Charting Socio-Legal Approaches to International Law in China: Taking the Interdisciplinary Study of International Law and History as an Example

The mainstream of international legal academia has started to address a distinctive fundamental question of whether international law is international in recent years, in which national differences in terms of the understandings of and approaches to international law have been (re)recognized and accentuated. Thanks to its increasing importance and influence in the international community, the ways in which China engages with a variety of international legal issues and topics have garnered more attention from the so-called western scholars. Meanwhile, Chinese international legal scholars have also committed to establishing a Chinese school of international law through which to intensively and comprehensively showcase its own characteristics in this regard. Against this backdrop, this article aims to unveil the underestimated part of its characteristics concerning the socio-legal scholarship in China’s international law research by taking the interdisciplinary study of international law and history as an example. To that end, this article first reviews the overall configuration of international law research in China and roughly summarizes the current “Chinese characteristics†as follows: 1. The ternary, multipolar, and marginal morphology of the scholarly field of international law; 2. The China-based, trending topic-driven, and positive law-oriented contents of international legal scholarship. These characteristics also imply the present dominance of the doctrinal tradition in Chinese international legal scholarship, which has impeded the interdisciplinary collaboration between international law and other disciplines or fields of research. However, this article also recognizes that the emergence of socio-legal approaches to international law in China by assessing the status quo of research on international law and history in particular and international law and other social sciences in general, although the voices of this group of interdisciplinary academics are still relatively feeble.