The Politics of Imagining Asia: Empires, Nations, Regional and Global Orders

Wang Hui

Translation by Matthew A. Hale

Following the recent trends of globalization and regionalization, the idea of Asia has been revived in political, economic, and cultural fields. This essay examines some of the multiple uses of the idea of Asia in modern East Asian and especially Chinese history. It consists of four parts. Part One discusses how the idea of Asia developed from modern European history, especially the nineteenth century European narrative of "World History," and points out how the early modern Japanese "theory of shedding Asia" derived from this narrative. Part Two studies the relationship between the idea of Asia and two forms of Narodism against the background of the Chinese and Russian revolutions. One, exemplified by Russian Narodism, attempted to use Asian particularity to challenge modern capitalism; the other, represented by Sun Yat-sen, attempted to construct a nation-state on the basis of a socialist revolutionary program, and to develop agricultural capitalism under the particular social conditions of Asia. Part Three considers the differences and tensions between the "Great Asianism" of Chinese revolutionaries such as Sun and the Japanese idea of Toyo (East Asia), and discusses the need to overcome the categories of nation-state and international relations in order to understand the question of Asia. Part Four discusses the need to go beyond early modern maritime-centered accounts, nationalist frameworks, and Eurocentrism in reexamining the question of Asia through historical research by focusing on the particular legacies of Asia (such as the tributary system) and the problems of "early modernity."

The “new empire” that has re-emerged in the “war on terror” follows naturally upon the heels of neoliberal globalization. The latter seeks to restructure various social traditions according to neoliberal market principles such as the legal protection of private property, the state’s withdrawal from the economic sphere, and the transnationalization of productive, commercial, and financial systems. The former uses the violence, crises, and social disintegration caused by the processes of neoliberal globalization as pretenses to reconstruct a military and political “new empire”. These two apparently different discourses cooperate to knit together military alliances, economic associations, and international political institutions in the construction of a total order at all levels– political, economic, cultural, and military. That new order may, therefore, be called a “neoliberal empire/ imperialism”.

In his article “Why Europe Needs a Constitution,” Habermas argues that it is necessary to organize nation-states into a unified political community in order to uphold the European social model and its modern achievements (Habermas 2001). In order to defend the European way of life in terms of welfare, security, democracy and freedom, Habermas proposes three major tasks in the construction of a “post-national democracy”: to form a European civil society, to build a Europe-wide political public sphere, and to create a political culture which all citizens of the European Union would be able to share. He recommends that Europe apply to itself “as a whole, ‘the logic of the circular creation of state and society that shaped the modern history of European countries’ ” so as to establish a unified constitution by popular referendum. A Europe formed according to these three main tasks resembles a super state or empire: its component societies retain their own characteristics and autonomy to a certain degree, but on the other hand it has unified institutions that carry out governmental functions, including a unified parliamentary and legal system, and it is supported and safeguarded by a historically formed civil political culture and social system.

Mirroring the progress and crisis of Europe’s unification is a two-fold process taking place in Asia. On the one hand is the concentration and expansion of a new kind of power network with the USA as its center. For instance, in the Afghanistan War, many Asian countries actively participated in the US-centered war alliance for their own particular economic or political reasons. On the other hand consider the advance of Asian regional cooperation following the 1997 financial crisis. In June 2001, China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan founded the “Shanghai Cooperation Organization,” and in November 2001 China reached an agreement with the ten countries of ASEAN sign a free trade agreement in ten years. This plan rapidly expanded from “10 plus 1” to “10 plus 3” (ASEAN plus China, Japan and Korea), eventually to “ 10 plus 6” (ASEAN plus China, Japan, Korea, India, Australia, and New Zealand). A Japanese news agency published an article saying that “If the unification of Asia accelerates […] the sense of distance between Japan and China will disappear naturally in the process of regional unification; eventually, based on the first occasion of regional negotiation excluding the United States –-a conference that joins ASEAN and the summit of Japan, China, and Korea, […] Japan and China may achieve an ‘Asian version of the reconciliation between France and Germany’” (Nishikyo 2002). Since the views of China, Japan, and the ASEAN countries on regional progress are not entirely consistent, the expansion of this regional plan (the addition of India, Australia and New Zealand bring the membership to sixteen) indicates not so much the spread of the idea of Asia as the product of the power dynamics among the region’s various nation-states.

ASEAN + 3

The course of Asian regional integration includes many complex, contradictory features. On the one hand, in the name of the region or “Asia” it appeals to supra-national interests, but on the other hand, it incorporates nation-states into a larger, protective community. On the one hand, this regionalism includes the intent to challenge global hegemony through constructing regional autonomy, but on the other hand, it is the product of global market relations under “new imperial” dominance. From a historical perspective, the discussion of “Asia” is not an entirely new phenomenon. In the early modern wave of nationalism we encountered two sharply opposed visions of Asia: the colonialist vision developed from Japan’s “continental policy,” and the Asian social revolution vision centered on national liberation and socialist movements. The former constructed the idea of Asia (Yazhou or Toyo) based on the binary between East and West, whereas the latter discussed the issue of nation from an internationalist perspective. Discussion of Asia, therefore, cannot avoid reviewing the early modern colonialist and nationalist movements.

I Asia and Toyo: Questions of Derivation

Historically speaking, the idea of Asia is not Asian but, rather, European. In 1948, Takeuchi Yoshimi wrote in an article called “What is modernity?”: “[If we want to] understand East Asia (Toyo), [we must appreciate that] what constitutes Asia are European factors existing in Europe. Asia is Asia by dint of its European context” (Takeuchi 2005:188). This view can also help us to explain Fukuzawa Yukichi’s negative way of defining Asia, i.e. through his call to “shed Asia” [datsu-a] (Maruyama 1997:9-11). Scholars have various opinions about the role of “On Shedding Asia” (datsu-a ron) (published March 16th, 1885) in the development of Fukuzawa’s thought. As I see it, however, the important question is why the slogan developed from this article, “shed Asia and join Europe” (datsu-a nyu ou) (although Fukuzawa never actually used the words “join Europe”), became a recurring theme of modern Japanese thought. In the framework of “On Shedding Asia,” the notion of Asia included two levels. First, Asia referred to a region with a high degree of cultural homogenization, i.e. Confucian Asia. Second, the political meaning of “shedding Confucianism” was dissociation from China-centered imperial relations and construction of a European-style nation-state oriented towards “freedom,” “human rights,” “national sovereignty,” “civilization,” and “independent spirit.” In the context of the continuous expansion of “the state,” this new political form and its power relations, “Asia” was fundamentally negated as a cultural and political model opposed to the nationalist vision of modernization. According to the logic of Takeuchi’s comment that “Asia is Asia by dint of its European context,” the notion of Asia’s essence implied by Fukuzawa’s proposal to “shed Asia,” e.g. Confucianism and its social system, is actually internal to European thought. If “what constitute Asia are European factors existing in Europe,” the birth of “Asia” must result from Asia’s negation of itself. In this sense, Fukuzawa’s proposal to “shed Asia” and Takeuchi’s proposal both derive from the nineteenth century European conception of “world history.”

