‘The Peking Formula’: International Law, the United Nations, and Chinese Sovereignty during the Korean War

Abstract

The origins of China’s modern superpower ascendancy are most frequently located in the 1970s, the decade during which the People’s Republic of China (PRC) began to carry out transformative economic reforms and gained diplomatic recognition in the international system. Such narratives, however, sometimes mistake the PRC’s prior formal exclusion from international institutions for disengagement. In fact, the new Chinese state was, from its founding in 1949, actively involved in contesting and reshaping the postwar regimes of global governance and international law, even as it was kept conspicuously outside the organizations and agreements which constituted that order such as the United Nations and the Geneva Conventions. A series of US-PRC diplomatic and legal disputes in the first half of the 1950s concerning war crimes and the treatment of prisoners during the Korean War demonstrates that Chinese actors turned the PRC’s exclusion to their advantage by skillfully interweaving a novel theory of international law with the realities of power politics. When the Secretary-General of the United Nations traveled to Beijing in 1955 to negotiate the release of captured American airmen his Chinese interlocutors not only secured short-term political concessions, but asserted their government’s legitimacy and sovereignty in the international system, thus closing the door on more than a century of fractured or partial sovereignty in China.