Questions on the Reading

Week 13

Introduction to "The Search for an East Asian Modernity."

In the 1910s, Chinese intellectuals sought to rid of everything they considered obstructive remnants of traditional society, and pursued a new, superior, modern culture. The brutal slaughter on the battlefields of the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 signaled to some the end of Western imperialist domination. The Treaty of Versailles of 1919, which recognized Japanese claims to a former German protectorate, led to virulent protests by Chinese intellectuals in Beijing on May 4, 1919. The May Fourth Movement, named after these protests, capitalized on this disappointment with Western culture and explored alternative modernities. Some prominent members of this movement founded the Chinese Communist Party in July 1921. It was this Communist Party that established a firm basis in the northern loess plateaus of Yenan, from which it battled occupying Japanese troops during the Second World War and thereafter the Nationalist armies of Chiang Kai-shek, to found the People's Republic of China on October 1, 1949. (Note that this first edition of the Sources of Chinese Tradition was published in 1960, when the People's Republic was only a decade old.)

Japanese imperial expansionism began as an integral part of nation building of the late Meiji period. First, Hokkaid_ was occupied, Okinawa became a prefecture, and the Kiriles were annexed. In 1894, the Japanese army drove Chinese imperial troops out of Korea and took possession of the Liaodong peninsula on the Chinese mainland. With the subsequent Treaty of Shimonoseki (1895), the Japanese government claimed the islands of Taiwan and the Pescadores. In the war with Russia, ten years later, Japan took possession of part of Manchuria, as well as of the southern half of the island of Sakhalin, and it turned Korea into a full-scale colony. During the First World War, the Japanese government joined forces with the Allies in an attempt to acquire Germany's colonial territories in Asia and the Pacific. Thus, even before Japanese expansion moved deeper into China during the 1930s, the modern Japanese state had added considerably to the empire. The most aggressive period of Japanese expansionism occurred between 1931 and 1945, years bracketed by the military usurpation in Manchuria and by the defeat in the Pacific War.

Support for this imperialist expansion came not just from the military but also from capitalist and industrialist concerns who saw in the colonies both new sources of cheap raw material and new export markets. Others argued that international forces were to blame. With emigration barred by immigration policies abroad and entrance into world markets impeded by unequal trade barriers, Japan, it was claimed, had no options other than territorial expansion. Yet the government preferred to justify its actions in moral and religious terms, drawing on a powerful discourse informed by both confucian and Nativist vocabularies.

1. The readings in all four sections engage in a search for an East Asian modernity. How do the different authors understand national identity? How do they define identity in relation to others (the West) and to past selves (history)? What is "China"/"Japan" and who are "the Chinese"/"the Japanese"?

2. Is there an East Asian modernity or is "the modern" inherently Western or universal?