Fukuzawa on Japan's 10,000 yen banknote

Just as European self-consciousness required knowledge of its “outside,” “shedding Asia” was a way of forming self-consciousness based on differentiating Japan from Asia. From the perspective of “shedding Asia,” this proposal of early modern Japanese particularism, in fact derived from early modern European historical consciousness. In other words, Japanese particularism derived from European universalism. In the words of Karl Jaspers, “Dissociation from Asia was part of a universal historical process, not a particularist European gesture towards Asia. It took place within Asia itself. It was the path of humanity and the true path of history.” He continues:

Greek culture seems to be a phenomenon of the Asian periphery. Europe disengaged from its Asian mother when it was not yet mature. A problem emerges: at which step, which time, and which place did this rupture occur? Could Europe get lost in Asia again? Is there a lack of consciousness in the depths of Asia? Does its degradation equal a lack of consciousness?

If the West emerged from the Asian matrix, its emergence appears to be a bold movement in the liberation of human potential. This movement entails two risks: first, Europe could lose its spiritual basis; second, as soon as the West becomes conscious, it continually risks falling back into Asia.

However, if the risk of falling back into Asia were actualized today, this risk would be actualized under the conditions of new industrial technology that would transform and destroy Asia. Western freedom, individualism, many Western categories, and enlightened consciousness would be abandoned, and they would be replaced by Asia’s eternal characteristics: its existing forms of despotism, its fatalistic tranquility, its lack of history or volition. Asia would be the enduring world influencing the totality. It is older than Europe and, moreover, it includes Europe. All that derives from Asia and must return to Asia is temporary. […]

Asia has become a principle of depth. When we objectively analyze it as a historical phenomenon, it disintegrates. We cannot treat its opposing term, Europe, as a transcendental entity, so Eurasia becomes a dreadful specter. Only when we treat them as the epitome of certain historically specific, ideationally coherent things, rather than as a perception of the whole, then they become a determinate language of depth, and a code representing truth. Eurasia, however, is a code coexisting with the whole of Western history [Jaspers 1989:82-3].

If “shedding Asia” is not the premise for Japanese particularism but rather a particular step in Europe’s universal progress, what kind of European thought gave rise to this “universal progress”?

Eurasia relief map

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the European Enlightenment and colonial expansion provided conditions for the development of a new system of knowledge. Historical linguistics, race theory, modern geography, political economy, theories of state, legal philosophy, the study of religion, and historiography all rapidly developed hand in hand with the natural sciences and constructed a new worldview in every aspect. The notions of Europe and Asia were both products of this process of knowledge construction. In the works of European writers such as Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Hegel, and Marx, [1] the core of the construction of this European notion of Asia had the following characteristics: multi-national empires as opposed to European modern or monarchical states; political despotism as opposed to European modern legal and political systems; and nomadic and agrarian modes of production completely different from European urban and commercial life. Since the European nation-state and the expansion of the capitalist market system were considered an advanced stage or telos of world history, Asia and its aforementioned characteristics were consequently relegated to a lower stage. In this context, Asia was not only a geographic category, but also a form of civilization: Asia represented a political form defined in opposition to the European nation-state, a social form defined in opposition to European capitalism, and a transitional stage between prehistory and history proper. Throughout most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, discourse on Asia was embedded within a universalist narrative about European modernity that defined the apparently opposed historical blueprints of both colonists and revolutionaries. The three central themes and keywords of this narrative were empire, nation-state and capitalism (or market economy).

In many nineteenth century European texts on history, philosophy, law, state, and religion, Asia was presented as the “center” of all nations in the world and the “starting point” of world history. But in the framework of “shedding Asia”, the Confucianism of China was regarded as the “source of history”. This view of “source” or “starting point” arose from a double need that required both connection and breaking away. From the discovery by historical linguists of the connection between European languages and Sanskrit, we could examine how a political economist like Hegel would connect this linguistic discovery with nineteenth-century European racial theories and state theories so as to define “Asia as the starting point of history”:

It is a great discovery in history—as of a new world—which has been made within rather more than the last twenty years, respecting the Sanskrit and the connection of the European languages with it. In particular, the connection of the German and Indian peoples has been demonstrated, with as much certainty as such subjects allow of. Even at the present time we know of peoples which scarcely form a society, much less a State, but that have been long known as existing…. In the connection just referred to, between the languages of nations so widely separated, we have a result before us, which proves the diffusion of those nations from Asia as a center, and the so dissimilar development of what had been originally related, as an incontestable fact [Hegel 1899:60].

Asia must, therefore, meet two conditions in order to constitute the “starting point” of world history. First, Asia and Europe must be two correlated organic parts of the same historical process. Second, Asia and Europe must occupy two drastically different stages of this historical continuum, and the main standard for evaluating these stages must be “the state.” The reason Asia marked the “starting point” or prehistorical stage in Hegel’s view was that it still lacked states and had not yet formed historical subjects. In this sense, when Asian regions complete the transition from traditional empires to “states,” from agrarian or pastoral to industrial or commercial modes of production, from village to urban or “civil society” forms of organization, then Asia would no longer be Asia.

Because his account of civil society, market, and commerce derives from the Scottish school of political economy, Hegel’s notion of a despotic Asia is linked to a certain economic system. If we contrast Hegel’s historical philosophical account of the four stages—the Orient, Greece, Rome and the Teutonic peoples, with Adam Smith’s delineation, from the perspective of economic history, of four historical stages—hunting, pastoral, agricultural, and commercial, it is not difficult to discover internal relations between Hegel’s historical description centered on political forms and Smith’s historical stages centered on productive forms. Smith treats the development from agricultural society to commercial society as the transition from European feudal society to modern market society. Thereby he internally connects the ideas of modern era, commercial era and European society in the form of a historical narrative. The model of market movement that he describes is an abstract process: the discovery of the Americas, colonialism and class differentiation are all presented as an economic process of endless market expansion, labor division, technology advancement, rise of tax and wealth. A kind of narrative on the circulative movement of the world market is thus established through this formalist narrative method. This method regards the market mode as both the result of historical development and the inner law of history; here the concrete spatial relationship of colonialism and social differentiation is transformed into a temporal process of production, circulation, and consumption. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith’s division of four historical stages corresponds to a taxonomy of specific regions and peoples. When describing the “nations of hunters, the lowest and rudest state of society,” for example, he mentions “the native tribes of North America;” when discussing “nations of shepherds, a more advanced state of society,” he names his contemporary Tartars and Arabs as examples; when describing “[nations of husbandmen,] a yet more advanced state of society,” he turns backwards to ancient Greece and Rome (in a previous chapter he also mentions Chinese agriculture). As for commercial society, he refers to Europe which he calls “civilized states.” (Smith 1976:689-92). In Hegel’s vision, all these issues were incorporated into a political framework focusing on the state. The reason “nations of hunters” were “the lowest and rudest” form of society was that the scale of their communities was too small to produce the political division of labor necessary for state formation. In Gellner’s words, “for them, the question of the state, of a stable specialized order-enforcing institution, does not really arise” (Gellner 1983:5). Hegel’s narrative of world history therefore explicitly excludes North America (characterized by hunting and gathering) and situates the Orient at the starting point of history. If Smith divides history into various economic or productive modes, then Hegel nominates historical stages according to region, civilization, and state structure, but both correlate mode of production or political form with specific places (Asia, the Americas, Africa, and Europe), and both organize these places within a chronological narrative.

