Description
This paper examines the ways in which the politics of empire and an emerging nation-statist international order met in the site of the League of Nations’ technical cooperation work on
public health in China in the interwar years. Most parts of Asia remained under colonial domination by Britain, France, and a rising, expansionist Japan. In this context, China, alongside Siam, occupied a liminal space between empire and the nation-state. China stood out as an independent national government with its diplomatic status recognized by membership in the League, but its legal status was still compromised by unequal treaty relations and the extraterritorial spaces which these legal arrangements generated. Under a largely colonial regional context in Asia, contestations over which of the multiple public health administrations in China could represent China in the League’s public health networks constituted a site where different visions of the “international” and their constitutive member units were negotiated.
I argue that the League of Nations’ practices in this field were sites where international hierarchy was structured by a “standard of civilization” on self-governance capability and
modern public administration systems in the image of Western, capitalist modern states. At the same time, they were also sites where actors contested the “standard” to negotiate their sovereignty, political authority, and status. I examine China as a significant case of this process.
The paper contributes to historically-grounded International Relations theories on international change and decolonization, specifically challenging views of normative change and state formation as unilinear, teleological processes. It also contributes to a growing international history scholarship on early twentieth-century multilateral governance as a site where actors contested international hierarchy and the implications of such contentious politics on membership in international order, legitimate authority, and sovereignty.
