On 9 November 1926, Wellington Koo 顧維鈞 chaired a committee of lawyers and diplomats in Beijing to confront a problem that none of them could solve. Three days earlier, the Chinese government had unilaterally abrogated its 1865 treaty with BelgiumFootnote 1 —the first time an Asian government had denounced a treaty with a European power on the grounds that changed circumstances rendered it void. Brussels responded by filing suit at the Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ) in The Hague. Koo, the foreign minister and a Columbia-trained international lawyer who had long championed compulsory international jurisdiction, now found himself arguing that the Court should have no authority over the case. His vice-chair, Wang Chung-hui 王寵惠, was a deputy-judge of the very court whose competence they sought to deny. The committee’s dilemma was not a failure of strategy. It was a structural impossibility: the post-1919 international order simultaneously promised China sovereign equality and denied it the legal means to achieve it.
The predicament Koo and Wang faced was not an aberration. It was built into the architecture of the post-1919 international order—the League of Nations Covenant, the PCIJ’s Statute, the web of most-favoured-nation (MFN) clauses that bound China to arrangements it could not unilaterally escape. League membership affirmed China’s sovereign equality; the continued operation of unilateral treaty privileges denied it. The institutions that promised peaceful change—Article 19 of the Covenant, the PCIJ’s jurisdiction, the principle of rebus sic stantibus—could not deliver it without the consent of the powers whose privileges would be diminished. To name this contradiction, Chinese lawyer-diplomats forged the discourse of the ‘unequal treaties’—a term coined as a political category only in 1923, retroactively reaching back to the 1840s.Footnote 2
The anachronism was strategic: it used the normative standards of the post-1919 order to delegitimise the treaty structure that order simultaneously upheld. And it was structurally embedded, because the institutions Chinese actors invoked against the old treaties were the same institutions that enforced their continuation. Wherever the post-1919 architecture extended formal sovereign equality while withholding its substance—in the Ottoman successor states, in Latin America, in Siam, in Persia—actors trained in international law deployed analogous strategies, using the system’s own normative vocabulary to contest the terms of their inclusion. The predicament was not unique to China, but neither was the response uniform. Turkey escaped by military victory; Persia by a unilateral exit no court could reach; the Latin American states by turning the same Geneva institutions to their own advantage against a hegemon—the United States—that had stayed outside the League. China was caught by that machinery from within. The contrast localises the obstacle, which is not semi-peripheral weakness as such, but the specific institutional position each state occupied.Footnote 3
Why has this predicament remained difficult to see? Erez Manela’s influential account of the ‘Wilsonian moment’ captures the hope and disillusionment of 1918–19 but stops precisely where the story becomes most revealing—the decade of institutional-legal contestation that followed, when Chinese actors tested the system’s own mechanisms for peaceful change and found them blocked.Footnote 4 Arnulf Becker Lorca has shown how semi-peripheral jurists internalised and subverted European legal norms, but his emphasis on the eventual success of this strategy obscures cases—and China is the most consequential—where the post-1919 architecture imposed constraints that no creative appropriation could overcome.Footnote 5 Martti Koskenniemi’s theorisation of international law as oscillating between ‘apology’ (law reflecting power) and ‘utopia’ (law as objective normative order) describes precisely the bind Chinese lawyer-diplomats found themselves in. Yet he develops it exclusively through European legal consciousness, as if the oscillation’s most exposed subjects were incidental to its analysis.Footnote 6 The Sino-Belgian dispute sits in the gap these accounts leave open: a documented instance in which the institutions of the post-1919 order did not merely fail to deliver equality but foreclosed the legal route to it.
The renegotiation of the 1865 Sino-Belgian treaty is where those contradictions surface most clearly, not because the bilateral relationship was exceptional but because the dispute passed through the channels provided by the post-1919 order for peaceful change—the PCIJ, the League, bilateral denunciation—without remedy.Footnote 7 Read from the semi-periphery, the institutions that enlarged international society could also foreclose it. Formal equality produced substantive blockage.Footnote 8 At the doctrinal level, China invoked rebus sic stantibus while Belgium invoked pacta sunt servanda and referred the dispute to the PCIJ. At the institutional level, the Court’s jurisdiction could be turned against treaty denunciation, while Article 19’s unanimity requirement allowed treaty beneficiaries to block revision. At the biographical level, Chinese lawyer-diplomats found themselves in roles the system made incompatible: Koo championing and then resisting the Court’s authority; Wang Chung-hui judging and contesting the same legal order; Eugene Chen 陳友仁, born a British subject in colonial Trinidad and remade as a Chinese revolutionary.
What follows traces the contradiction from the institutional architecture of the post-Versailles order, through the careers of four lawyer-diplomats who navigated it—Koo, Wang Chung-hui, C.T. Wang, and Chen—and into the Sino-Belgian dispute, where the Investigative Committee’s deliberations laid bare every dimension of the impasse. The final section follows the displacement of legal contestation into mass politics and ‘revolutionary diplomacy’, a shift that was less a failure of nerve than the course left open once the legal channels had closed. Throughout, the biographical material is not illustration but evidence: the post-1919 order’s fault lines are recoverable only at the level of individuals forced to inhabit them.
Rejecting the Treaty, ejecting the world?