The notions of Asia or China articulated by Montesquieu, Hegel, Marx, and recently Fukuyama, all developed through comparative description of civilizations. In order to construct Asia as this particular type of civilization in contrast with European civilization, it was necessary to elide its internal development and change; even the history of conflicts between northern and southern Chinese ethnic groups (i.e. what European writers called the conquering of China by the “Tartars” and vice versa) was not regarded as changes in “historical forms”. In the words of Montesquieu: “[T]he laws of China are not destroyed by conquest. Their customs, manners, laws, and religion [were] the same thing” (Montesquieu 1914). In this culturalist horizon, Asia does not have history or the historical conditions or impetus for producing modernity. The heart of this modernity is the “state” and its legal system, its urban and commercial way of life, or its mechanism for economic and military competition based on nation-states. Perry Anderson wrote In critiquing European notions of the “Asiatic mode of production” and its “despotism”, Perry Anderson pointed out that the concept of “despotism”, from its origins was an outsider’s appraisal of “the Orient.” As far back as ancient Greece, Aristotle had claimed that by their very nature barbarians are more servile than Greeks, and Asians are more servile than Europeans; hence they endure despotic rule without protest [Anderson 1974:463]. [2]

Early modern European notions of Asian state structures were produced through the long history of the conflict of European states with the Ottoman Empire. Machiavelli’s The Prince first pitted the Ottoman state against European monarchies, arguing that the Ottoman monarchical bureaucratic system was categorically different from all European state systems. Similarly, Bodin, often regarded as the first European theorist of sovereignty, also contrasted European “royal sovereignty” with Ottoman “lordly power” (Anderson 1974:397). With the nineteenth century expansion of European colonialism, this contrast eventually mutated into the contrast between European nation-states and Asian empires, to such an extent that today it is difficult to recognize that the “despotism” or “absolutism” we associate with Asia in fact derives from European generalizations about the Ottoman Empire (1974:493). In this perspective, early modern capitalism is the product of Western Europe’s unique social structure, and there is a necessary or natural relation between capitalist development and the system of nation-states, with feudal states as their historical precondition. Under the influence of this conception of history, imperial systems (vast, multi-ethnic empires such as the Ottoman, Chinese, Mughal, and Russian systems) are viewed as the political form of Oriental despotism incapable of producing the political structure necessary for the development of capitalism (1974:400, 412). It was this notion of despotism derived from descriptions of empire that made it possible for later generations to contrast Europe with Asia in terms of political categories (democratic Europe vs. authoritarian Asia), and that made it possible for Fukuzawa and his successors to contrast Japan with Confucian China through the theory of “shedding Asia.”

The idea of Asia in early modern European thought was always closely connected with the vast territory and the complex ethnicity of an empire, as contrasted with the republican system of Greece and European monarchy—in the wave of nationalist movements in the nineteenth century, republican system or feudal monarchy existed both as predecessors of the nation-state and as political forms distinct from that of any other region. In other words, despotism became closely associated with the idea of vast empire in the transition from feudal state to nation-state. The category of “state”, opposed to empire, therefore acquired its superiority in value and in history. European thinkers such Montesquieu firmly negated some relatively positive description of politics, law, customs, and culture in China by some priests (such description had been the base of the European Enlightenment views of China, particularly those by Voltaire and Leibniz). They proceeded to summarize the political culture of China as “despotism” and “empire”. According to the classic description since Montesquieu, the major characteristics of an empire are: the sovereign monopolizes the distribution of property with his military power, thereby eliminates aristocracy that could balance the sovereign’s power and blocks the growth of the nation-state. [Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws: 126-9]. If we analyze this European notion of despotic empire of mixed ethnicity and vast territory by contextualizing it in the self-understanding of early modern Japan, we discern the foundation of two ideas—the contrast between a Japan with a single ethnicity, mutating from feudalism to a modern state, and a multi-ethnic China, trapped in Confucian empire systems; and the proposition of so-called “turning down the friends of Asia”. 　

The early modern Japanese idea of “Asia” was also founded on this sort of European-style culturalism. In Maruyama Masao’s words, “it reflected Japan’s rapid process of westernization following the Meiji period, for the cultural and political path formed through the confluence of statism and post-Meiji westernization was so obviously different from those of all the other Asian countries” (Maruyama 1998:8). In explaining the formation of early modern Japanese “state rationality” Maruyama points out that the sovereign states of early modern Europe were born through the disintegration of the Christian world-community symbolized by the [Holy] Roman Empire, and their international society was an agglomeration of all independent states, whereas “Japan was the opposite; it began to develop a nation-state only after it had been forced into this international society” (Maruyama 1997:146). This is why the early modern Japanese notion of “equality among states” developed through a struggle against the hierarchical Confucian notions of “differentiating between barbarian and civilized” (yi xia zhi ban) and “expelling barbarians” (rangxia lun). According to this contrast between the principle of formal equality in European international law and the Confucian idea of “expelling barbarians,” early modern Japanese expansionism can be explained as a result of lacking European-style “state rationality” or as a product of Confucianist “expelling barbarians”. Maruyama argues that in Fukuzawa:

Internal liberation and external independence were understood as a single problem. According to this logic, individualism and statism, statism and internationalism achieved a splendid balance – this was indeed a fortunate moment. However, the harsh realities of the international context soon shattered this balance [Maruyama 1997:157].

The notion of “expelling barbarians” paved the way for the modern state’s expansion and exclusion, but if that is all, then the tragedy of early modern Japan is a tragedy of “incomplete westernization” or “incomplete modernization” rather than a tragedy of Japanese modernity itself.

In a later article explaining the notion of “state rationality,” Maruyama wrote:

“State rationality” goes beyond the stage of absolute sovereignty to an age of coexistence among all modern sovereign states. According to the principles of international law, these modern sovereign states establish diplomatic relations and pursue their state interests through means such as treaties, alliances, and war. This sort of “international community” seems to have already taken shape in seventeenth century Europe, where it was called the Western State System. “State rationality” developed under the twin pillars of the principle of equality among sovereign states and the balance of powers [1997:160].

Japan’s 1874 invasion of Taiwan, however, and its 1894 invasion of Korea both appealed to European international law and its notion of formal equality among sovereign states. Should we interpret these actions within a framework of “the decadence of state rationality,” or should we interpret them within a process of seeking or forming this European “state rationality”? There is no real contradiction between such imperialist actions and the embrace of the notion of sovereign equality in order to cast off the imperial Chinese tribute system or hierarchical relations. Rather than explaining this problem through a binary opposition between tradition and modernity or xenophobia [“barbarian-expulsionism”] and international equality, we would do better to consider the derivativeness of Japan’s early modern nationalism, colonialism, and Asianism. That is, we should examine early modern Japanese expansionism within its “European context.”

According to the classic model of nationalism forged in the French Revolution, the nation-state is the basic precondition for the individual as unit of power (i.e. the citizen). Without this political community, without the precondition of national uniformity, it would be impossible to establish the individual as a juridical subject. As European writers have asked over and again:

Will a free Europe take the place of monarchical Europe? The wars against other monarchies undertaken to defend the fruits of the [French] Revolution quickly became a liberatory mission involving annexation of other countries’ territories. […] The revolution and the empire tried to incite other nations to overthrow their monarchs in the name of liberty, but this expansionism eventually drove these peoples to unite with their traditional monarchies in opposition to France [Gerbet 1989:12].

