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The Global and Regional in China’s Nation-Formation

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China’s history tends to be studied from a national perspective only. The Global and Regional in China’s Nation-Formation attempts to train our eyes to see the picture of China less as a self-contained entity, a ‘geobody’, than as part of a broader set of global and regional processes – from the outsidein. It covers the major historical problems of China in the twentieth century: imperialism, nationalism, state-building, religion and the role of history. Part I views imperialism and nationalism in China from the perspective of global and regional circulations and interactions. It also examines the changing role of history over the twentieth century from the same perspective. Part II focuses on how myth, religion and Chinese conceptions of society and polity are reshaped by external influences and forces, as well as how these internal practices themselves shape the external impact. Part III is a comparative section, examining how global processes become unique developments in China. The Global and Regional in China’s Nation-Formation is an ideal resource for anyone studying China’s history, society and culture. Prasenjit Duara is Director of Research in Humanities and Social Sciences at the National University of Singapore.

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The Global and Regional in China’s Nation-Formation Prasenjit Duara



Prasenjit Duara


First published 2009 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business © 2009 Prasenjit Duara

Typeset in Times New Roman by Taylor & Francis Books Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Duara, Prasenjit. The global and regional in China’s nation-formation / Prasenjit Duara. p. cm. [etc.] 1. Regionalism–China–History–20th century. 2. Geopolitics–China– History–20th century. 3. China–Politics and government–20th century. I. Title. JQ1506.R43D83 2009 327.51–dc22 2008028149 ISBN10: 0-415-48289-5 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-415-48290-9 (pbk) ISBN10: 0-203-88437-X (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-48289-9 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-48290-5 (pbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-88437-9 (ebk)

Contents

xi

Introduction

1


Acknowledgments

PART I

Nationalism and Imperialism 1

2

3

19

The Global and Regional Constitution of Nations: the View from East Asia

21

The Imperialism of ‘Free Nations’: Japan, Manchukuo, and the History of the Present

40

Historical Narratives and Transnationalism in East Asia

60

PART II

Society and Religion

77

4

Superscribing Symbols: the Myth of Guandi, Chinese God of War

79

Deconstructing the Chinese Nation: how Recent is it?

97

5 6

‘Tradition within Modernity’: Women and Patriarchal Regimes in Interwar East Asia

117

PART III

China in Comparative Perspective 7

149

Between Sovereignty and Capitalism: the Historical Experiences of Migrant Chinese 151

Contents

8

Critics of Modernity in India and China

167

9

Visions of History, Trajectories of Power: China and India since Decolonization

186

Notes Bibliography Index

200 216 237


x

Acknowledgments


When Mark Selden first invited me to submit some of my papers reflecting the major issues I had explored for a book in the Critical Asian Studies series, I could not imagine a simpler way to put together a volume. After some consideration and rewriting, I put together the collection in a few months and sent it in. The critical commentary that came in response from Mark might have constituted one of the major chapters of the book itself. That was over five years ago! Thus my deepest gratitude goes to Mark not only for his invitation, responsiveness and patience, but for holding me up to high standards of scholarship, clarity and relevance. Needless to say, he is not responsible for the deficiencies that remain. It has been a particular pleasure for me to get the help of many colleagues and students and several colleagues who were once students. They have seen some of these chapters in different incarnations and have been more influential in shaping their final form than they may realize. My warmest thanks go to Haiyan Lee, Viren Murthy, Anup Grewal, Thomas Borchert, Elizabeth Perry, Kapil Raj and Robert Weller. As always, Juliette and Nisha provided the warmth without which little could have been achieved. Lastly, I am most grateful to my new home institution, the National University of Singapore, for enabling me to write up the final version of the book.


Introduction


All eyes are riveted on China as the emergent superpower and we are often told that we can have little understanding of this nation without a deep knowledge of its history. Certainly many have pointed out that China has had the longest continuous history of all major states. Historians tend to think of history as the ground of contemporary developments, but if for a moment we adopt the Gestalt visual perspective, it may turn out that this history is a figure erected upon the ground of contemporary systems. Like the classic Gestalt duck-rabbit switch, whereby an image may be perceived either as a rabbit or as a duck depending on the ground of our perception, so too China may look historical or not depending on how our perceptions have been trained. In this volume I want to train our eyes to see the picture of China less as a self-contained entity, a ‘geobody’, than as part of a broader set of global and regional processes; from the ‘outside-in’. Only by integrating outside and inside can we view history in its fullness, grasp our historically global condition and recognize the condition’s urgency for our future. Of the nine essays in this volume, four were published between 1988 and 2003, and five in 2007–8 in various journals and collections. The essays are integrated by their concern with the major historical problems of China in the twentieth century, including imperialism, nationalism, state-building, religion and the role of history. My line of inquiry is distinguished by the wider angle from which I approach these questions: the regional (principally Sino-Japanese interactions), the global and the comparative. The essays have been recast to highlight this approach. The essays are divided into three parts. Part I views imperialism and nationalism in China from the perspective of global and regional circulations and interactions. I also examine the changing role of history over the twentieth century from the same perspective. Part II focuses on myth, religion and Chinese conceptions of society and polity, all phenomena that have, of course, older histories within Chinese society. I utilize a comparative and interactive perspective to explore not only how they are re-shaped by external influences and forces, but how these internal practices themselves shape the external impact. In Part III, I adopt a fully comparative framework. By examining how convergent global processes play out in China in comparison

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to India and how experiences of Chinese migrants in the US differ from those in Southeast Asia, we can gain a robust sense of how global processes become unique developments in China. The essays thus speak to each other through their substantive connections and concerns of historical methodology arising largely from the outside-in approach. They raise questions and develop approaches to the problems of the efficacy of conceptions and practices from the past in the face of external influences, including the structuring role of historical narratives, of comparing societies that are also interconnected or interactive, and not least, of hegemony and counter-hegemonic forces in society. I will return to these problems below. Much of what follows in this introduction deals with how I conceptualize the ‘outside’: the dominant global forces shaping and shaped by China and the East Asian region during the twentieth century. The decentering of national histories has recently been gaining popularity in the profession, but questions remain as to how and why it is taking place during these decades and what might be the most productive ways of approaching the move away from the nation as the ultimate ground of history. The historical event that catalyzed what is arguably a paradigm change in the human sciences was the end of the Cold War. To be sure, in retrospect many changes in the post-1945 political and economic systems were taking place in the 1980s. This is particularly true of East Asia, where the Sino-U.S. rapprochement and the opening up of China had practically been underway since the 1970s. But our understanding of systemic change was catalyzed by developments in Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and China from the late 1980s. The fall of socialism during this period led fairly rapidly to two important developments. The first was the unleashing of nationalist and identity movements that often overshadowed the simultaneous outbreaks of democratic movements in the post-socialist world. The second was the new globalization associated with the spreading power of multi-national corporations, finance capitalism and neo-liberal market economics, particularly into and from Asia. The developments in China after June 1989 were of a piece with what was happening in many other parts of the world, such as India and Russia. In all these societies, a protected and redistributive national economy and a multi-ethnic, territorial nationalism that had been built up since World War II (earlier in the USSR) was being replaced by a market-oriented economy and a dominant ethnic nationalism. I discuss these changes in China, especially through its changing historiography, in Chapter 3. In the humanistic social sciences in the West, the historical break was reflected in burgeoning theories of globalization and renewed, critical interest in nationalism, which displaced or destabilized what we might call the national modernization paradigm of the previous decades. The new theories were often underpinned by cultural or constructionist methodologies. While, again, the advent of poststructuralism certainly preceded the end of the Cold War, two developments occasioned by these changes reinforced the constructionist (and deconstructionist) perspective in my understanding of history.

Introduction

3


One was the accelerated rise and fall of nationalisms in the 1990s, as the Soviet Union and its client states collapsed and gave rise to ethnic and racialist movements. The unleashing of ever-changing if still more exclusive nationalist formations reflected the entrenchment of nationalism – ethnic, linguistic and religious – as a highly adaptive, rights-bearing and recognition-seeking ideology. The other had to do with the rapid commodification of the sign catalyzed by capitalist globalization in many socialist and socialistic developing societies. National histories of the earlier period were significantly enabled by state control of the media, not only in socialist societies but in most developing (and perhaps developed) nation-states for several decades after World War II. Through control of the media and education, these mid-century nation-states sought to mandate the meaning of many historical signifiers and control the interpretation of historical narratives. The subsequent commercialization of the media, which led to the decoupling of the sign from its historical referent, represented a kind of retrospective profaning of national history that we have not fully grasped. For instance, the proliferation of the symbols of Mao into once unimaginable spaces of consumption and circulation – even as a spirit invoked by contemporary shamans – subverted ideals of revolutionary nationalism. Similarly, the re-emergence of the figure of the mythical Yellow Emperor as the ancestor of the Han Chinese fed into an ethnic nationalism that had been less salient during the Maoist period. The violence of exclusive nationalisms, the growing power of globalizing forces and the destruction of communities and the environment – the counter-finality of modernization, or the end of the end of history – did much to shake the scholarly confidence in the national modernization paradigm. What was the alternative? Globalization theories that emphasized the current moment did not do much for historians because, by emphasizing its novelty, these theories of globalization still left us with the nationalist modernization paradigm to grasp the condition prior to this latest round of globalization. The recognition of the constructedness of nationalism and the remarkable underlying similarity of national forms across the globe obliged us to investigate the very forces that had led to the construction of nationalism in the first place. Any account of national formations would have to take account of global capitalism, and vice versa. I had for long been drawn to world systems theory to understand the most basic forces shaping society over the last two hundred years. As developed by Immanuel Wallerstein, Giovanni Arrighi and Étienne Balibar among others, world systems theory furnished several of the most important assumptions that I have made since the 1980s and doubtless conditioned the outside-in perspective that I had often tacitly adopted. While these assumptions were embedded in my earlier analyses, they have come more to the fore in my recent work. I have tried to build on some of the assumptions of world systems theory to develop my own arguments. The most important premises from world systems theory that I adopt are 1) the long-term systemic processes of integration of the world economy in

4



an uneven and unequal capitalist system; 2) the creation and maintenance of global capitalism as made possible by the fusion of territorial and capitalist logics: ‘the capture of mobile capital for territorial and population control, and the control of territories and people for the purposes of mobile capital’;1 and 3) the nation-state and nationalism as the means whereby a state or social formation seeks not only to become competitive, but to leverage its way out of the periphery of the world system into the core.2 Yet world systems theory tends to ignore factors that develop a logic different or autonomous from the capitalist economic system: the new cosmology of the world system built upon Enlightenment ideas of history and progress, the creation of a global and regional political culture, the relative autonomy of the global system of nation-states and its structural tensions with the world capitalist system (note for instance the rupture created by socialist nation-states), all problems addressed in Part I of the book. Thus, while capitalism and the nation-state have often been collusive, there are important tensions between the two systems and their organizing principles that have generated many of the major historical developments of the twentieth century. These explorations also plunge us into the Chinese historical materials. On the one hand, they allow us to see how the penetration of global practices was culturally and politically mediated by imperialist powers (in the post1949 period, the Soviet Union became the most important mediator of global socialist ideas and practices). The importance of Japan as both an imperial power and one that historically developed within the orbit of Chinese cultural and geopolitical reach ensured that this mediation was asymmetrical and that it played out on a regional stage. During the early decades of the twentieth century, the political and economic – but equally, the discursive – connections between China and Japan were so close that it is not possible to grasp China during that period without understanding this multifaceted relationship. On the other hand, global ideas and practices were hardly absorbed wholesale. They were interpreted and understood in a historical language and in particular circumstances. Regional and local, popular and elite groups engaged, selected and contested globally sanctioned forms and thus remade them into local and national cultures. When the Republic of China was established in 1912 after the fall of the Manchus, it was declared a ‘Republic of Five Nationalities’ (wuzu gonghe) referring to the Mongols, Manchus, Tibetans, Muslim and Han peoples. It was one of the first multinational states in the world, preceding the Soviet Union by five years. To be sure the Republic was a compromise to address the disagreements between moderates and the die-hard anti-Manchu revolutionaries. Nonetheless, it represented a creative adaptation of older Manchu or Qing ideas of a ‘federated empire’ with modern ideas of republicanism and nationality. Twenty years later, the Chinese socialist revolutionary experience, wrought by soldering global socialist ideas and local conditions, itself became a world force,

Introduction

5


eventually challenging the Soviet model in much of the world. The complex relationships and gaps between historical reality and these global models constitute the terrain of this book. By advocating the view of China from the outside in, I am abandoning the national modernization narrative within which much past history was written. In the Western historiography of China, the modernization paradigm was laid to rest as early as in 1984 by Paul Cohen. Cohen advocated its replacement with a ‘China-centered history’, which was certainly a muchneeded corrective. But the China-centered history itself can be easily assimilated into a one-sided nationalist perspective. The globalization hypothesis needs to grasp the ways in which historical and China-centered tendencies can be appropriated for new global-structural ends, as well as the ways in which these tendencies may reshape global forms in China.3

The Historical Globalization Hypothesis

Globalization is an emergent paradigm replacing, or in some cases subsuming, the modernization paradigm. The term globalization is laden with conflicting attitudes: in the positive neo-liberal policy prescriptions (as in the Washington Consensus) it reproduces many assumptions of modernization theory, albeit with a weak nation-state. But it is also attacked by both conservatives and radicals alike as deeply undesirable. Regardless, the emergent paradigm of globalization assumes only that overarching political, economic, social and technological forces and institutions have been integrating the world. Of course, a paradigm – and particularly an emergent and morally contested one – is not systematic or analytically sufficient like a theory, a model or a hypothesis. What I will try to do here is to articulate a hypothesis of globalization in modern history as an alternative to the nation-centered narrative. The hypothesis of historical globalization, unlike modernization theory, is not prescriptive or normative but descriptive and analytical. It highlights the systemic relationship between world capitalism, the nation-state system and the cosmology of history over the last 150 years or so, and is thus better able to account for large-scale historical forces such as nationalism and imperialism than the modernization narrative. While national modernization histories focused largely on the continuity of internal or domestic history, the globalization hypothesis draws attention not only to transnational intersections that were previously marginalized, but to the idea that the histories of nations and localities have been just as significantly shaped by an often invisible (in historical writing) infrastructure of global circuits of knowledge, society, economics, culture and ideology. Another dimension of historical globalization refers to the regional scale. East Asia has been repeatedly constituted as a region for at least a thousand years, though by no means in unchanging terms. Nonetheless, the territorial and political desires of states and militaries, economic, religious and

6



scholarly networks, the common linguistic filter for understanding the Western Enlightenment, as well as blue-prints of future empires or cooperative regions have involved the three major societies of China, Japan and Korea. Yet this regional nexus has not been deemed to be of major significance for the destiny of the individual nation-state. As such, we will need to focus our attention on crossed histories and shared cognitive structures in the region to continue to train our eyes to look at China from the outside-in. There is now much debate about when globalization actually began, with many of the contemporary globalization theorists sticking to the idea that to expand the concept beyond the late twentieth century will needlessly dilute it. But there is an equally vocal minority arguing for the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries – and some for a much earlier period, when maritime commerce and other networks linked many parts of the world together. It is important to distinguish this work from a tradition of scholarship that sought to emphasize the conditions or lack thereof of the success of capitalist modernity in China. Although this scholarly tradition may have incidentally pointed to convergent factors in global economic history, it was inspired by a Eurocentric model of linear history informed by the legacy of imperialism and nationalism. By seeking to substitute the primacy of Europe with that of China – or even seeking to answer why this substitution did not take place, this scholarship ignores the history of capitalism as global structure into which different regions were asymmetrically integrated at different moments. The more recent work of Kenneth Pomeranz, however, promises new directions in this research precisely by not taking “national economies” for granted.4 My own view of the beginnings of globalization is that it depends upon which indices are being considered. From the perspective of regimes of global accumulation which were facilitated by large-scale market integration through political means (imperialism) in East Asia, globalization was occurring from at least the middle of the nineteenth century.5 New work on the Imperial Maritime Customs in China shows, for instance, how legions of native and colonial agents spread far and wide across the empire to collect information and supply reports on local currencies, weights, measures, administrative practices, levies and the like, in order to ultimately create measurable, commensurable, standardized and marketable objects of exchange – exchangeable not merely within China but with goods coming from distant places like Rio de Janeiro.6 In other areas, specifically the globalizing activity of transforming societies into nations in Asia, which I take up in Part I, the process begins in the late nineteenth century in the context of, and/or in reaction to, the expansive thrust of imperialism. I refer to this process as ‘cognitive globalization’, because although nations see themselves as unique formations, the ways in which they cognize and constitute themselves – and are recognized as such by other nations – is based upon imitation and replication. By ‘cognize’ here I refer to tacit or unreflexive knowledge. Thus nations are constructed in a global space premised upon institutional and discursive circulations made

Introduction

7


possible largely by capitalist globalization. But this cognitive globalization does not preclude or discourage the perception of nations by nationalists and nationals as unique and singularly authoritative. The disjunction between how nations cognize and perceive themselves – elaborated in Chapter 1 – makes possible the logic of the nation-state system as collusive with but also relatively autonomous from the global capitalist system. The current era of globalization does involve a massive extension and deepening of economic, demographic, cultural, military and financial flows across national borders and new scales of interdependence. However, not only does it build on important earlier foundations, it does not necessarily lead to the evisceration of the nation-state and nationalism. The nation-state may be moving away from a redistributive model in an epoch driven by neoliberal presuppositions, but it is not declining and certainly not disappearing; rather, it is restructuring in order to accommodate and regulate its transnational connections.7 As I argue in the book, the relationship between capitalist globalization and nationalism sustains and even intensifies, in several ways, a structural tension generated over a century ago. This tension emanates from the nation-state’s dual, and sometimes contradictory, role of both enabling participation in the global society and protecting national society – or select groups within the nation – from destructive competition. The national modernization model and the neo-liberal globalization model represent two moments in the century-old dialectic between global capitalism and the nation-state system that is central to the globalization hypothesis. How can we locate imperialism in this hypothesis which has focused on capitalist globalization and nationalism? Capitalist imperialism from at least the mid-nineteenth century was responsible for the widening of global markets, but it was also tied to the nation-state and nationalism. The benefits to British or French capital were the principal impetus for creating and extending the reach of global capitalism in the colonies and semi-colonies noted, for instance, in the case of the Chinese Maritime Customs as an institution to regulate trade in the interest of the metropolitan nations. The colonial government or its agents in the semi-colonies were committed above all to securing metropolitan national interests, both capitalist and other. Kapil Raj has shown how strategic regions of Central Asia were secretly mapped during the late nineteenth century. Himalayan pundits and munshees, disguised as merchants and pilgrims, were equipped with concealed instruments and calibrated knowledge to map Xinjiang and Tibet. This cadre of “human instruments” succeeded in mapping and charting the region which yielded knowledge and control of trade routes and strategic information, but notably for the British (as opposed to the Russians or the Qing). As such, imperialism was also basically about competitive national capitalisms.8 However, the colonial space was different from the national space in that it was built upon a racist division of labor through which hyper-profits could be made. Yet the colonial space was protected from, or rather excluded other

8


national capitalist competitors in the same way that the national space was secured: through economic and military means. As I discuss in Chapter 2, racism gradually came to be disavowed in the colonies during the inter-war years, but they remained within the spheres of national domination and influence of the metropolis. Japanese colonialism in Taiwan and Korea was ambivalent about differentiating racially between the colonizer and colonized; Japan also initiated the transformation of imperialism into the de facto domination of de jure sovereign – or puppet—nations, a transformation that displaced the centrality of racial difference in imperialist doctrine.

Hegemonic Modernity


In addition to capitalism and the nation-state system, the third variable in the globalization hypothesis is the ideology or worldview of modernity, which I refer to as ‘hegemonic modernity’. In modernization theory, modernity is often treated as a historical ontology—an objective condition of society. When we characterize a section of time as a period, we assume it to be pervaded by an essence or structure – in this case, by ‘modernity’. One of the most influential concepts in the study of nationalism is Benedict Anderson’s formulation of the ‘imagined community’. According to Anderson, the possibility of such imagining is a quintessentially modern condition through which unrelated people come to perceive themselves as bound by a common future, past and present. While Anderson’s conception evokes a powerful role for human imagination, at the same time he tends to objectify the imagined community as the reality of the nation. Instead, I urge that this imagining becomes the site of political contestation of different nation-views for many, and scarcely affects many others as a frame of reference. In my view, modernity is not an essence but fundamentally a new conception of time as linear, progressive, and often, accelerating. Modernity is not thinkable outside a concept of history as linear and progressive. The manner in which this history becomes associated with claim-making (as heritage) in the present is a problem that I discuss in Chapters 1, 3, and 5; here I want to underscore the difference between being modern and identification with a conception of time. This conception of linear time is, of course, embedded in institutions and material practices consistent with the logic of capitalism and the nation-state. Thus we may think of the relationship of the three variables as a kind of collusive hegemony. But progressive temporality also has a transformative logic that reaches beyond nation and capitalism, expressed for instance through the extension of the Enlightenment conception of rights and humanity. As such, the temporal ideology of modernity is not reducible to the other variables and may also be regarded as distinctively hegemonic in its own right. Hegemonic, not only in that it dominates other conceptions, but in that it is being constructed and institutionalized.

Introduction

9


Rather than objectify the modern as a pre-existing period that fundamentally shapes and unifies our experience, I prefer to think of it in dynamic and constructivist terms. The axioms of modernization – whether commodification, rationalization, nationalization, or secularization – are, more than anything else, efforts by agents, human and institutional, to realize them. Modernization is a hegemonic project in that linear time is imposed or instituted by modernizers who seek to dominate other modes of existence in which time is cyclical, ‘backward looking’, transcendent or non-simultaneous. These efforts are powerful enough to have created something called an era, yet each of these axioms of modernity is contingent and can be negated or superseded, as we have seen by socialism, fundamentalism and transnationalization. Moreover, the modernizing project entails struggles and compromises, contingencies and irruptions, adaptations and subversions, resistances and innovations. Even in mature capitalist societies, abstractness and linearity are dominant representations of time that coexist with and sometimes obscure other conceptions – religious, apocalyptic, cyclical (such as the business cycle) or unchanging essences. Historically, globalization over the last 150 years has been the effort to circulate and institute ideas and practices of modernization related to the interests of capitalism and the nation-state. Throughout the twentieth century, the Chinese nation-state, like other modern nation-states, sought to colonize and rationalize this lifeworld by defining and creating new forms of classification and categories, for instance between the public and the private; the nuclear and extended family; religion, superstition and secularism; and ethnicity and nation-state. But while these categories may have been proclaimed at a constitutional level, historical reality continues to confound these distinctions, or at least to follow older patterns not based on such categorical differentiations. In my earlier work I tried to show how the modernizing project in China frequently came up against the reef of popular culture, which was not prepared to give up an older lifeworld. The repeated campaigns against religion and superstition conducted by the state and modernizers from the beginning to the end of the twentieth century (note, for example, the emergence of the Falungong at the end of the century) were the prism through which this stark encounter can be viewed.9 It is worth exploring whether the destruction of rural markets and ‘feudal’ rural culture in the China of the 1950s and 1960s was as thorough as the communists claimed. Older communal and kinship structures often inhabited the shell of communist teams and brigades and cadre insubordination often followed older moral ideals during this period. It should come as no surprise, for instance, that the work-point system of labor remuneration and the (inverted) class system in the rural collectives were factors in the calculus of older-style arranged marriages during the 1960s.10 In today’s China we see such non-conformity in the flowering of the religious, in the martial arts and healing practices evoking an older cosmology, in the return of older conceptions of the polygamous family and ancestor worship, in the

10



continued, multi-leveled crossings between private and public, in the inability to contain ethnicity, and in class-based demands by migrants and peasants severely pressuring the hegemonic order. The stories of Lu Xun, China’s literary master of the twentieth century, may well be read from the perspective of the tensions and costs of impacting a traditional life world that haunted the author. In the preface to the collection, ‘Call to Arms’, Lu Xun presents us with an imaginary iron house without windows – the sleeping people within it are destined to die. He asks, why cry aloud to wake a few light sleepers, making them suffer the agony of certain death. Could one be said to have done the right thing?11 In the end the narrator decides he has no alternative but to awaken them. But the question continues to trouble Lu in a later collection called Hesitation (Panghuang), which includes several stories dealing with his rural hometown. Lu is profoundly unsentimental about the village or the native place and mercilessly attacks the nostalgic, pastoral mode among urban writers. Yet in these stories he has no answers to the existential dilemmas presented by the impact of modernity. One of the most poignant is ‘New Year’s Sacrifice’, the story of Xianglin’s widow, a miserable wretch driven to death by misfortune and the systemic victimization of unprotected women in traditional society. Because of her victimhood, Xianglin’s widow is cruelly rejected by the village as an outcast, and Lu treats her death as a communal sacrifice during the New Year celebrations. Yet the one encounter between the modern, urban narrator and the widow, who asks him to confirm whether she will become a ghost and whether she will meet the son she has lost in death, leaves the narrator bewildered and stumbling, doubting his confidence in the modern world-view. In other stories from this collection, too, such as ‘In the Wine Shop’, there are moments of compassionate understanding of the value of ritual tasks that the narrator had rejected so passionately in his younger days; here, to me, the poignancy lies in the narrator’s difficult decision to ultimately reject this compassion.12 The conception of hegemonic modernity is superior to objective modernity first because it maintains a critical distance between the normative and the analytical that modernization theory cannot sustain. By historicizing the notion of modernity it draws attention to resistant and alternative trends and practices that often cannot find a name or that are denigrated as marginal, superstitious or backward in the dominant narrative so that their other contemporary meanings cannot be deciphered. At the same time, by recognizing modernity as hegemonic, it does not endorse an empiricist view in which all kinds of social formations coexist happily in our world. Hegemony has powerful effects and alternative practices that seem marginal and atavistic (even when they are creatively atavistic) are by no means untouched by these effects; these practices survive and create with reference to this framework of hegemony. Having grown up in a society where multiple temporalities continue to prevail (India), and studying a society where these temporalities were being acutely transformed (China), let me cite some ordinary examples of the

