Table Of ContentPALGRAVE MACMILLAN TRANSNATIONAL HISTORY SERIES
EMBRACING ‘ASIA’ IN
CHINA AND JAPAN
Asianism Discourse and the
Contest for Hegemony, 1912-1933
Torsten Weber
Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series
Series Editors
Akira Iriye
Department of History
Harvard University
Cambridge
MA, USA
Rana Mitter
Department of History
University of Oxford
Oxford, UK
This distinguished series seeks to develop scholarship on the transna-
tional connections of societies and peoples in the nineteenth and twen-
tieth centuries; provide a forum in which work on transnational history
from different periods, subjects, and regions of the world can be brought
together in fruitful connection; and explore the theoretical and method-
ological links between transnational and other related approaches such as
comparative history and world history.
Editorial board
Thomas Bender, University Professor of the Humanities, Professor of
History, and Director of the International Center for Advanced Studies,
New York University
Jane Carruthers, Professor of History, University of South Africa
Mariano Plotkin, Professor, Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero,
Buenos Aires, and member of the National Council of Scientific and
Technological Research, Argentina
Pierre-Yves Saunier, Researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche
Scientifique, France
Ian Tyrrell, Professor of History, University of New South Wales
More information about this series at
http://www.springer.com/series/14675
Torsten Weber
Embracing ‘Asia’
in China and Japan
Asianism Discourse and the Contest for Hegemony,
1912–1933
Torsten Weber
DIJ German Institute for Japanese
Studies
Tokyo, Japan
Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series
ISBN 978-3-319-65153-8 ISBN 978-3-319-65154-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65154-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017949201
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Cover illustration: detail from two-page illustration of Sun Yat-sen’s Greater Asianism
speech of 1924, as portrayed in the Chinese Dongya lianmeng huabao journal, March 1941
(see Fig. 7.2). Courtesy of Waseda University Library
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To my parents
S F
erieS oreword
The Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series is designed to
encourage research and writing in transnational history, that is, the study
of the modern era that is not constrained by the focus on nations. Most
studies of modern history are still confined to conceptual frameworks
that privilege sovereign states and their interactions with one another.
We believe, however, that such frameworks tend to lose sight of the fact
that human beings have many identities besides their nationality that
have preceded the birth of modern states. Identities such as gender, race,
age and physical as well as psychological conditions have long existed,
none of which is equatable with nationality. People interact with one
another across national boundaries as women, for instance, or as chil-
dren, Muslims and the physically handicapped. These are all important
identities in terms of which individuals relate themselves to one another.
Many such identities are presented as dichotomies; young and old,
men and women, sick and healthy, ‘whites’ and ‘coloured’, and so on.
This is a way to enable humans to make sense of each other both within
and across national boundaries.
‘Asia’ is another example. ‘Asia’ or ‘the East’ stands in contrast to ‘the
West’. Just like other dichotomies, ‘Asia’ or ‘the East’ is defined as that
part of the world that is not ‘the West’ ‘Asians’ or ‘Easterners’ divide
the world with ‘non-Asians’ or ‘non-Easterners’, of whom there are not
only ‘Westerners’ but also ‘Southerners’, the former usually referring to
Europeans and Americans and the latter to people in Africa. Where the
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Middle East and South America fit is not always clear, and sometimes
they are put in the category of ‘the West’, and at other times in ‘the
East’. But historically, the most influential reference point for ‘Asia’ has
been what is called ‘the West’.
It is not surprising that, just as people in ‘the West’ have developed
their identity as ‘Westerners’, those in ‘Asia’ have also been fascinated
by the question of what makes them ‘Asians’. Discourses on ‘Asia’ and
‘Asians’ have long existed, but they became politically significant in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries as Europeans and Americans aug-
mented their economic and military power, in the process also spread-
ing their ideas of the world and of history to the rest of the world. In
response, thinkers and publicists in Asia developed their own perspectives
on humanity, seeking to locate themselves in relation to the West.
This book focuses on such discourses in China and Japan in the early
decades of the twentieth century, in particular from the 1910s to the
1930s. This was the time when Chinese and Japanese thinkers, pub-
licists, and educators wrote a great deal about the meaning of ‘Asia’.
Many of them were ‘Asianists’ in that they rebelled against the influ-
ence of Western thought that had begun to penetrate Asian countries
and sought to resuscitate what they believed to have been an indigenous,
authentic tradition. Hence the vogue of ‘Asianism’. This book examines
this phenomenon and recaptures the environment in which Chinese and
Japanese writers were engaged in asserting the authenticity of the ‘Asian’
tradition.
At that time, it was a losing battle. Both China and Japan con-
tinued their societies’ ‘modernization’, which was tantamount to
Westernization. Worse, a ‘Westernized’ Japan went to war against a
‘Westernizing’ China, with tragic consequences for both. But it is worth
recalling that story today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century
when ‘the rise of Asia’ is once again developing as a way to understand
world affairs. But this time the idea of Asia’s rise seems to be gaining
more influence in view of what many consider the loss of influence of the
United States in world affairs.
It would be premature to consider such a phenomenon as more than
a temporary circumstance. It may well be that in the decades to come,
Asia and the West may both ‘rise’ or, alternatively, ‘decline’. Whatever
happens, it will be a world in which there will be far more exten-
sive interactions and intermingling among people of different regions
and cultures. More and more people may end up being intermixed so
SERIES FOREWORD ix
there may be no such thing as ‘Asia’ or ‘Asianism’ left in the world. To
comprehend this development, it will be important to go back to the
‘Asianism’ discourse of a century ago. This book will provide an essential
guide to such understanding.
Cambridge, USA Akira Iriye
Oxford, UK Rana Mitter
P
reFace
The embrace of ‘Asia’, as studied in this book, occurred in the first
half of the twentieth century and refers to the ways and motivations of
Japanese and Chinese who started to accept and utilize the newly coined
concept of Asianism as a useful instrument in their rhetorical toolboxes.
The discourse that unfolded around the neologism, called Ajiashugi
in Japanese and Yazhou zhuyi in Chinese—which I refer to as Asianism
discourse—often concerned itself with defining and defying hierarchies
regarding China’s and Japan’s place in East Asia, in Asia, vis-à-vis the
‘West’, or globally. But not all participants in this discourse prioritized
the nation (usually their own); some were less interested in the nation
than in promoting different political, social, or cultural agendas, such
as liberalism, Christianity, and democracy, while a few others were true
Asiaphile, Chinese Japanophile, or Japanese Sinophile transnational-
ists. Asianism discourse therefore was a contest for hegemony on two
different, if interlinked, levels. It was a contest for discursive hegemony
regarding the real, true, or best conception of Asianism and simultane-
ously it was a rhetorical expression of the ideological or pragmatic con-
test for political hegemony within a social group, a country, or a region,
or in the world.
As this book aims to demonstrate, Asianism understood as a political
concept played an important role in facilitating this contest within and
between China and Japan in the first decades of the twentieth century
and particularly from 1912 to 1933, when Asianism discourse peaked in
the transnational Sino-Japanese public sphere. Of course, there were also
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