“China is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it. Beijing's vision would move us away from the universal values that have sustained so much of the world's progress over the past 75 years.”Footnote ¹

The idea that China has, and will continue to, undermine the existing international order is widely accepted among U.S. policymakers of both political parties.Footnote ² Yet, China's international law approach, practices, and theories are rarely discussed or analyzed in U.S. academic research or theorizing about international law. This is surprising because China will almost certainly be central to the future evolution of international law, especially if, as former Secretary of State Blinken says, China's intent is to “reshape the international order.”Footnote ³

Huikang Huang's China's Diplomacy and International Law is both well-positioned and well-timed to fill this gap in understanding among non-Chinese academics. Although his work is not the only recent study of contemporary China's treatment of international law,Footnote ⁴ Huang's status as a scholar, former top lawyer in China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ambassador, long-time Chinese member to the International Law Commission, and an advisor to the Chinese government makes this work the closest thing in either Chinese or to an authoritative expression of official and academic perspectives on international law. Moreover, because China's Diplomacy and International Law grew out of lectures Huang delivered to leading international law students in China, it reveals for a non-Chinese audience what a leading and influential Chinese figure believes the next generation of Chinese international lawyers should know and think about when using and developing international law in the future.

The Chinese title for China's Diplomacy and International LawFootnote ⁵ is more literally translated as “Major-Country Diplomacy with Chinese Characteristics and International Law.” The clunky phrase “Major-Country Diplomacy with Chinese Characteristics” (MCDCC) signifies to a Chinese audience that Huang is aligning his work with the official foreign policy doctrine of Chinese leader Xi Jinping. In a major 2014 address, Xi set out the key features of MCDCC and its central importance was confirmed when key elements of the MCDCC were added to the preamble of China's Constitution in 2018.

Based on Xi's 2014 address and its subsequent distillation in the Constitution, MCDCC has six persistent features: (1) upholding the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party; (2) continuing peaceful development without sacrificing legitimate rights and core interests; (3) democratizing international relations; (4) pursuing win-win cooperation as a new type of international relationship; (5) maintaining a correct balance between justice and profits (particularly with developing countries); and (6) continuing the policy of non-interference in the internal affairs of others.Footnote ⁶ While much of MCDCC is built upon prior Chinese foreign policy stances, it signified Xi's desire to place his distinctive stamp by identifying China as a “major country” and emphasizing the supremacy of the CCP in formulating and executing foreign policy.

As his Chinese title indicates, Huang takes MCDCC as a given and sees his task as explaining how Chinese lawyers can use international law to carry out China's goals and defend its interests as defined by MCDCC (p. 7). Huang is therefore not offering his own normative theory of international law, nor is this work a purely descriptive account of how China uses international law. Rather, it is best understood as an attempt to harmonize international legal concepts and doctrines with the values and goals set out in the doctrine of MCDCC. It is not unlike a U.S. international law scholar writing a book about how international law can advance the Biden or Trump Doctrine. But unlike U.S. foreign policy doctrines, MCDCC has remained a guiding policy for over a decade and will likely remain as long as Xi is China's leader. So, Huang's determination to square international law with the Party's vision (and not the other way around) makes his work a valuable guidebook to what the Chinese government is likely to say, or do, with respect to international law, even if Huang's unquestioning commitment to the Chinese government's priorities is dissatisfying to an academic reader.

Most of China's Diplomacy and International Law lays out how international law intersects with MCDCC priorities in areas such as security, maritime affairs, climate, cyberspace, and transnational cooperation, among other topics. Perhaps not surprising from a book intended to support the Party's leadership of China's foreign policy, international human rights law and international jus cogens prohibitions on torture and genocide are barely mentioned. For this reason, international law scholars will likely focus on the chapters discussing the historical role of international law in Chinese diplomacy and China's perspective on the future evolution of international law.

