ABSTRACT
The chapter summarises key findings of this study in the context of the conceptual framework presented in Chapters 1 and 2. It concludes by arguing that this study has demonstrated that far from being fixed and unitary, Chinese and Taiwanese domestic and international responses to the sovereignty conflict in the East China Sea conjoined diverse and shifting notions of state sovereignty. Cross-Strait overlapping territorial claims and related ideational narratives reveal the social power of ideas and the centrality of domestic actors and audiences in the state’s variable productions of sovereignty. It is these intra-state contestations—mediated by external actors—that inform social constructions of sovereignty and its constitutive elements: authority, territory and population.
