Indigenizing International Law in Early Twentieth-Century China: Territorial Sovereignty in the Sino-Tibetan Borderland

If we can sufficiently control Tibet, then England will be willing to acknowledge that Tibet belongs to us. Under international law, states do not invade each other, thus we can use this to repel Russia. Thereby Sichuan will have a fence on which it can rely.

—Lu Chuanlin (1900)¹

In 1864, the Zongli Yamen (Board of Foreign Affairs) distributed 300 copies of a new book of "western learning" to provincial magistrates across the Qing Empire. The book, Wanguo gongfa (The Public Law of All States), was the first comprehensive introduction to Euro-American international law translated into Chinese. Its principal translator, W.A.P. Martin, was an American missionary who by the end of the nineteenth century would serve as professor of international law at the Imperial College (Tongwen guan) in Beijing, an institution attached to the Zongli Yamen.² With the establishment of the Zongli Yamen in 1861, following defeat in the Second Opium War (1856–60), the Qing court initiated formal participation in the global structure of diplomacy forged by the polities of Europe. Yet in spite of its rhetorical emphasis on "equal relations" among polities under international law, in the latter half of the nineteenth century the "family of nations" at the core of this structure did not accept China as a full diplomatic member. At the same time, central government officials in Beijing were slow to embrace fully the conceptual basis of a still-evolving structure of international law. By century's end, however, officials overseeing the empire's southwest borderlands indigenized its core principles, adapting them to counter both regional and local challenges to Qing authority on the Tibetan Plateau. In doing so, they would appeal to both the Euro-American rhetoric of equal relations and its corollary, non-intervention. Initially disseminated from the imperial center in the pages of Wanguo gongfa, then deployed in the borderlands, these indigenized principles of international law circulated back to Beijing, where they would begin to influence central frontier policy in the first years of the twentieth century. The above epigraph, from the preface to a 1900 book by Lu Chuanlin, former governor-general of Sichuan Province, reflects this.

Scholarship exploring the global circulation of the norms and principles of international law during the long nineteenth century demonstrates that their universality manifested less in the geographic expansion of Euro-American empires than through their appropriation by polities, government officials, scholars, and intellectuals outside Europe.³ Complementing these studies, which focus largely on the adoption of international law at the central level, this article offers an alternative perspective from the borderlands of Asia, from the interstices of global power where states and empires met and were transformed by two newly globalizing norms of statecraft—territoriality and sovereignty. It was in such contentious borderlands that theoretical claims to sovereignty under international law intersected with the actual exercise of authority, where Sichuan scholar-officials at the turn of the twentieth century adapted the norm of territorial sovereignty to both exert and assert absolute Qing authority in the Kham borderland of eastern Tibet as a stepping stone toward the whole of Tibet. They transformed frontier policy within Kham by adapting the principles of international law for the borderland, simultaneously invigorating their importance to Chinese state-building and infusing a reoriented conception of sovereignty into regional relations.

First introduced directly to Qing scholar-officials in translation, and later conveyed in original Chinese and Japanese texts, the Euro-American rhetoric of international law instilled an idealized image of its universality. Central to this rhetoric was the Westphalian fiction that territorial sovereignty, constituting exclusive and absolute authority within a polity, structured equal relations in a global state system under the aegis of a universal international law. This fiction prompted adoption by Sichuan scholar-officials of an absolutist conception of sovereignty—not because they believed this fiction to be true in both principle and global practice, but rather because they perceived that demonstrating attainment of the substance of sovereignty in Kham would be sufficient to compel its recognition under international law. This...