This study offers a comparison between two traditions concerning human rights, through the prism of state sovereignty: the Western European liberal tradition and the Chinese Marxist tradition. It does so as follows. The first part introduces the distinction between false and rooted universals. A false universal forgets the conditions of its emergence and asserts that its assumptions apply to all irrespective of context, while a rooted universal is always conscious of and factors into analysis contextual origins, with their possibilities and limitations. With this distinction in mind, the next part deals with state sovereignty. It begins with the development of the Western European approach to sovereignty. The standard narrative of this development has two main phases: the initial Westphalian definition (1648) and its significant restriction after the Second World War. The main problem with this narrative is that it largely neglects what drove the shift: the success of anti-colonial struggles in the first half of the twentieth century. In light of this global perspective, it becomes clear that in formerly colonised and semi-colonised countries the definition of sovereignty is transformed into an anti-colonial definition. It is not simply an extension of the Westphalian definition, an assumption that entails a false universal.