For a long time, China has supported international norms and laws as a foundation of conducting contemporary international relations. As early as in November 1950, the PRC sent General Wu Xiuquan to the UN headquarters in New York, revealing and condemning the US aggression on Taiwan and Korea, by citing the United Nations Charter.

In 1954, China, in partnership with India, as well as with Myanmar, first proposed the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence while concluding the Panchsheel Treaty with India on April 29 in Beijing. Even since then, the Five Principles have been widely accepted as a norm of contemporary international relations. China has not only promoted the notion of conducting inter-state relations through diplomacy, with a focus on equality and fairness, but has also created the set of Five Principles as its major contribution to the norms of handling international relations.

Since the founding of the PRC six and a half decades ago, China has championed the UN Charter, as this Charter, in advocating for peace, non-aggression and development, has been the source of all international public laws in the post-colonial age. As a former victim of imperialism and colonialism, China and all other formerly suppressed countries would enjoy a fair world as protected by the UN institution. While sticking to the model of UN-based collective security and widest possible multilateralism, those former empires and colonizers shall also be better off through treating small and weak countries on an equal footing.

Though China advocates advancing national interests and international relations with international norms and laws as a priority, a number of its own legitimate sovereign interests have not yet been properly respected. In fact, among all major countries, China is still the only one whose fundamental national interests in sovereignty and territorial integrity have not been fully attained. For instance, the Chinese mainland has not yet reunified with Taiwan, not has China fully retained the Diaoyu Islands, despite the fact that it is a WWII victor over imperialist Japan, which invaded China and stole these islands around 1894-1895. Additionally, Vietnam, the Philippines, and other neighbors have occupied some of the Chinese islands and islets in the South China Sea since the 1970s, which they used to admit, explicitly or implicitly on numerous occasions as having belonged to China. Frankly speaking, external factors, especially the American intervention, have complicated these cases even more.

This indicates that modern international norms and laws, such as the principle of non-aggression, have not been fully respected and implemented in reality. For Cold War interests, the US intervened in the Taiwan issue, deploying armed forces and nuclear weapons on Taiwan before 1979, thus seriously violating the UN Charter. Though Washington has normalized relations with Beijing since 1979, it has continued to sell weapons to Taiwan, as well as making and placing its domestic law, the Taiwan Relations Act, above international law. By “reverting” the Diaoyu Islands to Japan in 1972, the US has disregarded the Cairo Declaration and Potsdam Proclamation. In addition, President Obama claimed in his April 2014 Japan tour that the US-Japan Security Treaty of 1960 is applicable to this issue. With the Americans breaching international norms and laws, Japan has become more emboldened in challenging China’s sovereign interest. Similarly, Vietnam and the Philippines have ventured to provoke Chinese sovereign interests in the South China Sea, by taking advantage of Obama’s “rebalancing” strategy.