On 28 June 1919, when the peacemakers sat down to sign the Treaty of Versailles, all but two signatories were in attendance. Both empty seats belonged to Chinese representatives. China’s delegation had arrived in Paris expecting five seats at the top of the table as a major allied power.Footnote 9 It was instead assigned two on the corner. But the even more acute issue was the Shandong problem. Both the Beijing government and its rival, the Kuomintang (KMT) government in Guangzhou, opposed Article 156 of the Treaty, which transferred Germany’s control over parts of Shandong province to Japan. As a condition for entering the war, the Japanese empire had demanded the assumption of defeated powers’ territories together with Germany’s mining and railway rights across north-east China. Representing a new republic from a weak position, the Chinese delegation had to make a strong argument to maintain the country’s economic and political independence. The delegation compiled a dossier of proposals for the post-war settlement, including tariff autonomy and an end to extraterritoriality.Footnote 10
The issues of tariff autonomy and extraterritoriality were even more intractable than the Shandong problem and reached back to treaties signed in the mid-nineteenth century. Beginning with the Treaty of Nanking (1842), a series of agreements established a treaty port system with foreign concessions and consular jurisdiction that fundamentally transformed the commercial system. The treaties limited customs duties to 5 per cent ad valorem and abolished the management of foreign trade by government-appointed Chinese merchants.Footnote 11 The treaty port system formalised the trade principles of most-favoured-nation (MFN) and national treatment.Footnote 12 But it did so unilaterally, leaving the Qing government no legal right to renegotiate bilateral agreements. In the foreign-governed concessions, especially multijurisdictional Shanghai, an extremely complex legal system created conditions of persistent inter-ethnic strife—between Chinese and foreign subjects as well as between foreigners of different extraterritorial jurisdictions.Footnote 13 Foreigners commanded key roles in national institutions—Europeans largely managed the Maritime Customs Service and the Salt Tax Service—heightening the political stakes for control over government revenue.Footnote 14 As the Peace Conference proceeded, Chinese officials were aware that they represented one of the last countries to resist formal colonisation, but also one of the last non-colonies to recover jurisdictional rights.Footnote 15
Chinese representatives saw an opening in the Conference’s multilateral composition. Paris signalled a ‘unique opportunity’, the delegation publicly hoped, ‘because the revision requires the consent of all the treaty Powers which is practically impossible to obtain under ordinary conditions’. Without negotiating tariff autonomy, Chinese commercial policy was a moot point. The treaties precluded differentiating commodities, such as luxury goods, in tariff schedules.Footnote 16 The treaty port system impacted Chinese society well beyond commercial interests. It shaped taxation, policing, the rights of missionaries, the treatment of workers, and transportation between different parts of the country. But French prime minister Georges Clemenceau, president of the Conference, responded bluntly to Chinese delegates: there was no time for their proposals in Paris.Footnote 17 The major powers had greater strategic need of Japan as an ally, and were in no position to morally condemn Japanese expansionism in Asia, which Tokyo’s representatives defended as their version of a Monroe doctrine.Footnote 18 Still, on 7 May 1919, even after the first protests of the May Fourth movement to oppose the Treaty of Versailles’ treatment of Chinese claims, delegates expressed the belief that the League’s inauguration would provide opportunities to broach these issues.Footnote 19
As a result of its treaty relations, China entered the 1920s occupying a peculiar position within the international system of law and trade. The League coordinated international economic law on the basis of commercial equality, which Article 23(e) of its Covenant codified.Footnote 20 Its work on reducing trade discrimination centred on moving past bilateral trade treaties towards a maximally universal and unconditional interpretation of the MFN clause.Footnote 21 But China was bound precisely by a series of bilateral treaties that it could not change. It belonged to a group of nominally independent countries—Siam, Egypt, Mexico, Persia—that experienced significant constraints on economic sovereignty as the result of varying historical trajectories.Footnote 22
China’s path—legal-institutional contestation from within—was the most thoroughly legalistic and, because it alone was caught by the multilateral machinery the order provided, the most thoroughly blocked. That is what makes its failure diagnostic rather than merely unfortunate: not Chinese weakness but the institutional position it had accepted. The Beijing government, which was more successful in the early 1920s than the KMT in its claim to represent China abroad, was in no position to engage with the League’s work on ‘the equitable treatment of commerce’.Footnote 23
Disappointment at the Peace Conference was a founding moment of modern Chinese nationalism. Rapidly expanding print media connected diplomacy at Versailles with popular culture in China, especially among the small but growing literate population in cities. The students that gathered to protest on Tiananmen Square often received news of the negotiations on the same day.Footnote 24 Invoking public opinion, municipal and provincial officials petitioned their national counterparts to reject the Treaty.Footnote 25 Although oceans away, the delegates in Paris could not easily evade public sentiment.Footnote 26 For Chinese nationalists, the Conference signified that China was not fully independent and that it was marked as unequal unless proven otherwise.Footnote 27 As a later League report put it, the ‘international’ had a ‘sinister meaning’ in China and referred primarily to the interests of treaty powers.Footnote 28 The coming and going of the ‘Wilsonian moment’ suggested that the new norms of international relations favoured China and other weak nations no more than those they replaced.Footnote 29 China’s inclusion carried the implication that international inequality was not confined to nations under direct colonial rule.
The apparent consensus on the need to remove foreign control masked competing motivations. Many advocates wanted China to take a greater, not lesser, part in international affairs. Even the most vociferous proponents of evicting the 列強 (lieqiang, ‘powers’) found themselves drawn into the world to make a legal case for Chinese claims.Footnote 30 Calls to expel elements of the foreign presence and to gain recognition as an equal member of international society often appeared together. One article in a new flagship magazine of the May Fourth movement, for example, argued for the immediate assertion of sovereignty but justified peremptory action by the consensus on the equality of nations among 現代文明國家 (xiandai wenming guojia, ‘modern civilised countries’).Footnote 31 Vehement rejection of the Conference’s treatment of the Shandong question did not stop Chinese representatives from pursuing national objectives through international institutions. China joined the League as a signatory to the Treaty of Saint-Germain and became more intertwined in international legal norms.
These contradictions were not experienced in the abstract. They were inhabited by specific individuals whose professional lives required them to navigate—and sometimes deepen—the fault lines of a globally integrated legal order.
New generation, new arguments for equality
Across the semi-colonial world in the early twentieth century, a generation of Western-trained legal professionals became the primary agents of their countries’ engagement with international institutions. The Chinese cohort was distinctive not in its existence but in the specific contradictions it was forced to navigate.
