Unshackled?: China, the ‘unequal treaties’, and the limits of international law, 1919–1929

Abstract The post-1919 international order extended to China formal sovereign equality while offering few legal means to exercise it. The Sino-Belgian treaty dispute of 1926–29 reveals this: when China abrogated its 1865 treaty with Belgium and Brussels sued at the Permanent Court of International Justice, the institutions that promised peaceful revision could not deliver it without the consent of the powers whose privileges were at stake. The ‘unequal treaties’, a political category coined only in 1923, named the contradiction the order had built in. Four lawyer-diplomats—Wellington Koo, Wang Chung-hui, C.T. Wang, and Eugene Chen—were each caught between national autonomy and admission among the ‘civilised’ powers. The turn from legal argument to ‘revolutionary diplomacy’ was the structure’s doing, not a failure of nerve. Read beside Turkey, Persia, and the Latin American states, China’s case locates the obstacle: not semi-peripheral weakness as such, but the institutional position from which each engaged an order that subordinated its members through the very terms of their admission.