Czeslaw Tubilewicz - Chinese Constructions of Sovereignty and the East China Sea Conflict

This book analyses Chinese social constructions of sovereignty in the context of the East China Sea conflict. It specifically explores China and Taiwans overlapping cross-Strait sovereignty claims and their domestic debates and policies towards the territorial dispute.

Providing an up-to-date discussion of the East China Sea conflict, the book challenges conventional assumptions regarding both Beijings and Taipeis adherence to the classical notion of Westphalian sovereignty. Instead, it brings China and Taiwan into the Constructivist analytical framework and develops a domestic agency-focused approach to demonstrate the social power of ideas and the centrality of domestic actors in the production of sovereignty. Offering a comprehensive examination of Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese and US responses at the domestic and international levels, the book studies the sovereignty narratives and the coordination of efforts made by the PRC and ROC authorities to counter Japans territorial claims in the East China Sea.

Featuring extensive analysis of the conceptual approaches to understanding Chinese sovereignty, Chinese Constructions of Sovereignty and the East China Sea Conflict will be useful for students and scholars of Chinese and Asian politics, as well as international relations and security studies.

Czeslaw Tubilewicz is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Politics and International Relations, the University of Adelaide. He has authored Taiwan and Post-Communist Europe (Routledge, 2007) and edited Critical Issues in Contemporary China (Routledge, 2006 and 2017).

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Chinese Constructions of Sovereignty and the East China Sea Conflict

Czeslaw Tubilewicz

For the full list of titles in the series, visit: www.routledge.com/Politics-in-Asia/book-series/PIA

Czeslaw Tubilewicz

First published 2020

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2020 Czeslaw Tubilewicz

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ISBN: 978-0-367-35492-3 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-429-34027-7 (ebk)

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This book has developed from a conference paper prepared for the twelfth Conference of the European Association of Taiwan Studies (EATS), held in Krakw in 2015. The author wishes to thank the EATS and the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy for the invitation and the fellow panellists for their initial feedback. The author also wishes to thank Professor Kanishka Jayasuriya (Murdoch University) for his insightful comments on the conceptual framework, as well as Professor Wei Bai-ku (National Chengchi University) for his support for the authors fieldwork in Taipei. The research for this book has benefited from a travel grant, extended by the Faculty of Arts, the University of Adelaide.

The Peace of Westphalia (1648) is conventionally believed to have createdat first in Europe and then around the globethe concept of sovereignty as a distinctive configuration of state authority (Jackson 2007a, 56) and brought about a modern international state system (Gross 1948; Morgenthau 1997, 328; Waltz 1986a, 329; Thomson 1995, 236; Blaney and Inayatullah 2000, 3335; Caporaso 2000, 1; Philpott 2001). For Francis Harry Hinsley (1996, 26), Westphalian sovereignty denotes a final and absolute political authority in the political community [] and no final and absolute authority [existing] elsewhere. For international legal experts, to be considered deserving the title of a state, Westphalian territorial entities, in addition to having a defined territory, a population, and a government, must also possess sovereignty: their rulers should enjoy supreme domestic authority and independence within and without the borders of the state (Jennings and Watts 1992, 120122). The state practices of Westphalian sovereignty have been described as messy and the precise meaning of the concept as confusing. Still, despite having been pronounced by the late 1960s as a dead duck (Nettle 1968, 560), Westphalian sovereignty has remained the foundation of both International Relations (IR) as a field of academic enquiry and inter-state relations (Weber 1995, 1; Lawson and Shilliam 2009, 657), a basic or operational concept (Krasner 1995/6, 121) or a master noun of international relations (Slomp 2008, 33).