In Recentering the World, Ryan Martínez Mitchell details the evolution of China's interaction with international law, primarily covering the period between 1850 and 2001. Challenging “recent studies of the ‘genealogy of sovereignty in China,’” Mitchell finds that, instead of “sovereignty,” the Chinese concept guoti initially “served as the dominant metric for evaluating legal interactions,” but gradually, guojia zhuquan (state sovereignty) came to serve as a “‘basic concept’ . . . of legal and political discourse” (5).
The evolution of guoti 國體, translated loosely as “state form” or “stateliness,” and zhuquan 主權 or guojia zhuquan 國家主權, translated as “sovereignty,” has been vital to China's perspective on international law since the nineteenth century, when guoti's most important dimension “was an overriding sense of ‘state dignity,’ rather than a set of specific formal norms” (13). As it unfolds, the narrative of the book engages with additional debates, including whether the historical...