Wellington Koo, born in 1888 in Shanghai’s International Settlement, grew up at the intersection of the worlds the unequal treaties had created. His father held a senior position in the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company, a Qing-era enterprise created to challenge the European and American monopoly of riverine transport.Footnote 32 The young Koo’s proximity to this venture exposed him to the ‘paradox’ whereby free trade often arrived through state-sponsored coercion.Footnote 33
After studies at the missionary-founded St John’s University, Koo sailed in 1904 for Columbia University in New York, where he found a mentor in John Bassett Moore, an international lawyer and later a PCIJ judge.Footnote 34 His doctoral dissertation, The Status of Aliens in China, reassessed the treaties that had expanded extraterritorial jurisdiction from the Ottoman empire to China and other countries falling outside the ‘nations of Christendom’.Footnote 35 The term ‘unequal treaties’ does not appear in the text; the anachronistic concept did not yet have wider usage. As Moore put it in relation to the end of extraterritoriality in Japan in 1899, the expansion in the ‘concert of nations’ reaffirmed rather than challenged ‘the test of the advancement in law, in morals, and in civilisation’.Footnote 36
Koo was not an isolated figure. He belonged to an expanding cohort of young Chinese people who received higher education abroad and joined the rapidly growing legal profession.Footnote 37 By internalising the standard of civilisation embedded in international legal argument, semi-peripheral elites—in Turkey, China, and Latin America—secured their own acceptance into respectable circles and their country’s membership among ‘civilised’ nations.Footnote 38 At the same time, Koo’s pursuit of the law was not exclusively concerned with foreign relations. As he put it, his generation’s purpose was to ensure that China could secure ‘that form of constitutional government which will work for the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people’.Footnote 39
When the Qing dynasty collapsed in 1911, the twenty-three-year-old Koo left New York, joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA) as secretary to President Yuan Shikai, and rose quickly through the ranks to become ambassador to the United States.Footnote 40 He had advocated for an international institution adequate to the ‘so-called society of nations’, including an international court with compulsory jurisdiction.Footnote 41 Wilson’s Fourteen Points offered what Koo called ‘a ray of hope for the oppressed nations’ of Asia and Africa, including China.Footnote 42 For the first time, the Chinese delegation to an international conference consisted largely of lawyers. Koo and his fellow delegates believed international law could secure China’s entry as an equal into the international order,Footnote 43 and deployed an ‘assertive legalism’ to counter Japanese claims in Shandong and Manchuria.Footnote 44
There was no single way in which Chinese representatives engaged with the law. The barrister and judge Wang Chung-hui was another member of the delegation. Born in Hong Kong under British colonial rule and educated across five countries—China, Japan, the United States, Britain, and Germany—Wang was internationally recognised for his 1907 English translation of the German civil code before he became the first foreign minister under Sun Yat-sen in 1912. His cosmopolitan legal formation gave him an unusually deep understanding of the international system’s internal logic; it also meant that, when he became a deputy-judge at the PCIJ, his entanglement in that system was more thorough than any of his colleagues’.Footnote 45 An ardent republican, he believed in the inseparability of domestic reform and international sovereignty: laying the basis for constitutional government, actualising the republican constitution, and abolishing extraterritoriality, to be rid of ‘what is in effect an imperium in imperio’.Footnote 46 More so than Koo, he remained closer to legal thinking and practice even as he moved into politics.Footnote 47 In the 1920s, he became a deputy-judge, then a judge, of the PCIJ.
Sobered by the treatment of Chinese claims in Paris, Wang represented China with a more guarded approach at the Washington Conference in 1922. By this point, Koo’s public speeches about Chinese sovereignty acquired a more pointed anti-imperialist tone.Footnote 48 Three years of intense diplomatic activity had provided a resolution to the Shandong problem and brought the United States back into multilateral discussions. The Washington Conference also provided an opportunity for other questions to be broached. Foremost for the Chinese delegation was the future of extraterritoriality, tariff autonomy, and other treaty terms from the mid-nineteenth century.Footnote 49 The delegates attached significance both to renegotiating each treaty term for specific reasons and to meeting their overarching goal of securing China’s equal status.Footnote 50
The powers conceded the principle of tariff autonomy and agreed to reconvene in a Special Tariff Conference to be held in China, but did not agree on a specific timetable for treaty revision. China’s demands were less opportune than those of a state like Turkey, which came into existence after the League’s inauguration and directly benefited from attempts to construct new forms of international legal authority.Footnote 51 Turkey had achieved at Lausanne in 1923 what China spent the entire decade pursuing: complete abolition of capitulations, recognised sovereignty, and no reparations—enabled by military victory rather than legal-institutional contestation.Footnote 52
Sun Yat-sen began to speak publicly and regularly of the ‘unequal treaties’ in 1924.Footnote 53 The phrase—coined as a political category only in a 1923 KMT declaration, as Dong Wang has shown—had been used sporadically in the 1910s, including in Chinese discussions on the Peace Conference, but it had not been a focal point of discourse.Footnote 54 After the First World War, China negotiated treaties without unilateral clauses, such as those with the new governments of Austria, Germany, and the Soviet Union. The USSR had been in a shifting alliance with the KMT since 1918—three years prior to the founding of the Chinese Communist Party—and encouraged a more active approach to renegotiating the nineteenth-century treaties, given the disappointing results of ‘diplomacy by conference’.Footnote 55 Chinese commentators explicitly drew on Russian and Turkish successes for ‘Young China’ to escape ‘similar shackles’.Footnote 56
‘Unequal treaties’ was a politically effective concept precisely because it was imprecise. It conflated concepts of inequality from different eras, and fused the Treaty of Nanking (1842) and the Twenty-One Demands (1915) into a single narrative of humiliation.Footnote 57 It created a periodisation that implied a new set of relations between China and the world after 1919, in which the country could move freely and equally. The ‘Wilsonian moment’ did not die in China. Instead, nationalists deployed a strategic anachronism—retroactively applying post-1919 standards of sovereign equality to delegitimise pre-1919 treaty arrangements—to transform international rhetoric into a longer-term agenda to abolish legal inequalities.Footnote 58
The Beijing government initially branded Sun’s phrase 過激 (guoji, ‘overzealous’).Footnote 59 But the term proliferated across sectors of Chinese society—in schools, newspapers, Christian communities, local government petitions, and universities, eight of which declared their aim to abolish the unequal treaties.Footnote 60 When workers took up the phrase during the anti-imperialist movements of 1924–25, the KMT further cemented its leadership over the cause and over the mass mobilisations.Footnote 61 By the time Sun died in March 1925, the agenda had reached the top of the KMT’s priorities for the ‘national revolution’.Footnote 62
Popular discourse on the unequal treaties began to shape Chinese rhetoric in Geneva. At the League’s Sixth Assembly in September 1925, Beijing’s representative, Chao-hsin Chu, protested against the ‘indefinite continuance of extraordinary political and economic privileges and immunities conferred by those treaties upon foreigners’. He appealed to Article 19 of the League Covenant, which provided for treaty revision under changing international conditions. He also appealed to the League’s function as an impartial arbiter independent of the interests of national governments.Footnote 63 One month later at the Special Tariff Conference in Beijing, Chinese delegates argued for tariff autonomy again on the basis of Article 19.Footnote 64 Treaty powers conceded China’s right to tariff autonomy and agreed on a provisional timeline for a new tariff schedule by 1 January 1929. The Chinese government agreed, in return, to abolish several archaic taxes.Footnote 65
But Beijing struggled with mounting and conflicting pressures: domestically, to immediately abolish the ‘unequal treaties’, and internationally, to comply with its existing legal obligations. Renewal dates of the treaties were especially sensitive moments. The formation of internationalised legal elites was a global phenomenon in the early twentieth century—visible in the Young Turk jurists, the Calvo and Drago generation in Latin America, and Prince Devawongse’s diplomats in Siam—but the Chinese cohort faced a specific institutional predicament. The case of China was diagnostic of the system’s limits beyond the bilateral frame.
