Asia After Versailles addresses an important watershed for Asian nations - the response to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. It marked the end of a conflict which, although intrinsically European, had globalized the world on many levels and stood at the beginning of a new order that saw the power centre shift towards the US and Asia.

This book examines Republican China’s diplomatic strategies and engagement, and power reconfiguration in East Asia after 1914. Drawing on a vast trove of primary sources, including newly declassified archival materials, the book offers not only a richly-informed account of how the Beiyang government conducted diplomacy at the Paris Peace Conference but also new insights into why. Calling into question such long-held beliefs that the Beiyang government was inadequately prepared for the Conference, was treasonous in urging the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, and that its behavior at the Conference amounted to a thorough failure of diplomacy, the author tries to make a case for a much more nuanced re-interpretation and re-evaluation of this critical period in the country’s diplomatic history.

Using sources in Japanese, Chinese and American archives, this text reassesses Woodrow Wilson's agenda at the Paris Peace Conference. It argues Wilson did not "betray" China, but negotiated a compromise with the Japanese to ensure that China's sovereignty would be respected in Shandong Province.

The Japanese delegation was led by Prince Saionji, the dashing "kingmaker" of early twentieth-century Japanese politics whose life spanned the arrival of Commodore Perry and his "black ships," the Japanese civil war, the Meiji Restoration, the Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War, the First World War, and the Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty of Versailles.

This book provides a comprehensive history of the emergence and the formation of the concept of sovereignty in China from the year 1840 to the present. It contributes to broadening the history of modern China by looking at the way the notion of sovereignty was gradually articulated by key Chinese intellectuals, diplomats and political figures in the unfolding of the history of international law in China, rehabilitates Chinese agency, and shows how China challenged Western Eurocentric assumptions about the progress of international law. It puts the history of international law in a global perspective, interrogating the widely-held belief of international law as universal order and exploring the ways in which its history is closely anchored to a European experience that fails to take into account how the encounter with other non-European realities has influenced its formation.

Using sources in Japanese, Chinese and American archives, this text reassesses Woodrow Wilson's agenda at the Paris Peace Conference. It argues Wilson did not "betray" China, but negotiated a compromise with the Japanese to ensure that China's sovereignty would be respected in Shandong Province.