Introduction

11


intersection of temporalities. The Hindi film industry – or Bollywood as it has more recently come to be called – is a thoroughly modern mass medium. Yet the industry is constantly negotiating the different temporalities in which it becomes enmeshed. In his dynamite, ethnographic reportage of Mumbai, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, journalist and screen-play writer Suketu Mehta describes it thus: ‘When every other country has fallen before Hollywood, India met Hollywood the Hindu way. It welcomed it, swallowed it whole, and regurgitated it. What went in blended with everything that had existed before and came back out with ten new heads’.13 Plots in Indian movies often replay roles from mythologies: the evil mother versus the saintly one, the wicked uncle and loyal cousin are recognizable from the Epics. A movie playing in the villages may be named after a goddess (Jai Shakumbari Maa), whereas in the city it is called ‘Foreign mother-in-law, Indian spouse’ (Vilayati Saas, Desi Bahu).14 Indeed, the cinema itself becomes a physical site for the negotiation and conflict between these temporal spaces. If a film offends the sensibilities of the audience – for instance having the saintly woman do something unseemly – the audience is known to have become violent. There has been considerable, if scattered, work about the articulation of linear or capitalist time with other temporalities that does not conform to the modernization narrative of unidirectional change or irrational resistance of tradition. In particular, the writings of historians and anthropologists of Latin America, such as Michael Taussig and Nancy Farriss, have shown how the hegemonic conception has often been appropriated and subverted in contemporary lifeworlds. Just as we can see the conception of Enlightenment time as relatively autonomous from capitalism and the nation-state, we may also see that it cannot easily erase other temporalities.15 Several studies of recent Chinese society reveal ways in which older practices and conceptions inhabit and deflect modern ones towards local or older goals. Elizabeth Perry has shown that movements of political resistance in China do embed popular notions of rights. But these rights are not based upon the individual rights of modern citizens as much as on older, substantive issues of moral economy upon which new ideas of development are grafted. Similarly, Stevan Harrell has observed that many minority groups in Southwest China occupy two kinds of ethnic statuses. While some small groups may be classified as, say, the Yi or Naxi in the state categories of minzu (nationality/ ethnicity), this may not overlap with lived ethnicity or practical ethnic identification. Nonetheless, he shows that rather than oppose it, these ‘misclassified’ groups often utilize the state classification to their advantage. They inhabit their modern categorization as a tactic.16 With decollectivization and the decline of formal state organizations in the post-Mao period and the state’s cautious acceptance and even embrace of local customs in such realms as marriage and funerals, there has been a remarkable revival of lineage organization, genealogies, ceremonial life and ritual spaces whose physical expressions include the rebuilding of temples

12



and shrines. Mayfair Yang shows that by ritually re-territorializing and claiming ‘civil/sacred spaces’, local communities develop new identities that both contest and accommodate the power of the state and capital.17 Thus the modernizing process has not been unidirectional or total. It has been inhabited, subverted and even partially reversed by communal lifeworlds The encounter and articulation of these temporalities can be fruitfully grasped through the hypothesis of historical globalization. The hypothesis presupposes three dominating systems that are fundamentally connected but not isomorphic: global capitalism, the nation-state system, and the worldview of hegemonic modernity. While global capitalism may well be the driving force and the condition for both the nation-state system and the cosmology of linear temporality, the latter two may also be seen as reactions to the former. As such, each system follows a different logic. Thus the nation-state presupposes an atemporal presence or timeless past to sustain its sovereignty claims, embodied for instance in the divinity of the Japanese emperor or in New Life Confucianism (see Chapter 6), even as it seeks its destiny in an utterly changed future. The nation-state also claims a sovereign right often to limit the penetration of global capitalism and its influences. Note for instance how during the 1990s, the PRC encouraged the rise and spread of relatively ‘modernized’ martial arts and qigong practices – as an expression of authentic Chineseness – largely in reaction to the contaminating and threatening influences from globalization during the previous decade. The qigong movement, however, soon began to reclaim the traditional cosmology from which it had originally derived and spun rapidly out of state control. It climaxed in the rise of the Falungong, after the suppression of which the regime became more wary of such movements. My point is that such a popular movement reaching out to the past was able to rise exactly in the gap between the nation-state and globalization. While we have seen that the worldview of linear and progressive history seeks to collusively dominate older lifeworlds and other temporalities, it has frequently served efforts to liberate society from capitalism and the nationstate. Although it is often advocated by partisans of capitalism or nationalism, it also represents a body of Enlightenment ideas that can inspire and shape ideologies which transcend or negate both systems. Historically it has generated movements for abolition of slavery, civilizational ideals, transnational rights – for worker, peasant, feminist, disabled and other humanitarian concerns – and most recently, for environmental and conservation causes. In the wider systemic logic, linear historical time represents a sub-set that simultaneously perpetrates the hegemony of the system as a whole and retains its autonomy. The gaps between the three systems sustain and generate difference within and from the collusive structure of the whole. They help us to see alternate practices in the interstices of these imbricated systems, often in atavistically creative forms. These practices represent the core of what is distinctively historical and historically adaptive in a society.

Introduction

13

Methodology and Chapters


I arrived at the idea of hegemonic modernity after wrestling with methodological issues that have dogged me over the last twenty years. Several of the essays here reflect this struggle and it may be useful to identify the issues and their relationship to it. The first issue, a temporal one, concerns the role and effectiveness of historical factors in an understanding of ‘modernity’: How do historical factors – especially longer-term recurring problems in China – influence the nation-state’s modernity? The second issue concerns the problem of ‘hegemony and difference’, and is spatial: How totalizing is domination and hegemony? A third derives from the first two: Does hegemony in a nationalist and capitalist society differ from that in earlier polities? Each of these issues is also particularly relevant to understanding the relationship of the ‘inside’ to the ‘outside’ in history discussed above. These methodological issues appear through the book, but are salient in Part II. Chapter 4, ‘Superscribing Symbols: the Myth of Guandi, Chinese God of War’ offers a case study of the ‘cultural nexus’, an idea I developed in my 1988 book, Culture Power and the State; it reflects my view of late imperial China’s state-culture relations.18 As such, the essay discusses the form of hegemony that the pre-capitalist and pre-national imperial state exercised. The argument developed here is that the imperial state often sought to appropriate a popular cultural symbol, such as the local cults of Guandi, by superscribing it – that is by imposing its own version and interpretation of the image without entirely erasing other versions. The state thus prescribed, where possible, the appropriate mode of veneration. In response, local communities and groups found a way to both acknowledge the state superscription and still have Guandi symbolize and serve their particular purposes. This type of hegemony met the needs of imperial society but was vastly different from what we see in the successful nation-state. Chapter 5, ‘Deconstructing National Histories’, which was composed in the same general period, reflects a similar methodology, arguing that nationalism meant different things to different groups. Within a few years of its publication, however, I was beginning to mount a much stronger argument about the hegemonic power of nationalism, evidenced for instance in Chapter 1. The question inevitably arose about the difference between the hegemonic power of modern political formations and premodern ones. It is in the nature of cultural media, signifying practices and institutions to be open to difference; thus nationalism as a fundamentally meaning-laden ideology is subject to the same variability of meaning as any pre-national ideology. In Chapter 5, I trace the procedure whereby the multi-vocality of signs is reduced to create an ideology capable of political mobilization. I argue that this kind of hardening and mobilization can take place in prenational societies as well. While I investigated the process of how boundaries harden and hegemony congeals, I did not explore whether the new global ideologies and technologies made a difference.

14



Not long after I began to write about these matters, Robert Weller produced his electrifying work on Chinese social and political movements, Resistance, Chaos and Control, in which he developed a theory of saturation and precipitation. He argued that it was only in limited cases like the Taiping movement that a popular social movement succeeded, through ritual and political control (even using pre-capitalist technologies), in reaching saturation – that is, limiting the range of interpretations among its followers. In the process, the movement was able to precipitate meanings and transform itself into a powerful political force. Weller considered several other movements that had political potential but never were able to precipitate meanings and transmute them into unchallenged political ideology. The work of Weller and others, such as David Apter and Tony Saich, were helpful in thinking further about the soft and hard boundaries of communities and social movements. In societies with premodern technologies of communication and control it was still possible to harden or precipitate communities of identity, but it is not at all clear if the leaders could sustain the mobilization function, especially as the political community itself spread territorially.19 As I explored nationalism in more depth, it became clear that nationalists and the nation-state had to institutionalize this mobilizing function. The institutions of hegemony worked directly on a person’s growth from the earliest stages, particularly through the education system. I believe this is what Ernest Gellner meant when he talked about nationalism as a product of the congruence of state and culture. He argued that this congruence was generated by the requirements of industrial society, in which the state had to develop a literacy-based skill set required for the interchangeability of tasks (and jobs). This new skill set, taught in a common language under state auspices, produced the foundations of national culture.20 This last step in Gellner’s argument is not very persuasive because a single nation often uses different languages, and different nation-states sometimes use the same language. More importantly, Gellner emphasizes industrialization rather than competition as the critical variable behind nationalism. Yet industrialization does not seem to require the civic and historical pedagogy that is so important for nationalism. Work by John Fitzgerald, Haiyan Lee and others have shown that the mobilization of affect for the nation through the arts, literary media and sentimental education was crucially important in creating national identity.21 To be sure, there is often a gap between nationalist sentiments and ‘nation-views’ and the more systemically derived imperatives of the competitive nation-state; this is historically an enormously productive gap – or non-isomorphism – that I take up in Chapters 1 and 3 among others. Be that as it may, the consequence of intrusive mobilizing institutions led to the nation-state’s ability to shape self-formation among its citizens more than any premodern society. The state and social institutions not only played a role in mobilizing and creating the modern subject – and here Michel Foucault’s conception of governmentality is helpful – they did so in order to adapt the population to

Introduction

15


constantly changing conditions. The imperial Chinese state, such as the Han or the Tang, had the capacity to mobilize the population for military and control purposes. But it typically did so through the family and other corporate organizations, such as lineage and the baojia system of community self-surveillance. The nation-state’s new technologies of communication and education sought to ‘interpellate’ individuals as directly as possible to adapt to the conditions of ceaseless, competitive change.22 Thus, nationalism was significantly enabled by and a response to capitalism. What we call modernity is in significant part conditioned upon the role of ideas of history and progress to naturalize the nation-state’s demand on the individual. But while the nation-state ideology and technologies of governance may be more powerful and pervasive, the accelerating temporality and the destructive/ creative dialectic of capital also impose a greater burden on this hegemony, opening up spaces for difference often drawn from historical sources. The question of how historical factors come to play a role in the emergent hegemony of national modernity is also taken up in Part II. The abandoning of and attack on the mode of superscription, or what we might call a religious sphere of communication and negotiation, by the Republican state did not – because of its weak organizational structure – yield the alternative hegemonic modernity in its place. Or rather, the Republican state did not have the capacity to dominate or monopolize this ideology. It would take the communist regime to build the new society from the bottom-up. Nonetheless, the Republican regimes – especially the Guomindang – did institute many of the categories of the modern state, which continued to be influential during the rest of the century. Chapter 5 ‘Deconstructing the Chinese Nation’ engages how historical conceptions of political community modify and are modified by new ideas of nationalism, citizenship and race. Chapter 6, ‘“Tradition within Modernity”: Women and Patriarchal Regimes in Interwar East Asia’ explores the repressed history of the redemptive religious societies that, despite their massive followings, have been ignored in the modern history of China. Women played an important role in these societies, and my story shows women both affirming the hegemonic ideology and creating a space of their own that was a form of resistance. Here we have an instance of a Chinese historical tradition that adapts to and transforms the modern world. The theme of outside-in in this book emphasizes not only the globally derived transformation of China, but more specifically the role of the East Asian region in this transformation. As discussed above, most of Parts I and II consider the mutually influential and interlinked histories of China, Japan and, to a lesser extent, Korea. In Part III, I adopt the outside-in optic to grasp the distinctiveness of the Chinese transformation by adopting a comparative perspective; I consider how global forces produce different effects in China and India as well as among Chinese migrants in different places in the world. Chapter 7 compares the Chinese overseas during the first half of the twentieth century in the US and Southeast Asia, particularly in the Dutch

16



East Indies. Chinese emigrants fared much better in the colony than in the US, ironically because in the former, domination and privilege were organized not around the discourse of rights as they were in the US, but through an (hierarchical) order of communities – racial and religious. The Chinese were able to develop and maintain communities – that many were denied in the US – and this was an important factor leading to difference in the two societies. Finally, the China–India comparison. The two societies share some comparability in background conditions – for instance, both are agrarian societies dominated by what Max Weber called liturgical elites23 – but more interestingly, they both respond, though quite differently, to the challenges presented by the West. In Chapter 8, we see how different historical structures shaped the responses to the discourses of the Enlightenment and History. Although Gandhi and Mao diverged widely in their approaches to the mass movements they generated, each posed critical challenges to the hegemony of the capitalist nation-state system. The final chapter traces the paths by which the two societies abandoned their earlier ideals and accepted reintegration into the capitalist nation-state system. At a time when the entire world seems to be riveted on the rise of and competition between these two nations, it remains for us to see how their complex histories, now increasingly inter-linked, might shape the future of the world. Can the current turn in globalization, with its twin conditions of competition and interdependency, sustain the more constructive relations that have recently been built between the two nations? In this volume I have tried to understand the history of China in the long twentieth century from the perspective of the changing character of the global nation-state system in its widest sense. This system has been the organizing principle of political power in the twentieth century but it cannot be seen as a self-sufficient system in the way it was once described by international relations theorists. It has to be grasped in its relation to global capitalism and imperialism, to constitutive ideas of history and cognitive globalization, and to the historical and cultural mediation of regional dynamics. Finally, it must be seen in its hegemonic relation to more indigenous local and national developments. While the global impact has been much more powerful than national histories have allowed us to see, what is new and distinctive about Chinese developments is precisely the interaction between the global and the historical. Several Chinese innovations have emerged from this interaction, beginning for instance with the multi-national Republic of the Five Nationalities established in 1912, peasant revolution, or ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’. Can these innovations provide ways of thinking outside the logic of competitive capitalism and the nation-state system? That is the new challenge for China. We are at a time, not of the certainties of the immediate post-World War II era when modernization theories and decolonizing ideals were in the ascendance. Rather, there is considerable confusion and disagreement about the role of

Introduction

17


the nation-state, globalization and modern ideals with regard to society, development and the environment. In a fundamental way, this volume has been a struggle to come to terms with the uncertainties of our categories, moral and epistemological. My studies have developed from the insight that the world and the region have been at the heart of the nation for well over a hundred years. Much history has emerged from the myriad flows between the nation and the world; just as much history has resulted from the ways the nation has sought to separate itself ideologically from the outside. At a time when every nation faces difficulties of truly global scope, we need to break away from the paradigm that places the nation and the world in a binary or dualistic relationship.



Part I

Nationalism and Imperialism


1

The Global and Regional Constitution of Nations The View from East Asia*


While the causes of nationalism have long been studied within a global framework, the global and regional circulation of ideas, practices and institutions and the power structures that sustain and continuously reshape nationalism have been less well understood. The formulation of the system of nation-states, such as the Westphalian order or the contemporary UN, while useful in understanding international relations, is quite inadequate to explain the depth of the global and regional constitution of nations. Similarly, while Benedict Anderson’s conception of ‘modular nationalism’ – where later nationalisms are successively modeled on earlier ones – represents an original insight, it is considerably underspecified as to who borrowed what, when and why. The view from East Asia during the twentieth century shows that many internal developments in the national societies of China, Japan and Korea cannot be understood apart from the global circulation of capital, institutions and ideas. These circulations represent a processual dynamic where developments inside the nation constantly interweave with those outside, and the nation cannot be seen as the a priori ground of history. These circulations are also mediated by regional interactions that bind nations together in rivalry and interdependence. I will try to show that my conceptual formulation of the global and regional constitution of nations allows a better grasp of certain key problems of nationalism: the relationship between historical change and national structure, and the relationship between state and popular nationalisms.

East Asia before nation-states

An earlier generation of scholars identified the East Asian region with societies (China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam) sharing a Confucian civilizational heritage going back at least to the first millennium.1 More recent studies have looked to interconnections and interdependencies as the basis for identifying a historical region. In the newer conception, economic and political activities interlink a much wider East Asian region, including Southeast Asia and Inner Asia in addition to Northeast Asia.2 For the purposes of this

22



chapter, it is the Northeast Asian core of East Asia that is the relevant region. Not only were Japan, Korea and China (including the Japanese colony of Taiwan and the puppet state of Manchukuo) tightly interconnected in every sphere of activity during the formative period of modern nationalism, but it was precisely the intellectual and civilizational goals of this Confucian universe that were appropriated and deployed by Japanese imperialism in pursuit of regional hegemony.3 Within this more narrowly construed East Asia, the spread of Confucian learning and models of governance led to the development of bureaucratic structures that penetrated and regulated societies until the late eighteenth century. From the perspective of state formation, each East Asian state – like the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century West European states – had created an administrative and territorial unity that presumed a measure of cultural unification, including a common writing system within the territory. By the seventeenth century, the region was politically and economically interconnected by the Chinese tribute system, sustained by a hierarchical order defined by the Confucian conception of a ‘rule of virtue’.4 The tribute and gifts exchanged with the Chinese court were not purely political but also commercial, based upon the price structure in China, and yielded great profits to the tributaries and the accompanying trade missions. These exchanges became the framework around which wider trading networks in the region were organized. Although Japan did not pay tribute during the Tokugawa/Qing era, it was deeply involved in the intra-Asian maritime trade through the commercial scaffolding around tribute trade. Indeed, the Satsuma domain in Japan continued to profit from the tribute trade to China after it subjugated the Ryukyu kingdom in 1609 and sent tribute missions to China under the formal cover of the Ryukyu missions.5 Premodern ideas of a unified political community directed against an outside threat or invaders were hardly lacking in East Asia. The Chinese literati were often faced with ‘barbarian’ invaders, and sought to mobilize resistance to the Mongols or Manchus. Literati thinkers during the Southern Song (1127–1279) or the Ming–Qing transition (c. 1620–60) created traditions of resistance that were later appropriated by modern nationalist movements.6 In Japan, proto-nationalistic ideologies were developed at various times by the millennial Nichiren sect, particularly in response to the Mongol threat to the islands in the thirteenth century and, during the later Tokugawa period, by the Mito school, which aimed at restoring the imperial institution, creating a world empire under the divine Yamato dynasty, and rejecting the foreigners.7 Several modern scholars, such as Maruyama Masao, have argued that Tokugawa thinkers such as Ogyu Sorai made possible a type of linear historical consciousness typically associated with modern nationalism by locating authority away from the timeless Way itself to the sages and their actions.8 Similarly, Qing scholars combined the importance of the Way with the idea of the ‘propensity of the times’ (shishi) to legitimate a framework for

The Global and Regional Constitution of Nations

23


practical action. This practical historical consciousness was also developed in Korea, where, as Andre Schmid has shown, a boundary line was drawn between the territory of the Korean state and the Qing empire long before such lines of demarcation appeared in Europe. The state tradition, a common written language and a culturally unified elite also existed in Korea at least from the mid-Koryo period around the twelfth century. Korean elites took pride in resisting both the Japanese and the ‘barbarian’ Manchus.9 At the same time, neither state formation nor competitive commercial activity before the last third of the nineteenth century led to the distinctive characteristics of nation-formation that we find in Western Europe and the new world. Thus identity movements in prenational East Asia were often limited to small groups or regions even when they invoked a polity-wide rhetoric. Moreover, they were not accompanied by attempts to create an unmediated relationship between state and individual or informed by the ideological complex that included notions of popular sovereignty, historical progress and economic competition.10 The historical and cultural interconnectedness of East Asia in considerable measure provided the regional framework for subsequent national competition. Moreover, while East Asian states and societies were by no means nationalist in cosmology and goals, the relative institutional homogeneity and channels of administrative communication of each state within its core territorial area, together with available historical narratives of political community, were significant conditions enabling nationalism to penetrate deeply, even into rural areas. Arguably, nationalism became more strongly rooted in this region in the twentieth century than in most other parts of the non-Western world.

Imperialism and the nation-state system

At the time when nationalism arrived in East Asia, it was perceived as inseparable from imperialism, embedded as it was in the discourse of social Darwinism.11 The very states that were depicted in the Westphalian system as mutually respectful of their territorial integrity were engaged in a competition for resources that entailed military conquest, colonization, and also annexation or domination of each other’s territories. Over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries these states increasingly became involved in creating the conditions for capitalist competition and accumulation within Europe as well as overseas. Throughout the nineteenth century, they standardized and regulated their economic, judicial and political systems while competing for colonies in Asia, Africa, the Americas and the Pacific. Colonization or semi-colonization (informal domination through, for example, the imposition of unequal treaties in East Asia) was frequently justified by the allegation that colonized societies did not possess the laws and institutions of ‘civilized nation-states’. Their resources and labor were fair game for colonization to be mobilized for capitalist competition. Thus

24



the emerging system of nation-states was closely associated with imperialism abroad. East Asian societies became part of this competition both as colonizers and colonized, and represented a regional microcosm that was also significantly shaped by these global forces. As is well known, the nation in Western Europe and America also became associated with the doctrine of rights for its citizens, that is to say, for those within the boundaries of the nation-state. The notion of the ‘nation-people’ as the bearer of rights served as a spur for self-determination and fueled the spread of nationalist movements in the territories of the vast Eurasian empires in the nineteenth century and in Qing China by the early twentieth century. In Japan, while the Meiji period was dominated by official nationalism, it also witnessed a more popular rights movement called the jiyu-minken undo(movement for liberty and people’s rights) during the 1870s and 1880s. This popular movement was also deeply nationalistic.12 But if the promise of rights came to fuel nationalism across the world, by the time of World War I this nationalism also became both the goal and the means of competition for global resources and superiority among nationstates. Several emergent European nation-states, such as Germany, Italy, the USA and Japan, discovered nationalism as a powerful means to challenge the supremacy of Great Britain and France. Nationalism permitted these states to mobilize resources, integrate the lower classes, and discipline the population for competition, often with the promise of imperial glory and rewards. For instance, calls to maximize production, rein in consumption and ban strikes during World War I were rhetorically aligned with national loyalty in Europe.13 To sum up, when modern nationalism spread to East Asia from the end of the nineteenth century, it carried with it certain characteristics. States or movements viewed the transformation of the older empire and kingdoms into imperialistic nation-states as the only means of survival in a social Darwinian, ‘eat-or-be-eaten’ competitive world. Indeed, the Meiji government even consulted the leading writer associated with social Darwinism, Herbert Spencer, who advised against interbreeding Japanese with Europeans.14 At a time of turmoil and weakness, the most prominent nationalist thinker in China, Liang Qichao, who was also very influential in Korea,15 reminisced in 1906 about the forgotten Chinese heroes who had colonized lands in Southeast Asia. Reflecting on the origins of these heroes from the maritime provinces of the south, Liang noted that ‘if in the future our country could expand her imperialism outward, people of these two provinces would remain useful’.16 New ideas of popular sovereignty held the promise of rights, egalitarianism and material amelioration, but largely for the core of the population identified as the national ‘Us’. Uncivilized or alien Others within and outside the national territory tended to be seen by nationals as objects of disdain, conquest or competition. While some nationalists expressed solidarity with emergent anti-imperialist movements, it was not until the Soviet revolution


25

and the publicity of Woodrow Wilson’s ideals of self-determination that antiimperialist nationalism gained momentum through the colonial and semi-colonial world. The interpenetrated model of nationalism and imperialism was adapted by the Japanese to the historical circumstances of East Asia, with long-lasting effects.

