawing on extensive archival research, this book is a valuable guide to China's often conflicted role in international law, its reception and contention of concepts of sovereignty, property, obligation, and autonomy, and its gradual move from the 'periphery' to a shared spot at the 'center' of global legal order.
Table of contents: 
Introduction: 'In the Nineteenth Century, There was No International Law'
Part I. Preserving Stateliness, 1850–1894:
1. Universal Prosperity
2. Synarchy
3. Vast Imperium
Part II. Asserting Sovereignty, 1895–1921:
4. The Public Law of Planet Earth
5. The Problem of Equality
6. Reconstituted Hierarchies
Part III. Internationalisms, 1922–2001:
7. Changing Circumstances
8. New Orders
9. Perpetual Peace
Conclusion: From Object to Subject? – China in a World of Institutions
Glossary of Chinese and Japanese Names
Bibliography
Index
About the author: 
Ryan Martínez Mitchell is an associate professor at the Faculty of Law of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a Ph.D. in Law from Yale University. His scholarship on China and international law has appeared in a number of leading scholarly journals.
More information can be found here.  

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