Here the key issue is that, on the one hand, the bourgeois nation-state and its individualist notion of citizenship were political paths to abandon the hierarchy of aristocratic systems and ancient empires, but, on the other hand, they were the best political forms for the expansion of capitalism (especially the formation of national markets, the expansion of overseas markets, and the system of private property), and this expansion was never limited to borders of nation-states. So even if they could have actualized the system of “rights” awaited by Fukuzawa, there was not necessarily any guarantee that this “system” would not possess expansive or invasive features. In this sense, there is no real contradiction between his theory of “shedding Asia” and the reality of “invading Asia” – both can find grounds in the “European context” from which they derive. Pointing this out does not mean denying the historical connection between early modern Japanese imperialist expansion and the political tradition of “respecting the emperor and expelling the barbarians”; my aim is to highlight how the use of this political tradition was produced under new historical conditions and relations, and to show that reflections on this political tradition should therefore become an organic part of reconsidering such new historical conditions and relations.

II Populism and the Dual Meaning of “Asia”

Twenty-six years after Fukuzawa published “On Shedding Asia,” the Chinese Revolution of 1911 broke out. Shortly after the Provisional Government of the Republic of China was founded, Lenin published a series of articles applauding the fact that “[today] China is a land of seething political activity, the scene of a virile social movement and of a democratic upsurge,” and condemning the civilized and advanced Europe, which, “with its highly developed machine industry, its rich multiform culture and its constitutions,” had nevertheless remained “in support of everything backward, moribund, and medieval” under the command of the bourgeoisie (Lenin 1977, 1977a). These observations constitute part of Lenin’s theory of imperialism and proletarian revolution, where he argued that, as capitalism entered the imperialist phase, the various social struggles of oppressed peoples around the world would be integrated into the category of world proletarian revolution. This method of connecting European and Asian revolutions can be traced back to Marx’s article “Revolution in China and in Europe,” written for the New York Daily Tribune in 1853 (Marx 1853). Lenin and Fukuzawa’s opposing views are based on a common basic understanding, that is, that Asian modernity was the outcome of European modernity, and regardless of Asia’s status and fate, the significance of its modernity manifested itself only in its relationship with the more advanced Europe. Lenin regards Russia as an Asian country, but this orientation is defined not from the perspective of geography but from the degree of capitalist development and the process of Russian history. In “Democracy and Narodism in China,” he wrote that “Russia is undoubtedly an Asian country and, what is more, one of the most benighted, medieval, and shamefully backward of Asian countries” (Lenin 1975). Although he was warmly sympathetic to the Chinese revolution, Lenin’s position was “Western European” when the issue switched from Asian revolution to the changes within Russian society. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Russian intellectuals regarded the spirit of Russia as the struggle and collision of two forces: the Eastern and the Western, the Asian and the European. In the quotation above, Asia is a category connected with notions such as barbarity, medievalness and backwardness. It is for this reason that the Russian revolution had a prominently Asian character – that is, because it was directed against Russia’s benighted, medieval, and shamefully backward social relations—and at the same time, had a global significance. [3]

The special position of Asia in the rhetoric of world history determined how the socialists understood the task and direction of modern revolution in Asia. After read Sun Yat-sen’s “The Significance of Chinese Revolution”, Lenin criticized the democratic and socialist programs proposed by this Chinese revolutionary that transcended capitalism. He noted that they were utopian and populist. Lenin observed, “The chief representative, or the chief social bulwark, of this Asian bourgeoisie that is still capable of supporting a historically progressive cause, is the peasant” (Lenin 1975). Before the Asian bourgeoisie accomplished the revolutionary task that the European bourgeoisie had accomplished, therefore, socialism was out of the question. He adroitly used historical dialectics to assert that Sun Yat-sen’s “Land Reform Outline” was “reactionary” because it went against or beyond the present historical stage. He also pointed out that because of the “Asian” character of Chinese society, it was exactly this “reactionary outline” that could accomplish the task of capitalism in China: “[populism], under the disguise of ‘combating capitalism’ in agriculture, champions an agrarian program that, if fully carried out, would mean the most rapid development of capitalism in agriculture.”

Lenin’s impressions of the Chinese revolution were based on his reflection on the Russian reforms of 1861, and especially the failure of the 1905 revolution. In 1861, after the failure of the Crimean War with Great Britain and France over control of the Balkans and the Black Sea, Alexander II initiated reforms to abolish serfdom. Two points about these reforms should be highlighted. First, they originated from pressures external to Russian society. Second, the “Decree of Emancipation” announced on 19 February 1861 was carried out under the premise of full protection of landlord interests, and the Russian peasants paid a heavy cost for Russia’s top-down process of industrialization. This is why Lenin argued that 1861 led to 1905 (Lenin 1973). From the reforms of 1861 to the revolution of 1905, the concentration of land did not give rise to capitalist agriculture; instead it led peasant members of agrarian communes to demand vehemently the appropriation and redistribution of landlord lands (Lü 2004). [3] It was against this background that Lenin linked his thoughts on the 1905 revolution to Russia’s land question. In “The Agrarian Program of Social-Democracy in the First Russian Revolution, 1905-1907,” focusing on the Russian land question, Lenin described two models of agricultural capitalism as “the Prussian path” and “the American path”: in the former case state and feudal landlords allied to deprive the peasants of communes and their land ownerships with violence, turning feudal economy into Junker bourgeois economy; the latter might be preferable for the peasants to a small number of landlords. It took all land into state ownership in order to abolish the serf system in countryside. It was exactly such economic necessity that led the Russian peasants to support the nationalization of land. In considering the relation between the Russian land reform and the failure of the 1905 revolution, Lenin concludes that under Russia’s social conditions, “Nationalization of land is not only the only way to thoroughly abolish the medieval agricultural system, it is also the best land system possible under capitalism” (Lenin, 1972).

Poster, Russian Revolution of 1905

Lenin believed that the Russian Populist (Narodnik) agrarian program was bound to lead Russia to return to a small peasant economy in which village land was divided up into small plots, and this kind of economic system could not provide the impetus for capitalist development. He endorsed the “American path” first because only abolition of medieval agrarian relations through nationalization of land could provide the possibility to develop agricultural capitalism, and second because Russia had large areas of virgin land and other conditions for the American path as opposed to the paths of European countries. The development of capitalist agriculture must involve the coercive reshaping of earlier social relations, but this could happen in various ways:

In England this reshaping proceeded in a revolutionary, violent way; but the violence was practised for the benefit of the landlords, it was practised on the masses of the peasants, who were taxed to exhaustion, driven from the villages, evicted, and who died out, or emigrated. In America this reshaping went on in a violent way as regards the slave farms in the Southern States. There violence was applied against the slaveowning landlords. Their estates were broken up, and the large feudal estates were transformed into small bourgeois farms. As regards the mass of “unappropriated” American lands, this role of creating the new agrarian relationships to suit the new mode of production (i.e., capitalism) was played by the “American General Redistribution”, by the Anti-Rent movement […] of the forties, the Homestead Act, etc. [Lenin 1972].

It was from this perspective that Lenin saw the truly revolutionary potential of Sun Yat-sen’s program. He marveled at this “advanced Chinese democrat” who knew nothing of Russia but still argued like a Russian and posed “purely Russian questions”:

Land nationalisation makes it possible to abolish absolute rent, leaving only differential rent. According to Marx’s theory, land nationalisation means a maximum elimination of medieval monopolies and medieval relations in agriculture, maximum freedom in buying and selling land, and maximum facilities for agriculture to adapt itself to the market [Lenin 1975].

