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Suzerainty

Rights and obligations of a dominant state

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Suzerainty differs from sovereignty in that the dominant power does not exercise centralized governance over the vassals, allowing tributary states to be technically self-ruling but enjoy only limited independence. Although the situation has existed in a number of historical empires, it is considered difficult to reconcile with 20th- or 21st-century concepts of international law, in which sovereignty is a binary concept, which either exists or does not. While a sovereign state can agree by treaty to become a protectorate of a stronger power, modern international law does not recognise any way of making this relationship compulsory on the weaker power. Suzerainty is a practical, de facto situation, rather than a legal, de jure one.

China

In early Ancient China, the various self-ruling regional polities (some being merely tribal city-states) often align under the sphere of influence of a confederacy, of which the largest, most powerful state typically became the de jure dynastic leader. During the era of the mythical Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors dynastic and the subsequent theocratic Xia and Shang dynasties, such a suzerain state would assume the "divine blessings" of Mandate of Heaven and became known as an overlord (Chinese: 共主; pinyin: gòng zhǔ; lit. 'universal lord'), who claimed superiority over numerous submitted but autonomous states known as fangguo (方國 lit. 'regional/local state'). During the Zhou dynasty, most of the states were not indigenously established, but rather were aristocrat polities appointed by the ruling Ji royal family via enfeoffment (册封 cè fēng lit. 'decreed investiture') to extended relatives and loyal allies who contributed to the overthrow of the Shang dynasty. Although China then was largely a federacy where the ruling Zhou kings only had limited sovereignty over the affairs of their vassal states, the term "Son of Heaven" (天子 tiān zǐ) has since become the title of all Chinese sovereigns of the subsequent dynasties until the Xinhai Revolution in 1912, with Classic of Poetry even claiming the king's suzerainty over all lands under Heaven:

普天之下，莫非王土。率土之賓，莫非王臣。
"Under the sky, nothing isn't the king's land; the people who lead the lands, no one isn't the king's subjects."

The unification of China under the Qin dynasty in 221 BC started the two millennia-long Imperial era of Chinese history, and the Emperor became the supreme leader of a unitary China. Although the Qin dynasty was short-lived and fell to remnant rebels of the states it once conquered soon after the death of the First Emperor, the subsequent Han dynasty (whose founding emperor Liu Bang and chancellors Xiao He and Cao Shen were all former civil servants of the Qin bureaucracy) inherited Qin's concept of Chinese uniformity and, through diplomatic power projections and trade routes such as the Silk Road and Tea Horse Road, became a prosperous empire with international influence far beyond the boundaries of China proper. The prominence of the Han empire, especially after defeating the Xiongnu Empire, Dayuan and Wiman Gojoseon, had led to fealty and tributes from numerous states in the surrounding Central Asia (then known as the Western Regions), Northeast Asia (mainly Buyeo and the Jin Koreans) and Southeast Asia (pre-Jiande Nanyue and early Funan), to whom the Chinese emperors granted titles of kingship, as evidenced by King of Na gold seal of Yayoi period Japan (then known as Wa) and the similar gold seal of Dian. Similarly, the dominance of the early Tang dynasty, especially after its annihilation of the Eastern Turkic Khaganate in 630 AD and Xueyantuo in 646 AD, earned Emperor Taizong the nickname of Khan of Heaven (天可汗 tiān kěhán) by various Göktürk nomads of Inner Asia subdued during his reign.

The tributary or Chaogong (朝貢) system under the Chinese sphere of influence (particularly within the Sinosphere) was a loose network of international and trade relations focused on China's prestige as the undisputed regional power in East Asia, and other states in the surrounding Central, Northeast, Southeast and South Asian regions also facilitated their trade and foreign relations by acknowledging China's primacy role in the Far East. It involved multiple relationships of trade, military force, diplomacy and ritual. The other states had to send a tributary envoy to China on schedule, who would kowtow to the Chinese emperors as a form of submission and acknowledgement of Chinese supremacy and precedence, and the Chinese emperors often granted gifts, wealth, blessings and favorable policy promises in return. The other countries followed China's formal ritual in order to keep the peace with the more powerful neighbor and be eligible for diplomatic or military help under certain conditions. Political actors within the tributary system were largely autonomous and in almost all cases virtually independent.

The term "tribute system" as applied to China is a 20th-century Western invention. There was no equivalent term in the Chinese lexicon to describe what would be considered the "tribute system" today, nor was it envisioned as an institution or system. John King Fairbank and Teng Ssu-yu created the "tribute system" theory in a series of articles in the early 1940s to describe "a set of ideas and practices developed and perpetuated by the rulers of China over many centuries." The Fairbank model presents the tribute system as an extension of the hierarchic and nonegalitarian Confucian social order. The more Confucian the actors, the more likely they were to participate in the tributary system.

In practice the behaviors which were collectively seen as a tributary system, involving tribute and gift exchange in return for symbolic subordination, were only formalized during the early years of the Ming dynasty due to Zheng He's treasure voyages. Tributary members were virtually autonomous and carried out their own agendas despite paying tribute; this was the case with Japan, Korea, Ryukyu, and Vietnam. Chinese influence on tributary states was almost always non-interventionist in nature and tributary states "normally could expect no military assistance from Chinese armies should they be invaded".

The Chinese tributary system was upended in the 19th and 20th centuries as a result of spreading Western colonialism and the rise of Imperial Japan after the Meiji Restoration. Previously, the Portuguese conquest of Malacca and settlement of Macau, the Spanish colonization of the Philippines and the Dutch incursions to the Malay Archipelago had already eroded the Chinese prestige in the Nanyang region (roughly present-day Southeast Asia as well as New Guinea). During the late Qing dynasty, the Chinese tributary system was gradually destroyed with Britain annexing Hong Kong, Lower and Upper Burma following the Opium Wars and Anglo-Burmese Wars; the France conquering Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam into Indochina, and Japan annexing Ryukyu Islands, Taiwan and Korea after the Ryukyu Disposition and First Sino-Japanese War. The downward spiral of the Qing dynasty over the second half of the 19th century also caused mainland China to become semi-colonized, with many of its coastal regions turning into foreign concessions that lasted through the First and Second World Wars. Most of the foreign colonies were returned to Chinese control before the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, with the last three concession territories being returned in by the Soviets in 1952, by the British in 1997 and by the Portuguese in 1999.

Since colonial times, Britain had regarded Tibet as being under Chinese suzerainty, but in 2008 the British Foreign Secretary David Miliband called that word an "anachronism" in a statement, and recognized Tibet as sovereign part of China.

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