Japanese imperialism and the geopolitical context


When the two principal East Asian states, China and Japan, entered the twentieth century, they were distinguished from most other Asian and African countries by the absence of direct colonial rule. One might say they occupied a semiperipheral status in the system of world domination. This enabled the mobilization of contemporary and historical resources to create strong nationalist movements and identities in these states. In Japan, the ability of the nation-state to create nationalist institutions and instill nationalist and imperialist ideology through its control of education and media was quite unhindered. Yet the Meiji (1868–1912) state-led nationalism in Japan, which had suffered under unequal treaties, was affected by its unique position in the world system. The Japanese leadership, anxious to gain recognition from the Western powers by creating an empire in the contiguous region, also felt victimized by these very powers and identified with their weaker ‘Asiatic brethren’. This generated an imperialism that was both highly repressive but also strongly developmental; indeed, Japan may have pioneered the ‘developmental state’ in several of its colonies and the puppet-state of Manchukuo.17 China, on the other hand, was a semi-colony of the imperial powers and was thrown into political turmoil with the 1911 revolution, the warlord period and the Japanese occupation. Nonetheless, its formal independence allowed the Chinese state (or the various provincial states) some institutional autonomy that contributed to the education and institutionalization of nationalism. Two organized nationalist movements led by the Kuomintang (KMT) and the Communist Party of China (CCP), with autonomous state and military power, enabled nationalism to flourish, particularly as a mobilizing ideology against the Japanese occupation. Thus nation-building proceeded apace with the state-building process in the political, economic and ideological realms.18 Korea, which became a Japanese colony formally in 1910, lacked this institutional autonomy until the end of World War II, when it achieved independence. Thus, while there is evidence of considerable resistance by ‘righteous armies’ to the initial Japanese colonization of Korea from 1905 to 1911, the modern Korean nationalist movement was characterized by much ambivalence. The March 1919 movement touched off widespread protests against Japanese imperialism, but, on the other hand, youth in Korea (and Taiwan) responded enthusiastically to military recruitment drives by the Japanese Imperial Army in the 1940s.19

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The spreading nationalisms of East Asia were deeply interconnected because of the central role of Japanese modernization and imperialism in the region during the first half of the twentieth century. Nationalism in China and Korea was shaped both directly by Japanese penetration and cultural influence, and by the opposition to it. Japanese adventurers, soldiers, advisors, businessmen and teachers pursued economic, cultural and imperialistic projects in China and Korea, while Chinese and Korean students, businessmen, professionals and political exiles learned lessons about the virtues and evils of modernity in Japan.20 Japanese imperialism from the Meiji period was justified by the nationalist rhetoric of security needs to withstand Western aggression. After the 1895 Sino-Japanese war, Japan acquired Taiwan from the Qing empire. Following victory in the Russo-Japanese war of 1905, Japan obtained a leasehold in the Kwantung peninsula of Manchuria while making Korea first a protectorate in 1907, then a colony in 1910. After the outbreak of World War I, Japan quickly sought to fill the temporary imperialist vacuum created in East Asia. Although, at the end of the war, the Japanese government sought to follow a multilateral international policy, rising domestic unrest fueled ultranationalist movements in the late 1920s, leading the nation into the Asian and Pacific war. On March 1, 1919, anti-Japanese protests in Korea were ignited by the European rejection of the Korean petition against Japanese colonialism. The European actions were seen, as in the later May 4th Movement in China, to betray Woodrow Wilson’s promise of self-determination. The brutality with which the movement was put down gave rise to militant nationalism in Korea, which attacked Japan in the 1930s; however, Korea was forced to conduct its operations from Manchuria, China and Russia.21 During the 1920s, the colonial government in Korea exercised a calibrated publication and censorship policy, through which it suppressed and marginalized militant nationalism while permitting a moderate nationalism. By the 1930s, as the press became increasingly commercialized, it adopted a more conciliatory attitude towards the colonial authorities. Even so, the Korean press use and promotion of the Korean language tended to clash with the official policy of assimilating Koreans by promoting Japanese language use during the Asian and Pacific war.22 Although Chinese nationalism was aroused by China’s defeat in the first Sino-Japanese war of 1895, Chinese nationalist protests against the Japanese were not sustained until after Japanese actions in World War I. The protests began with the infamous Twenty-One Demands of 1915, by which Japan (unsuccessfully) sought to turn China into a virtual protectorate. They swelled into the famous May 4th Movement of 1919 directed against the Versailles Conference’s sanction of Japan’s seizure of the German leasehold of Jiaozhou in Shandong. In 1931–32, when Japan created the puppet state of Manchukuo in northeast China or Manchuria, it was faced with considerable popular urban opposition in China. However, the KMT state was too preoccupied


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with stabilizing its position vis-à-vis the communists to resist Japan. After 1937, when Japan occupied much of the Chinese mainland, the anti-Japanese resistance was led by a United Front of the KMT and the CCP. If resistance to Japan fueled nationalism in East Asia, this nationalism was shaped by circulating discourses and practices mediated by Japan. One of the greatest ironies of modern nation-states and nationalism is that they are overwhelmingly formed by utilizing the global practices of other, usually powerful, nation-states.23 Not only measures such as the hertz and GDP, but the concept of the child, the deviant, civilization, history and religion are globally circulatory forms that societies adopt to be recognized as nations and to become competitive in the system of nation-states. Yet the sovereignty of each individual nation-state is dependent largely on an immanent theory of an original people – descended, for instance, from mythic ancestors – and a historical narrative of this people as poised to fulfill their destiny in a modern future. In East Asia, ideas of the nation and technologies of nation-building often originated in the West, but circulated in the region through a complex process. A common lexicon of hegemonic modernity circulated in all three societies. Many new texts, on international law for instance, were first translated into the Chinese language by Western missionaries and their Chinese associates in the nineteenth century, using classical Chinese terms.24 This vocabulary was frequently appropriated, adapted and systematized by modernizers in Meiji Japan and then reimported into China and Korea to create a radically new lexicon that, however, still appeared traditional and indigenous. Thus, apart from the many thousands of new words coined to express the language of global culture, an entire class of paleonyms, deriving from the classical Chinese but resignifed (originally in Japan) with meaning and function drawn from Western conceptions of history – such as the words for ‘feudalism’ (fengjian) or ‘revolution’ (geming) – emerged in the Chinese vocabulary. Frank Dikötter has discussed the signifier zu, which historically referred to lineage or line of descent, but came to be associated with the late nineteenthcentury concept of race or a community of blood ties (zhongzu) by revolutionary nationalists.25 This process of resignification enabled the emergence of new conceptions of political community by naturalizing the nation-form. I have called this process in the region ‘the East Asian modern’.26

Fetishizing national difference

While it is practically and cognitively an agent of globalization, the nationstate also represents the authority – indeed the only legitimate authority – to regulate, resist or attack competitors and reshape society to attain global and national goals. In practice, many nation-states gain this sovereign authority not through long-term, home-grown historical processes, but because they overhaul their legal and social systems so that other nations and powerful multinational entities, like the United Nations or World Health

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Organization, might recognize them as such. Ultimately, this recognition is critical: Taiwan, which has all the cultural and legal attributes of a modern nation-state, is a pariah state because it is denied recognition by the international system. However, nation-states tend to overlook the ways in which they are, in fact, the product of foreign ideas and practices, and of their own adherence to external norms of ‘state-like’ behavior. Instead, they prefer to misrecognize their origins, seeing or presenting only the part of the story in which they express the will and culture of their citizens. Nationalism as the predominant ideology of the nation-state has tended to locate sovereignty in the ‘authentic’ history and traditions of the people – the regime of authenticity – even while these have been considerably resignified, if not invented, to fit the nationalist project. Thus, while world and regional cultures have been the source of many circulatory practices transforming societies into nations, and interstate recognition has been a crucial source of national sovereignty, the fact that all nations tend to misrecognize sovereignty as emanating almost exclusively from within the nation suggests that the dialectic of recognition and misrecognition is essential to nationalism as a whole.27 The production of national histories is an exemplary place to observe the relationship between recognition and misrecognition. National histories were cast in a common mold of the linear progressive history of an emerging national subject that joined an ancient past to a modern future, often by overcoming a dark middle age of disunity and foreign contamination. The new historical consciousness synthesized ideas of progress and popular sovereignty with claims to territorial sovereignty, three basic assumptions of nationalist thought. This relationship became the means of creating a historical agent or (often juridical) subject capable of making claims to sovereign statehood. A ‘people’ with a supposed unified self-consciousness developed a sovereign right to the territory they allegedly originally and/or continuously occupied. To be sure, many historians recognized that they were affiliating with a universal history; certainly their histories could not be recognized as national without the common narrative form. But misrecognition functions at a ‘meta’ level of the discourse. The very idea of a subject of history born of common origins – or, as in East Asia, of founding ancestors – could hardly be recognized as an imported model. From a regional perspective, as noted above in the case of China, new historical paleonyms such as feudalism, restoration (isshin) or religion (shu-kyo-, zongjiao) concealed the new as the old. Finally, the construction of the national subject as a unified and unique people – the premise of claims to sovereignty – was a misrecognition of the effort actually to produce such a people. Meiji Japan’s historians, most of whom were salaried officers of the state, were the first in East Asia to adopt the idea of a linear history shaped by Western enlightenment ideals of progress.28 By the first decade of the twentieth century, the state had developed and disseminated the idea of a unique


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Yamato race with a common ancestry and divine origins in Amaterasu; this race and its culture became the subject of Japanese history.29 At the same time, the failure of Western powers to accommodate Japan as an equal led to the Japanese construction of to-yo-shi (Eastern history) – an alternative to the universalism of Enlightenment history. Although it had a new scope, to-yo-shi nonetheless was developed with principles of formation similar to Enlightenment history. Through it, Japan could present itself as the representative of an alternative Eastern civilization even more ancient and profound than that of the West; at the same time, it claimed leadership of a now stagnant East, and would enlighten the rest of Asia (particularly China and Korea) in the ways of modern civilization. This historical narrative would ultimately come to legitimate Japanese imperialist expansion into East Asia among its own citizens.30 Modern Chinese historiography is said to have begun with Liang Qichao’s New History (Xinshixue, 1903), in which the author repudiated traditional Chinese histories as incapable of giving meaning to the Chinese national experience. He established the tripartite scheme of ancient, medieval and modern periods familiar to Enlightenment histories of the nation, thereby forging a connection between the national community formed in the ancient period and its modern incarnation, while rejecting the ‘accretions’ of the middle period, which obscured this connection.31 Meanwhile, republican revolutionary activists traced the origins of the Han Chinese (and subsequently all Chinese) to the Yellow Emperor.32 Many of the early modern histories of China and Korea were also fashioned from Japanese understandings of both Enlightenment national history and to-yo-shi. The doyen of modern Chinese history, Fu Sinian, noted that it was not until 1918, after the first major protests against Japanese imperialist activities took place, that Chinese historical texts stopped following the Japanese periodization of Chinese history. Fu believed that the Japanese narrative of Chinese history placed more emphasis on conquest dynasties like those of the Mongols or Manchus, and did not sufficiently emphasize history from the perspective of the Chinese or the Han race; they thereby confused the essential continuity of Chinese history (and obscured the implicit territorial claim).33 From Fu’s time, while Chinese historiography became more complex and sophisticated, there was also a clearer effort to maintain the continuity of the history of a people or a race. Thus, even while great historians such as Gu Jiegang (1966) blasted the ancient age of the founding Yellow Emperor and sage kings as mythic, national historiography continues to include them as history. In Korea, early nationalists such as Shin Chae-ho believed that the emergence of nationalist historiography was hindered by the strong tendency of Korean elites to see their state as a tributary of China and a mentality of subordination to it (sadae). Even while struggling to free themselves from Chinese hegemony, Korean nationalists were faced by Japanese colonialism, which sought to depict Koreans as lesser versions of the Japanese, and tried ultimately to assimilate them. Writing in the early twentieth century, Shin

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Chae-ho struck out against both of these obstacles by transforming the myth of Tan’gun into the starting point of the history of the Korean people or minjok, distinct from both the Chinese and the Japanese. In the absence of a state of their own, the minjok or Korean nationality became the focus of nationalist sentiment, and nationalist Korean historians became committed to defending the historicity of Tan’gun and the history of Koreans as a single race living in a common territory.34 Even left-wing Korean historians, who succeeded in identifying the history of Korean society within the wider framework of historical materialism, nonetheless saw the Korean nation as having developed ‘precociously’ from an early stage of history.35 As in China, history began with a founding moment or era that would represent the authentic subject, now asleep but soon to be awakened to fulfill its destiny. With the emergence of three different national founders among the major states in the regions, the cosmology of the universal Chinese empire died an unmourned death. The idea of a national subject gathering or recovering awareness over historical time presupposed two axioms, both necessary to the participation of these societies in the competitive global world order. First, this history identified an ancient subject represented by a present or would-be nationstate; and second, the subject’s very existence in a universal, linear historical trajectory set it on a track to a modern future occupied by advanced nationstates. While the future-orientation secured the legitimacy of the nation-state in its ability to propel the nation towards a globally recognized ideal of progress, the past-orientation tended to ground sovereignty in the misrecognition of history as the evolving primordial subject dominated by authentic racial, linguistic or cultural characteristics.36 This founding dualism tends to produce a structural tension, often schizoid, between a desire to belong to or partake of a global culture and a desire to retreat to the national or more local haven. In China, this dualism goes as far back as the late nineteenth century, when reformers couched their tentative affiliation with global knowledge through the ti-yong (Chinese learning for the essence, Western learning for practical use) formulation. Ti represented the zone of essential and inviolable Confucian values, whereas yong represented the limited zone in which Westernizing changes were permitted. In Japan, this dualism was itself doubled: Japan versus the West (wakon yosai), and an East Asia led by Japan versus Japan itself as a Westernized nation (nyuA versus datsuA).37 Note that the East Asian region may, at different times and for different groups, belong to either side of this duality – as home or the world. Even where East Asian national histories evoke their distinctiveness, they often do so in a common mode. Just as Chinese nationalists sought to derive the Chinese nation from the mythical Yellow Emperor and the Japanese from Amaterasu, so did Shin and Korean nationalists seek to raise Tan’gun to the same status.38 Ironically, each of these societies sought to distinguish the authenticity of their nation, often by resignifying symbols from a


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common cultural historical reservoir. One such symbolic role was that of the ‘self-sacrificing woman’ (xianqi liangmu, ryo-sai kembo) upon whose sacrifices for the home and nation the new citizen and modern society would be built. Similarly, historical practices of self-cultivation and discipline from Confucianism and Buddhism were employed to produce new habits of citizenship, for instance in the New Life movement of KMT China and later in Korea. Manchukuo exemplified an all-too-transparent effort to build a nation-state from this East Asian repertoire.39 In some situations, the weight given to historical and cultural doctrines of authenticity can tip the scales overwhelmingly towards misrecognition. During the 1930s, the civilian government in Japan was toppled precisely because it was perceived to have compromised the authentic traditions of Japan – namely the warrior bushido- tradition and agrarianism – both at home and abroad. In this way, the doctrine of authenticity can often blind nationalisms to the limits of systemically acceptable actions and can enable the nation to defy the transnational authority of, say, the League of Nations, as Japan did in the 1930s, or the manner in which the United States defies multinational authorities today. In sum, while the nation-state is shaped by global materials and accompanied by a progressive historical vision open to the future, it is simultaneously constricted by a vision of the past policed by a regime of authenticity that influences how it will move into the future. But how constricting is this view? Can this symbolic regime deny other views of the nation, community and history? What is the relationship between oppositional or alternative nationalisms and custodianship of the regime of authenticity?

Hegemony and difference in nationalist ideology

Since the early 1990s, scholars have observed that nationalism as an ideology and politics was not uniform or monolithic. Indeed, the study of nationalism is becoming a vast field, with proliferating subfields dealing with its differentiated relation to gender, class, consumerism, geography, historiography and other issues. Different groups, political parties, women, workers, farmers and minorities have very different conceptions of the nation, or different ‘nation-views’. I will explore some of these views in East Asia. In his study of working-class nationalism in Shanghai during the first quarter of the century, S. A. Smith shows how radicals within the working class movement sought to shape a ‘class inflected anti-imperialist nationalism’. This radical view conflicted with the more paternalistic and conservative vision of the movement and nation supported by employers, labor contractors and secret societies.40 The CCP, which was closely associated with this ‘class-inflected nationalism’, ultimately developed a full-blown version of anti-imperialist nationalism that centered the representation of the nation on certain core classes and was, at many points, in striking opposition to the racist and more conservative nationalism espoused by other

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nationalists, including the KMT. The legacy of this opposition lasted for a long time in the Taiwan–PRC rivalry over the true China. As we we will see in Chapters 5 and 6, the purity and honor of Chinese civilization and the nation was often inscribed upon the bodies of Chinese women. Yet writers and activists also sought to create a more equal role for women as active, not passive, co-nationals. In early twentieth-century Japan, where the public sphere of the nation excluded women and their concerns regarding reproduction and sexuality, early feminist activists or the ‘New Women’ sought to push through a discussion of the female reproductive body and influence the profile of national citizenship from a feminist perspective. These efforts, although largely unsuccessful at the time, represented an important historical resource for women who struggled for these rights in the post-World War II era and have reshaped the profile of ‘embodied citizenship’ for men and women.41 Others have made a distinction between radical ethnic nationalism and that led by the nation-state. Rebecca Karl has argued that nationalist intellectuals in early twentieth-century China developed nationalism around ethnic, anti-colonial consciousness oriented towards other oppressed nationalities (minzuzhuyi), in a manner fundamentally different from statist nationalism with its territorially bounded loyalties.42 These intellectuals drew upon resistance movements in the Philippines and the Transvaal to create the notion of the sovereign ‘people’, heroic, self-sacrificing figures, and a consciousness of ethno-nationality. Similarly, studies of Japanese nationalism have also emphasized different ‘nation-views’. There were socialistic visions of the nation, including those of Christian socialists such as Abe Iso-, who propagated gender equality and Christian values for the nation.43 But perhaps the greatest challenge to the nationalism of the Japanese state came from the restorationists and revolutionary nationalists of the late 1920s and 1930s, who succeeded in propelling the state headlong into militarist expansionism. The group included the radicals of an ‘authentic’ agrarianism (no-honshugi), responding to the widespread rural immiseration of the time and to young, disgruntled military officers, the Showa restorationists, who felt that the capitalists, politicians and bureaucrats had abandoned the authentic bushido- spirit of the Japanese nation.44 This nationalism was also fanned by other elements of the military unhappy with disarmament programs, as well as by pan-Asianists of various stripes, including certain (new) religious groups such as the Omotokyo- and Hitonomichi, who fostered the idea of Japan as leader of an Eastern spiritual mission in its battle against the West. One may think of these groups as locked in a contest over the custodianship of the regime of authenticity.45 The distinction between statist and ethno-popular nationalism (kokuminshugi versus minzokushugi) – which also appears in postwar Korea, as we will see – reappears in postwar Japan, and has become a subject of interest among scholars of nationalism. Curtis A. Gayle has recapitulated the debate between postwar Japan’s most celebrated thinker, Maruyama Masao, and the


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group of historians belonging to the Historical Association (rekishigaku kenkyu- or rekiken) in the 1950s and 1960s. Maruyama urged that the only way


to build a ‘healthy nationalism’ was by developing democratic institutions of citizenship and civil society, so that the decisions regarding the nation were not left to dangerously manipulable ideals of national authenticity (kokutai). By contrast, the rekiken group sought to radicalize the idea of ethnic nationalism, which was now to be led, theoretically at least, by the proletariat, and sought to combat the military dependency on America, the emperor system and capitalist modernity (which were presumably reflected in Maruyama’s alternative). Most of all, these influential historians believed that minzokushugi expressed deep solidarity with the anti-imperialist nationalism of the decolonizing world, particularly with that of the communist China.46 But as Gayle suggests, there is not a great difference between the minzokushugi of the postwar era and that of the 1930s.47 The theorists and leftists of the 1930s were influenced by Stalinist ideals of nationality and selfdetermination, and, as noted in Chapter 2, the ideology of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo (1932–45) was based on the ideal of harmony among different nationalities, such as the Chinese, Japanese, Mongols and others (minzoku kyo-wakai or minzu xiehehui). In Manchukuo, the formal equality among different nationalities was pursued in such policies as the teaching of different languages, and the appointment of officials from different nationalities in the government. In practice, however, equality was trumped by the domination of the Japanese in the crucial military and economic domains. One could also make the argument that the minzokushugi of radical nationalists in Japan during the 1930s led to the wartime ideology of the East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere, in which the different Asian nations were brought together in a common economic, military and even developmental framework; but few would deny that whatever else it was, minzokushugi was a means to expand the power of the Japanese nation-state. The point I am trying to make here is that ethnic nationalism may raise the rhetoric of solidarity and even have political effects as an oppositional nationalism. But we cannot lose sight of the defining goal of all nationalist movements, which is ultimately to attain state power and produce a nation-state. Once that happens, the nation-state rapidly becomes immersed in the competitive relationship (whether for survival, dominance or profit) among nation-states, and seeks to secure the interests and security of the nation-state above all else. Liberatory or radical nationalisms are often overcome by a hegemonic statist nationalism that is much more collusive with capitalism and a teleological history.

Anti-imperialist nationalism In order to understand better the rhetorical and political effects of an oppositional and radical nationalism, I will explore here the role of antiimperialist nationalism in China. The decolonization movement received one

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of its most important early stimuli from the victory of Japan over Russia in 1904, widely regarded as the first victory of a non-Western people over a European power. Although the anti-imperialist movement did not develop strong ties of solidarity until the Comintern took over its organizational leadership, Sun Yat-sen reminisced about the event in a speech he made in Japan in 1925. He was on a ship crossing the Suez Canal soon after news of the Japanese victory became known. When the ship was docked in the canal, a group of Arabs mistook him for Japanese and enthusiastically flocked around him. Even upon discovering their mistake, they continued to celebrate their solidarity with him against the imperialist powers. In the speech, Sun developed the theme of a racial or color war against the white race, for whom ‘blood is thicker than water’ (original expression in English) and urged the oppressed Asians of common color and culture to unify and resist imperialism.48 Anti-imperialist nationalism in East Asia was reinforced by a new vision of civilization that challenged the social Darwinist conception of a civilization limited to certain races. During the anti-Japanese war of resistance, the CCP rapidly built up its leadership role among anti-imperialist nationalists. The communists emphasized and implemented reform and revolution in the rural areas, but their success was also based on the nationalist framework of their reformist program. Thus it was not only class war, but the call for national salvation that brought them to power. In 1940, Mao Zedong wrote On New Democracy, in which he declared, ‘the Chinese democratic republic which we now desire to establish can only be a democratic republic under the joint dictatorship of all the antiimperialist and anti-feudal people’, and included in this common front the proletariat, the peasantry, the intellectuals, the petty bourgeoisie, and even sections of the capitalist bourgeoisie opposed to imperialism.49 The CCP’s commitment to an anti-imperialist nationalism continued to play a role internationally after the party came to power. China became a recognized leader of the international decolonizing movement during the Bandung conference of 1955, and the expressions of solidarity with this movement – revealed, for instance, in development projects in Africa – continued until much later. As is well known, socialism was born amidst hostile nation-states and retained the nation form. By the time it was established in China, its encasement in the nation form was taken for granted. The Chinese socialist state soon became embroiled in several territorial and leadership conflicts with its neighbors, including the Soviet Union, India, and later Vietnam. This state also came to dominate other ethnic groups, such as Tibetans, Mongols and Uighurs. At an ideological level, the socialist nation-state in China was driven by the goals of increasing production in order to fulfill the socialist vision of plenty for all. In practice, these goals came to be guided by the narrative of progress within a framework of competitive states. The need to demonstrate


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the superiority of China was perhaps best expressed in the slogan of the Great Leap Forward of 1958–59, ‘to overtake the steel production of Great Britain and France in 15 years’. These state-socialist strategies of capital accumulation often came at the cost of providing for the basic needs of the majority rural population or representative institutions. In the present time, when China has become one of the most significant competitors in the world capitalist system, the state-socialist strategies of accumulation – including a disciplined and continuously deployable labor force – of the Maoist period may be seen in part to have enabled this subsequent competitiveness. In both the Chinese and Japanese cases, we have seen the radical and transnational urges of national movements and ideologies become absorbed by the goals of statist nationalism. How can we understand this phenomenon?


The dialectic of statist and popular nationalism in post-war East Asia

The dialectic of oppositional or popular versus statist nationalism is not unrelated to the dialectic in which nations formed from global and regional ideas and institutions misrecognize these resources as historically and authentically national. Transnational yearnings and non-state nationalisms – which often reflect or capture aspects of the universalist preconditions of nationalism – generate different nation-views and alternative notions of the community. Yet the system requires that the nation-state mobilize these views for its own authority. Failure to establish such control over an extended period would amount to the failure of the nation-state and, in the case of alternative political communities, nationalism itself. Socialist anti-imperialism was perhaps the ultimate test case of this dialectic. It revealed both the possibilities and limits of transgressing nationalist assumptions. Its founding slogan, ‘workers of the world unite’, and its support for the solidarity of the oppressed of the world, on the part of both the Soviet Union and China, transcended national identification. Socialist thought recognized clearly the condition of global unification produced by capitalism. Yet the construction of socialism around the nation-state, its commitment to a linear, progressive history that entailed increasing production within a competitive state system, enabled, under particular historical circumstances, both nationalism and competitive capitalism to prevail in these socialist societies. I do not want to suggest that there is an inherent logic in the nation-state system that made the socialist state a short-lived aberration. If, for instance, the socialist revolutions had succeeded in Europe during the interwar years, it is distinctly possible that the nation-state would have been transformed away from a competitive model. As it is, in important ways interwar ideas of a redistributive state (expressed for instance in Keynesianism) and the Cold War permitted new, decolonizing nations to focus on internal development rather than plunge into global capitalist competition.