‘Beyond conventional diplomacy’: revising the Sino-Belgian treaty
In April 1926, Beijing’s foreign minister, C.T. Wang 王正廷, convened a Diplomatic Commission with the mandate of revising all ‘unequal treaties’ and notifying the relevant nations that treaty terms would no longer apply on the grounds of rebus sic stantibus. In other words, the government deemed that the circumstances under which the treaties had been established no longer obtained and that it could renegotiate new terms on an ‘equal’ basis at each renewal date.Footnote 66 Starting with the Sino-Belgian treaty of 1865 had strategic benefits: its renewal date of October 1926 was convenient and Belgium was a smaller European power. On 16 April, the Chinese government informed Brussels that the treaty would not be renewed after October. In response, the Belgian government reiterated its unilateral right of modifying Chinese tariffs under Article 46 of the treaty. Brussels expressed openness to treaty revision. But it rejected the provisional arrangement proposed by the Chinese government, and in August 1926, communicated its intention to involve the PCIJ.Footnote 67 While Belgium and China were relatively minor in each other’s foreign relations, the dispute became a test case for the post-1919 order’s capacity for peaceful change.
Ritualised displays of nationalist sentiment brought the politics of treaty revision beyond formal diplomacy. In late October 1926, the League Secretariat was notified of alleged police brutality in Brussels towards ‘peaceful protestors’. Members of the Chinese diaspora, according to a letter signed by ‘la colonie chinoise de Lyon’ (‘the Chinese community of Lyon’), gathered to oppose the Sino-Belgian treaty. For months, Chinese students in Belgium had been agitating for the non-renewal of the 1865 treaty as a first step towards abolishing the unequal treaties.Footnote 68 Other diasporic associations, including European branches of the KMT, soon joined the demonstrations.Footnote 69 The protestors especially denounced the unilateral clause in Article 46. They denounced the treaty as ‘lettres mortes’ (‘dead letters’) and a contradiction to Article 19 of the League Covenant. The protest ended with the Chinese flag confiscated, thirty people injured, and seventeen arrested.Footnote 70
That same week, aware that the Beijing government was likely to denounce the treaty, Belgian officials prepared their submission to the PCIJ.Footnote 71 Both countries were signatories to the Court’s Statute, a treaty concluded in December 1920 that conformed with Article 14 of the League Covenant. Åke Hammarskjöld, the Court’s Registrar during these proceedings, recounted that one of the PCIJ’s core issues was the clause of rebus sic stantibus: ‘the effect of an essential change in circumstances’ for the continued validity of treaties.Footnote 72 But the PCIJ focused on cases individually and never gave a general opinion on what ‘essential change’ justified the termination of treaties. In fact, there was no criterion in international law to indicate specific conditions under which treaties should be revised and made ‘equal’. The Court both acknowledged the coherence of an anachronistic concept like the ‘unequal treaties’ and lacked recourse to mechanisms for adjudication—a structural gap, not an accidental oversight.Footnote 73 Meanwhile, the Beijing government further distanced itself from the actions of Qing officials almost a century ago. It wanted to participate in the international order that orbited the League, but its actions revealed a willingness to do so selectively if evasive action proved beneficial.
Despite internal disagreement, Beijing took the crucial step on 6 November and abrogated the Sino-Belgian treaty. The foreign ministry sent a statement to Brussels and to the League Secretariat, claiming that the treaty had been imposed against China’s ‘free will’ and had no place given the republic’s ‘unswerving desire to place China in the family of nations on a footing of equality with the other states’. As positive counter-examples, the statement cited the new ‘equal’ treaties drawn up with countries such as Austria, Germany, Bolivia, and the USSR. These treaties, signed with other ‘outsiders’ to the post-1919 system of trade treaties, did not restrict China’s right to renegotiation or its tariff autonomy.Footnote 74 The statement further appealed to Article 19 of the League Covenant to justify the ‘general right of revision’ against Belgium’s claim to its exclusive right.Footnote 75 Aware that it had embarked on an extraordinary course of action, the Beijing government immediately established an Investigative Committee on Treaties, 條約研究會 (tiaoyue yanjiuhui). The chair was Wellington Koo, who was now foreign minister.Footnote 76
In the committee’s opening session on 9 November, Koo opened by defining the task. He acknowledged that the Chinese government’s approach went ‘beyond conventional diplomacy’. While positing China’s new bilateral treaties with Germany and Austria as models for the future, the committee was aware that the same approach would be impossible with Belgium. The two countries had lost the Great War. Even though Koo had advocated for an international court with mandatory jurisdiction, he now argued that the dispute should be submitted to the League Assembly instead of the PCIJ because the case was political rather than legal.Footnote 77
The Investigative Committee’s discussion was inconclusive, but its members were collectively averse to the PCIJ, especially since most of the court’s judges were nationals of countries with interests similar to those of Belgium in China. Like Koo, most committee members preferred the Assembly: one member cited its susceptibility to publicity and its ‘room for flexibility’.Footnote 78 The committee considered its options given Brussels’ strong reaction. It had to maintain international sympathy to negotiate new treaties.Footnote 79 (The surviving minutes are detailed on legal reasoning but largely silent on informal negotiations—a limitation that makes it difficult to distinguish strategic positioning from genuine disagreement.)
Brussels’ formal submission to the PCIJ further narrowed the committee’s options.Footnote 80 Apart from Koo, the committee was led by Wang Chung-hui, its vice-chair and primary legal expert. During the next two sessions, the chair and vice-chair disagreed on the best course of action. Koo argued against flouting the jurisdiction of the PCIJ. Attendance came with risks, but also the opportunity to demonstrate China’s fulfilment of its ‘international obligations’ and to gain international sympathy, as the delegation to Paris had done on the issue of Shandong. Wang argued against presenting China’s case at the PCIJ, which was unlikely to endorse the abrogation and would bind the government to a judgment. If China did not represent itself at The Hague, it could at least argue against the Court’s competence over the case. In contrast, just six months earlier, Wang had publicly and enthusiastically argued for the international court’s centrality for the League’s mission to settle disputes and banish war.Footnote 81 This tension in Wang’s attitude reflected his dual position as an international judge and a national lawyer—and sometimes, a national politician. Another committee member went so far as to argue that the government need not refer to international law at all, since political ends should be achieved by political means alone.Footnote 82
By the committee’s next session on 9 December, Wang had altered his position.Footnote 83 The implications for the ‘fundamental issue of the League of Nations’ were ‘too grave’. The legitimacy of the court, whose jurisdiction was contested, depended on League member states’ compliance. He argued for the necessity of appearing at the PCIJ, even if the Chinese government’s case was unlikely to succeed given the imprecise criterion of ‘essential change in circumstances’. As a deputy-judge at the PCIJ, Wang was familiar with his fellow judges’ attitudes towards treaty revision. His association with The Hague, however, also alerted him to the consequences of shirking China’s responsibilities as a signatory to the PCIJ’s Statute. Koo agreed, maintaining his case for the government’s need to present its case at the Court. The discussion was inconclusive on details, but the committee resolved to consult external experts in international law.Footnote 84
The committee’s trajectory over these weeks reveals the institutional trap in its starkest form. Every path the members considered led back to the same impasse. The PCIJ would likely rule against China, legitimating the treaty system through a binding judgment. The League Assembly required unanimity, which treaty beneficiaries could block. Bilateral denunciation had provoked a legal counterattack. And rebus sic stantibus, while doctrinally coherent, had no institutional mechanism for adjudication—the post-1919 architecture acknowledged the principle of changed circumstances but provided no procedure for determining when the threshold had been met. The committee was not failing to find the right strategy. It was discovering that the system’s mechanisms for peaceful change were designed in ways that foreclosed the outcome they were meant to enable.
