Rethinking the Concept of Sovereignty in Shanghai: From the Political to the Cultural

This talk explores how Shanghai’s historical experience of semi-colonial entanglement provides a unique vantage point for rethinking sovereignty beyond its political and territorial formulation.

In early twentieth-century China, sovereignty was perceived as juridical independence—control over territory, resources, and legal authority—and its erosion was dramatized by Shanghai’s extraterritorial enclaves. Yet by the late twentieth century, especially through the concept of cultural sovereignty, sovereignty increasingly came to signify agency over symbolic systems, values, and civilizational narratives rather than solely state power. This shift reveals that sovereignty has never been merely a state-centered absolute; rather, it is a negotiated practice shaped by transnational flows of culture, commerce, and knowledge. The Shanghai experience—where sovereignty was simultaneously fragmented, contested, and hybridized—illustrates how power operates through culture as much as through law.

In the twenty-first century, sovereignty is enacted through media representation, language, and global epistemic authority, suggesting that the contemporary arena of global competition is cultural rather than geopolitical. The reframing of sovereignty from the political to the cultural thus positions Shanghai not only as a site of historical loss but as a laboratory for understanding how nations reassert identity, dignity, and self-definition within a deeply interconnected world.

Meet our speaker:

Professor Xin Fan is Professor of History and Vice Dean at the Institute of Humanities at ShanghaiTech University. He is the author of 'World History and National Identity in China: The Twentieth Century' (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and 'Global History in China' (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). He is also the co-editor of 'Receptions of Greek and Roman Antiquity in East Asia' (Brill, 2018, with Almut-Barbara Renger) and 'The SAGE Handbook of Interpreting Chinese History' (SAGE, forthcoming in January 2026, with Kristin Stapleton and Els van Dongen). His research articles and book reviews have appeared in leading journals such as the Journal of Asian History, Twentieth-Century China, Chinese Historical Review, Global Intellectual History, Contributions to the History of Concepts, and Storia della Storiografia.

Meet our chair:

Dr Qingfei Yin is Associate Professor of International History at LSE. As a historian of contemporary China and inter-Asian relations, her research focuses on China’s relations with its Asian neighbours and the Cold War in Asia. She is the author of 'State Building in Cold War Asia: Comrades and Competitors on the Sino-Vietnamese Border' (Cambridge University Press, 2024). She is currently working on the history of Chinese seamen during the Cold War and the development of China’s ocean shipping during Mao’s era.

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