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One might say that the Cold War created circumstances enabling an extended period of protectionist development in what Karl Polanyi called the dual movement between the self-regulating market and state intervention.50 The divisions of the Cold War protected these economies from internal and external competitiveness, and the nation-state enhanced its role as agent of redistribution and regulation. Under these conditions, Chinese socialism did achieve considerable egalitarianism and collectivism. This kind of protection was even true, relatively speaking, of economies under the US umbrella such as Japan, Korea and Taiwan, which otherwise shifted from an importsubstitution economy to an export-driven one to take advantage of the markets of the ‘free world’. The triumph of the USA and the Soviet Union in World War II and their subsequent domination of the world, among other factors, meant that nationalism in East Asia generally conformed to the territorial model of civic nationalism. This model emphasized creating an egalitarian society, economic development and a scientific and secular consciousness within the territorial nation-state. It was generally also accompanied by a strong and protectionist state in economic development. It is true that Japan, Korea and Taiwan became increasingly incorporated into the global market economy by the 1960s, but certain factors, namely a historically activist state and guaranteed market access to the United States, enabled these nation-states to continue to play a powerful redistributive role ensuring a relatively egalitarian society (although without political rights in Korea and Taiwan until the 1980s). Nonetheless, both popular nationalism and the regime of authenticity continued to play a role in these three states. Large segments of the population were alienated from a state nationalism that they felt was too closely identified with foreign powers. In Japan, ethnic nationalism identified with an anti-imperialist stance directed against the state’s US security pact, and later the Vietnam War.51 In Taiwan, the KMT-led vicarious Chinese nationalism ignored and suppressed Taiwanese identity and aspirations. This was covertly challenged by local Taiwanese nationalism, which began to flourish openly soon after Taiwan was democratized in 1986. In South Korea, popular resistance to a US-backed militarist regime broke out during the 1970s and 1980s. The minjung or people’s movement spread widely among students, youth and workers. Fiercely opposed to the dictatorial state and capitalist policies, it was an oppositional political movement and conceived an alternative ideal for the nation based on an indigenous vision of village socialism. Even today, a popular nationalism seeking to break away from US hegemony and unify North and South Korea is flourishing.52 Thus, although we can hardly ignore the fact that much of the East Asian success in the global economy emerged from the interventionist role of the nation-state – playing the competitive game successfully, as it were – we continue to see the dialectic between state and popular nationalism play out. Over the past 40 years or so, the nation-state in these three societies has adapted to competitive global capitalism by gradually changing its role from


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protectionism and redistribution to producing and securing the conditions of competitiveness. In the PRC, this transformation since 1979 has been telescoped and radical. At the same time, the role of the alternative model of socialist nationalism that informed the first 30 years of the regime can hardly be discounted in today’s economic success. Through guaranteed land allotments, pump-priming government investment, subsidizing labor and infrastructural costs, the ex-socialist state contributes to global competitiveness; even more, the system has pioneered forms of public–private ownership (in the ‘township village enterprises’) that may herald changes in capitalist forms. Be that as it may, the transformation in China has been accompanied by a changing nationalism, with integrative territorial nationalism being redrawn to join regions and communities so that the nation-state can respond to competitive pressures with cohesive action and expanded resources. Hence we hear of Greater China connecting the Han majority in the coastal provinces with diasporic communities who have enhanced China’s competitiveness. This nationalism appears to be shorn of the rhetoric of solidarity characteristic of the decolonization movement. It also has an alienating effect on minorities and less incorporated regions, as the promise of national territorial citizenship falters in this large multinational state.53 At the same time, capitalist globalization and the competitiveness of China has also heightened nationalism over the past decade or so. This nationalism is assertive and reacts aggressively to the criticisms and fears of competitor nations, particularly the USA and Japan, in both political and economic areas. While protests occasionally break out in the streets, as in the 2005 anti-Japanese demonstrations and attacks on Japanese property in Shanghai, analysts have observed that it is spread and intensified by the virtual media, even to the extent of pressuring the government to take its side.54 Scholars have tried to specify the particular causes of this new wave of nationalism, suggesting, for instance, that nationalism is one of the few legitimate arenas in which the government permits the public expression of grievances.55 From a longer-term perspective, however, the resurgence of nationalism is hardly surprising in a period of unfettered capitalist globalization, since it is structurally linked to enhancing the competitive power of a society as much as to protecting society from competitors. What is more interesting is that the impetus for this nationalism may have moved from the state to the people.

Conclusion One of the last major areas of the world to be dominated by Western powers, East Asia emerged as a relatively autonomous region and a semiperiphery in the nineteenth-century world economy. Outside the few ceded territories and the concessions in the treaty ports in China, there was no direct Western political control. Even less under Western domination, Japan succeeded in reversing the Unequal Treaties signed with Western powers by the end of the

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Russo-Japanese war in 1905. Subsequently, the intensified competition that preoccupied Western nation-states and culminated in two world wars allowed Japan to consolidate its military–political and cultural domination in the region. I have suggested that common signifying mediations of global categories – such as racialist conceptions, or the conception of history derived from a founding ancestor – as well as power interactions entangled the countries of East Asia in a common history. While patently brutal, like most other colonialisms, the peculiarity of Japanese imperialism as perpetrator and fellow victim of Western imperialism in Asia also led it to be developmental. The combined effect produced strong state and economic institutions in the colonies and a deeply penetrative and revolutionary nationalist movement in China. Compared with India or Vietnam (which had historically been part of the Confucian ecumene), the Japanese ex-colonies, including Korea and Taiwan, but also the puppet state, Manchukuo, emerged from World War II with much better development records and stronger mobilizational structures. The historical interconnectedness of the region prepared its nation-states to become more competitive in the world economy than most other decolonizing nations in the postwar world.56 Theoretically, looking at nationalism from the perspective of global and regional circulations and interactions yields two interrelated themes: the dialectic between globalization and misrecognition, and the relationship between statist and non-state nationalisms. The two are linked and are fundamental to the historical understanding of nationalism. Practically, the nation remains tied in myriad ways to the world, and is indeed the agent of globalization, especially at a cognitive level. But partly in response to the competitive and expansionist nature of capitalist globalization, the state is frequently compelled to fall back upon narratives of (misrecognized) authenticity. At different moments in the history of nationalism, popular nationalism has succeeded in reshaping the goals and agenda of national communities. I am thinking not only of socialist movements, but also of movements that advocate gender and minority rights as well as environmental protection. For instance, gender and environmental movements had emerged in prewar Japan, but were co-opted by the state. In postwar Japan, both movements have been able to break through and influence capitalism and the nationstate.57 Similarly, popular movements harking back to socialist ideals of rural welfare, as well as new environmental movements, may well reshape Chinese nationalism.58 But if there is a glimmer of hope with regard to the content and priorities of nationalism, there is no indication that the self/ other distinction underlying nationalism with its morally absolutist tendencies is likely to be transformed. The inequalities and accelerating pace of change accompanying economic globalization appear to have reinforced a nationalism that is often more


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reactive than creative, and takes place, as we will see in greater detail in Chapter 5, within the schizoid oscillation between recognition and misrecognition. Tensions have been rising in recent years and are being expressed in the discourse of authenticity and the contesting claims to heritage and territory within the region. Interestingly, the states of East Asia have been enormously successful in enhancing trade and investment with their neighbors; they often seek to abide by transnational norms of political and economic competition – the recognition function. In the process, however, they may be losing some of their authority as custodians of authenticity – the misrecognition function – to popular nationalists, who often seize on the inviolate sacredness of the national. It is a matter of some concern that this kind of reactive nationalism that is collusive with capitalism and regimes of authenticity has itself become hegemonic rather than developing as a limit to collusive hegemony.

2

The Imperialism of ‘Free Nations’ Japan, Manchukuo, and the History of the Present*


Just as the nationalisms came to be formed by global circulations, we would be hard-pressed to find an imperialism or empire that operated in a historical vacuum without reference to other imperial practices and ideas circulating since at least the early modern era. Meiji (1868–1912) Japanese imperialism was shaped by two historical forces: modern Western imperialist nationalism, and the historical circumstances, models, and ideas of the East Asian region. These two currents produced a schizoid Japanese self-perception. Anxious nationalists eager to gain recognition and respect from the Western powers by creating an empire, the Japanese leadership also felt victimized by these very powers, and identified with their weaker ‘Asiatic brethren’. This generated a highly contradictory imperialism that shaped the East Asian region in the early twentieth century. Interestingly, this contradiction spurred Japanese imperialists to experiment with new forms of empire drawn from diverse global and regional sources; such experimentation crystallized in Manchukuo, the Japanese puppet state established in northeast China from 1932 until 1945. I argue that Manchukuo was the first full-blown instance of what I call the ‘new imperialism’ – an imperialism rooted in the historical circumstances of the USA, the Soviet Union and Japan, rather than in those of the older European colonial powers. I have also called this new imperialism the imperialism of ‘free nations’ after the well known ‘imperialism of free trade’ coined by Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher to describe the British Empire over 50 years ago. According to Robinson and Gallagher, while formal colonial empires have tended to dominate understandings of imperialism since the late nineteenth century, the broader and older tendency was represented by the imperialism of free trade. British policy applied formal controls only when it was not possible to safeguard and extend British interest through informal control. Eventually, it was the foreign challenge to British dominance in tropical Africa in the late nineteenth century, and the inability to create strong and supportive indigenous political organizations there, that made it impossible for the British to conduct ‘imperialism on the cheap’ and led them to switch to modes of direct control and formal rule.1

The Imperialism of ‘Free Nations’: Japan and Manchukuo

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The new imperialism (by which I refer to the imperialism of ‘free nations’) that evolved through much of the twentieth century is to be distinguished both from the earlier European colonial imperialism and from free trade imperialism, in several ways. While the new imperialists maintained ultimate control of their dependencies or clients through military subordination, they often created or maintained legally sovereign nation-states with political and economic structures that resembled their own. The new imperialists espoused anti-colonial ideologies and emphasized cultural or ideological similarities; they made considerable economic investments, even while exploiting these regions, and attended to the modernization of institutions and identities. In other words, these imperialist formations were not founded in principle upon the sustained differentiation between rulers and ruled characteristic of most colonial formations; nor were they founded upon a general indifference towards political forms – as long as they were pliable – so characteristic of free trade imperialism. The new imperialism reflected a strategic conception of the periphery as part of an organic formation designed to attain global supremacy for the imperial power. Although subordinate states were militarily dependent on the metropole, it was not necessarily in the latter’s interest that they be economically or institutionally backward. Thus, this imperialism occasionally entailed a separation of economic and military/political dimensions. In some situations, as in the Soviet Union–Eastern Europe and the Japan–Manchukuo relationships, massive investments and resources flowed into the client states, thereby breaching the classical dualism between an industrialized metropole and a colony focused on the primary sector. In this way, too, my conception of the new imperialism differs from theories of neocolonialism, which continue to emphasize underdevelopment and traditional forms of exploitation. Another aspect of this new imperialism, and one that distinguished it still more from the imperialism of free trade, was its tendency to form a regional or (geographically dispersed) bloc formation promoting economic autarky as a means for the imperial power to gain global supremacy or advantage. In this formation, while benefit to the metropole continues to be the rationale for domination, benefit does not necessarily derive from transferring primary wealth to it, but often entails the industrialization of the puppet or client state. Thus the new imperialism was related to the principle of nationalism that extends the benefits and pains of creating an integrated, globally competitive entity, but extends them unevenly over the whole. By the same token, the imperial formation is often ripped apart by enduring nationalist prejudices fostered in earlier times and simultaneous processes of nation building, especially within the imperial metropole.

Anti-imperialism and imperialism in the interwar period The emergence of anti-imperialist nationalism represented one of the most important conditions for the transformation of imperialism. The end of

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World War I, as is well known, introduced epochal changes that made the world the stage of history in the twentieth century. No longer could the world be made to appear, in the words of Oswald Spengler, to ‘revolve around the pole of this little part-world’ that is Europe.2 Anti-imperialist nationalism, sanctioned by the still emergent global powers, the USA and the Soviet Union, grew out of two new global ideologies: socialistic egalitarianism and the discourse of multiple civilizations. Virtually all the significant thinkers of the new nationalisms espoused some combination of these ideals to create nationalisms that could claim to be fundamentally different from the prewar social Darwinist ideology of imperialist nationalism. Socialistic ideas provided both a critique of imperialism and a powerful model of social justice and resource redistribution. At the same time, they also entailed, through the model of a party-state, new structures of mobilization and surveillance that were continuous with the competitive nationalisms of central Europe and the older nation-states. Socialistic ideas came to be intertwined in many cases with a new conception of civilization. The nineteenth-century imperialistic idea that Civilization was a singular phenomenon closely associated with the European Enlightenment had served to colonize the non-European world by denying rights and sovereignty to people without Civilization (and/or History). The unequal treaties contracted in East Asia, for instance, were based on this premise. The Japanese and the Chinese spent considerable energy revamping their society and institutions in order to renegotiate these treaties as ‘civilized’ societies. Nonetheless, an alternative discourse of civilization as multiple, spiritual and moral – as opposed to materialistic and legalist – that had survived in the penumbra of the singular Civilization received an important fillip towards the end of the war. The rise of this alternative conception accompanied the global critique of the ‘civilizing mission’, which was seen by the colonized and by many Western intellectuals – such as Arnold Toynbee – to be a fig leaf for the barbarism of European civilization demonstrated by the war. Western Civilization had forfeited the right to represent the highest goals of humanity, and the new national movements sought to turn towards their own civilizational traditions – often reconstructed in the image of Civilization – to found the ideals of the new nations and the right to sovereignty.3 Anti-imperialist nationalism attained a new height in East Asia with the March 1919 protest against colonialism in Korea and the May 4th Movement in China in the same year.4 While both movements were directed against Japanese imperialism, ironically, the Japanese also began to develop an anti-(Western) imperialist civilization discourse of pan-Asianism. Japanese nationalism originated under the threat of Western imperialism and racism – events such as the US immigration laws denying naturalization to Japanese and other Asians in 1922 and leading to final exclusion in 1924; the denial of naval parity to Japan by the US and Britain in the Washington Conference hardened this self-perception. Thus Japanese nationalists tended


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to see themselves as victims of Western imperialism and racism even while building their own empire and brand of racist nationalism. Sensitive to the scrutiny of the West, at certain historical moments Japanese empire builders tended to take the rhetoric of new empire seriously. At another level, they were bound by the pan-Asian rhetoric of common victimhood, which became intertwined with the development of a contiguous empire (in part because of security concerns) in a region occupied by people whom the Japanese perceived as culturally or racially continuous with themselves. Thus while Japanese imperialism targeted East Asian societies, ideologically it sought to incorporate them through ideas of pan-Asian brotherhood. It is, I believe, less fruitful to view this ideology simply as a smokescreen than as a highly contradictory ideology of the new imperialism, in which domination and exploitation coexisted with development and modernization. Historically, modern imperialism had always been closely identified with nation-states. From a world-systems perspective, capitalism was a product of competition between states for global resources: the more sophisticated versions of this theory eschew simple economic arguments. According to Giovanni Arrighi, the creation and maintenance of global capitalism was made possible by the fusion of ‘two logics’, territorial and capitalist. Competition among states in the early modern period entailed the capture of mobile capital for territorial and population control, and the control of territories and people for the purposes of mobile capital. Beginning in the seventeenth century, the territorial state (possessing absolute jurisdiction within its boundaries and growing military and organizational capabilities) became necessary to control the social and political environment of capital accumulation on a world scale. In Arrighi’s scheme, the hegemonic power in the competitive system of European states – Dutch power in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, British power in the nineteenth – was successively challenged by latecomer territorial states that sought, in the drive to become globally competitive, to first mobilize the economic and human resources within their own jurisdictions, thus producing some aspects of nationalism. Immanuel Wallerstein was more explicit, declaring that nationalism became the means whereby a state or social formation sought to leverage itself out of the periphery of the world system and into the core.5 From the late nineteenth century, the mobilization of human resources for competition in the name of the nation became very significant. Nationalism was deployed to rally the population and resources for war preparation and for the war itself. State-administered mass organizations to mobilize civilian support for war were first developed by states such as Japan, the Soviet Union and Italy, which were not principals in World War I, but which observed the insufficiency of civilian support during the war. Japanese planners saw the need to prepare for a long-term economic war by mobilizing resources over an area that went beyond the Japanese empire. Mass organizations in competitor nation-states were developed along the model of a

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conscript army and were elevated rhetorically to represent the will of the people. In this way, they would call on the people to transcend immediate and particular interests, for example by foregoing personal consumption or delegitimizing striking workers within the nation. To be sure, one can hardly explain the rise of nationalism during this period by global competition alone. Several other factors, having to do with the emergence of industrial society and its needs, competitive democratic politics, and the spread of mass communications featured significantly in the emergence of nationalism. These factors appeared to have combined with the drive for global competition to shift the balance in the functional relationship between imperialism and nationalism in the world. If, during the nineteenth century, as Eric Hobsbawm and Hannah Arendt have argued, imperialism was largely the business of competitive nation-states, and nationalism was mobilized to further their interests, by the twentieth century nationalism had become the driving force behind imperialism. Arendt commented that imperialists appeared as the best nationalists because they claimed to stand above the reality of national divisiveness and represent the glory of the nation. While nationalism represented the incentive of glorious recognition to drive global competition, it also entailed the granting of the rights of citizenship and the obligations of discipline to enable the nationstate to transform itself into a sleek competitive body. In the process, imperialism not only became an important goal for some nationalisms, it also became an important means of the formation of this nationalism.6 Nationalist principles became still more deeply implicated with imperialism in the intensifying competitive environment. Responding to this heightened – including military – competition, several imperial formations sought to organize colonies into relatively autarchic regional structures or economic blocs. In Britain and France, the value of empire for military competitive purposes was not fully recognized until World War I, when colonial troops and resources played a vital role. In Britain, Joseph Chamberlain’s neomercantilist ideas of colonial development (which had been largely ignored before the war) and of ‘imperial preference’ began to be taken more seriously. But as a consequence of entrenched ideas of colonial self-sufficiency, post-war capital needs at home, and, not least, demands for protection by British industry, only once before 1940 did expenditure on colonial development creep above 0.1 per cent of British gross national product.7 The post-World War I transformation of French attitudes toward the colonies was summed up by Albert Lebrun: the goal was now to ‘unite France to all those distant Frances in order to permit them to combine their efforts to draw from one another reciprocal advantages’.8 But while the French government extended imperial preference and implemented reforms, particularly with reference to legal and political rights in Africa during the 1930s, investments in economic and social development projects were insignificant until the creation of the Investment Fund for Economic and Social Development in 1946. Both evolutionist ideas of backward races (and their


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incapacity for modernity) and protectionist pressures from agrarian society served as impediments to development.9 To compete with Britain and France, Germany had sought to develop a regional bloc in Central and Eastern Europe since the end of the nineteenth century.10 This trend accelerated during the interwar years, and German commercial influence before the war peaked in 1938, when Austria was incorporated into the Reich and Hitler annexed the Sudeten region of Czechoslovakia. Hannah Arendt regarded the German (like the Russian panSlav) movement as an expression of ‘continental imperialism’, whereby latecomer nationalists sought to develop their empires through the nationalistic pan-German movement.11 This racist ideology seemingly authorized the Germans to annex or dominate territories belonging to other states. At the same time, Nazi racism excluded such large numbers of people that even the rhetoric of anti-imperialism or solidarity of cultures was made impossible. The German economic New Order in Europe, built upon states that were essentially German puppets or had German military governors, was designed to supply the German war effort. However, there were also plans to build an economic region around a prosperous Germany linked to new industrial complexes in central Europe and captured areas of the western USSR. This unitary European market, however, remained a nationalistic German vision, and we should be wary of seeing it as a predecessor of the European Union. The German plan represented in several ways no more than an aborted version of the new imperialism.12 The Japanese economic bloc, built throughout the 1930s and intensified during the Pacific war, resembled the German New Order in that the entire occupied zone became subordinated to Japanese war needs, and Japan’s defeat represented a failure of the new imperialism. Still, Japan’s initial experience with Manchukuo reveals the lineaments of a more functional version of the new imperialism, not entirely driven by wartime needs, though often representing a preparation for war. Moreover, beginning especially in the 1930s, after the establishment of Manchukuo, the Japanese exploitation of colonies such as Korea was accompanied by increases in productive capacity. As the Korean economist Sub Park has demonstrated, while Indian growth between 1900 and 1946 was under 1 per cent annually, the yearly mean growth rate of gross domestic production in Korea was 3 per cent from 1915 to 1940.13 The accumulated per capita British investment in India and Japanese investment in Korea were $8 and $38, respectively, in 1938.14 Given the common global climate, how and why did Japanese colonial policy become more oriented toward economic development than European colonial policy did? Pan-Asianism had emerged as an ideology incorporating Japan’s curious role as both victim and victimizer in the imperialist game, and that ideology permitted the Japanese the conceit that Japan was obliged to lead the Asian nations against the West. Such claims were, however, belied by the vigorous nationalism of Asian peoples against the Japanese. In response to this complicated scenario, Japanese colonial bureaucrats,

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military officers and intellectuals began to experiment with modes of association and alliance that would reinvent empire and nation.

Manchuria and Japanese imperialism


Manchuria, or what the Chinese refer to now simply as the northeast, was rapidly settled by Han Chinese from north China from the latter half of the nineteenth century. This settlement represented the reversal of the ruling Manchu regime’s earlier policy of keeping Han Chinese out of their ancestral homeland, and was in response to Russian and Japanese imperialist penetration of the region. The Lytton Commission, which was assigned the responsibility of investigating the Japanese puppet state in this region, declared that Manchuria was ‘unalterably Chinese’. It should be noted that this was largely as a consequence of the demographic and cultural integration that took place in the first half of the twentieth century, when ethnic Chinese came to represent 80 per cent of the population, and not because of some primordial Chinese claim to this region. However, despite this settlement, Manchuria remained a contested borderland; whereas in earlier periods Chinese dominance was challenged by Manchus, Mongols and others, the challenge in the modern period came first from the Russians and then from the Japanese. From early in the Meiji period, Japanese imperialism was justified by nationalism, and mainland northeast Asia was characterized as the outer zone of national defense against the advancing Euro-American powers. Japanese expansionism in northeast Asia during the first three decades of the twentieth century was accompanied by the rhetoric that Korea, Manchuria and Mongolia represented the ‘lifeline’ of the Japanese nation. The Treaty of Portsmouth that concluded the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, while acknowledging in theory China’s sovereignty in Manchuria, granted Japan the Russian lease on the Kwantung peninsula and the South Manchurian Railroad. From this time, Japanese interests and influence grew, particularly after the annexation of Korea in 1910 and during the imperialist power vacuum in East Asia during World War I.15 The economic and political affairs of the Japanese-leased territories were managed by the Kwantung government and the South Manchurian Railway Company, a quasi-governmental corporation with many subsidiary enterprises, and one of the largest research organizations in the world, until 1945. Japanese investment in the South Manchurian Railway Company in 1920 alone was 440 million yen. By 1927, 85 per cent of Japanese foreign investment was in China, and 80 per cent of this in Manchuria. In 1932, Japan’s share of the total industrial capital in Manchuria was 64 per cent, while the Chinese share was 28 per cent.16 As early as the 1920s, the Japanese controlled Manchuria economically and militarily by means of an unstable alliance with the warlord of the region, Zhang Zuolin. Each party had its own reasons for the alliance.


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Zhang’s desire to control Beijing increasingly militated against Japanese interests in Manchuria, whereupon the Japanese murdered Zhang. Zhang’s son and successor, Zhang Xueliang, was, however, even more China-directed and declared his allegiance to the Kuomintang. It was under these circumstances that elements in the Kwantung army overthrew the Zhang regime on September 18, 1931, and established the puppet state of Manchukuo in 1932. Until recently, Manchukuo was thought to represent a break in Japanese imperial policy. In this scenario, the Japanese government in the 1920s sought through diplomacy to secure concessions from imperial powers and subject nations such as China. The September 18th Manchurian Incident was considered a new turn because onsite army officers took the initiative and presented the Japanese government with a fait accompli.17 This event may be seen as the first in a sequence of faits accomplis in the 1930s, enabling the military to take over the civilian government in Japan and ultimately leading Japan into the China war (1937), the Pacific war (1941), and ignominious defeat. But recent scholarship has changed this account of events in several ways. First, while military officers, with or without the tacit approval of higher authorities, did present the Japanese government with imperialist faits accomplis, enormous popular support was mobilized for their actions. After 50 years of steady and forceful nation-building, by the 1920s Japanese nationalism had developed a life of its own not fully within state control. The emergent mass media and various social and political organizations such as labor unions, political parties and social associations were infused with high nationalist – and imperialist – sentiments that military officers could and did easily mobilize.18 By the late 1920s, with the onset of the depression that affected Japanese farmers acutely, agrarian radicals, together with young disgruntled military officers – the Showa restorationists, who felt that capitalists, politicians and bureaucrats had abandoned the true bushido (‘way of the warrior’) spirit of Japan – catalyzed this popular nationalism and laid the conditions for support of imperial expansion. Second, as Yoshihisa Matsusaka and others have pointed out, new imperialist ideas had been incubating, especially among members of the military stationed in the colonies and Manchuria since the last years of World War I. The primacy of diplomatic and multilateralist approaches of party governments during the 1920s kept these ideas out of the limelight, but several advocates of the new imperialism were busy experimenting with them in the 1920s, especially in Manchuria. The scale and duration of World War I convinced the Japanese military that the competition for global resources would be a long, drawn-out war for which Japan would need to be economically self-sufficient. Thus was born the idea of ‘strategic autarky’, which entailed an entirely new conception of imperialism: the colony or dominated region was to be made structurally and organizationally amenable to imperialist intent by utilizing the principle of the nation-state and nationalism. Military analysts such as Major Koiso Kuniaki, who would later

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become chief of staff of the Kwantung army, conceived of resource mobilization within a regional rather than merely national framework. For Koiso, the idea of autarky implied an alliance: the Chinese would supply land, resources and labor, and the Japanese would furnish technology and capital. He was mindful that a genuine autarky would involve some sacrifice of Japanese interests for the sake of the whole.19 With the growth of nationalism in these territories, and the spread of panAsianist ideas among various Japanese groups in the 1920s, the conditions for regional control increasingly came to be seen to involve cooperation (or forced cooperation) with potential allies. Matsuoka Yosuke, who argued the Japanese case for the independence of Manchukuo from China at the League of Nations in 1933, best exemplified the strategy of the new imperialism. In the 1920s, when he served on the board of directors of the South Manchurian Railroad Company, he developed the idea of autarky by creating a relationship of dependent alliance with Zhang Zuolin; the Kwantung army at the time embraced Matsuoka’s ideas. Through a series of loans for railroad construction and other projects, Matsuoka sought to transform Zhang’s administration into a client state. At the same time, according to Matsusaka, Matsuoka’s vision transcended the old imperialist game of dealing with native allies merely to gain concessions and privileges. Rather, Matsuoka’s goal was first to bring the regional government, principally through financial ties, firmly under Japanese control, and subsequently to pursue economic policies for developing Manchuria as a whole. Development was to take place not by excluding Chinese and others, but by encouraging them to contribute to the prosperity of the region. The Japanese, who were presumed to be the principal actors and natural leaders of this effort, could only benefit from this general development.20 While the new imperialism was being tested in Manchuria, experimentation with strategies of colonial development also characterized the 1920s in Korea. The shock, to the Japanese, of the March 1919 nationalist uprisings in Korea was processed originally by academics, journalists and colonial bureaucrats, and emerged as a policy called ‘Cultural Rule’. Cultural Rule was designed to produce cooperation between colonizer and colonized in economic and political matters. Characterized by slogans of ‘Japanese Korean joint rule’ (Nissen do-chi) and doctrines of ‘coexistence and coprosperity’ (kyo-son kyo-ei), Cultural Rule was in many respects a failure: the Japanese would have had to give more autonomy to the Koreans than they were prepared to do. The new thinking in Japanese colonial discourse was driven, according to Michael Schneider, by middle-class professional and managerial classes keen to align Japanese colonialism with the norms of international modernization, to respond to the rising nationalism of the colonized, and to develop the colony within a wider program of regional integration and management under Japanese leadership. The policy of Cultural Rule was, as Schneider has said, ‘an attempt to fit Japanese colonialism into the new internationalism of the 1920s’.21


