The rise of China and international law: taking Chinese exceptionalism seriously

Abstract

As Nobel Prize Laureate Douglass C North defines, ‘institutions are the rules of the game in a society or, more formally, are the humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction’. In light of this definition, it is evident that international law is a type of institution that coordinates and regulates the actions of the members, mainly those of sovereign states. Since the implementation of the Reform and Opening-up Policy in China in the late 1970s, the economic rise of China has been steadily and irreversibly realized under the complex and dynamically variable framework of international law. Currently, Western countries, especially the US, argue that China has ingeniously and unfairly taken advantage of the multilateral structures created by international law to accomplish its economic rise and reinforce its military capabilities. Against this background, Cai Congyan, a prominent Chinese international lawyer from the School of Law at Xiamen University, has contributed the timely and significant book ‘The Rise of China and International Law: Taking Chinese Exceptionalism Seriously’ with the academic mission to explore the answers to the following two important questions: (1) What is the relevance of international law to the rise of China? (2) What will China bring to international law as a rising great power? Chapter 2 depicts the profile of international law in tandem with the rise of China, by making a comparison with the previous system of international law, which favoured the Western great powers, including the leading European countries and the USA. Firstly, it demonstrates that international law was manipulated by Western great powers as a tool to justify their hegemony prior to the end of the Second World War. This is illustrated by the various unequal treaties signed between Western great powers and the Qing Dynasty during the First and Second Opium Wars. Following on from that historical perspective, it further asserts that, since the 1950s, international law has converged to the justice-oriented model that pursues a level playground for all participants in the international community. The integration of China into the international community has taken place amid the rise of a justice-oriented international law, which has in turn substantially promoted and benefited the rise of China. From my own viewpoint, Chapter 2 fulfils the task of sketching out the positive role of international law in the rise of China. Chapter 3 elaborates on the fundamental reversal of China’s national strategy which occurred in the late 1970s – abandoning the prevalent practice of Class Struggle and implementing the Reform and Opening-up Policy, which was promoted by Deng Xiaoping and his senior allies at that time. Chapter 3 illustrates that underlying the Reform and Openingup Policy was the determination of China’s political entrepreneurs that China should seek to integrate itself into a world that had been, to a large extent, under the rule of a justiceoriented international law since the 1950s. The chapter further relays the spectacular economic developments that have taken place since an open China met this justice-oriented international law. For example, China was ranked as the number one exporter of commodities in 2020, only ten years after its entry into the WTO. The result of this grand experiment has