Planes de gasto de los órganos de Gobierno y Administración

2.2.1 Imperial China: invasion, humiliation, unequal treaties

Imperial China positioned itself ideologically in the centre of the world – it is well known that the Chinese name for China, Zhongguo¹²³, means “Middle Kingdom”. Surrounding smaller and less powerful states in Asia were seen to be in a relationship with China as a sort of vassals, owing tribute to the emperor who ruled with the Mandate of Heaven. Remnants of this sinocentric and exceptionalist self-image survive until today among the Chinese establishment. This Confucian view of world world order contained universalistic elements;

it saw China’s central position in the world as the natural way of things.¹²⁴ The Celestial Empire of China was also considered the only civilised country, which had little, if anything to learn from other countries but had much to teach the rest of the world instead.¹²⁵

Imperial China’s self-image came under increasing strain in the nineteenth century, when western powers, determined to open up China’s economic potential for themselves,

123 Chinese: 中国.

124 For detailed discussion, see Li Zhaojie, ‘Traditional Chinese World Order’, CJIL 1 (2002) 20-58; Wang,

‘International Law in China’, supra note 115, 205-225; Samuel S. Kim, China, the United Nations, and World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1979), 19-42. See also Wang Gungwu, China and the world since 1949: The Impact of Independence, Modernity and Revolution (London: Macmillan 1977) 1-8. It has been debated whether international law existed in ancient China. Wang Tieya notes this debate (at 205), including negative answers by Arthur Nussbaum, A Concise History of the Law of Nations (Revised Edition;

New York: The Macmillan Company, 1954) 3 and Oppenheim, as well as positive ones, and notes that the first person who noted the idea of existence of international law in ancient China was W.A.P. Martin, who introduced modern international law to China (see below). It is submitted here that it should be taken into account that some historians of international law such as Nussbaum may be overly concerned to, somewhat anachronisitically, fit present-day notions of what constitutes ‘international law’ on the past. This is not to deny the legitimacy of attempts to identify parallels in different rule systems which governed the relationships between states in different times and places. Other conceptual deficiencies in older histories of international law may include reliance on obsolete world views, such as the primitive-civilisation dichotomy and the attribution of propensity for “moderation in warfare” to factors such as “racial disposition” by Nussbaum (at 1 and 5).

125 Yang Zewei, ‘Western International Law and China’s Confucianism in the 19th Century. Collision and Integration’, Journal of the History of International Law 13 (2011) 285–306, at 287. In this article, the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci, who traveled to China in the late 16th century and became one of the first Western scholars who learned Chinese, is mistakenly referred to as “Mathew Ricci” (288). Its description of the tributary system as not based on the use of force unless in exceptional circumstances and a certain principle of non-intervention may be somewhat anachronistic, although it is described accurately as hierarchical and a form of cultural imperialism (293-294).

ultimately resorted to force and invasion to achieve this. In the process, China’s self-image clashed with the then-prevalent western conception of international law.¹²⁶ Episodes which are still generally considered traumatic in Chinese history were justified from the point of view of the western powers by ideologies deriving from international law. One crucial and oft-mentioned episode is the Macartney mission of 1793, in which China’s view of itself as the centre of the world clashed with the European conception of sovereign equality of states held by the British envoy Lord George Macartney, who famously refused to kowtow to the Emperor.¹²⁷ Macartney’s refusal has been taken to symbolise the clash between the Western system of sovereign equals and the hierarchical, Confucian Chinese system in which Western missions, such as the Dutch which preceded the English ones, were treated as tributary missions just like those of China’s neigbouring countries, even though this was more fiction than fact. To the Chinese, the kowtow was part of etiquette and symbolised respect and good faith to the emperor.¹²⁸

After the Opium War (1839-1842), China signed the Treaty of Nanjing (1842) with Great Britain, the first of a series of unequal treaties signed after military defeats following foreign encroachments into Chinese territory. In 1860, a joint Anglo-French military expedition to Beijing resulted in the burning of the Summer Palace, again followed by Chinese concessions laid down in a treaty.¹²⁹ These treaties were signed under coercion and provided for non-reciprocal privileges for Western powers in many areas, including a system of extraterritoriality, trade ports, lease of territories (such as Hong Kong and Macau), foreign customs commissioners, most-favoured nation treatment, navigation rights on coastal and inland waters, stationing of foreign troops, religious and educational

126 Some earlier encounters with the international legal system did take place in the seventeenth century, inter alia when the Dutch were trying to send envoys in comformity with the “law of all nations” and China signed the treaty of Nerchinsk with Russia, in 1689 in which the Chinese emperor conceded to not treat the Russians as tributaries. However, subsequently international law was no longer mentioned in official or unofficial sources until 1839. Wang Tieya, ‘International law in China’, supra note 115, 226-228.