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In the aftermath of World War I, Japanese imperialism came to be rethought radically in the context of pan-Asianism, the new discourse of civilization that began at the time to burgeon in Japan and many other parts of the continent. Pan-Asianism also had a special meaning for Japanese nationalists and thinkers during the 1920s because of the growing perception that, despite Japan’s effort to become a world-class nation-state (with colonies to boot), the Japanese continued to encounter racism and discrimination. Discrimination was perceived at the international conferences in Washington (1922) and at the London Naval Conference (1930), when Japan was allotted a lower quota of ships than the British and Americans. But most of all, it was the build-up of exclusionary policies in the USA and the final Exclusion Laws prohibiting Japanese immigration in 1924 that galled Japanese nationalists. In their view, Asian civilization did not exhibit inhuman racist attitudes and policies of this kind, and for militants such as Okawa Shu-mei and his followers in the Kwantung army, these ingrained civilizational differences would have to be fought out in a final, righteous war of East against West. In providing a moral explanation for wrongs inflicted upon Japan, panAsianist discourse also demanded empathy for the other exploited peoples of Asia, including those that Japan itself colonized. The ideas behind the Cultural Rule in Korea reflected, in theory, some of this empathy. During the 1920s, many intellectuals argued that Japanese and Koreans had the same ancestors, and this idea grew together with a theory of the mixed origins of the Japanese. Note that this expression of pan-Asianism led ultimately to the policies of assimilation of the Koreans (and Taiwanese) into the Japanese nation.22 In Manchuria, pan-Asianism was expressed in a strategy not of assimilation and homogenization, but of independence and alliance. Not only would it have stretched the contemporary imagination outrageously to argue that the Chinese and Japanese had the same origins, but the national movement and international opinion regarding the status of China was much too strong for the Japanese to seek to assimilate the Chinese in Manchuria, whom they insisted on calling ‘Manchurians’. Here pan-Asianism, expressed as shared Asian ideals and a common history (especially vis-à-vis Western imperialism), spoke to the new conceptualization of global domination through regional autarky. To achieve an industrial resource base in Manchuria, the Japanese military had to develop an alliance with key groups in this society, among the Chinese but also among the Japanese settler community on the Kwantung peninsula. Accordingly, the military was compelled to champion the rhetoric of these allies, which included talk of a sovereign state. Ishiwara Kanji and his associates in the Kwantung army, Itagaki Seishiro and Doihara Kenji, recognized that they could ignore the new discourse of rights and autonomy only at their peril.23 Pan-Asianism thus necessarily served as the basis of this alliance and ‘economic bloc’. Ishiwara Kanji (1889–1949) was perhaps most representative of the young radicals in the Japanese army who were fired by Japanese nationalist ideals,

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and distrustful of the contemporary military and civilian leadership’s commitment to achieve greatness at home and abroad. Ishiwara’s nationalism drew from a vision of militant Nichiren Buddhism, a proto-nationalistic millennialism that first developed in response to Mongol threats to the Japanese islands in the thirteenth century. In this vision, Japan was the center of the faith, and it was the duty of the Japanese to propagate the faith in the world. Over time, this millennial vision in Ishiwara was overlain by a pan-Asianist view of the ultimate clash between East and West. The most articulate exponent of this view was Okawa Shu-mei, a scholar of Hindu philosophy and a translator of the Koran, who used Hegelian dialectic to predict a final civilizational battle of East and West. Under Okawa’s influence, Ishiwara sought to blend in his nationalism with this pan-Asian civilizational vision and proclaimed the necessity of cooperation with China and Manchuria under Japanese leadership for success in this holy war or righteous duty (zhengyi, seigi).24 Ishiwara and his colleagues who precipitated the Manchurian Incident became committed to the formal equality of Asian nations and advocated the concord of nationalities in Manchukuo. Ishiwara found no contradiction between viewing the alliance as representing the supposed opposition between Asian ideals and Western imperialism, and viewing it as a means in a final war for global dominance. He was among the few Japanese officers to oppose the military expansion into China in 1937. But Ishiwara’s concern for more genuine partnership with the Chinese was pushed aside by higher levels of the military government, and he was put under surveillance by the military police after 1938.25 The idea of an autarkic Japan–Manchuria bloc was influenced by models of autarky in fascist Europe, but was understood within the civilization discourse of pan-Asianism. By the mid-1930s, the bloc idea had helped to produce the East Asian League (To-a renmei) and the East Asian Community (To-a kyo-do-tai), and still later the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere (Dai-To-a Kyo-eiken). Indeed, figures associated with the propagation of these institutions were critical of Nazi theories of racial superiority and emphasized cooperation with the Chinese in a regional alliance under Japanese leadership.26 To be sure, commitment to the idea of an alliance – and even to the notion that Japan should renounce extraterritoriality in Asian countries – was premised on the Japanese belief in their intrinsic superiority and the need for these Asian nations to accept Japanese leadership. Yet it is impossible to understand fully why the military encouraged rapid modernization and industrial build-up in Manchuria without grasping the framework of pan-Asianism.

Manchukuo In an earlier period, Manchukuo might have become a colony. But the new conceptualization of imperialism demanded that it become more like a subordinate ally or client-state in global competition. The status of the


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dependent state under the new imperialism was quite fluid, in part because the rapidly changing demands of global competition could, depending on the circumstances, give it more leverage (as in the case of the relationship between postwar Hong Kong and Britain) or generate more resistance and further subordination. The status of Manchukuo over its 15-year history gradually shifted, in official rhetoric, from that of an independent nationstate – with Japan conceived as a friendly country (youbang) and ally (mengbang) – to that of a dependent kinsman, even a child or younger brother. In the end, the rhetoric used was Confucian: it represented both the language of the ‘family state’ model of imperial Japan and the older rhetoric of the Chinese empire. By the time of the Pacific war, Manchukuo had become, in the words of its ambassador to Japan, Li Shaogeng, ‘the eldest son of the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere’. Pu Yi, the last Manchu emperor – who became first president and then emperor of Manchukuo – underwent a rebirthing ritual in 1940. He emerged from the womb of Amaterasu, the Shinto sun goddess and ancestor of the Japanese royal family, as the younger half-brother of Hirohito, the Japanese emperor.27 Ridiculous as this may sound to us (and as it did to the Chinese), it is fruitful to think of this ritual relationship as an innovation made possible by the theory of the mixed origins of the Japanese nation, a theory studied closely by Oguma Eiji. According to Oguma, a leading sociologist and historian of Japanese nationalism, the imperial ‘family state’ ideology was able to incorporate this theory because it privileged the (modern) Japanese ideal of the ie or household, which, unlike the lineage model, could accept outsiders by adoption into the family: ‘In this system’, Oguma writes, ‘as long as ancestors of the ie are linked to the current membership, blood is of secondary importance.’28 Becoming the younger brother of the emperor entailed a strictly dependent and subordinate status. Brotherhood in the Confucian understanding reflected a hierarchical relationship. In more modern rhetoric, brotherhood was often invoked instead to characterize egalitarian relationships: Sun Yat-sen used the slippage in this trope to rally secret fraternal societies (of the inegalitarian kind), while entering them in the historical record as at the core of revolutionary brotherhood (of the egalitarian kind).29 The same slippage in the idea of brotherhood was also very important in pan-Asianism, and we might even say that brotherhood was the pivot that joined the hierarchical ‘family state’ ideology with panAsianism. Brotherhood or, more broadly, the family relationship among East Asian peoples implied sharing a mission regardless of one’s preferences. It was the obligation of the patriarch or the older, dominant brother to create the ethos of the family, to form its enterprise, and to deliver the goods it promised. Japanese rhetoric did not fully develop this metaphor to embrace the relationship between Japan and Manchukuo, and the rhetoric always appeared somewhat contradictory, perhaps because of continued lip service to the independence of Manchukuo. Nonetheless, by 1940 the ‘family state’ model

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was utilized to characterize the relationship of citizen to state within Manchukuo: ‘National citizenship is the expanded version of family membership. Just as the family member has an obligation to obey the family unconditionally, so does the citizen have to obey the state.’30 Manchukuo was developed as an East Asian brother or son who set up a house modeled closely upon, but subordinate to, that of the Japanese patriarch. Practically, this structure meant using Chinese officials at all levels, including in the top administrative and political positions, but having their activities supervised by Japanese officials responsible ultimately to the Kwantung army. Developing the family enterprise and delivering the goods amounted to creating the modern developmental state in Manchukuo, which emerged as the most industrialized part of Asia outside Japan. The Manchukuo banking system was reformed, and for the first time the currency of the region was unified. The new currency was made equivalent in value to the Japanese yen, which facilitated its integration into the yen bloc. There was a dramatic rise of Japanese investments which, according to Louise Young, grew to almost 6 billion yen between 1932 and 1941 (in 1941 exchange rates) – a figure far greater than any other transfer from a metropole to a colony. By 1945, Japanese investment in Manchukuo exceeded the combined total of its investments in Korea, Taiwan and the rest of China.31 Industrial production tripled between 1933 and 1942, and producer goods output grew the fastest.32 Considerable attention was also paid to the social infrastructure, at least in the urban areas, including the public health and education systems.33 The new regime always touted these achievements as having reversed decades of warfare and economic chaos perpetuated by the previous warlord government. The rapid increase in industrial employment meant that, despite some early efforts of the government to restrict immigration from China, Chinese continued to pour in, and amounted to roughly 90 per cent of the population of 40 million in the 1940s. Koreans came into Manchuria in large numbers from the 1920s, and their numbers reached almost 800,000 by 1935. The Japanese had a plan to bring 5 million Japanese settlers into Manchukuo, but the rural settler population never exceeded 250,000. In the mid-1930s the total Japanese population was under 600,000.34 The other side of this development state was the brutality of an occupying army. The massacres of the resistance, the notorious human experiments with bacteriological toxins developed by Unit 731 in Harbin, the dispossession of agricultural land from Chinese farmers, and other brutal crimes have been well recorded.35 Manchukuo presents us with on the one hand, a record of cruel violence, and on the other hand, the record of a developmental state. There is perhaps no better symbol of the antithetical structure of the modern state in Manchukuo than its police. Manchukuo’s huge police force conducted punctiliously detailed censuses and surveys; made extensive and complex plans for settlements; paid close attention to hygiene and welfare; made available education, drinkable water and shelters; and mobilized the


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population for inoculations – sometimes at gunpoint.36 But there were many modern states characterized by this duality. What made Manchukuo different from Italy, Germany, the Soviet Union or Japan was that it lacked the legitimacy of a nation. In a time when nation-states allegedly represented the ‘will of the people’, the Manchukuo regime claimed instead to represent the essence of Asian culture. The ‘kingly way’ was presented as the ancient Chinese ideal of the just and moral ruler, a trope that Sun Yat-sen – widely regarded as the father of modern China and Provisional President of the Republic of China in 1912 – extended beyond Chinese civilization in a lecture on pan-Asianism delivered in Kobe, Japan.37 In Manchukuo, the kingly way, related notions, and the example of the Manchu emperor were deployed as symbols of pan-Asian civilization, bringing together diverse groups who, whether by choice, opportunism or necessity, came to support the new regime. These included many of the warlords and political leaders of the old society, dyed-in-thewool Confucian monarchists, and, most numerously, the deeply religious and universalist redemptive societies. The redemptive societies in China and Manchuria included those associated with sectarian traditions worshipping the Buddhist and folk deities, but they mostly represented the late imperial syncretic tradition (sanjiaoheyi), which combined the three religions of Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism into a single universal faith (see Chapter 6 for more). Although these societies commanded followings in the millions, they had historically been persecuted by the Chinese state, both imperial and modern. Just as Japanese imperialists had forged a Confucian language of empire to address their new subjects, so did the Manchukuo regime reach out to these religious societies – to some extent in their own language – to reinforce their alienation from the KMT and the CCP. Tachibana Shiraki, architect of Manchukuo ideology, said that the redemptive societies exemplified the essence of Asiatic civilization and were amenable to mobilization as civic organizations.38 Less easy to manipulate than the Japanese had hoped, these societies seized the opportunity to pursue their own goals: by the late 1930s, the Morality Society of Manchukuo claimed a membership of 8 million out of a total population of 40 million.39 The second legitimacy claim made by the puppet regime was that it represented the ‘concord of nationalities’ (minzoku kyo-wa), a conceit that was supposed to represent two advances over older colonial ideas. Not only was the concord supposed to reject exploitation and the reproduction of difference between ruler and ruled, but it was also designed to counter the homogenization of differences that nationalism had produced and that had led to nearly insoluble conflicts. By allegedly granting different peoples or nationalities their rights and self-respect under a state structure, Manchukuo presented itself as a nation-state in the mode of the Soviet ‘union of nationalities’. Among others, Tominaga Tadashi, the author of Manshu- no minzoku (Nationalities of Manchuria), wrote copiously about the early Soviet policy

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towards national self-determination. It was a policy that fulfilled the goals of federalism and protected minority rights, while at the same time strengthening Soviet state and military power, particularly with regard to ‘separatists’ in the old Tsarist empire. Writing in the early 1940s, after the war machine was moving ahead full throttle and riding roughshod over niceties of nationality policy, Tominaga, like many others committed to Manchukuo, continued to warn and plead against repressing Asian nationalist movements. Recalling Soviet policy, he believed that these nationalities could be utilized positively for the goals of the state and were, indeed, the only hope for the Japanese empire.40 These constituencies of potential support were managed, maintained and mobilized by the Concordia Association (Chinese: xiehehui; Japanese: kyo-wakai), which was effectively the Manchukuo regime’s party. But whereas in theory the association was to represent the will of the people and was ultimately destined to replace the Kwantung army, by mid-decade it was purged of its original leadership and made into an instrument of the army and government.41 Less a means of ethnic, cultural and occupational representation than of mobilization and surveillance, the Concordia Association closely resembled contemporary ‘totalitarian parties’ in Europe. The leaders refrained from calling it a party precisely because the appellation smacked too much of partisanship. The association enrolled all officials and government functionaries, including teachers, as well as important figures in society. All youth between the ages of 16 and 19 were compulsorily enrolled beginning in 1937, and by 1943 the association included about 10 per cent of the population (as compared to 5 per cent for the Chinese Communist Party in the PRC today). Like its fascist counterparts, the Concordia Association was corporatist, anti-communist and anti-capitalist. It sought to overcome class divisions by organizing people through their communities, both occupational and ethnic, while promoting a dirigiste economy. But the association was distinctive in representing Asian communities – Mongols, Manchus, Hui Muslims, Koreans, Japanese and white Russians (together accounting for under 10 per cent of the population), as well as the majority Chinese – and their traditions. This commitment often meant supporting the religious leadership among these peoples: Mongol lamas, Manchu and Daur shamans, Muslim ahongs, Buddhist monks and Confucian moralists. The regime’s control of local society was enhanced by the work of association units established within, for example, Manchu villages, Hui mosques and the Chinese community self-surveillance system (baojia). Thus pan-Asianism came to play an important role in maintaining both the corporatist, fascistic character of the regime and its claim to legitimacy based upon adherence to the ‘kingly way’. At the same time, the Concordia Association had been founded to realize the modern goals of nation-state-building (Chinese: jianguo; Japanese: kenkoku). Japanese ideologists like Tachibana saw no contradiction between the goals of republicanism, equality and modernization, on the one hand, and the ‘Eastern’ values of community, solidarity and the moral state, on the


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other. After all, did not Japan exemplify a synthesis of the best of both worlds? In practice, however, the very different programs and interests pursued by modernizers and pan-Asianists led to many tensions and conflicts that leave us with a view of Manchukuo as a polarized rather than harmonious society. Mongol youth demanded modern education and the elimination of the power of the lamas; Chinese supporters were fiercely divided between those who favored the restoration of the emperor and those who opposed it. Propaganda activists were frustrated by their inability to mobilize redemptive societies for wartime work. The contradiction reflected in particular the tensions of an artificial nation-state dominated by an imperial power in an age of nationalism. The inability to construct a truly independent nation-state led Manchukuo to cling to constituencies that would have to be gradually overcome in the process of national modernization. As it was, the wildly ambitious Japanese imperialist military leadership derailed the entire process by plunging this carefully constructed state into a mad and destructive war.

Conclusion: trajectories and affinities

The Japanese domination of Manchukuo represented a new form of imperialism. As nationalism, rights consciousness and social mobilization developed in the colonized and semi-colonized world, the costs of direct colonial rule increased, while the conditions for indirect rule were enhanced. With the creation of modern institutions in the military dependencies, it became possible to control these areas economically by dominating their institutions of resource and social mobilization (such as the banks, the transportation infrastructure, or the Concordia or redemptive societies). Japan, like the later Soviet Union and the USA, sought to bring its client states into a structure of governance that not only permitted dominance, but integrated them into a regional, and ultimately global, order.42 As alluded to above, the Soviet Union’s internal nationality policy, both through perception and influence, served as an instrument of control in Manchukuo. During the post-World War II era, the Soviet Union’s creation of a regional system of militarily dependent states in Eastern Europe reflected many features of the new imperialism. A shared anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist ideology sanctioned a centralized economic and political system. The Soviet Union combined economic leverage and military threat to integrate what were often states more economically developed than itself into a regional economy. In some ways, the imperialism of the Soviet Union revealed the counter-economic consequences of this logic of empire. Not only were the client states of the Soviet Union in Europe often more developed, the USSR may have been subsidizing their economies by supplying them with cheap oil and raw materials while importing finished products from their economies. This was the price paid by the imperial power to create and maintain dependence upon it and ensure its security.43

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In part because of the consciousness of its own colonial past, and with the exception of a few places (most notably the Philippines), the USA had long practiced imperialism without colonialism. After the Spanish-American War in 1898, the USA created a system of client states around the Caribbean basin in Central America. These nominally independent states became increasingly dependent on the USA, which accounted for more than threequarters of the region’s foreign trade as well as the bulk of foreign investment.44 During the 1920s, when Japan was experimenting with indirect imperialism in Manchuria, the USA, too, was seeking to develop and refine informal control over Central American countries, especially in response to anti-Yankee, and frequently revolutionary, nationalism in the region. Officials, diplomats and business groups stressed means such as US control of banking, communication facilities, investments in natural resources, and the development of education – particularly the training of elites in Americanstyle constitutions, ‘free elections’ and orthodox business ideas. But the threat and reality of military intervention remained close at hand.45 American imperialism was characterized not only by the Monroe Doctrine, but also by the Open Door policy. Although there were contradictions and tensions between the two approaches, there were also continuities, most importantly in the practice of using sovereign or nominally sovereign polities to advance American interests. In 1917, Woodrow Wilson pointed to the continuities when he declared that the nations of the world should ‘with one accord adopt the doctrine of President Monroe as the doctrine of the world. … no nation should seek to extend its polity over any other nation or people’. But just two weeks before, Wilson had sent troops to the Dominican Republic and committed US military forces in Haiti and Mexico as well.46 The USA sought to foster an ideological and economic hegemony among its client states by creating them as reliable emulators subject to external economic and military constraints. Note, however, that this imperialism did not become developmentally oriented until the 1950s, when it sought to respond to the Cuban revolution.47 The tensions between American interests and global enlightenment were to be contained not only by military power, but perhaps more importantly by the notion of a limited self-determination, the idea of tutelage. As Secretary of the Interior Franklin Lane wrote in 1922, ‘What a people hold they hold as trustees for the world … It is good American practice. The Monroe Doctrine is an expression of it. … That is why we are talking of backward peoples and recognizing for them another law than that of self-determination, a limited law of self-determination, a leading-string law’.48 Little wonder then that the Japanese representative at the League of Nations hearings on Manchukuo repeatedly insisted on the Asiatic Monroe Doctrine as Japan’s prerogative in Asia. Indeed, the tension between enlightenment and selfinterest paralleled the same tension in Japanese pan-Asianism. In the post-World War II period, this combination of interest, enlightenment and military violence has developed into what Carl Parrini has


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called ‘ultraimperialism’. This refers to US efforts to maintain cooperation and reduce conflict among imperialist nations that had been, during the first half of the century, busily scrambling to create monopolistic or exclusive market conditions in various parts of the world.49 ‘Ultraimperialism’ is secured by a chain of military bases around the globe – and structures such as the International Monetary Fund, General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and the World Bank – to enable the conditions of cooperation among advanced capitalist powers and to facilitate the new (developmental or modernizing) imperialism in the decolonized world.50 Although the USA is hardly a regional power any longer, as a global empire it employs, in the words of Arrighi, Hui, Hung and Selden, a vast system of ‘political and military vassalage’ and fosters a ‘functional specialization between the imperial and vassal (nation) states. … ’ In this respect, the postwar USA represents the apogee of the imperialism of ‘free nations’.51 Looking at Manchukuo comparatively, it is clear that its creators were influenced by both the USA and the Soviet Union, and by German ideas of the economic bloc. But, by an eclectic and adaptive mixing, Manchukuo also synthesized these ideas into the prototype of the developmental client state within a new imperialist formation that could be found after World War II in Eastern Europe, French Africa, the British sterling zone, and the US empire. The USA in particular favored the model of modernizing client nation-states centered on royal identity in Asia – witness Japan, Vietnam, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Thailand and others. Despite the differences between this form of imperialism and the ‘classical’ nineteenth-century forms, nationalists have emphasized the continuities between the classical and the clientelistic or dependent forms, and they have been right to note the lack of autonomy in both.52 But does the ability of power-holders to influence and manipulate institutions and rhetoric overwhelm the effects of new institutions and policies in changed domestic and international circumstances? To be sure, Manchukuo remained a highly exploited society. For instance, rural society remained stagnant largely because the landowning classes represented an important base of support for the regime. Moreover, Chinese workers received less than a third of the wages paid to Japanese workers in state factories. The Manchukuo government and Japanese enterprises, which controlled 72 per cent of total invested capital, made it hard for Chinese capital to penetrate the modern sector.53 At the same time, the idea of strategic autarky necessitated the development of Manchukuo as a developmental state with advanced technologies of economic growth, generating higher standards of urban life until the Pacific war. In general, the state in Manchukuo was able to deploy modern technologies of control, surveillance, discipline and mobilization among the populace. The regime and its affiliated organizations – such as the Concordia Association and the redemptive societies – penetrated peoples’ lives to keep a stricter watch on them, but also to generate new consciousness regarding, for

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instance, the proper nuclear family, consumer spending, engagement in afforestation programs, and other projects prioritized by the mobilizing state. If some of these projects were driven by the immediate needs of the metropole, others were driven by the logic of a modernizing state. Is it possible to think of Manchukuo as the beginning of an imperialism that culminates with Hong Kong in the sterling area? Or Iraq? The immediate factors behind the failure of Manchukuo had to do with its growing dependence on Japan, and the role it was forced to play in the Japanese wartime empire. Indeed, the Manchukuo model of the client state was partially extended to regimes in occupied China and Southeast Asia during the Pacific war. This regional imperial formation bent upon global domination was characterized by a set of interdependencies within an imperially dictated enterprise. A simple model of economic exploitation, utilizing existing modes of production and colonial difference, was to be supplemented (if not replaced) by high levels of investment, the development of new modes of mobilization and identity production, and a rhetoric of brotherhood and regional federalism. All of this came to naught with Japan’s defeat. Recently, some scholars have suggested that modern imperialism is transforming itself into a form of federalism. Anthony Pagden, who provides the most cogent version of this argument, believes that ‘it would be far wiser to look upon both the United States and the European Union as, in their very different ways, attempts to revive a federalist rather than an imperial object’. Pagden traces his ideas to thinkers such as Joseph Schumpeter and Jean Monnet (credited with the idea of a ‘United States of Europe’). According to Pagden, the ages of conquest and commerce were, by the twentieth century, being replaced by a global order in which the eighteenth-century European idea of sovereignty was transferred from the nation-state to ‘something more amorphous: a modern, or postmodern, global society’. At the base of this development was the idea of empire, which survived the competitive nationalisms of the nineteenth century as an ‘extended protectorate’ and, in the words of Edmund Burke, a ‘sacred trust’.54 Yet I think Pagden is far more sanguine about nationalism having basically been overcome, especially on the part of the imperial or ‘federating’ power, than the historical record shows. Ultimately, the case of Manchukuo reveals the fault lines of the new imperialism. By pointing to the wartime emphasis on the fact that the Japanese were of mixed origins, Oguma Eiji has stressed the importance of assimilation over nationalist–racist elements within Japanese imperial ideology. Others, such as Komagome Takeshi, an expert on Japanese colonial education at Kyoto University, have argued persuasively that while Japanese imperialism reflected the extension of the principles underlying national integration, Japanese nationalism was a contradictory affair composed not only of the principle of common language and culture (or civilization), but also of ‘blood descent’. Whereas language and culture created possibilities of integrating the colonized based on


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assimilation or alliance, the exclusionary principle of blood descent invented new ways – institutional, legal or attitudinal – to circumvent the incorporation of non-Japanese in the empire as equal citizens.55 Imperialist competition in the first half of the twentieth century was catalyzed by a particular configuration of capitalism and nationalism. Although novel formations and ideals – then and now – have sought to transcend both capitalism and nationalism, the force of nationalist identity and interests from the earlier period has proved remarkably tenacious, particularly as they develop new linkages with competitive capitalism.56 The globalization, cooperative economic blocs and regional formations of our own time are not unprecedented developments – and the precedents are not encouraging.