For Huang, international law is the crystallization of international relations into rules and norms that enable the resolution of interstate disputes and global stability. Citing the Peace of Westphalia, he identifies states as the sole subjects of international law and interstate relations as the primary focus of international law (p. 74). Though international law emerged within Europe, he recounts how, beginning with the Opium War in 1840, China was gradually integrated into the same European international law system that has now spread to the whole world. China's integration was hardly smooth. As Huang recounts, the traditional Chinese historical narrative emphasizes how foreign powers subjected imperial and Republican China to onerous “unequal” treaties that severely undercut its sovereignty and independence. Following the current government's preferred narrative, Huang explains that this “Century of Humiliation” ended only when the Chinese Communist Party established the People's Republic of China in 1949. In this story, the PRC enabled China to fully claim all of the rights and privileges of a sovereign and equal state under international law.

To set the stage for the PRC's current position toward international law, Huang reviews a nineteenth century debate within China over whether to embrace or reject European international law. The “Law Supremacy” faction argued that China could rely on international law to protect its rights and freedoms in the global sphere, whereas the “Power Supremacy” faction argued that only strengthening the Chinese state could have a meaningful effect. The debate was never fully resolved, but Huang offers the PRC's approach today as a synthesis of the two schools—relying on law to defend and pursue China's interests while not ignoring the importance of strengthening the state's power (pp. 9–10).

Thus, since 1949, China's communist leaders have consistently cited international law as a necessary feature of its foreign policy. Huang notes that the Treaty Commission, the precursor to today's Department of Treaty Law and Policy, was established only a few weeks after the creation of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1949 (p. 65). As part of his case to a Chinese audience for why international law can advance China's interests, Huang approvingly cites case studies where the PRC was able to use international law to defend its core interests. For instance, the new PRC imposed what Huang calls “inverse conditions” before agreeing to establish diplomatic relations with other countries. Thus, it refused to exchange ambassadors with the UK due to the UK's refusal to vote for its admission to the UN even though the UK had also recognized the PRC as the legitimate government of China. Huang cites these conditions as a new application of the international law of recognition and credits the tactic for creating pressure on the UK to eventually vote in favor of seating the PRC in the United Nations in 1971. More recently, he describes how China invoked its rights under international law to demand redress for the 1999 U.S. bombing of the PRC embassy in Belgrade. Huang notes that direct negotiations between the U.S. State Department's legal adviser and the PRC's director-general of the Department of Treaty and Law led to a bilateral agreement under which the U.S. government agreed to pay compensation directly to China. Huang states that this agreement marked the first time China won compensation from a foreign government, and also (incorrectly) claimed that “the United States had never compensated others for military operations since the [sic] World War II” (p. 22).

In these and other ways, Huang argues that international law, at least as traditionally understood, can support China's goals as it transitions into its role as a “major country.” He describes international law as Westphalian law as modified by the UN Charter. In this view, states are the fundamental subjects of international law, and individuals are subjects only of domestic law. Additionally, the key foundational international legal principles are Westphalian—sovereign equality and non-interference in domestic affairs—combined with innovations of the UN Charter—prohibition on illegal use of force, peaceful settlement of international disputes and the good faith fulfillment of international obligations. Finally, the UN serves as the central institution for guaranteeing collective security and resolution of disputes through voluntary consent by states.

This description of a state-centric international law system based on the UN Charter is notable for what is missing. It does not refer to human rights, nor the jus cogens norms that the victorious powers after World War II (including China) invoked to punish German and Japanese war criminals. Huang indirectly recognizes this omission when he describes how the rise of certain international organizations and non-governmental organizations have placed pressure on the traditional conception of state sovereignty. Indeed, he describes the efforts to undermine state sovereignty as a key front in the struggle over international law's evolution. He points the finger at the U.S. actions in Kosovo which he says both undermine state sovereignty and the international law prohibition on the use of force. He also cites U.S. policy toward Venezuela as a recent example of how the United States is the main global player disregarding state sovereignty (he even calls U.S. recognition of Venezuela's opposition leader during a contested election “crazy”) (p. 7, n. 15).

