by Julian Ku
As regular readers of this blog might have noticed, I have become more and more interested China and its engagement with international law issues. Last year, I proposed to the ASIL Planning Committee that we put together a panel of leading U.S. China law scholars. But the ASIL organizers pushed back and put together a much more diverse group than I had suggested, which included a U.S. China scholar like Jacques Delisle from Penn, but also Chinese international law scholars like Bingbing Jia of Tsinghua and then added a nice dose of on-the-ground policy analysis from Stephanie Kleine-Ahlbrandt of the International Crisis Group. It ended up being a terrific mix of style, topics, and expertise. We didn’t rate a “livestream”, but I wanted to share a few thoughts for our readers on what I think is an important topic. I am not going to attempt to summarize their comments, but simply offer some of my reactions to their key points.
The idea of the panel (at least to me) was to consider whether the “rise of China” in global affairs has changed much about how China interacts with international law. In my crude formulation, the question is now less about what “international law does to China” but more what “China will do to international law.”
Both of the lawyer-panelists (Jia and Delisle) focused on “sovereignty” as the most important principle guiding China’s understanding and engagement with international law.