3

Historical Narratives and Transnationalism in East Asia*


How have the past two decades of rapid globalization in East Asia affected historical understandings in East Asia? My goal is to probe in a preliminary way the relations between historical writing and the changing meaning of history in East Asia today. Although the core of this chapter concerns China, my goal is to view Chinese developments within the regional context. First let me clarify my terms: by historical narrative I mean narratives and even emergent paradigms that frame and give meaning to academic and popular understandings of the past in relation to the present. To be sure, as I will argue below, there is often a gap between popular and academic understandings of history all over the world, and I will try and identify some of these gaps in East Asia in the hope of detecting some of the directions in which the uses of history are flowing. As earlier chapters have demonstrated, nationalism and the related narrative of progress or modernization represented the dominant paradigm for history during much of the twentieth century. Globalization has been affecting this paradigm in important ways without obliterating it; one might say that it has been reshaping the national paradigm. The nation no longer possesses the near-monopoly over the framework of historical writing that it once had, but the nation-state and nationalists still have considerable power over the writing of history in all East Asian countries. More importantly, while nationalism as an ideology has been restructured and resignified, it remains just as intense as earlier. Soon after World War II, with the recovery of Europe and Japan and the seemingly limitless prosperity of the USA, it must have seemed like the beginning of the ‘end of history’ to many in the West, and we all recall how the end of history was trumpeted at the end of the Cold War. In the wake of World War II, mature capitalist nations began to loosen the close association of academic historical writing with directly national purposes. More specifically, this took place under the twin developments of growing professionalism and the need and capacity to acquire global knowledge necessitated by the Cold War and global developmental projects. Historical writing about East Asia in the West, and to some extent in Japan, followed the area studies model, in which knowledge about Asia was only indirectly linked to US and

Historical Narratives and Transnationalism

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Japanese national goals. After the 1960s, Japanese academic historiography, often dominated by Marxism, even sometimes became opposed to these national goals. Of course, Marxism, which was the ideological target of the Cold War, continued to be taboo in the USA until the 1970s. For three or four decades after World War II, unlike the more developed capitalist countries, the new nation-states of Asia, in places such as China and India as well as Taiwan and Korea, focused their historical attention on national studies of the past. The principal narrative was the anti-imperialist and modernization narrative, which focused on the problem of national development, highlighted the achievements of national and nationalist revolution, and attributed obstacles to development to either imperialism or feudalism and tradition. The Bandung conference of 1955, when the excolonial countries of Asia and Africa held their summit meeting, symbolized the climax of the anti-imperialist movement in espousing ideals that were greater than the nation. But, as we will see in Chapter 9, the post-Bandung situation soon revealed the importance of nationalism and the difficulties of cooperation among new nations in a competitive world. China and India fought a war over territory in 1962, and the Chinese soon split with their socialist anti-imperialist allies, the Soviet Union and Vietnam.1

Decolonizing histories

History continued to be a vastly important tool for these new nations, still in the process of consolidating the nation-state and its boundaries, its recalcitrant minorities and distinctly unmodern masses. Indeed, these nations were only engaging in what the older nation-states had engaged in the century before. The incredibly violent historical process of national and imperial consolidation in the USA, Europe and Japan was facilitated by powerful historical narratives of progress and of fulfillment of the destiny of nations. The fusion of history and nation created the unique structure of a national subject that was both primordial and evolving into the modern future. The linear history of the national subject was not only the means to claim and reclaim sovereign right to the territory the nation allegedly originally and/or continuously occupied, it was the means whereby this subject evolved – indeed was propelled – into modernity. The promised vision of a bright future, often a glorious imperialist future, was important for the mobilization and reshaping of national populations for global competition.2 Unlike the old ones, the new nation-states were inheritors of the decolonizing, anti-imperialist movement, and their process of consolidation had to take place at a time when pacifism and the renunciation of imperialist violence formed the core of their rhetoric. Yet there was equally an imperative to forge national integration. The term ‘national integration’, taken from modernization theory, sounds peaceful, but in reality it was scarcely so. The goal of integration was to create a disciplined body of citizens out of peasants, ethnic and religious minorities and other marginals, capable of

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sacrificing their lifeworlds for increased competition, state intrusion, surveillance and deferred consumption. The nation-state project entailed homogenization and mobilization for advantage in a competitive world. Historical education, through which one learned, among other things, to love one’s new national self and hate one’s enemies, became one of the principal means of identity formation. No matter if the nation was founded on socialist or communal goals, once the nation-state entered the world nation-state system it became involved in a competition in which wealth, value, respect and indeed recognition came from beating the competitor in the game. We have noted in earlier chapters how the construction of socialism around the nation-state, and its discursive commitment to a linear history and progressive future entailed a competitive understanding of the world that would, under particular historical circumstances, enable both unconditional nationalism and capitalism to prevail. Given the historical conditions of its emergence in East Asia, socialism was only abstractly opposed to nationalism. Soon after the first Sino-Japanese war, it became abundantly clear to Chinese intellectuals and politicians that Chinese people and the state could raise their heads only once China had become a respected member of the world system of nation-states. This entailed a program of nation-building based on studying the strong nationstates – especially Japan, the most accessible of these rising states. Since the late Qing reforms (1902–9), the Chinese state has sought to reorganize its legal, political and social system so that other powerful nation-states, and later multinational entities such as the League of Nations, may recognize it as one of them. After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, the Soviet model became for the Chinese communists the most progressive, as well as the best, means for the Chinese people to stand up in the world. Socialism was, in the long run, good for the world, but it would have to be made through the nation-state, whose sovereignty was delimited to a territory where it would have to engage in state- and nation-building. The socialist nation-state saw its historical past and immediate destiny in terms of the welfare of the nation. Indeed, soon after its establishment differences broke out between PRC and Soviet historians over the right to interpret Chinese history. PRC historians such as Fan Wenlan objected, for instance, to the Soviet idea that the imperial Chinese state had merely effected a political unification and that Chinese nationalism developed only with the emergence of bourgeois capitalism in the twentieth century. Fan protested that national unification had begun with the Qin–Han unification, much earlier than elsewhere in the world. Chinese historians also objected to characterizing China as part of the Asiatic mode of production. Within the progressive conception of historical materialism, this characterization made contemporary China even less advanced than ancient Greece and Rome, which had slave modes of production.3 One can readily sympathize with the Chinese objections to such disparaging historical characterizations, but I want to draw attention here to the Marxist reproduction of the civilizational


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hierarchy of enlightenment imperialism. This framework of linear, progressive history shared by two socialist states embedded within it a competition over which was better equipped historically to attain the goals of socialism. Competitiveness tended to become a crucial feature of the socialist worldview, and shaped the relations between the two states for the next 30 years. As noted in Chapter 1, the interstate system and world culture has been responsible for many institutions and practices transforming societies into nations. The advent of nationalism as a world ideology, on the other hand, tended to identify sovereignty solely within the people and culture of the nation. Sustaining such an immanent conception of sovereignty necessitates a misrecognition of the systemic or wider sources and impetus of nationformation. This dualism, so central to nationalism all over the world, generates on the one hand a powerful desire to affiliate with global culture and forces, and alternatively (or sometimes, schizophrenically, in the same moment) a desire to withdraw into the local or the national. The Chinese formulation of ti-yong, which was the first expression of this dualism, also appeared in other East Asian societies. The Cold War did, however, provide the new nations some opportunities and protection that created a hothouse environment within which national narratives could flourish. It permitted decolonizing nations to focus on internal development and redistribution rather than plunge into global capitalist competition. One might say that the Cold War created circumstances enabling an extended period of protectionist development and deferred the schizoid oscillations between the global and the national. The divisions of the Cold War protected these economies from internal and external competitiveness, and the state became the principal agent of redistribution and regulation. Historical writing reflected the needs of the hour. Chinese socialism sought to achieve egalitarianism and collectivism, and historical research focused on class struggle, popular uprisings, the thwarting of the ‘sprouts of capitalism’, and the unity of different peoples (minzu tuanjie) striving towards the same class and anti-imperialist national goals. National histories were also dominant in the rest of East Asia. In Taiwan, the KMT vicariously conceived a national history and an imagined Taiwanese integrity that suppressed histories of the land and people of Taiwan even as part of the national narrative. Thus the Palace Museum (gugong) had not a single piece from Taiwan, and monumental sites on the island usually featured a telescope pointing in the direction of the original site on the mainland.4 Perhaps this blatantly willful omission had to do with suppressing any memory of the violent foundation of the regime on the island in the (1947) massacre. But the episode is itself symbolic of the suppressed foundations of national histories – a suppression that is perhaps intrinsic to national histories.5 From the national perspective, Japanese historical writing during this period represented an interesting combination of a nationalist and an

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emancipatory history of the region. The latter reflected the capacity of the older Japanese nation-state to undertake non-national histories, as well as the historically peculiar minzoku narrative that dominated Japan since the interwar years. We have referred in Chapter 1 to the 1950s debate between Maruyama Masao and historians affiliated with the Historical Association. Over the next three decades, Marxist analytical categories and concerns increasingly dominated the field of Chinese studies, establishing a massive socioeconomic foundation for the understanding of the Chinese revolution that was often more persuasive than the more restricted versions of Chinese Marxist historiography.

Globalization and history


As in much of the world, the close identification of the nation with historical writing has been challenged in East Asia. This has not meant that the nation-state has been excluded in historical writing, but it has lost its nearmonopoly as the subject or agent of history. There are several interrelated factors behind this. Economically, we are familiar with the increasing transnationalization of capital and the movement of people, technologies and culture across boundaries. Cultural narratives responding to the creation of these cross-national spaces and communities are beginning to appear, although they are not fully fledged historical ones. At the same time, democratization and liberalization in all East Asian societies has permitted subaltern and other handicapped groups – whether linguistic, ethnic, social or sexual – that had been assimilated into the nation to articulate their demands and seek recognition and restitution. Third, the marketization of society has led to more uncertainty and mobility, and an attendant quest for identity among citizens more widely. This search – expressed, for instance, in successive theories of Nihonjinron or Asianism in Japan, the ‘search for roots’, the Mao and ‘red nostalgia’ craze, the popular resignification of historical figures such as Zeng Guofan (who has become the sage for aspiring business graduates), and the various native-place movements linking the village to the region – often bears a complex relationship to dominant national narratives. Moreover, the loosening of central controls over media and state institutions such as museums has also led to the proliferation of available media, while the commodification of the sign and the unleashing of the historical signifier (such as Mao or Zeng Guofan) have made an entire array of symbols available for identity-building. In other words, while subject-making and identity politics were, in the earlier period, principally or legitimately a national project conducted through state apparatuses, they are now a more decentralized phenomenon, and both the demand and the means for identity-making have proliferated. At the same time, however, note that subject-making itself – the process of creating an agency for historical action and recognition – whether it is the burakumin or feminist groups in Japan, or aspiring Chinese provinces, or


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peasants displaced by the Yangzi dams, has many similarities to the earlier process of national subject formation, which I have called the ur form of identity politics. This homology of political forms, the identification of the self versus the other, remains a significant factor linking the new identities to nationalism. In the first place, the revolutionary narrative of history exemplified by Professor Hu Sheng’s ‘three revolutionary climaxes’, namely the Taiping Rebellion, the Boxer Uprising, and the 1911 Republican Revolution,6 has been replaced by the ‘reformist’ narrative of history that emerged full-blown in the 1990s. It substitutes three other events from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the Self-strengthening movement, the 100 Days Reform movement of 1898, and the Bourgeois Revolution of 1911.7 Popular uprisings are noticeably missing in this narrative, and many of the targets of the revolutionary narrative, such as Zeng Guofan and Kang Youwei, appear in an increasingly favorable light. Interestingly, in the 2003 television series Towards the Republic, watched by hundreds of millions of viewers, this reformist narrative has become more statist. Thus the Empress Dowager Cixi and President Yuan Shikai, de facto heads of state between 1900 and 1916, and long regarded as bitter opponents of reform, are treated with great sympathy and shown to be devoted to the greater interests of the nationstate.8 The revolutionary narrative has been overturned, but the power of the nation-state has been fortified in history. In many respects, though, professional historians today find themselves relatively free from the interpretive straitjacket of class struggle, popular uprisings and the standard of a single narrative. The favored approach among recent historians is the ‘history from below’ approach, established in the West with the appearance of E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class or Eric Hobsbawm’s Primitive Rebels.9 The goals of the movement appear to be similar in China as they were in the West, namely to eschew strictly defined class or law-governed histories from above in favor of a more experiential perspective of the people as agents of their own histories. Still, given the continued importance of the communist party in China, one can appreciate the difference in the implications of such a perspective. Zhao Shiyu has studied popular religion, temple life and carnivals in late imperial China. He shows that this religious life, while interlinked with official culture, could also subvert and threaten it; religion provided a refuge for women typically confined to the domestic area, and generally withstood the Westernization of Chinese society.10 Sometimes recent research reflects critically on the sacred events of the national narrative. Thus Feng Xiaocai, in an essay on the May 4th Movement in Shanghai, noted that the intellectual vision of the movement as a popular nationalist phenomenon was quite different from the scene on the ground. It was not the spirit of patriotism that motivated the popular movement, but rather rumors that the Japanese were spreading poison in the food. As panic gripped the population, they began to riot and attack the Japanese and even some Chinese people.11

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This kind of academic historical writing is, however, a sensitive matter and subject to periodic clampdown by state authorities. For instance, the journal Bingdian (Freezing Point) was shut down in January 2006 after the controversy generated by an essay written by Zhongshan University history professor Yuan Weishi. The journal, known for its serious and provocative essays, was reorganized and subsequently restarted in March. The thrust of Yuan’s essay was to criticize Chinese school history textbooks for distorting the record, especially with regard to the imperialist role in the Second Opium War (1858–60) and the Boxer Rebellion (1900). According to Yuan, this kind of pedagogy can only inflame nationalistic passions and reproduce youth such as the violently chauvinistic Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution. Indeed, he finds Chinese historical consciousness quite comparable with that of the Japanese: ‘the two have something in common: the mainstream culture in society lacks deep reflection on its contemporary history’. He concludes with a plea for a more calm and rational historiography so that China can engage properly in its modernization project.12/13 Two matters are of interest to me in this episode. The first is that most of Yuan’s criticism came from a comparison with Hong Kong history textbooks. According to Yuan, these textbooks present a ‘more complete picture’ of both events and do not end up demonizing the foreigners alone. This alternative view, so close to home, is likely to continue to unsettle the field of knowledge within China. The second is the vitriolic response to the essay in Bingdian from many quarters of its readership. Established academic historians criticized the essay for ‘seriously violating historical truth, delivering a mistaken judgment on history and gravely misleading the youth’. Others claimed that Yuan ‘grievously hurt the feelings of the Chinese people’.14 If academic historical writing represents the arena in which the limits to the official narrative are tested, the field of public history permits a greater flexibility of historical discourse. This may have to do with the general assumption that public displays about the past are not strictly history. Indeed, I consider the study of this level to represent the ethnography of historical consciousness. The contemporary public media produce new assumptions about the past in relation to the environment or habitus of everyday practices – assumptions that can sometimes come into radical dissonance with the official view of history. While museums have often been the site of the display and formation of a national historical identity, James Flath has argued that in Shandong, perhaps one of the most historically rich regions of China, recently dwindling governmental support has led museums to look elsewhere; it is only museums in remote places still dependent on government support that continue to follow the official narrative. In the major cities, museums have branched out in different directions – such as the history of alcohol, folk-culture or mining – and they are often driven by market considerations. Flath suggests that since 1992, with the guarantee of the security of historical sites from attacks such as those of the Cultural Revolution, it has become acceptable to display


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politically incorrect items relating even to historical subjects of national significance, such as the many rooms for Kang Youwei’s concubines, or the Catholic church as the first location of the provincial CCP headquarters.15 This national ecumenicalism may also be seen in managing the historical monument Yuanmingyuan, the Qing emperors’ summer palace and gardens filled with architectural replicas from China and Europe. Until recently, this site was remembered chiefly for its devastation and national humiliation at the hands of the Western imperialists during the Second Opium War and the Boxer Rebellion. Haiyan Lee’s analysis of the various recent efforts to utilize and represent this site reveals the state to be quite neutral as to whether Yuanmingyuan should be kept as a site of ruins (and thus of national humiliation and avenging), or restored to promote a happy history of imperial romance and cosmopolitanism. She argues that the job of the state today is to balance the two, and also the relationship between history as commercial pleasure and history as a reminder of national humiliation. The nation-state’s principal concern appears to be to ensure that globalization – the desire for global goods and values – is not negated by the desire for national authenticity, and vice versa. Lee argues that Yuanmingyuan is ‘an ideal schooling ground for the art of socialist neo-liberal citizenship: of being able to reconcile authoritarianism and freewheeling capitalism, patriotic loyalty and transnational imaginary, self-righteous rage and aesthetic and sensual enjoyment … ’.16 Thus, while public displays now seem to be much less state-driven, they do not necessarily exclude nationalism in their mode of presentation. For instance, on Liugong Island in Shandong there is a new museum dedicated to the former Beiyang Navy, defeated by the Japanese in 1895. It houses enormous dioramas of Chinese crushing the Japanese foes, but it has few reminders of the actual Chinese defeat.17 This seems compatible with Lothar von Falkenhausen’s argument that by the mid-1990s, Chinese provincial museums had undergone a paradigm shift. While they became much more interested in displaying and boosting regional rather than national history, these regional narratives are not incompatible with the latter; rather, they generate a voluntary more than a coercive integration with the center, spawning mass cultural patriotism from below rather than above.18 Yonsoon Ahn has shown how this kind of cultural patriotism has generated a tense situation and a ‘relics warfare’ across the Chinese–Korean border over the problem of Koguryo.19 In the ethnographic perspective of history, we can often see the performance and reception of historical knowledge by collectives and ordinary people in public life. Some performances may be relatively passive, such as those staged by museum and monument authorities, or showings and discussions of cinema and TV shows that perform or alter historical narratives. Others may be very active, such as the popular actions expressed, for instance, in the anti-Japanese or anti-American riots of recent years, actualizing the message from decades of historical pedagogy. While this historical

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consciousness inevitably bears a relationship to government pedagogy in textbook histories that have created a ‘historical self ’, it also takes on a life of its own. Heshang to shijie


I explore here two instances of performative public narratives. Together, the two media events represent the oscillating structure that frames historical visions, albeit with variations. Heshang (River Elegy) is a six-part documentary series that was first broadcast on television in June 1988. It had a powerful impact on the intelligentsia and urban viewing public, and may be seen as a crucially important event in the chain that triggered the 1989 student protests in Tiananmen Square. The serial, which has been ably analyzed by Xiaomei Chen, among others, presented itself as a historical narrative, indeed a counter-narrative to the official revolutionary nationalist history. Its basic message is that Chinese culture and history is tyrannical and brutalizing; the Yellow River (together with the Great Wall), representing the stagnant Asiatic mode of production, is the central cause and metaphor of this misery. By contrast, Western civilization is dynamic and is symbolized by the openness of the blue ocean, which transports science and democracy across the seas. A crucial event in this history was the closing of China to the outside world during the Ming dynasty: ‘For humankind as a whole, the fifteenth century was an extremely critical century. The human race began to move its gaze from the continent to the seas. History gave a fair chance, both to the Orient and to the Occident, to make a choice.’20 With China’s inward turn, it lost its opportunity. Heshang is no academic history and, as its critics untiringly pointed out, is highly selective in the presentation of the historical materials and passionate in its rhetoric. But it was perhaps the first mass media event in China that successfully reached out and moved vast numbers of people to question the official historical narrative. Xiaomei Chen has described the popularity of Heshang, which circulated in video form and hand-copied manuscripts even before the competition in the publishing industry broke out to acquire the script.21 It was received enthusiastically, particularly by high-school students in both urban and rural areas. Su Xiaokang wrote that a million youth came to debate Heshang in Guangzhou.22 For the ethnography of history, Heshang poses many important questions, but for the moment I merely wish to record its role as performative history that radically alters and questions historical perceptions of the self in order to move the future in a different direction – that of globalization, modernization and democratization. And just as surely, when the reception turned political and the enthusiasts fell silent, its denunciation was national and civilizational: ‘you have flogged our ancestors with impunity’, they said. Fifteen years later, much has changed. China and its government are champions in the global economy, but popular culture is more subdued


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about the virtues of globalization, and there are not many articulate voices able to capture its wrenching effects on so many ordinary people. One that has done so, a film entitled The World (Shijie), made by Jia Zhangke, is set in the Beijing theme park Shijiezhi chuang (Window of the World), one of two identical parks (the other is in Shenzhen) that glitteringly celebrate global cultures. Spread over hundreds of acres, there are varying-scale replicas of many European and Asian historical sites, although it is mainly the Western ones that are large enough for a group of peasants to saunter through (a Renaissance plaza) or to hold weddings in (a German church). A large-scale version of Disney World’s It’s a Small World, its signature gala dance and musical performance resembles a Las Vegas-style revue that traces the history of world civilization (mainly China and Europe), the Olympics, and the search for peace in the world. The World is a story about poor rural youth who come to Beijing to work in the theme park in search of a better life. The romantic protagonists Tao and Taisheng are mere cogs in this world, the one a bit-dancer and the other a security guard; their simple desire for a better life is always in danger of being swallowed by the greater appetite for the high-rolling global lifestyle sowed at the site of their work. The two central workplaces of our protagonists symbolize the horizons of Window of the World. Taisheng works in the Eiffel Tower, which rises to one-third the size of the original. People are always shown rising up into its heights to achieve a vista of all the other monuments, the city and the sky. Tao works in the above-mentioned dance extravaganza, which features world cultures interwoven into a haphazard narrative of civilization. It is not only the protagonists who become caught up in the desires of this global play, but an entire community of youngsters from the same village. They soon discover the bitter reality behind their desires – a tragic one that involves corruption and adultery and ends up with three deaths. The home town is never shown, but is evoked both as a place they fled and as an object of warmth. The movie mourns the loss of community; when a likeable youngster nicknamed ‘little sister’ is killed in a construction site, his comrades weep uncontrollably for him and for themselves. We are never taken back to the village; only his parents come to take the body. Mute and shellshocked, they are, however, not averse to the compensation paid them as the father silently packs away the money in his bosom. The village may not appear, but it is a returning referent. As for the nation, it seems to have ceased to matter, at least in this story. We often see familiar Beijing sites such as Tiananmen, but the cityscape is itself folded into comic-book fantasies, with boxed frames through which people fly and become dreamlike characters. Planes are forever swooping down and passports have a magical quality. This is a story about the consequences of global desires and dying communities. Among the most poignant subplots is Tao’s growing friendship with a Russian girl, who is also hired by the company to dance. Although they are barely able to exchange a few words, the

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relationship grows and they clearly feel a kinship. But the girl is in search of someone more connected to her, and finally departs to join a long-unseen sister in a remote Russian town. The film may hold a message of promise in the mute abilities of these fugitives of capitalist globalization to reach out to each other, but it is a thin reed. While the theme park is not what we might consider historical, it does embed, in a rather tawdry way, the civilizational narrative of the Enlightenment with some great ancient Oriental achievements thrown in. It is ‘world civilization’ with Europe at the center. In this sense, it is closer to Heshang than to the revolutionary nationalist narratives of history. In a way, too, the movie The World may be seen as the counter-moment in this oscillation, criticizing capitalist globalization and urging the rebuilding of community. But The World is a depressingly bleak movie: there is no national pole to return to – it has been absorbed by the globe – and the local community is on its way to a similar vaporization. Indeed, if there is any axis of solidarity suggested, it is that of a transnational class, the materially and spiritually dispossessed from various nations who collect in Window of the World. But Jia Zhangke does not seem to hold much hope for the workers of the world to unite.