The contrast with Persia shows that the trap was institutional, not a matter of Chinese weakness. In these same years Reza Shah’s government abrogated its capitulations unilaterally—the very move China had just made against Belgium—yet no power could drag Persia to The Hague. Persia had accepted no compulsory jurisdiction, its old treaties contained no inter-state arbitration clause, and the chief beneficiary of the old order, Russia, had renounced its privileges in 1921. China was caught where Persia walked free.Footnote 85
The committee solicited opinions from at least four leading experts and practitioners: the German judge Walter Schücking, the Greek scholar-diplomat Nicolas Politis, the Swiss politician Giuseppe Motta, and the American former secretary of state Robert Lansing. They disagreed on strategy—but agreed that China had to acknowledge the PCIJ’s obligatory jurisdiction under Article 36 of its Statute. The legal aspect of the case could not be disregarded. But they also agreed that it was possible to argue for China’s case under the rebus sic stantibus clause. Politis suggested that the case for China’s unilateral abrogation was weak. The government should instead request the PCIJ to declare the 1865 treaty abrogated, on the basis of changing international conditions and Belgium’s unwillingness to devise a new treaty.Footnote 86 Discussion of the case quickly moved beyond closed committees in Beijing, Brussels and The Hague.Footnote 87
In January 1927, the PCIJ ordered a set of temporary measures to protect the rights of Belgian nationals in China.Footnote 88 The Belgian government, having unsuccessfully appealed to other treaty powers to act in unison against Beijing’s actions, re-engaged with bilateral negotiations for a new treaty. On 18 January 1927, Brussels applied to the Court for prorogation of the relevant deadlines.Footnote 89 The two governments agreed on the terms of a provisional arrangement, which maintained due protection of Belgian subjects ‘in accordance with the rules of international law’ as well as bilateral MFN status.Footnote 90 Brussels repeatedly rejected measures for the protection of its nationals that it deemed inadequate. Since the KMT’s Northern Expedition was now well underway, it was intent on prolonging negotiations, hoping that a general agreement might emerge from multilateral discussions.Footnote 91
The advance of KMT troops into Beijing-controlled territory brought already protracted negotiations to a standstill and left a number of legal and political questions unresolved. Among the most intractable and vexing was how each government defined an ‘equal treaty’. The Chinese government sought to abolish the wide range of privileges enjoyed by foreigners under the ‘unequal treaties’. The Belgian government, meanwhile, criticised the proposals to restrict foreigners’ rights to reside and to hold property in China. According to a consensus among treaty powers, whose position was articulated through the Belgian government, it was the Chinese government’s responsibility to maintain stable internal conditions before seeking treaty renegotiation. Beijing’s proposals were ‘a consecration of inequality’, since they flouted the judicial equality of the two states before the PCIJ. Why should Belgians not receive full national treatment in China, when Belgium was ‘entirely open to Chinese commerce and industry’?Footnote 92 But on the other side, Chinese representatives asked: why should the European way of life and of commerce expand into China without consent of its government or its people?
Such different notions of equality, in a period when no solution had been found in economic law to balance commercial equality with differential treatment to address uneven development, would continue to inform negotiations of the ‘unequal treaties’. The two governments were operating with incompatible conceptions of equality that no existing framework could adjudicate. What the Investigative Committee had encountered as a procedural impasse now surfaced as a substantive one. International legal argument shaped wider debate about the implications of cultural and economic hegemony for the meaning of sovereignty.Footnote 93
Gunshot in Wuhan: ‘Revolutionary diplomacy’ and the standard of civilisation
The displacement from legal-institutional contestation to revolutionary diplomacy was not unique to China—similar trajectories were visible across the semi-colonial world when legal channels proved inadequate. But the Chinese case, documented in the Investigative Committee minutes and embodied in specific individuals whose careers traced the transition, reveals the mechanism with unusual clarity.
In his final will, published after his death in 1925, Sun Yat-sen emphasised the damage caused by the unequal treaties. This act posthumously legitimised the KMT’s cause for wholesale abolition of the treaties. As the likelihood of its military success grew, the KMT leadership was consistently pressured by party branches to make good on the promises of its anti-imperialist ‘national revolution’.Footnote 94 At the same time, despite its disavowal of Beijing’s rule, the KMT faced similar sources of pressure from foreign governments.Footnote 95 C.T. Wang’s comment that the two governments converged in foreign policy referred not only to conceptual affinities but also to personnel continuity in the diplomatic corps.Footnote 96 After stepping down as Beijing’s foreign minister and two years away from government, he took up the same post in Nanjing in June 1928. Wang Chung-hui had left Beijing for Nanjing in 1927, serving first as Minister of Justice and then president of the Executive Yuan. (As a deputy-judge at the PCIJ, he also sat on the bench once during the Sino-Belgian proceedings.Footnote 97 ) For a time after the end of Beijing’s rule, Wellington Koo was wanted for arrest.Footnote 98 But he too eventually returned to the diplomatic service.