In contrast, “Our vulgar Marxists, however, in criticising ‘equalised redistribution,’ ‘socialisation of the land,’ and ‘equal right to the land,’ confine themselves to repudiating the doctrine, and thus reveal their own obtuse doctrinairism, which prevents them from seeing the vital life of the peasant revolution beneath the lifeless doctrine of Narodnik theory.” Through examining Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary program against Russia’s particular historical background, Lenin concluded that “The Russian revolution can succeed only as a peasants’ agrarian revolution, and the agrarian revolution cannot complete its historical mission without carrying out nationalization.” If the main characteristic defining the “American path” in contrast to the Prussian and English paths was the nationalization of land, the “Chinese path” represented a bottom-up “peasants’ agrarian revolution.”

The Russian reforms took place against the background of the Crimean War, the 1905 Russo-Japanese War, and the First World War, so Lenin’s reflections on the path of Russia’s reforms could not avoid addressing the international relations created by European imperialism. If Russia’s land question must be solved through “nationalization” [i.e. transferring ownership to the state], what kind of “state” could bear this responsibility? Lenin wrote that:

[T[he national state is the rule and the “norm” of capitalism; the multi-national state represents backwardness, or is an exception. […] This does not mean, of course, that such a state, which is based on bourgeois relations, can eliminate the exploitation and oppression of nations. It only means that Marxists cannot lose sight of the powerful economic factors that give rise to the urge to create national states. It means that “self-determination of nations” in the Marxists’ Programme cannot, from a historico-economic point of view, have any other meaning than political self-determination, state independence, and the formation of a national state [Lenin 1972a].

So when Lenin discussed “the awakening of Asia,” his concern was not with socialism but with how to create the political conditions for the development of capitalism, that is, the question of national self-determination. Two points are worth noting here. First, the “national state” and the “multi-national state” (i.e. “empire”) are opposed, the former being the “norm” of capitalist development, the latter forming its antithesis. Secondly, national self-determination is “political self-determination,” and under the conditions of Russia and China, the necessary form of “political self-determination” was to use socialist methods to form the political conditions for capitalist development, i.e. the political structures of the nation-state: “[C]apitalism, having awakened Asia, has called forth national movements everywhere in that continent, too; […] the tendency of these movements is towards the creation of national states in Asia; […] it is such states that ensure the best conditions for the development of capitalism.” Under the particular conditions of “Asia,” only peasant-led agrarian revolution and socialist state-building could create the preconditions for capitalist development, so all reform programs opposed to peasant liberation and redistribution of land must be rejected.

There is no need to exaggerate the influence of the 1911 Revolution in China on Lenin or on the Russian Revolution. In contrast, the October Revolution in 1917 arose against the background of European wars and influenced the Chinese Revolution profoundly. Lenin paid special attention to the 1911 Revolution in the context of his prolonged reflection on the problems of state, socialist movement, and people’s democratic dictatorship. Yet two facts are seldom remembered. First, the October Revolution took place after China’s Republican Revolution of 1911. The method of socialist construction after the October Revolution can to a great extend be regarded as a response to the revolutionary situation in Asia. Lenin’s theory of national self-determination and his interpretation of the significance of revolution in backward countries in the era of imperialism were both introduced after the Chinese Revolution and were theoretically connected with his analysis of this revolution. Second, the Russian Revolution greatly shocked and profoundly influenced Europe, and can be regarded as the historical event that separated Russia from Europe. There is no fundamental difference between Lenin’s revolutionary assessment and the notions of Asia in the writings of Smith or Hegel. All perceived the history of capitalism as an evolutionary process beginning in the ancient Orient and flowering in modern Europe, and moving through the stages of hunting and agriculture to modern industry and commerce. For Lenin, however, this world-historical framework had two meanings from the start. First, the global expansion of capitalism and the Russian uprising of 1905 that it stimulated were the main forces that would awaken Asia—a land that had been “standing still for centuries” and had no history (Lenin 1977). Second, since the Chinese Revolution represented the most advanced power in world history, it clearly indicated the point at which the imperialist world system would be broken through. In the protracted debate between Slavophiles and Westernizers among Russian intellectuals and revolutionaries, Lenin developed a new sort of logic that could be called “shed Europe and join Asia” (datsu-ou nyu a or tuo ou ru ya). It was within this logic that the Chinese revolution provided a unique path combining national liberation with socialism. This unique path provided the precondition for a new kind of revolutionary subject: the alliance between workers and peasants with the Chinese peasant as the principal component.

III “Great Asianism” in the Perspective of Social Revolution

Lenin’s theory gives us a clue for understanding the relation between early modern Chinese nationalism and the question of Asia. It is worth noting that early modern Japanese Asianism was first directed at “reviving” or “stimulating” Asia, but soon it became intertwined with expansionist “continental policy” and the imperialist vision of “Greater East Asia.” Beneath this shadow, the intellectuals and revolutionaries of China, Korea, and other Asian countries could not express interest in any variations of such an “Asianism.”

A few limited writings on this topic by Chinese revolutionaries such as Zhang Taiyan, Li Dazhao, and Sun Yat-sen were produced in a context associated with Japan. For them, the question of Asia was directly related to the Chinese revolution, social movement, and national self-determination. At the end of 1901, Sun Yat-sen published “On the Theories of Preserving and Partitioning China” in the Toho Society Journal. Addressing two theories then prevalent in Japan—that of preserving China and that of partitioning China, Sun pointed out that “From the perspective of state power (guoshi), there is no reason to preserve [China]; from the perspective of national sentiment (minqing), there is no need to partition [China].” There was no reason to “preserve” China because, from the perspective of revolutionary politics, the Qing state and the people stood opposed to one another, and there was no need to “partition” China because one of the aims of the revolution was precisely to implement national self-determination (Wang 2004:65-7).

In 1924, during his last visit to Kobe, Sun again articulated his views on the Asia question in a speech, which was his famous “Great Asianism” (da yazhou zhuyi) (Sun 1986). He delineated two visions of Asia with ambiguity: One was the “birthplace of the most ancient culture,” but which lacked “a completely independent state”; the other was the Asia about to be rejuvenated. The former had inherent connections with the “multi-national states” in Lenin’s account, but what was the starting point of this Asian rejuvenation or rejuvenated Asia? Sun said that the starting point was Japan, since Japan had abolished a number of unequal treaties and become the first independent state in Asia. In other words, we could say this starting point is the nation-state rather than Japan in particular. He also applauded the Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904:

The Japanese triumph over Russia was the first triumph of an Asian over a European nation in the past several centuries. […] All Asian nations are exhilarated and start to hold a great hope. […] They therefore hope to defeat Europe and start movements for independence. […] The great hope of national independence in Asia is born [Sun 1986:402].