Transnationalism and the territorial nation

In the current era of globalization, there is an inclination to see the balance tilted towards globalizing forces that overwhelm or delegitimate nationalizing or statist ones. Jia Zhangke’s The World subscribes to this view. I would put the change in different terms. The current round of globalization does not specify either the decline of nation-state ideology or the strengthening of it, but rather a change in the nature of the territoriality of the nation-state, also involving the production of a different ideology of nationalism. It behooves us to explore this problem before we return to the changing paradigms of history. There are two aspects of the changed nature of the nation-state’s territoriality. First, the state form itself has to be reconceptualized so that we can see it not in its unitary dimension, but in a more disaggregated form that is able to adapt to the more flexible nature of transnational capitalism. Second, there has been a deterritorialization of the ideology of nationalism, which becomes increasingly separated from the model of territorial civic nationalism and turns to cultural–ethnic models more attuned to the intensified quest for global competitiveness. Moreover, not only do the contours of the ideology morph to accommodate different constituencies, but the nature of this identity – particularly in relation to intensifying commercialism – is also transforming. Saskia Sassen has written about the restructuring of the contemporary state as a consequence of globalization: ‘The encounter of a global actor – firm or market – with one or another instantiation of the national state can be thought of as a new frontier zone. It is not merely a dividing line between the national economy and the global economy. It is a zone of politico-economic


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interactions that produce new institutional forms and alter some old ones.’23 Thus certain aspects of national governance are relocated to transnational private arenas (for example, international commercial arbiters), and mechanisms are developed nationally to accommodate the rights of global capital, leading to the denationalization of certain national institutions.24 In such ways, the historically fixed relationship between sovereignty and territory in the modern state (or state system) is being altered. Although there has been little work done in this regard concerning China, it seems to me that few states invite this kind of analysis more than the contemporary Chinese state. With a disaggregated concept of the state, we may see that even while there may be tensions between central, provincial and local state formations over control of both resources and the regulatory regime, certain aspects of state control may well be increasing. While local states may actually enhance their power, this is not always at the cost of the center, with which there is often some kind of power-sharing arrangement. New institutional formats are emerging to govern wider interactions between local or specific communities and transnational partners. The special economic zones, the Hong Kong–South China relationship, and the Taiwan–Fujian relationship are perhaps the most famous. Others include the recurrently mooted Tumen River initiative, bringing under an administrative format the already intensifying interactions between the northeast, the Korean peninsula and the Russian Far East. Similar proposals also reflect increasing interactions between parts of Yunnan and Southeast Asia as well as Eastern South Asia. The particular example I will elaborate upon here is the Yellow Sea economic region. If the special economic zones and transborder subregions in south and southeast China were developed by and around overseas Chinese connections, Korean Chinese and Chinese Koreans were crucially important to the Tumen river region and the Yellow Sea zone, respectively. The latter zone had already developed as a trading region between South Korea and the cities around the Bohai Gulf in China in the 1980s. But the increasing involvement of Fukuoka prefecture in this zone has produced a tremendous growth of economic links across the borders of the three countries. The end of the Cold War and the changing Japanese strategy of exporting capital (away from an integrated national economic developmental model) were key factors in the emergence of this region. Subnational units such as Fukuoka were encouraged to develop their own economic strategies, and they saw opportunities along the littoral of the Yellow Sea in Korea, Shanghai, Shandong and, most of all, Liaoning province, which had had historical connections with Japan.25 An economic zone has emerged here that exhibits some interesting tendencies, not simply toward autonomy, but toward the creation of a flexible format able to utilize the international framework of relations to further regional goals. Typically, Fukuoka provides the capital, the Koreans the technology, and the Chinese the land and labor force (although these relationships are already changing). In an unorthodox move, the Fukuoka

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prefectural government even established branch offices to supply information and networks in various Chinese cities.26 How the system works was revealed when Fukuoka sought to improve air links in the region: they pressured their counterparts in the Chinese local governments to pressure the Chinese national government to pressure Tokyo to sanction these flights.27 Local governments in this zone, as in South China, have developed relatively autonomous transnational relationships through informal institutions such as sister city offices and overseas business associations. Just as the Taiwanese business (or even businesswomen’s) association plays a major role in the south, so too do the Shandong and Liaoning provincial offices in Seoul and the Chinatown office in Inchon city. Businesses in the region not only receive concessionary terms from local governments, but also develop locally adapted legal–institutional regimes, often in response to global market demands.28 Despite the development of regional interdependencies, nationalist ideologies are not declining. To be sure, there is no shortage of efforts to create a unified Asian region and accompanying regional and transnational ideals, whether under the auspices of the Asia–Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), the East Asian Economic Council, or the Asian Development Bank, each of which has its own vision of Asia. Transnational narratives in East Asia

Let us explore some of these narratives of the region. Since the Japanese have long been producing narratives of Asia, and given that Japan has sought to develop investment and economic ties in postwar Asia since the 1970s, it is hardly surprising that these narratives have re-emerged. Academic narratives by Hamashita Takeshi and Sugihara Kaoru, among others, are well known. Hamashita has long argued that the imperial Chinese tribute system formed the basis of a flourishing regional, maritime economy that the Europeans could not fully destroy, but rather sought to control in the modern period. Sugihara adds that Japan and China opened up a path of ‘industrious’ development that was labor-utilizing rather than labor-saving. When combined with the benefits of the industrial revolution, the region not only integrated along a common model, it also pointed to, for the vast masses of the world, a way out of capital-oriented wealth production. Others, such as Mizoguchi Yuzo, have tried to demonstrate that the common neo-Confucian heritage of East Asia makes for the possibility of an alternative modernity.29 Yet the moment we step away from these largely academic narratives, the public narratives seem to be obviously colored by more immediate political and especially national agendas. Over the past two decades, the hugely popular governor of Tokyo, Ishihara Shintaro, has articulated a changing vision of Asia that fits expansive Japanese political interests quite closely. His Japan That Can Say No (1989) was directed primarily against the USA, but this opposition was embedded in a broader anti-imperialist history of European domination of the world. He believes that Westerners are unduly arrogant


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about having created modern civilization, and that racism may be the undoing of American superiority. Although he sees a tripolar world composed of the USA, Europe and Japan, he expects Western power to be gradually eroded by short-sightedness.30 Ishihara’s subsequent publication, co-authored with Mahathir bin Mohamad, The Voice of Asia (No to ieru Ajia) (1994) continues this narrative. Both works are structured around the opposition of Eastern and Western civilizations, and are peppered with citations from Spengler and Toynbee, among others. But the latter book places a greater emphasis on Asia. ‘The high tide of history’ he says, ‘is returning to Asia.’ The Japanese must free themselves of Cold War delusions and realize that they are related to Asia by ‘blood and culture’. Just as these pieces are eerily reminiscent of the rhetoric of the 1930s, minus the militarism, so are his views on China. Where in the 1989 book he was rather dismissive of China, the second work reveals a more concerned disdain. Although China has shown some strengths, economic polarization and ethnic strife, he declares, will lead to its break-up and eventual reintegration as a loose federation within Asia. This anti-Chinese stance reveals that the question of who will lead Asia remains a matter of great contention.31 More recently, as Matthew Penny has shown, there have been many positive and balanced evaluations of China in the post-Koizumi Japanese popular press, acknowledging the growing interdependence between the two societies. Nonetheless, the neo-nationalists remain exceedingly vocal, and their publications succeed in capturing the consumer market and foreign attention. Moreover, even in the constructive engagements, the Japanese popular press continues to depict the Chinese and Japanese people as essentialistically different. The fundamental conditions for the volatile oscillation between interdependence and nationalism, and the susceptibility of Sino–Japanese relations to being swayed by negative economic or political events, remain.32 With the increasing participation of China in the global economy, the priorities of the national development agenda have also shifted in practice, if not in theory, to coastal cross-border spaces and to non-territorial sources of economic power; the most conspicuous of these are the overseas Chinese. In turn, this has led to the deterritorialization of nationalist ideology in China. Until recently, roughly 80 per cent of the foreign investment of over $40 billion pouring into China annually has come from ethnic Chinese outside the mainland – from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the overseas Chinese of Southeast Asia and the Americas. Although the Chinese diaspora constitutes about 4 per cent of the population, it is a huge economy in its own right, accounting in 1999 for around two-thirds of the Chinese national GDP.33 The economic linkages established between the overseas Chinese and the mainland have been accompanied by shifts in the spatial imagination of the nation. The ideologies of deterritorialized nationalism have tended to flourish at the cost, frequently, of the territorially integrated nation of the People’s Republic of China (zhonghua). Such ideologies seek an alternative ethnic or

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cultural integration, found in the identification of ethnic Chinese as the children of the Yellow Emperor (yanhuang zhizi) or the new attention to Confucianism or notions of Chinese values and Asian values. These may be seen as new formats for both identity and alliance with the diasporic communities (as well as other Asian allies) in the pursuit of global competitiveness and opposition to Western hegemony. One of the most enduring tropes was created by Du Weiming when he identified the concentric circles of ‘cultural China’, including Hong Kong, China, Taiwan and Singapore, the Chinese Diaspora, and all students of China. According to Du, this concentricity may, in another view, be divided into two types of Chineseness, one ethnic and the other political.34 Du’s two types of Chineseness represent, in my view, two types of nation and nationalism: the civic territorial conception of the nation (zhonghua), with recognition and rights for all nationalities or ethnicities; and the ethnic or cultural one. These two types have had historiographies associated with them. James Leibold has recently written about the emergence of the racial and ethno-cultural notion of Zhonghua minzu among historians during the Republic. By arguing that the different peoples of China (including Tibetans and Mongols) shared a common ancestry derived from the Yellow Emperor, these conservative historians, closely associated with the Guomindang authorities, devalued the idea of the multiple origins of the nation (duoyuan) advocated by the left wing and the PRC. However, he finds that the narrative of ‘common history, soil and blood’ is resurgent today among many PRC historians.35 The 1998 publication of the Encyclopedia of the Overseas Chinese, edited by Lynn Pan, an excellent and authoritative history of the overseas Chinese, is in fact framed precisely by the concentric model of Chineseness. In its less academic form, this nationalism finds – or revives – an alternative ethnic or cultural integration in the ideology of the children of the Yellow Emperor. The favoring of the historical narrative of the ethnic nation, linking principally Han Chinese elites to overseas Chinese in a curious globalizing or deterritorialized nationalism, has significant consequences for the territorial nation. It is associated with the rival ethnic nationalisms in Tibet, Mongolia or Xinjiang, as well as with the withdrawal of the redistributive state, increasing inequalities, and regional imbalances. We are back to Jia Zhangke’s The World, where the (civic) nation-state seems to have effectively – or for practical purposes – disappeared for the dispossessed. What, then, are we to make of the new forms of interdependence that have emerged in the era of globalization? For some years I have been hoping to see new ideals and histories consolidate the interdependencies in ways that could help to make ours a safer world. So far, however, what appear more clearly are new configurations of national interests seeking to dominate these spaces. The ideology of nationalism is certainly useful for their regional or globally competitive ends. But this is not the only role of nationalism today. Nationalism is also the reflex of a world immured ever deeper in a structure of oscillation.36 As the population becomes more and more embedded


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in a globalized market culture, the belief in sacred myths of nationhood is commercialized, eroded or transformed. The most immediate response to this threat is, ironically, greater attachment to myths of national authenticity, even as these myths are themselves commodified, consumed, and returned to the void. While Jia’s The World brings us face to face with this void, the more common response is to ratchet back to both older and commercially created symbols of authenticity. Despite the fact that bilateral trade between China and Japan exceeded that of the USA and China since 2006, interdependence has not grown to the extent that it can overwhelm the dual force of competitive ‘globalizing nationalism’ or the anxieties that derive from the evisceration of community and authenticity.37 The configuration of the nation-state and nationalism may have changed, but the ideology of nationalism remains viable. As we know, competitive pressures have increased between the Chinese and Japanese, the Japanese and Koreans, and the Chinese and Taiwanese; and the same is true for the Koreans and Chinese. Indeed, tensions have been rising in recent years, and not surprisingly they are being expressed not only in economic and political terms, but in the realm of history: in the discourse of identity, authenticity and the claims arising therefrom. History textbooks and claims to historical heritage and territories are at the center of these tensions. They include the well known cases of China’s contested historical claim to Taiwan and Tibet, and the Japanese government’s decision to publish textbooks without due acknowledgment of Japanese colonial and war atrocities in Asia. Since 2002, Koreans have also protested the PRC denial that Koguryo (an ancient kingdom in present-day Chinese-controlled northeast China that Koreans regard as an integral part of the Korean heritage) had any Korean ethnic links. More recently, they have protested China’s expulsion of Korean business presence on Mount Changbaishan, which is regarded as an integral part of the Koguryo heritage. Additionally, there are hundreds of territorially contested islands in the region, most famously the disputes over Diaoyutai/Senkaku between China and Japan, and Dokdo/Takeshima between Japan and Korea.38 These issues have been a fundamental part of the historical pedagogy of nationalism in each of the East Asian societies. They have become crucial to the individual’s sense of self-worth. They are thus fuel for a sometimes runaway regime of authenticity – one even feared by the state. This was abundantly clear in the raging controversy in the Chinese press regarding the new Shanghai textbooks produced by Professor Zhu Xueqin and his team. The textbooks actually seemed to accord well with Yuan Weishi’s point of view, and played down not only class struggle and Mao Zedong, but also nationalism (for instance regarding the Japanese invasion). Professor Zhu’s claim that historical education needed to get away from ideology and nationalism and foster thinking for the global age was fiercely criticized by a majority of those who wrote about the texts. These critics were incensed by the abandonment of nationalism much more than by the

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abandonment of revolution, suggesting that Shanghai, which had always been a lair for foreign lackeys, ‘can now expect to see its women sport Japanese names’.39 In the summer of 2007, the new Shanghai textbooks were withdrawn from the schools.

Conclusions


Because of the continuing problems presented by historical knowledge and textbooks in many parts of the world, not least in East Asia, I have explored the continuities and discontinuities in the relationship between historical knowledge and the nation-state since the early part of the century, particularly in the regional context. How have the past 30 years of globalization affected the fundamentally nationalist narrative of history in China in the context of changing regional relationships? Globalization produces historical narratives for constituencies that are different from those of the older national narratives; yet these new narratives are not necessarily less nationalistic. Despite the dominance of ideas of socialist and anti-imperialist solidarity, historiography did not conspicuously assign a back seat to nationalist and patriotic themes. The competitive system within which nations were formed continued to influence the understanding of history throughout this period. In the post-Mao period, like much of the rest of the world, including the East Asian region, China has undergone a changing relationship between the nation and historical understanding. This has not meant that the nation-state has been excluded in historical writing, but it has lost its near-monopoly as the subject or agent of history. A variety of different interest and identity groups are also making claims on history, as we can see through museums, theme parks and popular media such as Heshang (River Elegy) and Shijie (a movie by Jia Zhangke). From a wider regional perspective, the objective potential for transborder histories and narratives of interaction may be found in the flourishing crossborder trade zones such as the Yellow Sea zone or the Tumen River basin. Moreover, while the territorial capacities and ideology of the nation-state have also adapted to accommodate elements outside the territorial nationstate in both China and Japan, nationalism continues to play a very important role in these new transterritorial spaces and ideologies. To some extent, this nationalism reflects the need to establish a single dominant power within the emergent regional formation (the extreme version of which we saw in the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere in Chapter 2). In other respects, increasing trade and contact between peoples of East Asia also brings tensions of competition and suspicion (of tainted foods, for instance). But most of all, rivalries between the nation-states of the region are deeply embedded in the national–historical symbolism of the past 100 years, which has continued to respond to the volatile oscillation between the regional/global pole and the national one.


Part II

Society and Religion


4

Superscribing Symbols The Myth of Guandi, Chinese God of War*


This chapter deals primarily with the Qing period. One of its principal goals is to understand the transition from the Qing to the communist revolution through the discrediting and decline of the myth of Guandi. It clarifies the differences in the form of hegemony between the precapitalist and prenational imperial state and nationalist hegemony. The chapter shows the importance of myth and ritual as a medium of communication in the imperial Chinese polity. The significance of this medium became particularly apparent during the Republic, when the institutional and cosmological roots of the myth were attacked and rejected. It would take a protracted revolution for alternative and (theoretically) more efficient modes of symbolic communication among the state, modernizing elites and the populace to reappear. Since this study was originally written, the historical study of myths and legends in Chinese studies has undergone much exciting development. Excellent studies that spring to mind are those of the demonic Wu Tong by Richard von Glahn; of Xiang Fei, the ‘fragrant concubine’ of the Qianlong emperor, by James Millward; and of the Boxer and Guo Jian myths by Paul Cohen.1 These studies illuminate the layered and historically stratified nature of myths, each stratum reflecting the concerns and contesting claims of different groups in an era. The present chapter is also concerned with this form of stratification and contestation. Specifically, it explores the historical problem of the breakdown of this mode of communication, and the methodological problem of the relationship between change in the symbolic realm and historical change among social groups and institutions. I argue that the complexity of the relationship between mythic and historical change lies not so much in the radically discontinuous nature of myths, but in the fact that myths are simultaneously continuous and discontinuous. I explore this relationship by examining the myth of Guandi through a concept that I call the ‘superscription of symbols’. Guandi (162– 220 CE), known originally as Guan Yu before he received the imperial title di in 1615, was the apotheosized hero of the period of the Three Kingdoms. This period, which followed the decline of the imperial Han state (209 BC– 220 CE), has been romanticized in Chinese history as an era of heroic warriors and artful strategists who dominated the battles among the three

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successor states contending for imperial power. Since then, the myth of Guandi has become increasingly popular in a variety of media – literature, drama, official and popular cults, and the lore of secret societies. Consider two episodes in the life of the Guandi myth that are separated by more than 1000 years. One of the earliest miracle stories about Guan Yu is derived from a temple stele erected in 820, when the Yuquan temple in Dangyang County in modern Hubei was reconstructed. Here, in the vicinity of Yuquan mountain, Guan Yu was decapitated during the long battle he fought against the enemies of his lord, Liu Bei. One still night, when the Buddhist monk Zhi Yi (538–97) was deep in meditation under a great tree on the mountain, the silence was suddenly filled by a booming voice: ‘Return me my head’. When the monk looked up he saw the ghostly apparition of a figure whom he recognized as Guan Yu, the spirit of the mountain. An exchange followed between the two, in which the monk reminded Guan Yu of the severed heads of Guan Yu’s own victims. Deeply impressed by the logic of karmic retribution, the spirit of Guan Yu sought instruction in the Buddhist faith from the monk, built a monastery for him, and began to guard the mountain. Later, the mountain people built a temple to Guan Yu, where they offered sacrifices at the beginning of each new season.2 In 1914 the president of the Republic, Yuan Shikai, ordered the creation of a temple of military heroes devoted to Guandi, Yuefei and 24 lesser heroes. The interior of the main temple in Beijing, with its magnificent timber pillars and richly decorated roof, was impressive in the stately simplicity of its ceremonial arrangements. There were no images. The canonized heroes were represented by their spirit tablets only. In January 1915, Commissioned General Yin Chang and the commander of the Model Army Division took their officers and soldiers to the temple to take their military oaths. They subsequently bowed their heads as they filed past a row of wooden tablets bearing the honored names of those who had fought for their nation.3 These two visions of Guandi, reflecting the needs of different social groups 1000 years apart, reveal the discontinuous nature of myth. The first, the vision of a nervous clergy reeling from attacks by a renascent Confucian establishment on the Buddhist faith as foreign and corrupt, seeks to establish one of the great heroes of Chinese culture as a devout follower and protector. The latter, the vision of the fledgling Republican military, seeks to forge new concepts of loyalty to the nation-state. Is Guandi the protector of the Buddhist faith or a Chinese god of war? Whether we speak of them as conceptions of the spirit world or as the embodiment of this-worldly interests, the two visions seem to have very little in common. But can a myth actually be so radically discontinuous? Do the symbolic materials in a myth exercise absolutely no constraints on what may be inscribed upon them? If a myth represents radically discontinuous meanings, if its symbols are pursued by particular groups only for their own particular purposes, how can it continue to impart legitimacy so widely across the

The Myth of Guandi, Chinese God of War

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culture? On closer examination, the two visions of the same figure have at least two common features: the apotheosization of a hero, and his role as guardian. This commonality is hardly accidental or insignificant. It is what gives the myth its legitimating power and gives historical groups a sense of identity as they undergo changes. What we have is a view of myth and its cultural symbols as simultaneously continuous and discontinuous. To be sure, the continuous core of the myth is not static, and is itself susceptible to change. Some elements of the myth may and do become lost. But unlike many other forms of social change, mythic and symbolic change tend not to be radically discontinuous; rather, change in this domain takes place in a way that sustains and is sustained by a dense historical context. In this way, cultural symbols are able to lend continuity at one level to changing social groups and interests even as the symbols themselves undergo transformations. This particular modality of symbolic evolution is one I call the superscription of symbols. Following Walter Burkert, we may define myth as a traditional tale with secondary, partial reference to something of collective importance.4 The process whereby different historical groups write or depict, through other cultural practices, their own version of an existing story or myth, incorporates their interests or establishes their ‘social charters’ in the sense used by Malinowski. In this process, extant versions are not totally wiped out. Rather, images and sequences common to most versions of the myth are preserved, but by adding or ‘rediscovering’ new elements or by giving existing elements a particular slant, the new interpretation is lodged in place. Even if the new interpretation should become dominant, previous versions do not disappear, but instead come into a new relationship with it, as their own statuses and roles within what might be called the interpretive arena of the myth come to be negotiated and redefined. Superscription thus implies the presence of a lively domain in which rival versions jostle, negotiate and compete for position. In this process, some of the meanings derived from the myth understandably get lost, but by its very nature, superscription does not erase other versions; at most, it seeks to reconfigure the arena, attempting to establish the dominance of the newly superscribed meaning over the others. In this respect it is unlike most other arenas of contestation, where victory is absolute or potentially absolute. The obliteration of rival interpretations of a myth is self-defeating because a superscription depends on symbolic resonances within the arena for its effectiveness. Just as a word in poetry draws its power from its many halfhidden associations, a myth at any one time represents a palimpsest of layered meanings from which the superscribed version draws its strength.

The Guandi myth in history What is most striking about the amazing variety of interpretations of the Guandi myth is that the original story is a very simple one. Guan Yu’s

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biography appears in the Sanguozhi (History of the Three Kingdoms), written by Chen Shou about 60 years after Guan Yu’s death.5 Chen Shou refers to Guan Yu’s place of birth in Xiezhou, Shanxi Province, and to his various names. He writes of Guan Yu’s friendship and devotion to Liu Bei of the royal house of the later Han. Together with the butcher Zhang Fei, the two friends took the famous ‘Oath in the Peach Orchard’, binding them to protect one another until death. Still later, Guan Yu became a general and a governor of a province. Even though he was tempted by the enemy of his lord, Cao Cao, with a marquisate, Guan Yu remained faithful to his oath. In 220 AD he was captured by the enemy and put to death. Chen Shou’s brief references to Guandi are not entirely complimentary. There are references to his vanity, overconfidence, and ignorance on matters of strategy.6 Yet these facts scarcely seem to have affected the future career of the Guandi myth. Over the centuries this basic story has been elaborated and Guan Yu’s achievements magnified beyond measure in storytelling and drama. Apart from his well known role as the god of loyalty, he becomes the god of wealth, the god of literature, the protector god of temples, and the patron god of actors, secret societies, and many others. The earliest temple dedicated to Guan Yu is the Yuquan temple in Dangyang County in Hubei, where he is said to have been killed. This temple was established in 713 AD and was attached to the Buddhist monastery on Yuquan mountain. Over the next 200 years, certain miracle stories became associated with the Guan Yu of Yuquan temple, and when the anti-Buddhist policies of the late Tang abated, his role as the Chinese protector of Buddhist temples (in place of the Indian devas) spread rapidly throughout the empire.7 Thus did Buddhism also become sinicized. To this day in Taiwan, despite his exalted status, Guandi continues to guard Buddhist temples as a door god.8 Appealing to a rather embellished version of the earliest miracle story, the Buddhist clergy continues to claim that Guandi remains a steadfast and devout protector of the faith.9 One may pause to consider the true direction of the acculturation process: did the Buddhists convert Guan Yu, or did he in fact make them a little more authentically Chinese? Guan Yu’s career as a protector god of monasteries and temples, launched by the Buddhists, became well established by the ninth century.10 It did not take long for Daoist temples also to adopt him as their protector god; and during the Song (960–1279) the Daoist claim on Guan Yu was superscribed on his image as a protector. In Xiezhou in Shanxi, where Guan Yu was born, a Daoist temple was established for Guan Yu at Salt Lake during the Song. According to the founding myth, a temple to the legendary Yellow Emperor had originally been built by the lake. However, soon afterward a demon who turned out to be Chi You, leader of the Miao tribes defeated by the Yellow Emperor, began to menace the area. The Daoist Master Zhang was instructed by the imperial court to find a way to put an end to this desecration of imperial honor. The Master invoked the assistance of Guan Yu, who dispatched shadow (yin) soldiers to fight and vanquish Chi You.


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The temple was founded in order to thank Guan Yu and commemorate the event.11 Inoue Ichii12 believes that Guan Yu’s deification as a Daoist god is specifically communicated through the elaboration of this story in the plays of the succeeding Yuan period (1279–1368). Certainly the founding myth of the Guan Yu temple at Salt Lake has all the ingredients of a Daoist legitimating myth: it draws on a potentially significant element in the story of Guan Yu – his birthplace – and combines it with the sacred geography and ancient history of China; with this as background, it identifies the imperial court as the patron of the Daoists, who have successfully invoked the spirit of Guan Yu to restore the imperial honor. Inoue also associates Guan Yu’s role as the god of wealth with his patronage by the Daoists, who were famous for their preoccupation with alchemy. It is well known that the spread of the worship of Guan Yu as a folk deity beyond the confines of sectarian religion was communicated in the vernacular novels and plays of the Song–Yuan transition, particularly the Sanguozhi pinghua (Story of the Three Kingdoms) and the later Sanguozhi yanyi (Romance of the Three Kingdoms) by Luo Guanzhong. In these depictions, the mortal weaknesses of Guan Yu seen in Chen Shou’s account disappear without much trace, and it is undoubtedly because of them that the divine image of Guan Yu has been nourished in popular consciousness.13 But these popular media also reflect broad social developments, under way since the Song, that promoted the spread of Guan Yu as a deity among merchants, professional groups, rural communities and secret societies. Huang Huajie links Guan Yu’s growing popularity in the Ming (1368– 1644) and the Qing (1644–1911) to the great socioeconomic changes of the era, which also enabled the popular media to spread. As the rural economy became increasingly commercialized, self-sufficient, kin-based communities tended to disintegrate. In their place, settlements came to be composed of unrelated kin groups, merchants for whom sojourning had become a way of life, and marginal peoples without a community, such as vagrants and bandits. None of these new groups was able to use bonds of kinship or community to hold the settlements together. As a symbol of loyalty and guardianship, the image of Guan Yu inspired an ethic of trust and camaraderie to hold together a society of strangers.14 Thus certain elements in the myth as it had developed so far furnished common material for various groups; but each group also superscribed the image of Guan Yu to suit its own peculiar circumstances. For rural communities, the image of a trustworthy protector of temples yielded naturally to that of protector of communities, and eventually to those of healer and provider. Li Jinghan, in his massive survey of Ding County, wrote that the common rural folk worshiped Guan Yu to ‘seek fortune and avoid disaster’.15 For merchants, trading now in distant, unknown and unprotected regions, Guan Yu first inspired trust and loyalty (to contract) and gradually became the very source of wealth. Turning again to an example from Ding

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County, when merchants were asked why they worshiped Guan Yu, they replied that they did so because Guan Yu was none other than Caishen, the god of wealth.16 For the rootless bandits and rebels of secret societies, the oath of loyalty that Guan Yu upheld gained an unparalleled salience. All rites and ceremonies among the Triads, for instance, including those performed at the initiation of recruits and the punishment of traitors, took place before the altars of Guan Yu and the founders of the secret society.17 Like the Buddhist and Daoist superscriptions, the non-sectarian interpretations of Guan Yu were not random constructions. They built not only on original elements of the myth, but also on one another. Thus the common core was itself an evolving phenomenon; elements not found in any interpretation, such as the mortal weaknesses of Guan Yu in the original description by Chen Shou, naturally fell away. But, typically, a particular interpretive focus did not expunge other versions – indeed, it drew its strength from them. The prestige of the god itself derived increasingly from the god’s spiritual efficacy, as evidenced by the god’s adoption by so many groups over such a long time. In this way, a superscription depends on the symbolic resonances of the image in the culture.18 So far we have spoken only of social groups without the instrumental means to impose their image on others. What would happen to the interpretive arena when a particularly powerful group, such as the imperial state, sought to dominate the symbolism of Guan Yu with all the weight of its political apparatus?