127 The kowtow (Chinese: 叩头, kòutóu or 磕头 kētóu) is a series of prostrations which involves knocking the head on the floor or at least ensuring that it touches the ground; the term translates as “knock head”.

128 Teemu Ruskola, ‘Canton is not Boston: The Invention of American Imperial Sovereignty’, American Quarterly 57 (2005) 859-884, at 867-868; Yang, ‘Western International Law’, supra note 125, 295-296. See also Kim, China, the UN, supra note 124, 20; Jack Donnelly, Realism and International Relations (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2000) 140.

129 Kim, China, the UN, supra note 124, 30-31 and 37.

privileges. The unequal treaties broke the Confucian order.¹³⁰ Their three main features – extraterritoriality, foreign settlements and concessions – preserved the domestic sovereignty of the Chinese government, but provided for special privileges to western commercial and religious interests.¹³¹ The way in which they diminished the Chinese Empire’s sovereignty is also an illustration of the relativity of the concept, and has been described as an illustration “how law dynamically both constitutes and deconstitutes sovereigns at both national and international levels.”¹³²

The initial encounters of China with public international law must be seen as a clash between two systems, “between two diametrically opposed images of world order.”¹³³ The public international law as it first came to China was the European public international law.

It was thus seen by China’s rulers as a mechanism to justify foreign incursions and to impose unequal treaties, and only Western states apparently were considered ‘civilised’.

Following the Opium Wars, the Qing court did start to make use of it to defend itself against foreign invasions, but it would not be before the end of the Empire that Chinese authorities started to appeal regularly to international law to promote China’s interests.¹³⁴ The conservative Chinese elite had difficulty understanding and accepting ideas which were completely alien to the East Asian way of conducting foreign relations and even after accepting certain commitments, it would sometimes take a long time before China implemented or otherwise acted upon them.¹³⁵

International law was introduced to China by an American missionary, William Alexander Parsons Martin.¹³⁶ In 1864, he translated Henry Wheaton’s Elements of International Law¹³⁷ into Chinese, the first Chinese-language book on international law and the first formal

130 Yang Zewei, ‘Western International Law’, supra note 125, 298.

131 John King Fairbank, Trade and diplomacy on the China coast: the opening of treaty ports, 1842-1854 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964) 462.

132 Ruskola, ‘Canton is not Boston’, supra note 128, 861.

133 Kim, China, the UN, supra note 124, 37.

134 Ann Kent, Beyond Compliance: China, International Organizations, and Global Security (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2007), 34-35. See generally Brett Bowden, ‘The Colonial Origins of International Law.

European Expansion and the Classical Standard of Civilization’, Journal of the History of International Law 7 (2005) 1-23.

135 Jerome Alan Cohen and Hungdah Chiu, People’s China and International Law: A Documentary Study (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974) 6.

136 Known in Chinese as Ding Weiliang, 丁韙良.

137 Henry Wheaton, Elements of International Law: With a Sketch of the History of the Science (Philadelphia:

Carey, Lea and Blanchard, 1836)

and systematic introduction of international law in China. The title of the Chinese translation translates as “Public Law of All Nations”.¹³⁸ Martin hoped both that the heathen Chinese might accept Christ by learning about the legal principles of Christian civilisation, but also that it would enable the Chinese to cope with Western diplomats and traders who couched their demands in the language of international law, and recognise that the extent to which this law was applied to them varied from the treatment accorded to ‘civilised’

Christian states. This was exactly the reason why some Western diplomats in China opposed him.¹³⁹

Qing scholars recognised the significance of international law, but were divided on its potential benefits to China.¹⁴⁰ As the Qing government increased its use of international law in the late nineteenth century, the results varied. It became acutely aware of international law’s limits in the face of China’s lack of military, political and economic power. Even if it used international law, China did not try to change it or modify its rules.¹⁴¹ It cited international law in a number of cases, notably in its declaration of war during the Sino-Japanese War of 1894, which condemned Japan’s invasion of China for being in breach of treaties and international law.¹⁴² China also participated in the international legal order by joining the Universal Postal Union in 1897 and sending delegations to the Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907.¹⁴³ It joined the International Institute of Agriculture and became a party to various multilateral conventions in fields including the laws of war and peaceful settlement of disputes, as well as sending representatives to the Association for the Reform and Codification of the Law of Nations.¹⁴⁴

Contemporary observers were not blind to China’s diminished sovereignty. Explicit links have been drawn to China’s perceived inferiority at the civilisational level, or at least

138 Wangguo Gongfa (traditional:萬國公法; simplified: 万国公法). Eric Yong-Joong Lee, ‘Early Development of Modern International Law in East Asia – With Special Reference to China, Japan and Korea’, Journal of the History of International Law 4 (2002) 42-76, at 47.