By the end of 1928, the KMT had concluded twelve new trade tariff treaties, including one with Belgium.Footnote 99 But the apparent speed of these negotiations belied the uncompromising antagonism that had characterised the KMT’s diplomacy. While the Belgian government only began official negotiations with Nanjing in the summer of 1928, it had covertly initiated contact with the KMT in December 1926. The Nationalist foreign minister was another lawyer, Eugene Chen, born to immigrant Chinese parents in San Fernando, Trinidad.Footnote 100 Until the revolution of 1911, he had embarked on the respectable career of a barrister and shown no interest in his parents’ country of birth.Footnote 101 On an annual trip to London that year, a conversation with Sun Yat-sen convinced him of a future in that distant land—he spoke not a word of Chinese then, and would always require an interpreter to work in China. (The principal English-language sources for Chen’s early formation—his daughter’s memoir and Percy Chen’s autobiography—require careful handling.) Chen repeated his parents’ journey in reverse, moving from the ‘morocco-bound volumes of Dickens, Shakespeare, Scott, and legal books’ of Trinidad’s literary salons to Beijing, where he supported Sun’s republican revolution and launched a second career running English-language newspapers.Footnote 102
Chen’s colonial intellectual upbringing in the Caribbean gave him a different relationship to the post-1919 order than the one Koo and Wang Chung-hui inhabited.Footnote 103 They had been trained inside the institutions they were contesting—Columbia, the PCIJ, MoFA—and their engagement with the system was shaped by professional obligations that were simultaneously tools and constraints. Chen came to Chinese nationalism from outside, through colonial experience and English common law, without the institutional stakes that made Koo agonise over the PCIJ’s jurisdiction and Wang oscillate between his roles as judge and advocate. His background in the law returned to the fore when he travelled to the Paris Peace Conference as a legal advisor to the Chinese delegation. He attended the League’s opening ceremony, but according to his daughter’s recollection, he remained sceptical about any substantial change until ‘China was strong enough to demand fair treatment and treaties that were at least equally beneficial’.Footnote 104
When Chen became foreign minister in the mid-1920s, he favoured a militant approach to the transformation of international relations. He called openly for measures beyond ‘gradual reform’ and refused to recognise any agreement signed by the Beijing government.Footnote 105 He opposed the procedures and outcomes of the 1926 Special Tariff Conference, accusing the Beijing government of adhering to the ‘ineffective resolutions’ of the Washington Conference. His public speeches also defended the anti-British boycotts in the summer of 1926 for making China an ‘independent nation’ rather than an ‘international mandate’, a reference to the persistence of imperial governance through the League’s mandate system.Footnote 106 Chen’s position reflected the KMT’s strategy in an age of mass movements: the party wielded the boycott as an economic weapon not only to disrupt trade in the short term but also to produce a consumer nationalist consciousness. Since China was not a major exporter, while Britain and Japan’s export-oriented economies relied on access to the Chinese market, the boycott was also one of the few tools available to Chinese economic diplomacy.Footnote 107
In January 1927, a few weeks after the KMT’s first secret contact with Belgian representatives, its troops occupied the British concession in Wuhan. The soldiers were notionally responding to a clash between a group of organised workers and Royal Marines. Regaining sovereignty over foreign concessions was a priority for the KMT, and Wuhan was ripe for the taking.Footnote 108 Chen stymied the British government by refusing to compromise on anything short of ‘complete freedom’. He attacked pre-revolutionary nationalism, which provided only ‘superficial and ephemeral peace’, and threatened to suffocate all economic opportunities for foreigners.Footnote 109 The tone of militant anti-imperialism emphasised equality on the KMT’s terms, rather than the terms of the treaty powers. Within KMT-controlled areas, Chen did not oppose expropriation and restrictions on foreigners’ property rights in China. More broadly, he favoured differential treatment over commercial equality in international trade to rectify inequalities in economic development. Chen’s confrontational approach pressured the British to return ceded territory to Chinese administration for the first time since the mid-nineteenth century.
British diplomats were initially perplexed by this long-distance nationalist, born and raised a British subject, at the helm of Chinese foreign policy. John Brenan, the British consul general in Guangzhou, reported that he enjoyed a private dinner with Chen, ‘a pleasant host’, over ‘music by Chaliapine and Kreisler on an elaborate gramophone’.Footnote 110 But there could be little common ground over the ‘inflammable material’ of Chen’s suggestion that ‘we should cancel the existing treaties and treat China exactly as we do France or America. This of course is not practical politics, nor is it likely to be for a long time to come.’ Brenan argued that ‘I feel convinced that we shall get no solution of the boycott without the application of force.’Footnote 111 But with each day came mounting threats of physical violence from Chinese sources and mounting difficulties of justifying the treaty port system on the international stage. After the KMT’s occupation of Wuhan, the Foreign Office in London hastened to secure a ‘face-saving’ concession.Footnote 112
Amid these heightened tensions in Wuhan, Chen received Albert Sergysels, attaché to the Belgian Legation in Beijing. The foreign minister made clear that the Belgian policy stood in opposition to the ‘national movement’, even though the KMT did not consider Belgium a major imperialist power in China. As a result, the KMT was prepared to take discriminatory action against Belgian nationals.Footnote 113 (The escalating international conflict also spilled onto the streets. A few days later, the Belgian consul general in Wuhan was attacked by a crowd and recalled to Brussels.) Although some observers saw China’s tensions with treaty powers as bilateral issues,Footnote 114 the KMT delegation in Europe used alternative channels to influence international public opinion. A letter on treaty revision to Eric Drummond, the League’s secretary-general, espoused total abolition of the ‘unequal treaties’ and considered the actions of the Beijing government to be void.Footnote 115 As Sino-British relations deteriorated in early 1927, both proponents and opponents of Britain’s use of force in China wrote to Drummond in defence of their case.Footnote 116 Members of the Secretariat responsible for press relations noted particular ‘embarrassment’ over developments in China. Chinese officials did not always notify colleagues in Geneva before disclosing sensitive information, and one international civil servant noted the difficulty of handling ‘information from a disaffected source which is sure to seek its own publicity channels’.Footnote 117
The Secretariat’s ‘embarrassment’ reflected not only the intricacies of public relations but also deeper uncertainties about the uses of international law. While the League had no specific role in the concessions, Chinese demands for treaty revision threatened to push the League between China and the consular powers who were all sovereign members of the organisation. The former was unilaterally subverting the status quo, and the latter were prepared to defend it with force if necessary. Recourse to legal norms did not always yield greater certainty. International law could serve as the handmaiden to empires, but to do so it had to work through legal principles and third-party institutions.Footnote 118 The League, Drummond noted, required the approval and cooperation of imperialist interests.Footnote 119 It compartmentalised putative differences between peoples in specific organs such as the mandates system and minority protection. Otherwise, at least in theory, it consisted of equal and sovereign members. This was the basis of ongoing multilateral negotiations, including those on commercial equality.
