This chapter explores the relationship between international law and the Chinese Constitution, which reflects the country’s self-positioning in the international legal order and its reception of international law in the local context. It first covers (i) the adaptation of international law in the domestic context and (ii) China’s engagement and increasing influence in the international arena. The Constitution provides a normative context to understand how international law is interpreted and applied in China. It concerns the perception of the PRC’s party regime on the content and the effect of international law and how they may be selectively adapted and interpreted in the local context to serve theprimary goals. From a normative perspective, this chapter analyzes the evolution of the Chinese Constitution from that of a revolutionary state to that of an emerging global power, with a focus on the current 1982 Constitution and its amendments in the post-Mao era in light of the notion of selective adaptation. A global power’s constitution, as featured in the 2018 amendment, suggests an effort of the PRC to pursue normative consensus with the international community.

This chapter reviews the three case studies in terms of six areas of comparison: power politics, hierarchy, peaceful coexistence, international political economy, territoriality/transnationalism, and modes of thinking. It observes a spectrum with China and hierarchy at one end, Europe and anarchy at the other, and India and the Islamic world in between. It notes how the thinking and practice of the past are as relevant in the three case studies as they are in Europe and charts out the similarities and differences among the cases, how they compare with Western IR, and how this provides the foundations for a more pluralist, global discipline of International Relations.