Sun called attention to a subtle notion—“all Asian nations.” This notion is not only Asia as the origin of the most ancient civilization, but also an Asia that contains independent nation-states; it is not only East Asia within the Confucian cultural sphere, but also a multicultural Asia. The unity of Asia was based on the independence of sovereign states. “All Asian nations” is the outcome of national independence movements and not an awkward imitation of European nation-states. Sun insisted that Asia had its own culture and principles—what he called “the culture of the kingly way (wang dao)” as opposed to “the culture of the hegemonic way (ba dao)” of European nation-states. He titled his speech “Great Asianism” partly because he connected the idea of Asia with the notion of “the kingly way.” If we compare his speech with the imperialist idea of Asia, it becomes clear that although it preserves its association with Confucian ideas such “the kingly way” or “virtue and morality” (renyi daode), Sun’s notion of Asia is not an Asia with a core of cultural homogeneity. It is instead an Asia consisting of equal nation-states. According to this notion of Asia, the inherent unity of Asia is not Confucianism or any other homogeneous culture, but a political culture that accommodates different religions, beliefs, nations, and societies. Within this category of political culture, Sun discussed China, Japan, India, Persia, Afghanistan, Arabia, Turkey, Bhutan, and Nepal, and the tributary system of the Chinese empire. Cultural heterogeneity was one of the main characteristics of this idea of Asia, and the category of nation provides the vehicle for the heterogeneity inherent in the idea of Asia. In Sun Yat-sen’s usage, cultural heterogeneity was the historical basis for a nation-state’s internal unity and resistance against external interference. [4]

Sun Yat-sen (seated) and Chiang Kai-shek

Although Sun’s speech mentioned the tributary system of China, he did not intend to affirm the hegemonic or central status of China in relation to surrounding areas. It was used to prove the necessity of the kingly way. In the context of “Great Asianism”, Sun’s idea of the “kingly way” was opposed to the “hegemonic” logic of colonialism. He believed that the tributary model contained mutual recognition of the multiplicity of culture, ethnicity and religion, in which modern states would be able to discover the cultural resource for surpassing imperialist politics. When he referred to the tribute paid by Nepal to China, he did not intent to relive the dream of great China. It was because he firmly believed the tributary relation contained equality based on mutual recognition and mutual respect. Sun supported the national liberation and independence movements in Southeast Asia. His ideas of Asia and national independence deeply influenced this region. [5] He hoped that the pluralism of empire culture could be united with new relations among nation-states so as to obviate imperialist colonization and the tendency toward high cultural homogenization. His vision of Asia consisted of Japan in the East, Turkey in the West, and nation-states founded on Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Confucianism, and other cultures in the inner areas. He said, “We must insist on Great Asianism and recover the status of Asian nations. If we use only virtue and morality (renyi daode) as the basis to unite all nations, all nations of Asia, [when united,] will become powerful” (Sun 1986:408-9). According to Sun, the culture of the kingly way defends the oppressed nations, rebels against the hegemonic way, and pursues the equality and liberation of all peoples. Sun discerned the relationship between nationalism and the concept of race, and recognized that nationalism’s logic of resistance also contained a logic that could lead to its opposite, that is, the logic of oppression and hegemony. When he appealed to the notion of race to legitimize national independence, therefore, he proposed “Great Asianism.” Great Asianism, or “Pan-Asianism” (fanyazhou zhuyi), is antithetical to the Japanese proposal of “Greater East Asianism” (da dongya zhuyi). As a form of multiculturalism, it criticizes the Japanese notion of “East Asia” (toyo) which is highly homogenized. This notion is therefore not only a vision to transcend imperialism through self-determination, but also a multi-nationalism that surpasses the homogeneity of ethnicity, culture, religion and belief.

This self-deconstructive logic is the very basis of the close connection between “Great Asianism” and internationalism. Sun on the one hand defined Asia from an ethnic perspective, but on the other hand defined the Russian liberation movement as allied with Great Asianism and providing a means to surpass the demarcations of ethnicity. He said:

There is a new state in Europe which is discriminated against by all white Europeans. The European regards it as a venomous snake or a violent beast and dares not approach it. Some people in Asia hold the same view. Which state is this? Russia. Russia is parting ways with the white Europeans. Why does it do so? Because Russia advocates the kingly way and not the hegemonic way; it insists on virtue and morality rather than talking about right and might. It upholds justice to the utmost, and objects to the oppression of the majority by the few. Hence the new culture of Russia is entirely compatible with the old culture of the East. Russia will therefore come to join hands with the East, and part ways with the West [Sun 1986:409].

Here skin color is not the yardstick but rather the socialist “new culture” after the “October Revolution,” with which “Great Asianism,” as a “mass liberation movement” of oppressed nations, resonates. If we compare Sun’s words with Li Dazhao’s “Great Asianism and New Asianism” and “New Asianism Revisited,” both published in 1919, we notice that all of these texts describe a vision of Asia centered on national self-determination and internationalism, defined in reaction to Japan’s “Twenty-one Demands” on China, and catalyzed by Russia’s October Revolution. Li regards Japan’s “Great Asianism” as a “Great Japanism” understood as a form of “Asian Monroe Doctrine”. Its substance is “not peace, but invasion; not national self-determination, but imperialist annexation of weaker nations; not Asian democracy, but Japanese militarism; not organization befitting the world’s organization, but organization deleterious to the world’s organization” (Li 1919). His “New Asianism” involved two points: “One is that, before Japan’s Great Asianism has [been] destroyed, we weaker Asian nations should unite to destroy this Great Asianism; the other is that, after Japan’s Great Asianism has [been] destroyed, the Asian masses as a whole should unite and join the organization of the world – [only] then will it be possible to join the organization of the world” (Li 1919a). What he valued was not alliance among states but rather an alliance among “the masses as a whole” (quanti minzhong); regional or world organization must be a “great alliance of the masses” premised on social revolution and social movements.

The understandings of “Asia” by Lenin, Sun Yat-sen, and Li Dazhao were closely related to their understandings of the task and direction of China’s revolution. As for Lenin’s Asia, we can clearly see a synthesis between revolution logic and the special definition of Asia in Hegel’s conception of world history (a medieval, barbarous, ahistorical Asia). This Hegelian revolutionary conception of Asia not only includes ancient (feudal), medieval (capitalist), and modern (socialist) modes of historical development; it also stresses the unique position defined for “Asia” (especially Russia and China) in the age of world capitalism and imperialism, emphasizing the unique path of capitalist development within a society with peasant economy as its main component. The state question is addressed in a double sense: on the one hand, national self-determination is sought within an imperialist international order; on the other hand, the state and its violence must be directed toward peasant interests and capitalist development. These two aspects together comprise a revolutionary perspective on Asia’s social characteristics. In this perspective, what makes Asia is not any cultural essence abstracted from Confucianism or any other type of civilization, but rather the special position of Asian countries in the capitalist world-system. This special position is not produced by a structural narrative of world capitalism, but by a dynamic analysis of the class composition and historical traditions internal to Asian society.