Huang concedes that the international system is not static. New problems, such as climate change or cyberspace governance, need solutions so international law must respond to pressures for change and accommodation. The subject matter of international law has expanded to new topics, and stricter international enforcement mechanisms have been embedded in new treaties. Pressure to expand universal jurisdiction continues.

It is here that Huang offers some guidance on how the Chinese government is likely to respond to these trends. While conceding the pressure for weakening the state-centric international law system exists, he blames this almost entirely on political forces led by the United States seeking to “establish a more favorable international order for the West” (p. 89). He also notes that the forces of technological change and economic globalization may require adjustments in the international system, but if “China, Russia, and the developing world at large can play an important constraining role” on the “West,” the basic legal framework of sovereign equality and non-interference in domestic affairs will remain (id.).

In one of his more unconvincing claims, he tries to square pressure for stronger human rights protections with a commitment to a state-centric order by asserting that the protection of human rights requires a strong commitment to state sovereignty. In Huang's view, since states have “a sacred duty” to protect human rights obligations they have consented to, they will do so consistent with their own individual conditions. Forcing states to protect human rights, Huang suggests, would somehow undermine human rights.

As unattractive as this formulation of human rights protection might seem to liberal international lawyers, Huang's framing of the future of international law as a struggle between the U.S.-led “West,” on the one hand, and China, Russia, and developing countries on the other, is revealing. It highlights how he (and the Chinese leadership) sees their traditional state-centric conception of international law as a wedge issue to find common cause with Russia and developing countries like India resentful of the West's supposed imposition of liberal values. In Huang's view, China's diplomats carrying out MCDCC should not only defend the basic legal framework of a state-centric international law against Western encroachments, but need to actively engage in developing (and contesting) the formation of new international rules for new problems such as climate change and cyberspace to ensure China's interests are protected and that the basic state-centric international law system is preserved.

Huang's discussion of what he identifies as the key global issues of the day facing China further clarifies how he believes the state-centric international law system can benefit China's interests. On security questions, the PRC's broader-than-the-United-States construction of the UN Charter's prohibition on the use of force combined with its narrower-than-the-United-States construction of the right of self-defense allows it to claim the international legal high ground on topics such as the U.S. military intervention into Syria, Iraq, or Kosovo. In maritime affairs, Huang set out the Chinese position that the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea allows coastal states to prohibit military operations in its exclusive economic zone, a position sharply at odds with the United States and many other UN Convention on the Law of the Sea parties. On climate change, he aligns China with the Paris Agreement and its subsequent implementing rules and points out that China's long-standing engagement with multilateral negotiations led to a fair outcome that accounted for China's position as a developing country (and hence more flexibility in requiring emissions reductions). He notes that China has successfully used international treaties and agreements on transnational crime to help it track down and return allegedly corrupt Chinese officials who had fled overseas.

In Huang's telling, China has also made contributions to the evolution of the state-centric international law by creating a “one country, two systems” framework for Hong Kong and Macau. This creative solution maintains the sacredness of state sovereignty while allowing a high level of local autonomy that Huang says goes far beyond the powers of local government in other countries.

Overall, Huang concludes that China is uniquely positioned to lead, or at least play a leading role, in the management of global affairs and thus, the future evolution of international law. Drawing upon another one of Xi's doctrines—a human community with a shared futureFootnote ⁷—Huang explains that pursuing this vision does not mean that China needs or wants to “start a new cooker” and overthrow the existing system. Rather, the world can build “a world of lasting peace, universal security, common prosperity, openness, inclusiveness, beauty and cleanliness on the basis of the existing international legal order with the UN Charter at its core” (p. 343).

There is a superficially attractive coherence in the vision of international law Huang describes. The state-centric conception of international law with the UN Charter at its core is grounded in the traditional Westphalian conceptions of sovereignty modified by reasonable interpretations of the text of the UN Charter. Many developing states, who achieved independence after World War II, are just as unwilling as China to limit that hard-won sovereignty to former colonial powers or the pressure of non-governmental organizations. As the United States begins to withdraw from certain international institutions in the new Trump administration, China will also be able to position itself as the defender of international law and the UN system against a revisionist, isolationist United States.