139 Cohen and Chiu, People’s China, supra note 135, 7.

140 Yang, ‘Western International Law’, supra note 125, 299-300.

141 Cohen and Chiu, People’s China, supra note 135, 8-10. See also Chen, ‘The PRC and Public International Law’, supra note 115, 6-7.

142 Yang, ‘Western International Law’, supra note 125, 301.

143 Kent, Beyond Compliance, supra note 134, 34-35. China, Japan and Siam were the only East Asian nations represented. See Arthur Eyffinger, ‘Caught Between Tradition and Modernity: East Asia at The Hague Peace Conferences’, Journal of East Asia and International Law 1 (2008) 7- 46, at 9.

144 Cohen and Chiu, People’s China, supra note 135, 10.

its use as a rationale to justify China’s less than full international subjectivity by some Western scholars. Japan was also described as less civilised, but after the war of 1895 it was accepted as a full subject of international law, and even as a Great Power, as is illustrated by the 1905 edition of Oppenheim’s International Law.¹⁴⁵ Oppenheim divided states into five classes: (1) European states; (2) American states, Liberia, and Haiti; (3) Turkey; (4) Japan; (5) Persia, Siam, China, Korea, and Abyssinia. This fifth class was considered not to have reached a condition which enabled their governments and people to understand international law.¹⁴⁶ That states such as China, Persia, Siam and Korea, were only considered half-civilised or less was a predominant view, but not uncontested.¹⁴⁷

2.2.2 Republic of China, 1911-1949

The traditional Chinese world order collapsed fully with the Xinhai Revolution of 1911, after which China reconstituted itself as the Republic of China (ROC), officially established on 1 January 1912.¹⁴⁸ In his inaugural declaration, Sun Yat-sen, the founding father and first president of the ROC, expressed its goal “‘to obtain the rights of a civilized state’ and ‘to place China in a respectable place in international society.’”¹⁴⁹ The ROC inherited continued incursions on its sovereignty, and would fall victim to more foreign invasions with even more serious consequences. However, it also manifested itself on the international stage by participating in the Paris Peace Conference following World War I in 1919, helping to draft the Covenant of the League of Nations, and becoming a founding member of the International Labour Organisation.¹⁵⁰ However, within the League it had to suffer another

145 Suzanne Ogden, ‘The Approach of the Chinese Communists to the Study of International Law, State Sovereignty and the International System’, CQ 70 (1977) 315-337, at 316-317. See also Gerry Simpson, Great Powers and Outlaw States: Unequal sovereigns in the international legal order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) 56, 278-316 for discussion of the way in which unequal sovereigns have been legalised in international law; infra, section 4.4.3.

146 Chen, ‘The PRC and Public International Law’, supra note 115, 5.

147 Gao Feng, ‘China and the principle of sovereign equality in the 21st century’ in: Sienho Yee and Wang Tieya (eds.), International Law in the Post-Cold War World: Essays in memory of Li Haopei (London and New York: Routledge, 2001) 224-239, at 226.

148 Surrounding states still sent tribute missions even a few years before those events. The last tribute mission came from Nepal in 1908. Wang Tieya, ‘International Law in China’, supra note 115, 224-225.

149 Quoted in Cohen and Chiu, People’s China, supra note 135, 12. Sun Yat-sen is known under various names and titles, but the most commonly used one in the West is 孫 逸 仙, transcribed in Mandarin as Sun Yixian and Cantonese as Sun Yat-sen. The majority of Chinese references is to 孫中山 (Sun Zhongshan).

See also supra note 120.

150 ILO country profiles, <http://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=1000:11003:0::NO:::#C> [10.4.2013].

