ABSTRACT
The chapter critiques existing academic approaches to Chinese sovereignty and sovereignty contests in the Taiwan Strait and East China Sea, including Stephen Krasner’s thesis on sovereignty as organised hypocrisy. The chapter argues that most scholarly analyses of Chinese sovereignty are driven by empirics (i.e., the desire to explain Beijing’s stance on the sovereignty question in a descriptive manner) and state-centrism, and rarely feature any conceptual framework. Such unitary, descriptive approaches do not problematise the notion of sovereignty itself and engender instead the ‘Westphalian problématique’, i.e., the belief that the Westphalian (classical) notion of sovereignty—as enshrined in international law and exogenous to the state—informs Beijing’s (and its adversaries, including Taipei) understanding of sovereignty and defines its place in the inter-state system. The chapter ends by arguing in favour of the ‘Constructivist turn’ in the study of Chinese sovereignty, because divided and disputed states (such as China and Taiwan) experience formative moments, during which state identities are made and intensely contested. It is precisely such states that offer an apt contemporary illustration of social constructions of sovereignty.