There are reasons to doubt, however, that China will be able to fully capitalize on its vision of international law in its competition with the United States. First, as Huang's book inadvertently reveals, China will have a difficult time living up to the strictures of the state-centric international law system it advocates. To take one glaring example, the PRC has failed to condemn the international legality of Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine.Footnote ⁸ It has not even condemned clear examples of Russia's violation of international humanitarian law, while it has not been shy about demanding Israel's actions in Gaza comply with the same body of law.Footnote ⁹ (Oddly, Huang has not updated the English edition of his 2019 book to address the legal consequences of either conflict.) Huang also includes a scurrilous and conclusory attack on the legality of the 2016 South China Sea Arbitration Award issued under the authority of the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea. Instead of offering analysis of the award on the merits, or explaining how China's refusal to appear in the case fit into China's commitment to good faith compliance with international law obligations, Huang merely selectively cites authorities who agreed with China and includes an unworthy ad hominem attack on the Japanese jurist who, as president of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, appointed China's members of the arbitral panel because China boycotted the arbitration (p. 163 and n. 40).Footnote ¹⁰ Similarly, Huang's chapter on maritime affairs barely mentions, and fails to defend China's mysterious and legally unsupportable “Nine Dash Line” claim that was rejected by that arbitral tribunal and remains a central source of conflict in the South China Sea. Yet China's Coast Guard is now patrolling areas of the South China Sea where China's only claim appears to be its Nine Dash Line claim.Footnote ¹¹ China's tolerance for Russia's violation of Ukraine's sovereignty and its sweeping actions to enforce rights in the South China Sea that do not appear based on land-based territorial claims demonstrate the limits of its respect for its sacrosanct principles of sovereign equality and territorial integrity.

Huang's work demonstrates that he is a tremendously knowledgeable, intelligent, and experienced international lawyer. But this work, which offers valuable insights into the official Chinese approach to international law, also suffers from flaws that weaken almost all international law scholarship emerging from China. Under the guidance of the current Chinese Communist Party leadership, Chinese scholars rarely engage in an independent, academic exploration of international law from a global or abstract perspective. Rather, the task of a Chinese international law scholar is to explain how international law fits the priorities already set out by the Chinese Communist Party leadership in doctrines such as MCDCC. This pre-set political limitation is exacerbated by Huang's deep ties to the Chinese government, but it has an impact on other Chinese scholars of international law as well.Footnote ¹²

None of this fully answers the question this essay begins with. Are U.S. policymakers wrong to suggest China is seeking to undermine the existing international order? The answer is both yes and no. China has a coherent conception of a state-centric international law modified by the UN Charter but grounded in sovereignty above all other values. This conception ties it with Russia and overlaps with the views of other large developing countries like India and Brazil, and the “Global South” more generally. It gives China a powerful legal position from which to critique the West, and especially the United States, as the true revisionist powers in the international system. But even a scholar as clever as Huang cannot effectively explain China's silence on Russia's violation of both the law governing the use of force and the sovereignty of Ukraine, nor China's strange and legally unsound claims in the South China Sea. He simply ignores credible allegations of genocide, forced labor and crimes against humanity in China's northwestern province of Xinjiang.

Huang's book is a comprehensive representation of China's contemporary views on international law doctrine and some of the key legal and global governance questions of our times. It is also a useful guidebook for defenders of China and critics of a liberal U.S.-led international law order. Huang lands some effective blows when he illustrates how the United States has either walked away from international institutions or exceeded international law's strictures by aggressive promotion of democracy and human rights. But, like the Chinese government, Huang fails to grapple with China's actions that conflict with the sovereignty-focused worldview he advocates for. This both weakens the academic value of his work and gives credence to Secretary Blinken's accusation that China is taking actions to undermine the “international order,” including the state-centric international order with the UN Charter at its core that Huang is at such pains to defend.