Kent, Beyond Compliance, supra note 134, 35.

humiliation in seeing the former German concessions transferred to Japan, an event which diminished the Nationalist government’s legitimacy and contributed to the May Fourth movement of 1919 which included the first propagation of Marxism and the foundation of the Communist Party of China (CCP). This did not prevent the ROC from participating actively in the League.¹⁵¹ It also appeared as a respondent before the Permanent Court of International Justice in a case brought against it by Belgium concerning Denunciation of the Treaty of 2 November 1865 between China and Belgium.¹⁵²

The ROC valued international law and used it with limited results, such as the gradual dismantling of the structure of extraterritorial rights, concessions and other privileges which had been accorded to foreign powers (of which the Denunciation case is an example). However, it also suffered disappointments.¹⁵³ The League of Nations failed to act when Japan invaded and occupied Manchuria in 1931 and proved unable to fulfil its purpose of maintaining peace and security.¹⁵⁴ At the same time, China was torn apart by civil war, which culminated in a conflict between the Nationalists of the KMT (Guomindang), led by Chiang Kai-shek¹⁵⁵, and the Communist Party of China (CCP) led by Mao Zedong.¹⁵⁶ In the face of Japanese invasion, the warring factions formed a United Front, which crucially sent a united delegation to the United Nations Conference in San Francisco in 1945. There is therefore a signature of a representative of the CCP on the final text of the United Nations Charter. Two years before, China had for the first time been accepted as an equal among the great powers or ‘Big Four’, in part because of its importance in the war against Japan. US President Franklin D. Roosevelt considered China crucial to the post-war collective security

151 Robert Heuser, ‘China and Developments in International Law: Wang Tieya as a contemporary’, Journal of the History of International Law 4 (2002) 142-158, at 146-147.

152 PCIJ, Denunciation of the Treaty of November 2nd, 1865, between China and Belgium, Series A Nos. 8, 14, 16 and 18. The case ended before a judgment was rendered after China and Belgium concluded a new treaty in 1926. See also Heuser, ‘China and Developments’ supra note 151, 145.

153 Cohen and Chiu, People’s China, supra note 135, 12-13. Chen Tiqiang downplays the extent to which international law mattered to the ROC. See Chen, ‘The PRC and Public International Law’, supra note 115, 8. However, most other accounts detail the ROC’s careful efforts to dismantle the unequal treaty system through international law.

154 Lee, ‘Early Development, supra note 138, 53-54. Kent, Beyond Compliance, supra note 134, 35.

155 Chinese: 蔣介石 . In Mandarin, Chiang is usually known as Jiang Jieshi. Since he is commonly known in the West under the Cantonese romanisation of his name and this was the transcription used in UN documents dealing with issues relating to the ROC and the PRC, this rendering is the one used here. See also supra note 120.

156 Chinese: 毛泽东.

system.¹⁵⁷

The struggle between the KMT and the CCP was almost resolved by the conquest of mainland China by the CCP in 1949 and the promulgation of the PRC. However, the Republic of China survived on Taiwan, leaving two competing governments in place which both claimed to be the sole legal representative of China, in the United Nations and beyond. It would take 22 years for the Chinese government which had effective control of almost all of China’s territory and ruled over a fifth to, at times, a quarter of the world’s population, to replace the Chinese government which only controlled the island of Taiwan and a few other small islands, and a population slightly larger than that of, say, the Netherlands. However, in 1949 and throughout the 1950s this outcome did not seem predetermined, and various episodes of armed conflict still followed.

While its domestic position came under increasing pressure, the Republic of China did participate actively in the United Nations from its foundation, including in the legal sphere, where the ROC actively contributed to the development of international law and participated in international organisations.¹⁵⁸ It submitted proposals to the San Francisco Conference to the effect that the UN Charter “should provide specifically that adjustment or settlement of international disputes should be achieved with due regard for principles of justice and international law.”¹⁵⁹ An ROC proposal requiring all states to accept compulsory jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) had been opposed by the USA and the USSR during the drafting of the Charter.¹⁶⁰ The ROC also contributed actively to the process of the establishment of the International Law Commission (ILC).¹⁶¹ At The Hague, the Chinese ambassador submitted – rather brief, but usually as one of the first states – written observations on behalf of his government in the advisory proceedings before the International Court of Justice concerning Conditions of Admission of a State to Membership in the

157 Ann Kent, China, the United Nations, and Human Rights (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press 1999), 40. The name of the official is Dong Biwu ( 董 必 武), who attended with his colleague Qiao Guanhua (乔冠华). See also Kent, Beyond Compliance, supra note 134, 36-37; Yearbook of the United Nations 1946-47, 44 (where Dong Biwu’s name is spelled in Wade-Giles transcription as Tung Pi-Wu). The signed version of the UN Charter is available at <http://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/CTC/uncharter.pdf>

[8.4.2013]

158 Cohen and Chiu, People’s China, supra note 135, 12-13.

158 Cohen and Chiu, People’s China, supra note 135, 12-13.