EVENTS

ABSTRACT

Title: ‘A fence on which we can rely’: Asserting Sovereignty in the early twentieth-century Sino-Tibetan borderland

In 1864 the principles of international law were formally introduced to the scholar-officials of Qing China in the translated pages of Wanguo gongfa (The Public Law of All States), a text which then circulated among yamens across the empire. Over the succeeding decades, for central Qing officials, international law’s utility seemed limited to situational application of discrete principles in individual negotiations, indicative of a reticence to fully embrace its conceptual basis. Yet by century’s end, influenced in part by a Chengdu scholar’s original text, Sichuan Province officials overseeing the Kham borderland of eastern Tibet began to indigenise its core principles, adopting an absolutist conception of territorial sovereignty informed by the Euro-American rhetoric of international law’s universality. In such contentious borderlands, where theoretical claims to sovereignty intersected with the actual exercise of authority, sovereignty came to serve a different purpose, repelling British or Russian encroachment, both perceived and real, through outward appeal to the principle of non-intervention substantiated by an inward-facing ‘civilising mission’ intended to sever competing authority from Lhasa. By transforming frontier policy, these local officials simultaneously invigorated international law’s importance to Chinese state-building and infused a reoriented conception of territorial sovereignty into regional relations. This presentation traces the translation and circulation of international law and its conceptual basis beyond Beijing, to the distant Kham borderland, offering an alternative perspective of sovereignty’s global legacy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Dr. Scott Relyea is assistant professor of Asian history at Appalachian State University in North Carolina. His research centres on state-building and nationalism in the southwest borderlands of China and the global circulation of statecraft concepts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Dr. Relyea is currently working on a book entitled Gazing at the Tibetan Plateau: China’s Infrontier and the Early Twentieth Century Evolution of Sino-Tibetan Relations. He earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and Master’s degrees from the School of Oriental and African Studies and the George Washington University.