2025
SELECTED RESEARCH · 2025
Translating Sovereignty: Early Twentieth-Century Tibet Conventions between Britain and China
Ling-Wei Kung
Revue d’Études Tibétaines 78 (June) (2025): 186–221.
DOI not listed in the supplied full text.
Research summary
Focusing on British–Qing negotiations concerning Tibet in the early twentieth century, this article examines how “sovereignty,” “suzerainty,” and the Chinese term zhuquan acquired contested meanings through translation. Diplomatic misunderstandings and deliberate choices of terminology shaped negotiations, including the omission of sovereignty and suzerainty from the final 1906 convention. The study follows the interaction of legal concepts, imperial politics, and newspaper circulation to show how international law and China’s changing world order were produced through concrete disputes rather than simply imported as settled Western ideas.
This summary is prepared from the full article; consult the PDF for the original abstract and complete argument.
Main contributions
- Reconstructs the political stakes of translating sovereignty and suzerainty.
- Explains treaty wording through negotiations and competing imperial interests.
- Connects diplomatic archives, legal concepts, and the circulation of public discourse.
Citation
Kung, Ling-Wei. “Translating Sovereignty: Early Twentieth-Century Tibet Conventions between Britain and China.” Revue d’Études Tibétaines 78 (June) (2025): 186–221.
Why did translating “sovereignty” become a diplomatic dispute?
