Capped socialization: How have international norms changed China, 1860--2007

My research goal in this dissertation is to shed light on the historicity and the directionality of China's socialization into international norms. The history of modern China's interactions with the constitutional norms of international society in the past 150 years provides an opportunity to explain the process of fundamental reorientation she went through with respect to her domestic governance and foreign policy. I examine three norm-related contentions of different times---diplomatic representation (1860-1875), territorial jurisdiction (1925-1931), and the rule of law (1997-2007)---in order to reveal the socializing effects of the international normative structure on a nascent member of the Westphalian international system.;I hypothesize that an international socialization pressure can accelerate China's socialization by international norms, provided China's dominant elite conception of regime security interprets favorably the utility of the imported norm to the political survival of the existing regime. I measure the degree of China's socialization in the three episodes by examining norm-induced changes in foreign policy and domestic institution-building.;I find that Western normative pressure cannot by itself change China's foreign policy toward socialization. The West's ability to do this is a function of internal conceptual change within each Chinese regime. This conceptual change gives rise to competition between different perspectives of regime security that significantly influences the direction and extent of China's socialization in each episode.