China’s inability to participate fully in these negotiations strengthened the argument that problems surrounding sovereignty were not limited to formal colonies and reinforced the image that member states were organised in a tiered system.Footnote 120 As international relations scholar Quincy Wright put it, ‘the independent States of the Orient are now legally equal to those of the Occident’—except for China, which contradicted the wider process by which ‘the orbit of general international law has become worldwide’.Footnote 121 By 1927, both Chinese governments’ peremptory calls pushed the ‘unequal treaties’ into a wider framework for international discussions of China’s past and future.Footnote 122 At the annual meeting of the American Society of International Law that year, for example, political scientist Raymond Buell expanded from the Chinese experience to a broader critique of international legal inequality, moving through cases such as Turkey’s status, the United States’ treaties with Panama and Cuba, and even the limits on tariff autonomy in the Treaty of Versailles.Footnote 123
For decades, hierarchies in international relations were premised on a European ‘standard of civilisation’. This was justified in part by a notion of progressive modernity—what Ntina Tzouvala has analysed as an oscillation between a ‘logic of improvement’ (equality is achievable through reform) and a ‘logic of immutability’ (certain communities are structurally excluded).Footnote 124 China’s predicament in the 1920s exposed the limit of the former: Chinese governments had undertaken legal reform, yet the treaty powers insisted that further reform was required before treaty revision could proceed. The standard demanded change as the price of equality, then moved the goalposts when change occurred.Footnote 125
The League’s authority as a global organisation required plausible openings to change the international order from the inside.Footnote 126 The same machinery could cut the other way. In these very years the Latin American states used Geneva to roll back US tutelage—reinterpreting the Covenant’s Monroe Doctrine clause and pressing the non-intervention principle—precisely because the power they were resisting sat outside the League. Where the beneficiary was inside the institution, as Belgium and the treaty powers were for China, the same consent rules locked the door.Footnote 127
In time, how the League acknowledged and addressed such contestations became a significant reputational concern. One member of the Economic and Financial Section, Arthur Felkin, wrote internal reports in 1926 and 1927 to warn against attempts to revive the idea of a European ‘regional League’. To prevent war, the League needed to develop its capacity for internal adaptation—it ‘must be universal’ and ‘make real a non-European framework’. But ‘League action [in China] must be positively wanted and not merely accepted’, he continued, since most proposals in Geneva amounted to debt-collecting or enforcing the rights of foreigners ‘against the Chinese’. The League’s search for peace would have faltered at the first step if its emissaries were perceived to merely continue gunboat diplomacy by other means.
More broadly, the League’s relations with China highlighted the fraught question of whether it ought to gatekeep on a fixed ‘standard’, a fluid one, or an entirely different basis. Felkin’s report reflected the predicament of an international civil service that sought to adapt an alternative paradigm from the modus operandi of treaty powers. He concluded pithily: ‘we must watch for opportunities’.Footnote 128 The Secretariat’s predicament was not unique to China: Ethiopia’s League admission generated analogous contradictions, exposing the absence of any compelling formulation of statehood that could distinguish members from non-members.Footnote 129 China and Ethiopia occupied structurally parallel positions as nominally sovereign League members subjected to informal imperial constraints.
Frederick Whyte, a British advisor to the Chinese government, saw Geneva as a source of evolution rather than stasis: ‘Nowhere in the world has the change of international morality, which is embodied in the League of Nations, such significance as for China, if the Chinese will but recognise it.’Footnote 130 Chinese officials’ decisions to approach treaty revision through ‘assertive legalism’—and selectively to go beyond the law—show that they did recognise this change. They played an insurgent role, sowing doubts about the future of imperialism and reinforcing the expectation that non-Europeans would also participate in rule-making in international institutions.Footnote 131 ‘Revolutionary diplomacy’ was a gunshot at the placid dinner table of a Eurocentric ‘family of nations’. Other cases—the Dominican Republic’s representation under US occupation, Ethiopia’s access to the League—had already cracked the surface.Footnote 132 The cumulative effect was to throw into question the kind of state required in a universal but diverse international organisation.
This effect was, in part, unintentional. Dismantling the ‘standard of civilisation’ was rarely the Chinese priority, given a strong desire for acceptance by the ‘civilised’ world. For example, the Chinese Christian reformer R.Y. Lo observed overlapping forms of extraterritoriality in Egypt and Persia, but made the particularistic suggestion that China was uniquely humiliated by these arrangements.Footnote 133 Chinese representatives began by making an unqualified, urgent call for the reconstitution of the international legal order in pursuit of their national interest. Their success in advancing legal pluralism departed both from the status quo and from their initial agenda.Footnote 134 As the dispute moved from Beijing to Brussels to The Hague and Geneva, widening gaps between intentions and consequences revealed limits that Becker Lorca’s account of mestizo international law captures only partially.Footnote 135 The Sino-Belgian case suggests that the post-1919 institutional architecture imposed structural constraints that no amount of creative appropriation could overcome.