It is for this reason that there are extreme differences between the “Asia” defined by social revolutionary perspectives, on the one hand, and by the various culturalisms, statisms, and theories of civilization that emerged from early modern history. The former focuses on investigating social forces and their relations. The question pursued by social revolutionaries is: taking agrarian relations as the center, what kinds of relations exist among the peasantry, the gentry, the emerging bourgeoisie, warlords, and urban workers? As Mao Zedong demonstrated in his “Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan” and “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society,” these analyses of class composition are not structural, but rather political analyses made from the perspective of social revolution and social movements. These participants in revolutionary movements are not seeking to document the usual ownership ratios of determinate social groups, but rather to grasp the attitudes and potentials of various groups for social revolution and social movements. So this sort of “class analysis” is really more of a dynamic political analysis within the framework of class analysis. Political analysis is characterized by attention to the agency of subjects. Ignoring this, it is impossible to understand why, in the class transformations of early modern China, members from the middle and upper social strata could become the main forces of revolutionary movements, or why intellectuals from imperialist countries could become steadfast friends and comrades of the oppressed nations. If we analyze “Asia” from this kind of social revolutionary perspective, those generalized and static descriptions of “Asia” or “toyo” lose their validity, because the perspective of “political analysis” requires a dynamic grasp of international relations and relations internal to different societies. From the perspective of social revolution it asks: in this historical movement, who are our enemies, and who are our friends? And this question of friendship or enmity pertains to relations both among and internal to nations.

According to Machiavelli’s ancient explanation, “politics” is related to an active subjectivity or a subjective agency. A political perspective requires both the placement of conscious subjects within this perspective and the discernment of various active subjects – discernment of friends and enemies, and assessment of the direction of social movements. A “political perspective” is always an “internal” perspective, a perspective that places oneself in dynamic relations of friend and enemy, a perspective that puts the political actions of thinkers or revolutionaries into intimate relations with the recognition of Asia, China, Japan, and Russia. The strongest part of this perspective is that it can overcome the framework of statism and international relations among nation-states by discerning different political forces within and among societies. In this perspective, questions of opposition or alliance are founded not on stable frameworks of relations among states or nations, but on forces internal to each society and their possible dynamic relations. In order to illustrate the characteristics of this kind of political perspective or analysis, we may contrast it with the notion of “state rationality” (perhaps including its opposite, “state irrationality”) that Maruyama Masao used to discuss Fukuzawa Yukichi. According to Maruyama, one of Fukuzawa’s contributions to the history of thought was that he articulated a “state rationality” appropriate to the needs of his day. From the perspective of this rationality, modern Japan’s exclusionism and expansionism can be seen as results of lacking or betraying this state rationality. In other words, for Fukuzawa no politics is more important than the establishment of “state rationality.”

Carl Schmitt opened his now widely quoted The Concept of the Political with the words “The concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political.” “‘[P]olitical’ is usually juxtaposed to ‘state,’ or at least brought in relation to it,” but “equating the state with the political” cannot represent the true form of the political: “The equation state = political becomes erroneous and deceptive at exactly the moment when the state and society penetrate each other” (Schmitt 1996:19, 20, 22). His purpose was to illustrate that this situation “must necessarily occur in a democratically organized unit.” My purpose here in differentiating the political and the state is not to delineate the characteristics of a “democratically organized unit,” but to understand political practice during the era of the Russian and Chinese revolutions. In the context of social revolution, “the political” exists among various active subjects and in the self-conscious will of classes, class fractions, and political parties. These forces attempt to influence, dominate, transform, or control state power, but the state does not have an absolute capacity to encapsulate “the political” within its “structural-functional” operations. From this perspective, the equation state = political (i.e. active subjects having already become “structural-functional” factors of state power) describes not the normal situation but rather the result of a process of depoliticization.

In contrast to the analytical perspective of “state rationality,” “political recognition” during a period of social revolution is not the mode of action of political subjects (e.g. states) in a normative sense, but rather the reality and direction of carrying out a historical movement from the perspective of “active political subjects and their mutual movement.” This requires those with consciousness to transform themselves into “active subjects,” that is, to place themselves or the interests they represent within a field of political analysis, giving rise to a political summons. Lenin perceived in Sun Yat-sen’s program a link between the Chinese revolution and “purely Russian questions,” so he proposed a program of national self-determination, launching an inquiry into on whom revolutionary forces must rely, whom they must oppose, and which kind of state must be established in order for capitalism to develop in “Asia.” The political decision to combine socialism with the state was the product of this political analysis. Similarly, Japanese intellectuals such as Miyazaki Toten and Kita Ikki, based on their recognition that China’s independence and liberation was a necessary step in the liberation of Asia, and even in the liberation of humankind, either took part in the practice of China’s revolution or undertook direct investigation into the movements of Chinese society, and in this way they produced profound political analyses and energies. After the 1911 Revolution, “What Kita Ikki saw was the wretched obeisance to Great Britain in Japan’s foreign policy.” His analysis of the “theory of preserving China” (Shina hozen ron) was truly political: If Japan entered the group of six lending countries, “learning from the European countries’ [methods] of economic partitioning,” would that not be “to play the running dog, [helping to] partition [China] in the name of preserving [China]”? If one really wanted to “preserve” China, one must work towards China’s independence and national awakening, and that required drawing clear lines between traitorous warlords and the “emerging revolutionary classes.” The lending of money to warlords in the name of “preserving China” in fact demonstrated the relationship between state politics and the expansive aspirations of Japanese plutocrats (Nomura 1999:32-7). Kita supported and participated in Sun Yat-sen’s revolution, but he sharply criticized Sun’s acceptance of loans from Japanese plutocrats and his excessive reliance on foreign aid, saying that Sun failed to discriminate between “war and revolution” (Wang 2004:174-5). Here the ideal of “liberating Asia” (Sun’s “Great Asianism”) and the problems of “Chinese revolution” and “remaking Japan” generated intimate ties, and in this political perspective, not only did the abstractness of the idea of “Asia” disappear, but China and Japan were no longer monolithic, unanalyzable concepts.

Another example is Yoshino’s June 1919 article published in Chuo Koron, “Do Not Vituperate the Activities of Beijing Student Groups,” where he cut through the superficial appearance of the “pro-Japan faction” (Cao Rulin, Zhang Zongxiang, et al.) and the “anti-Japanese voices” of the student movement, proposing that: “If we want to get rid of the jinx of anti-Japanese [sentiment], the way is not to fund unrest among the people by supporting messieurs Cao and Zhang, but to [address] our own government’s policy of supporting [Chinese] warlords and plutocrats” (Nomura 1999:68-9). As I see it, this is a “political perspective.” During the second year of the War of Resistance against Japan, when the Nanjing government was forced to move to Chongqing, Ozaki Hotsumi perceived the deepening of the Communist Party’s influence and the weakening of the influence of the Zhejiang plutocrats, and he concluded that: “This has accelerated the desire for national liberation, and the national liberation movement has already become a force that is difficult for the Republican Government to control”; “China’s ‘reddening’ is determined by China’s particular complexities and its complex content; I think it should be understood as something quite different from the situation in Russia” (Nomura 1999:176, 184; Ozaki a:197; b:323). As I see it, this is a “political interpretation”. After the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, Tachibana Shiraki questioned his own recognition of China, saying: “My vision has been fixed on China’s objective aspects in an effort scientifically to grasp its various conditions, but my consideration of the crucial subjective conditions has been too shallow. How could this relation be established under these conditions? I must begin anew” (Nomura 1999:206). As I see it, this way of recognizing China through going back to “subjective conditions” is also a “political mode of recognition.

In terms of the history of thought, these recognitions of China or conceptions of Asia eventually strayed from their initial course in various ways and to various degrees. This was mainly because, in the face of powerful state politics, they could not fully implement these modes of analysis. That is, in the face of “the state,” the “active subject,” the heart of the political perspective, disappeared. This recalls a thesis proposed by a European historian: If we want to determine a central theme of world history since the nineteenth century, that theme would have to be the nation-state. While reading Professor Nomura on the thought and activities of Miyazaki Toten, I noticed that his analysis began with “Miyazaki’s two major regrets”: “First, why did he take part in this revolution as a Japanese person and not as a Chinese person?” And “Second, before devoting his life to the Chinese revolution, why did he not commit himself to bettering Japan?” Nomura then insightfully observes: “We can say that these two questions of Miyazaki’s regret were deeply influenced by the political situation during the Meiji and Taisho periods. […] [T]he basic source of this regret was the tragic sense of being ‘torn in two’ by the relations between the countries” (Nomura 1999:117). After quoting Miyazaki’s words in honor of the Japanese emperor and state, Nomura comments: “As a man of the Meiji era, Miyazaki never managed to break free from the shackles of this curse: the state’s emperor system (tennosei kokka)” (1999:165).

Kita Ikki went much further than Miyazaki: On the one hand he regarded Japan’s internal revolutionary transformation as a precondition to the liberation of Asia, but, on the other hand, he also claimed that “Our seven hundred million compatriots in China and India could not stand up on their own without our support. […] While the authorities of Euro-American revolutionary theory all take this superficial philosophical position and cannot grasp the ‘gospel of the sword,’ the farseeing Greece of Asian civilization had already constructed its own spirit. […] People who eschew armed states have the views of children” (Kita 292). Here, rather than carrying his political ideas about “remaking Japan” over into Sino-Japanese relations during the imperialist period, Kita instead uncritically imagined Japan as the armed liberator of Asia. As in his 1903 description of the Russo-Japanese War as a “decisive battle between the Yellow and White races” (Kita 78-96), notions such as “state” and “race” prevent him from making a political analysis of his own society, so that today it is easy to notice “an immense inconsistency between his ideal image of Japan as a ‘proletarian,’ ‘revolutionary’ state and its colonialist reality” (Wang 2004:171).

When Ozaki Hotsumi trumpeted an “East Asian Cooperative Community” in the late 1930s against the background of Japanese invasions throughout Asia, or when Tachibana Shiraki applied his analysis of Chinese society to his construction of Manchukuo as a “decentralized autonomous state,” what we see in their mode of analysis is precisely the equation “state = political,” and the deviation from the political mode of analysis that they had long insisted on. Political analysis halted at the gate of the Japanese Empire for different reasons. From a perspective of social revolution, this is “the statification (kokka ka) of politics,” a moment iin which the shadows of thinkers overlap with that of the very object—the “Japanese Empire” that they had earlier sought to transform.

In the visions of Lenin and Sun Yat-sen, national self-determination is a synthesis of nationalism and socialism. On the one hand, it requires the establishment of nation-states as the predetermined condition for capitalist development. On the other hand, it emphasizes that this process of state-building at the same time transforms traditional imperial relations through social revolution. Socialists believe that weaker nations’ demands for self-determination always include demands for a certain degree of democracy, and, moreover, their support for national independence movements is always linked to support for democratic forces. In this synthesis of internationalism and national self-determination, not much room is left for a category like “Asia” – Asia is only a marginalized part of the capitalist system, a geographical region that can enter the world capitalist system and the struggle against the world capitalist system only through national revolution. If we want to discuss how socialist thought relates to Great Asianism, then [we should recognize that], in the early modern context, they both have historical ties to certain forms of nationalism. The socialist idea of national self-determination is founded on the early modern European binary between “empire” and “state.” Those efforts to found “colonialist autonomous governments” such as Manchukuo under the banner of “Great Asianism” similarly employ the ideas of sovereignty, independence, and autonomy in order to incorporate Japan’s imperialist policies into a narrative of progress. The Japanese intellectuals mentioned above expressed sincere sympathy for China’s revolution and profound insight into China’s social movements, so why did even someone as insightful as Kita Ikki eventually convert to the very state system he had once criticized, even to the point of supporting policies of imperialist invasion? I cannot discuss these issues in greater detail, but two factors may provide certain explanatory possibilities: First, early modern Japan lacked the conditions for social revolution, so these keen intellectuals could not bring to fruition within Japanese society the political perspective they had developed through their observation of China’s revolution. Second, lacking these social conditions, socialist thought could not constitute the forces necessary to overcome nationalism and statism.

With the ebb of Asia’s national liberation movements and the Chinese revolution, that political perspective of social revolution and movement, that political mode of analysis capable of linking the social movements of Russia, China, Japan, and other Asian countries, eventually receded from consciousness as well. Since the late 1970s, following the decline of the 1960s social movements and the end of the national liberation movements, we entered an era of “depoliticization,” a process in which state mechanisms have gradually appropriated active subjectivity or subjective agency into “state rationality” and the tracks of the global market. As the question of “Asia” again becomes a concern of many intellectuals, we seem incapable of finding the political mode of analysis through linking different societies that last century’s revolutionaries adeptly developed through placing themselves within revolutionary history. In the present era, discussions of the question of Asia center on regional markets and alliances against terrorism, and are linked by financial security, and such factors.

IV Asia in Narratives of Modernity: Land and Sea, State and Network

Today intellectual discussions of “Asia” take place under conditions of neoliberal globalization. Above I mentioned two discourses of “empire.” One is the discourse of global empire with the US as its center and global organizations such as the World Bank, the WTO, and the IMF as its mechanism. According to Sebastian Mallaby, the formation of this global empire “would not amount to an imperial revival. But it would fill the security void that empires left – much as the system of mandates did after World War I ended the Ottoman Empire” (Mallaby 2002). The other is the discourse of regional empires, with the European Union as model, aimed at resisting the monopolized domination of the global empire. UK Prime Minister Blair’s foreign policy advisor Robert Cooper calls this “cooperative empire.” In his classification, the two types of “postmodern states” are the EU as a “cooperative empire,” and the International Monetary Fund and World Bank as [agents of] “voluntary global economic imperialism.” Both types operate according to laws and regulations, as opposed to traditional empires’ reliance on centralized power. Cooper’s vision of “cooperative empire” and “the imperialism of neighbors” were proposed in the shadow of the Balkan and Afghanistan wars. He associated “humanitarian intervention” with this new kind of imperialism, making “humanitarianism” the theoretical premise for “empire” (Cooper 2002, 2002a).

Against the background of colonialism and imperialist wars, Asian intellectuals have generally taken the East/ West binary for granted in their conceptions of history. Early modern ideas of Asia, moreover, often had strong culturalist overtones, inevitably tending toward essentialist perspectives in understanding and constructing “Asian” identity. Not only are ideas of Asia formed in this way unconvincing in practice; even if successful, do we really want to establish the kind of “cooperative empire” or “imperialism of neighbors” that can carry out violent intervention in the name of humanitarianism? How can such a politically, economically, and culturally complex Asian society form a “linking mechanism” to provide a form of regional organization different from both the early modern nationalist state model and the two “imperial” models described above? Having experienced both the cruel history of colonialism and powerful movements for national liberation, can we find a flexible mechanism that can avoid the traps of both “imperial” and statist models?

Let us begin our search with the various historical narratives of an “East Asian world.” The construction of such a world as a relatively self-sufficient “cultural sphere” is the invention of early modern Japanese thought, but there are different ways in which this world has been sketched. Nishijima Sadao described “the East Asian world&rdq