Who speaks for the people? The uncertainties of nationalism
When a Chinese international civil servant left his post at the League in 1928, he exhorted his compatriots: ‘if the Chinese people could unite to ask’ for applying Article 19 of the League’s Covenant to the renegotiation of treaties, ‘I am sure China would be able to obtain what she wants’.Footnote 136 But this claim begged a question: who was meant to represent the collective voice of the Chinese people, and how? The mass mobilisation of students and workers in the 1920s impacted not only the behaviour of diplomats but also the broader agenda to abolish the ‘unequal treaties’. Chiang Kai-shek struggled to claim leadership of the KMT. The party, in turn, claimed leadership of the national revolution but also sought to protect itself from popular mobilisation.Footnote 137
Although the rhetoric of revolutionary anti-imperialism persisted into the Nanjing decade, much had in fact changed during the course of the Northern Expedition that coincided with international legal disputes over the ‘unequal treaties’. Eugene Chen had fallen out with Chiang Kai-shek’s faction and spent the year in Moscow. C.T. Wang’s approach was revolutionary insofar as it attempted to revise all ‘unequal treaties’, but it favoured accommodation over antagonism. It sought, in his words, ‘to cloak the iron fist with a layer of rubber’.Footnote 138 His strategy was to secure a provisional arrangement, to adjust to ‘the needs of the moment in accordance with international law’, and then to establish new treaties.Footnote 139 Ongoing struggles between radical and moderate proponents of ‘revolutionary diplomacy’ intensified. The latter succeeded in controlling the treaty negotiations. T.V. Soong, the Minister of Finance and another moderate proponent of ‘national reconstruction’, led negotiations with the United States that resulted in the first new tariff treaty in July 1928.Footnote 140
In contrast to Beijing’s approach and its own earlier policy, the KMT turned to tariff autonomy as the first priority in abolishing the ‘unequal treaties’. C.T. Wang argued that tariff autonomy was the most important aspect of abolishing the ‘unequal treaties’ because it was the most general and concerned the entire nation.Footnote 141 The Nanjing government published new tariff schedules for the provinces under its control, even though opposition from relevant powers and the explicit threat of retaliation from Japan thwarted its implementation.Footnote 142 Negotiations between Brussels and Nanjing commenced soon after official contact was made on 1 August, and lasted for just under four months. Tensions soon emerged between Wang King-ky, the more radical Chinese Minister to Belgium, and the moderate line taken by C.T. Wang in Nanjing. The former continued to ask for withdrawal of the ongoing case at the PCIJ, whereas the latter conceded unprecedented recognition in the form of automatic consent to Belgium’s applications for prorogation.Footnote 143
To recover tariff autonomy, the KMT moved towards a selective strategy with softened stances on other issues. The resulting treaty would have been inconceivable to Eugene Chen. It accepted that Belgium would relinquish consular jurisdiction only when the majority of other powers did so. In Chen’s view, and that of many others, this allowed Belgium to shield itself behind an international consortium, including the USA and the UK, which had no incentives to terminate such arrangements.Footnote 144 The KMT agreed not only to bilateral MFN status and the reciprocal right of nationals to reside and hold property, but also to national treatment. In other words, no Belgian national in China would have to pay customs duties or taxes of any kind other or higher than those paid by Chinese nationals. These articles enraged the Minister to Belgium.Footnote 145 But C.T. Wang proceeded to sign the new Sino-Belgian treaty on 22 November.Footnote 146 He decided to add only one more amendment on the reciprocal and equal treatment of nationals as a safeguard for overseas Chinese.Footnote 147
The moderate line of the KMT’s foreign ministry in 1928 was effective in securing new trade treaties but incurred accusations of compromise and foreign manipulation.Footnote 148 In contrast to the treaties concluded with Germany and Austria after the war, the new agreements, including the renegotiated Sino-Belgian treaty, did not abolish consular jurisdiction. In response to the proposal that foreigners should be prohibited from owning property in China, C.T. Wang stated that the government had to respect reciprocity, since most other countries allowed Chinese to live in their territories. It had to abide by ‘international public law’ and carefully consider legislation.Footnote 149 He received the rebuttal from many corners that the principle of reciprocity only superficially guaranteed equality, given the overwhelming imbalance of capital available to foreigners. Almost all Chinese were too poor to compete.Footnote 150 For those who sought international equality in economic welfare, commercial equality was insufficient and even suspect. The Nanjing government was confronted with multiple and competing notions of equality. It did not ratify the new treaty until 1 February 1929.Footnote 151 Shortly after, notified by the Belgian government, the PCIJ closed the case that had arisen two and a half years ago.Footnote 152 Renegotiating the remaining clauses would have to wait until the Second World War.Footnote 153
The shifts in state–society relations that the case had set in motion did not end with the PCIJ’s announcement. Encouragement of nationalist consciousness was double-edged. It bolstered the KMT’s claim to political leadership but also legitimised sources of discontent and backlash beyond the party’s control. As legal arguments became increasingly legible to the Chinese public, and as new media increased the circulation of such arguments, even a case at the distant PCIJ became part of the ‘imagined community’. Popular discourse, in turn, informed foreign policy.Footnote 154 A comparison with Siam—the only other East Asian member state of the League apart from Japan, and a country whose relations with the organisation rarely strayed from elite diplomacy—illuminates the distinctive role of mass mobilisation in China’s case.Footnote 155
The consequences for domestic politics would not have surprised reformers such as Wellington Koo, Wang Chung-hui, and Eugene Chen, whose advocacy against the imperium in imperio was thoroughly intertwined with a vision of constitutional political reform within the nation. For all of them, sovereignty abroad and sovereignty at home were the same problem.Footnote 156 The KMT’s shift at the end of the Northern Expedition from mass mobilisation to ‘national reconstruction’ changed its relationship to both Chinese society and international organisations. Faced with the strategic necessity and inconvenient ambiguity of nationalist sentiment, governing elites found that the most effective way of speaking on behalf of a collective was to assert their dominance over it.
Conclusion
On 9 November 1926, the men in that Beijing committee room confronted a problem that the post-1919 international order had made insoluble. Every legal path they considered—the PCIJ, the League Assembly, bilateral denunciation, rebus sic stantibus—led back to the same impasse.Footnote 157 The institutions that had covenanted to peaceful change could not deliver it without the consent of those whose privileges it would diminish. Turkey’s success at Lausanne three years earlier—complete abolition of capitulations, enabled by military victory—only sharpened the contradiction: the system could accommodate force but not the legal-institutional strategies it claimed to have made available.Footnote 158 The contradiction was architectural rather than bilateral. That China’s ‘unequal treaties’ were not fully abolished until 1943, as a wartime concession rather than a legal achievement, confirms the diagnosis.
The strategic anachronism Koo, Wang, and their colleagues deployed was not merely nationalist rhetoric. The committee’s own deliberations reveal actors acutely aware of their contradictory position, who used anachronistic legal categories to make claims about equality that they knew the architecture was unlikely to honour. When every legal channel was closed, what emerged was Eugene Chen’s revolutionary diplomacy—the occupation of the British concession, mass politics fused with foreign policy.
The lawyer-diplomats diverged. C.T. Wang moved away from multilateralism toward bilateral deal-making. Wang Chung-hui, Hammarskjöld’s ‘last useful judge’, remained caught between his commitment to international law and the demands of the ‘national revolution’.Footnote 159 Eugene Chen refused every accommodation and found himself expelled from Chiang Kai-shek’s revolution. Each followed a different path; none arrived where the order had promised to take them.
Their divergence unfolded within the constraints of the post-1919 order, which is often remembered as an enlargement of international society. Seen from the semi-periphery, membership as a formal equal became the instrument by which the substance of equality was withheld. The hierarchy of international society was relocated inside its institutions and given legal form there. Persia, abrogating its capitulations in the same years, slipped free because no accepted jurisdiction could hold it; the Latin American states bent the same Geneva machinery to their own ends against a power that had stayed outside it; China was caught where the conditions converged. The post-1919 order subordinated states not by shutting them out but through the terms on which it let them in.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful for comments from participants at the conference on ‘International Organizations and the Making of the Modern World’ held in Shanghai, June 2025. My thanks to Patricia Clavin, Xiao Mao, Stefan Talmon, Andrew Thompson, Arne Westad, and Kate Yoon for their feedback and suggestions.
Financial support
Research trips were funded by All Souls College, Oxford.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
Lucas Tse is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford University.
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