The Guandi myth and the imperial state

Valerie Hansen’s work on the Song canonization of deities has established the close relationship between the official bestowal of a title on a deity and the flowering of a popular cult of the deity. The heretofore unsystematic recognition of local deities by the state became standardized in the Song, as titles were granted and the gods were brought into the local register of sacrifices. Officials, elites and commoners all believed that these titles actually enhanced the divine powers of the deities, and local groups often lobbied and colluded with officials to gain recognition for locally important gods.19 The imperial state’s involvement with the Guandi cult reflected this process: official recognition was encouraged by the popularity of the cult, which, in turn, spread the fame of the god further. But more importantly, the efforts of the state remained within the mode of superscription. The state could not, and in most cases did not even seek to, erase local versions of the gods; rather, it sought to draw on their symbolic power even while it established its dominance over them. Thus we see the imperial state from the Song onward lavishing Guan Yu with successively higher and more glorious titles. During the transition from the northern to the southern Song, he rises from the status of a god with a ducal title (gong) to one with a princely one (wang), reflecting perhaps the


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Song need for divine assistance to defend itself against the increasing pressure of attacks from the north.20 Under the Mongols (1279–1368) he replaces Jiang Taigong as the official god of war,21 and by 1615 he is awarded the imperial title di and declared to be Guandi, the supporter of heaven and protector of the empire.22 It is clear that all dynasties from the Song until the Qing sought to superscribe the images of Guandi and thus to appropriate his symbolism for their own ends. Yet, deliberately or not, these earlier dynasties actually promoted the worship of Guandi in his different aspects and encouraged the different interpretations. This was the case even during the Ming, well known for its absolutist tendencies. The Ming worshiped Guandi as the god of war in the Baima temple in Beijing, which later became the highest-ranking official temple to Guandi. Official temples to Guandi were also established at battle sites, especially during the Korean wars in the late Ming.23 The Ming also made substantial contributions to the Guandi shrine in Dangyang County only a few miles east of the original Buddhist temple. The original temple on Yuquan mountain, responsible for the cult of Guandi as a protector god of temples, had itself undergone a revival under the Mongols, who favored Buddhism. Through its patronage of this site, the Ming state drew on the power of the miracle stories associated with the temple and area – the alleged site of Guandi’s martyrdom – even as it honored him in the official style. Moreover, while it was writing its official superscription, the Ming government was continuing to promote other aspects of the cult. For instance, it patronized another temple in the Beijing area, called Yuecheng, where Guan Yu was worshiped as a god of wealth, a cult that spread rapidly during this period. Indeed, the cult became so important that it was to the Guan Yu of this particular temple that the imperial rank was bestowed in 1615.24 Given the preoccupation of the imperial Chinese state with establishing a monopoly over the channels of communication with the spirit world, it is hardly surprising that it would wish to control the flourishing Guandi myth. But the Ming state did not seek to secure its control by ridding the myth of those symbols that did not directly support its own version of Guandi as a warrior loyal to state authority; rather, it sought to bring Guan Yu’s various aspects within the ambit of imperial patronage and thus became the patron of patrons. In this way, its efforts contributed to the many images of Guandi found in the popular imagination down to the twentieth century: a hero who was a protector and also a provider, and a warrior who was loyal to constituted authority but also to his oath. The Qing superscription of the Guandi myth was distinctive partly because it was more systematic, and partly because it was orchestrated with institutional changes. As their predecessors had done, the Qing promoted Guandi to ever-higher statuses in the official cult. By 1853, during the Taiping rebellion, his worship was raised to the same level in the official sacrifices (sidian) as that of Confucius.25 The high point of the superscription process was the compilation of his hagiography, the Guandi shengii tuzhi quanji (A

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Complete Collection of the Writings and Illustrations Concerning the Holy Deeds of Guandi, abbreviated GSTQ), which represented a massive effort to Confucianize Guandi. This compilation was published first in 1693 and reedited four times in the Qing. There were elements in the story of Guandi’s life that might have been viewed dubiously by the Confucian orthodoxy. Not only was very little known of his background and early life, but the vernacular Romance of the Three Kingdoms had also played up his record as an outlaw – a righteous outlaw, to be sure, who killed an exploitative magistrate, but an outlaw nonetheless.26 There were other ambiguities with respect to his loyalty to constituted authority: in one episode he permits Cao Cao, the arch-enemy of the prince he served, to escape so that Cao Cao can continue to menace the state. Moreover, the spread of his worship as the god of wealth and as a patron god of various sectional interests was probably not particularly congenial to the Confucian mode of regarding its heroes. The occasion of the 1693 compilation was provided by the alleged discovery of Guandi’s genealogy among some bricks in a well in his birthplace in Xiezhou. Because of his obscure origins, one of the projects was to root him firmly as a respectable practitioner of filial piety. The fourth preface to the text begins with a literary exegesis on the complementarity of the values of loyalty and filial piety. The author writes, ‘It is by relocating filial piety that one gets loyalty. It is also said: if you seek loyal sons seek them at the gate of the filial son.’27 After recording the events of Guandi’s life that clearly reveal his loyalty, the author laments that, until the discovery of the genealogy, there was no real way of verifying Guandi’s parentage or whether he had really been filial. The discovery of the genealogy reveals how Guandi deeply understands the great principles of the Spring and Autumn Annals … his fine spirit, which resides in heaven, must necessarily be able to forget the benevolence and grace of his ancestors. He recalls these virtues to transmit them to later generations. Thus his heart of pure filiality is greater than loyalty and righteousness, which are of but one lifetime.28

In 1725, three generations of his ancestors were awarded the ducal rank, and sacrifices were ordered to be performed to them twice a year throughout all the official temples to Guandi in the empire.29 Other passages speak of his mastery of the Confucian classics: ‘People have always spoken of his courage and have not known of his knowledge of li [principle]. Guandi liked to read the Spring and Autumn Annals. When on horseback, his one free hand would always hold a volume.’30 Indeed, the work attributes his loyalty to his having understood the subtle meaning of the Annals. In contrast to Sima Qian, who represents the scholarly ideal, Guandi is depicted as representing the activist ideal, the Confucian sage who ‘protects the principles and perfects the exercise of power’.31 Finally, his divinity is linked to the greatness of the empire: ‘Guandi’s divinity resides in


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heaven. Sacrifices to him in the temple are held on an elevated plane in order to manifest his awesome dignity. He has silently assisted in the well-being and long peace of the empire. Herein lies his merit of protecting the state and harboring the people. Is this not great?’32 No matter how thoroughgoing it was, such a literate superscription might have gone unnoticed in society if it were not also accompanied by institutional changes. These changes, implemented in 1725, were of a piece with the massive administrative reorganization undertaken by the Yongzheng emperor to enhance the power of the imperial state. Of all the Daoist, Buddhist and non-sectarian temples to Guandi in every county capital, the most well endowed was selected as the official Guandi temple (often known as Wumiao, or Temple of Military Culture) by the local authorities, and here sacrifices were to be conducted regularly to Guandi and his ancestors. These temples were then brought under the command of the highest Guandi temple of official worship, the Baima temple in the capital.33 This structure was modeled on the hierarchy of Confucian temples (Wenmiao, or Temple of Civil Culture) through which the imperial state had incorporated the literati into an officially sanctioned empire-wide system of reverence. As Stephan Feuchtwang has pointed out,34 official temples in cities were rarely for exclusive official use; they were places where the official and nonofficial populace could mix. Whereas it was principally the gentry that frequented the Confucian temples (which often included an image of the literary god Wen Chang) during the official worship of Confucius, the Guandi temples were frequented by members of the gentry, merchants and others, with commoners outnumbering the gentry.35 Feuchtwang notes that in Taiwan and southeastern China, ‘merchants desirous of converting their wealth into status and moving into the literati class would contribute to the building of official temples. … An example of this face-improving enterprise – an even better one than the building of temples to Kwan-ti [Guandi] and Ma-tsu [Tian Hou], who were popular in all classes of the population – was the building of temples dedicated to both Confucius and Kuan-ti, often called Wen-wu miao and often founded in conjunction with the establishment of a private school’.36 The image of Guandi had developed a distinct association with Confucian and imperial culture, and it was through the hierarchy of official temples that the orthodoxy communicated its superscribed image. The imperial superscription of Guandi did not stay the growth of his popularity in his other roles, particularly as a god of wealth or as a protector of local communities. Nonetheless the institutional changes accompanying the imperial superscription enabled elites – both gentry and non-gentry – to demonstrate their allegiance to the official image, and thus the changes succeeded in considerably reshaping the interpretive arena of the Guandi myth. The myth now came to be dominated by official images, while other images were compelled to reorient and redefine their status in relation to them. To illustrate my point, I will turn to evidence from local society in North China in the Qing and the Republic.

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The Guandi myth in popular culture


Many of the materials for the arguments in this section are taken from ethnographic and epigraphic records from the North China plain of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.37 Guandi was probably the most popular god worshiped in the villages of North China. The numerous temples and stelae set up for him in the villages surveyed are eloquent testimony to that fact. Although the popularity of Guandi can hardly be attributed solely to imperial patronage, the image of Guandi found in the villages does indeed reflect the elevated status he occupied as a result of imperial honorings. Apart from Guandi, the earth god Tudi (tutelary deity of villages) was perhaps the god most commonly found in North Chinese villages.38 But Tudi was viewed very differently from Guandi. The following exchange was recorded in Shunyi County, Hebei: Q: A: Q: A: Q: A:

What is the difference between the Tudi temple and the Guandi temple? Tudi is concerned with only one village, but Guandi is concerned not merely with one village but also with the affairs of the entire nation. Do outsiders (waicunren) worship at the Tudi temple? They do not. Even if they do nothing will come of it. What about Guandi? People can come from anywhere. Anyone may visit a Guandi temple anywhere.39

The two gods represented distinctly contrasting symbols. Tudi was seen as a subordinate god uniquely in charge of the affairs of a particular village, whereas Guandi was seen as a great being, symbolic of the nation and worthy of being worshiped by everybody. Community-based religious cults in late Qing China, such as those to Guandi and Tudi, were indirectly linked to the state cult and official religion, and formed an important part of the sprawling infrastructure of popular orthodoxy. Tutelary deities such as Tudi and Chenghuang (the city god) had been assimilated into the official religion in the bureaucratic mode. As is well known, Tudi symbolized the village as a discrete entity, but he was seen as an underling of Chenghuang, who in turn was responsible to a higher deity. In other words, these gods were celestial bureaucrats with distinctly parochial jurisdictions. Guandi, on the other hand, appears to have borne a relationship to the bureaucratic order similar to that of the emperor, with whom he came to share the title di. He transcended a particular territorial identity and symbolized the relationship of the village with the outside, that is, with wider categories such as the state, empire and national culture. Guandi was not the only god who symbolized these wider identities; he shared this status with Tian Hou, or the empress of heaven, in the southeastern coastal provinces. But in the rest of China, I know of no god who was more broadly identified as a representative of Chinese culture than


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Guandi. And it is this identification of Guandi with the more extensive orders of Chinese civilization that attracted an upwardly mobile rural elite to the official interpretation of Guandi, and enabled it to be successfully installed in rural society. The stelae dedicated to Guandi in many villages throughout the Qing period show that of all the possible interpretations of Guandi – as a god of wealth, as a protector of temples, as a hero loyal to his vow – the one found most frequently was the one that invested him with Confucian virtues and loyalty to established authority. There were five stelae dedicated to Guandi in Cold Water Ditch village in Licheng County, Shandong. The texts of the stelae were sometimes drafted by degree-holders from the county seat, and sometimes by lower-degreeholders from the village. Other stelae mentioned no gentry titles at all, and simply recorded a brief text with the names of the village leaders and contributors. The earliest, dated in the Kangxi period, begins: It is said that in ancient times sacrifices were made and temples were built to honor those who have brought merit (gong) to the dynasty, who have been virtuous among the people, who have glorified honor and integrity (mingjie). … At a time when high and low were confused and the proper principles (gangji) had disintegrated, there arose a special person who was loyal and acted appropriately to his status (erjie buju yiming bugou). He caused evil ministers and sons of robbers to know their position. He was granted the heavy responsibility of seeing that they did not confound righteousness (dayi) and create disorder. … He [Guandi] did not accept a fief from the bandit Cao Cao and remained loyal to the house of Han. Is this not merit to the dynasty? He eliminated the danger of the Yellow Turbans and executed the disorderly soldiers. … Is this not virtue for the people? He searched a thousand li for his [sworn] brother. Finally, he died the death of a martyr (shashen cheng ren). Is this not to add glory to honor and integrity?40

Although the values of Confucian orthodoxy are written everywhere in this text, nowhere is there any explicit demonstration of allegiance to the Qing dynasty. Indeed, inasmuch as this is an early Qing stele, the references to Han loyalism might even be construed as a statement of opposition to the alien Manchus. But by the beginning of the nineteenth century, the effects of Qing superscription are evident everywhere. A text composed by a lowerdegree-holder of the village in 1819, and bearing the names of village leaders, reads thus: A chapter in the Book of History says, ‘There are times when a good man is afraid that there are not enough days, and when an evil man is also afraid that there are not enough days.’ Thus we know the godly way (shendao) establishes religious teachings in order to bring happiness to the good man and harm to the evil man.

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The Global and Regional in China’s Nation-Formation Now, the lord Guansheng of Shanxi despises the nine evils with extreme severity. On the fifteenth day of the ninth month of 1813, the White Lotus invaded the precincts of the capital and the imperial court was put in danger. In very little time, the blessed god of the armies, with the brilliance of his divine powers, pushed back the White Lotus. He caused them to submit to the law and executed every single one of them. … The leaders of our village and others have saved their humble possessions and put together some money to build a new temple and a new image.41


The alleged appearance of Guandi on the side of the imperial forces during the White Lotus rebellion of 1813 was something the Jiaqing emperor had himself publicized,42 and the Qing bestowal of a title on Guandi following the rebellion in 1815 was doubtless related to his role in the rebellion.43 It may well be that the promotion of the imperial image of Guandi in local society was connected with this event; at any rate, the stelae in this and other villages from the Jiaqing reign (1796–1820) are replete with references to Qing honorings of Guandi.44 Whatever Guandi may have actually meant to the ordinary peasants, the Qing state had managed to superscribe the image of Guandi all the way down to the villages, a remarkable achievement for a premodern state in a vast agrarian society. It could reach into the bowels of this society because it was able to forge a symbolic system that accommodated the aspirations of the rural elite. The Guandi cult exemplified this accommodation perfectly. Local leadership in rural society was often expressed by elite patronage of popular deities and the management of temple ceremonies. By their patronage of the multi-vocal image of Guandi – in the building, repair and management of temples, for example – these elites were able to articulate their leadership aspirations in society, and at the same time identify themselves with a set of symbols that was prestigious and Pan-Chinese in scope.45 The Confucian image of Guandi perpetuated by the state and rural elites as a protector of the empire and its institutions did not replace the other images of him. It is clear that neither the elites nor the state could fully appropriate the popular symbolism of the Guandi myth. Nor would their superscription have been effective if they had. Yamamoto Bin’s collection of folktales from North China in the 1930s and 1940s contains stories about Guan Yu that are simply local tales and nothing more.46 Then, too, ordinary villagers prayed to him for all kinds of benefits, including rain and those from his healing powers.47 This seems to have been the case for peasants all over North China, where he continued to be worshiped in his generalized aspect as a provider and protector of communities.48 Although this characterization of Guandi is not in the least incompatible with the imperial and Confucian characterization, it does not invoke the state and Confucian culture symbolically in the same manner as the depictions in the stelae do.


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Yet the imperial superscription was not without impact on folk culture. Occasionally it was assimilated into a kind of layered or imbricated imagery of Guandi in the popular consciousness. Guandi often appears in extremely popular morality books (shanshu), urging people to perform meritorious deeds to attain salvation. These books reflect a folk morality that is an amalgam of orthodox Confucian and heterodox beliefs. In these books, we frequently see Guandi in his Confucian mode: there are allusions to his fondness for the Spring and Autumn Annals and to his alleged qualities of filial piety and righteousness. At the same time, however, he expresses his faith in Buddhist notions of retribution and other beliefs. Guandi is frequently invoked in the redemptive societies. He espouses their syncretism by pronouncing that Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism all emanate from the same source.49 In the following stele from Hou Lineage Camp village in Changli County, Hebei, we observe an instance where the official image of Guandi was assimilated with older associations of him as the source of prosperity. This stele was emplaced in 1864 when the temple to the god of wealth was repaired:

A Stele Commemorating the Reconstruction of the Caishen Temple and the Creation of an Image of the Saintly Sovereign Guan His image is molded and painted to create awe of his divine authority. It will thereby attach importance to his teachings and his favors, which have always been the same. Our village of the Hou banners has of old had a temple to the god of wealth. Alas, it had become covered with brambles and smoke. In the past we had repeatedly improved the temple, but for three years the yield of the land had been very poor. Now Taisui [the star god presiding over the yearly cycle] is aligned to the sun. As a tribute of thanks we gathered to discuss the expansion of the temple. In this way we enhance our admiration of Guandi’s protection of righteousness (yi) and his preservation of the institutions of the empire (gang). We wish to burn incense and make offerings to him. We scattered the gold of Dannapati. We contributed money generously and brought a carpenter as capable as the famous Gongshu. We gathered artisans who were brilliantly skillful. There are now dragons dancing on the beams in abundant numbers. May wealth and honor be eternally renewed (fugui changchun).50

This stele, which bore the names of the village leaders and two degree-holders, was erected in the presence of the county magistrate himself. It demonstrates the actual process of imperial superscription in the village, as the official image of Guandi is written over an older cult of the god of wealth. This kind of superscription was probably not uncommon in the 1860s, when the imperial order was briefly reinvigorated after the devastation of the midcentury rebellions. But neither the state representative nor the villagers seemed to be particularly put out by the close relationship in the text

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between Guandi and the god of wealth, by the collocation of ‘honor’ and ‘wealth’. Commenting on this relationship more generally, Basil Alexeiev writes, ‘Another instance of this curious and apparently illogical association is the cult of Kuan Ti [Guandi], commonly called by writers on China the God of War, but who is, in fact, a Wealth God and appears in many household icons with all the paraphernalia of such a god.’51 The official superscription of Guandi in the stele, with its references to his righteous preservation of imperial institutions, did not result in any diminution of Guandi’s association with wealth and the promise of prosperity. On the other hand, a powerful superscription effort, such as that of the Qing state, could reorder the interpretive arena of the myth and bring alternative interpretations into a new relationship to it. There were situations in which the image of Guandi as the god of wealth among some groups had to negotiate its status in relation to the official image. We have mentioned that when merchants in Ding County were asked why they worshiped Guandi, they replied that he was Caishen, the god of wealth. Their interlocutor wondered how this could be, when Zengfu was already considered the god of wealth. The traders hastened to answer that there were actually two gods of wealth, Guandi and Zengfu. Whereas Zengfu was the civilian god of wealth, Guandi was the military god of wealth.52 This point of view was apparently common. Alexeiev observes that booksellers honor Caishen as the civilian god of wealth ‘while blacksmiths, cutters of every kind, and all manual trades’ worship Guandi as the military god of wealth.53 The division between civil and military temples was a basic feature of the imperial and early Republican state cult.54 The popular image had not gone away, but it had learned to accommodate itself to the prestigious official image. Sometimes the prestige and lofty claims of the imperial image gave it a power by which the imperial establishment was able to subordinate and even mobilize oppositionalist images of Guandi to its cause. This was the case during the Taiping rebellion in the middle of the nineteenth century, when Guandi was elevated to the same status as Confucius in the official rites, thus attaining full stature as the protector of the Chinese ecumene. The Taipings, a Christian-inspired rebel group, had appeared to threaten not merely the imperial state, but also the very foundations of the Confucian system. Rural elites led by the gentry, which mobilized the resistance and ultimately defeated the Taipings, were able to draw antistate secret society members into their local armies. Although monetary inducements were doubtless important in attracting the secret societies, Huang Huajie believes that the appeal to the image of Guandi was more significant.55 These societies were formed by the uprooted underclass elements of ‘the rivers and lakes’ (in the language of the Water Margin) for whom Guandi’s oath and heroic death forcefully symbolized the sworn brotherhood that they used to fashion a community of their own. For them, the oath symbolized loyalty to brotherhood, not to the state that had been their enemy. Yet when it could be demonstrated that Chinese civilization itself was under attack by the


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foreign-inspired Taipings, the identification of Guandi with the nation and Chinese civilization, shaped to a great extent by the imperial state and the elites, could be mobilized in defense of the imperial order. After all, had Guandi not defended the house of Han from the rebellious Yellow Turbans? The renegotiation of status could be complex. Although a non-official version might clearly defer to the official imagery of Guandi, as in the following Buddhist depiction, it is not at all clear whether non-official characterizations necessarily suffered a net loss in the process. In 1894, the bubonic plague spread widely over southern China. By means of a planchette, Guandi revealed himself to a Buddhist or Buddhistic society in Canton, the Society for the Performance of Good Deeds, and expressed his views on the causes of the plague as well as the way to eliminate it.56 Guandi referred to the many titles granted him by the Qing dynasty as well as his varied celestial offices. He revealed that he was in charge of the Department of Epidemics, where he supervised a thousand ghosts and functionaries to inspect human activities and morale. Guandi disclosed that the ultimate cause of the plague was the moral decadence of the people, who were dishonorable, wasteful and deceitful. People were to avoid the plague demons by practicing filial piety, loyalty and honesty and by chanting a liturgy. In addition, the rich were to demonstrate their virtue by making charitable contributions. As a sign that they were truly complying with the demands of the god of war, households were instructed to draw his halberd and beneath it write the ten characters of his name and title. The sign was then to be attached to the doorway of the house, thereby keeping away the plague demon. Guandi then advised the people on practical measures such as burning water – purifying amulets in family wells and mixing insecticidal drugs in the drinking water. It was widely acknowledged that the plague was being spread by water from wells and canals that had been poisoned by dead rats. The document apparently represented a familiar mode of harnessing the authority of the gods to mobilize the population to undertake both ritual and practical countermeasures during an epidemic. Francis Hsu reports similar developments in Yunnan during the cholera epidemic of 1943. Hsu also shows how the causes of the epidemic were thought to be rooted in socio-ethical factors.57 In this way, the goals of social welfare came to be inseparable from the spread of religious ideas. In the text cited above, social mobilization is mixed up with the consolidation of Buddhist faith and practice. This is revealed in the concern with retribution, the chanting of liturgies, and the call to the rich to make charitable contributions. But, more importantly, the authority of these messages is attributed to Guandi – a Guandi who very much partakes of the imperial characterization of him. The passage is replete with Guandi’s various high-sounding titles and with his own references to Qing honorings of him, his official position in the celestial bureaucracy, and the Confucian virtues of filial piety and loyalty. What we have here is the deployment of the official image of Guandi not only to

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mobilize the populace, but also to shore up the claims of an otherwise politically powerless entity, the Buddhist society that received the planchette.

Conclusion


Although the image of Guandi meant different things to different people, what he meant to one person also communicated itself in some degree to others. We have seen how the different versions were linked in a semantic chain: a warrior loyal to his oath has his loyalty transferred to constituted authority; a hero protecting temples, communities and state is turned metonymically into a provider of health and wealth. The semantic chain constituting the Guandi myth developed historically, reflecting the changing needs of state and social groups as they overwrote earlier symbolic inscriptions. Some elements, notably those in the original story that served the image of no particular group, fell away, but the conative strength – the strength to impel, inspire and motivate – of any single interpretation derived from its participation in this evolving semantic chain. The evolution of symbols along a semantic chain, their simultaneously continuous and discontinuous character, enables us to see the relationship of symbolic change to social change. Even when an agency such as the centralizing Qing state seeks to dominate a symbol thoroughly, the very mechanism of superscription necessarily requires the preservation of at least some of the other voices that surround the symbol. A symbol draws its power from its resonances (and sometimes its dissonances) in the culture, from the multiplicity of its often half-hidden meanings. It is precisely because of the superscription, not the erasure, of previous inscriptions that historical groups are able to expand old frontiers of meaning to accommodate their changing needs. The continuity provided by superscription enables new codes of authority to be written even while the legitimacy of the old is drawn upon. Thus symbolic media focus the cultural identities of changing social interests pursuing sectional ends, even as the symbols themselves undergo transformations.58 At any one point in time, the interpretive arena of a myth sustains a cultural universe that enables the communication and negotiation of worldviews. The struggle to survive within this arena may be desperate, and so also the effort to dominate, as with the Qing. But although the Qing state was able to reorder the interpretive arena of the myth, its hegemony was never absolute. Indeed, hegemony within a superscribed domain is rarely absolute. No matter how intolerant the Qing government may have appeared to be, over the long run its capacity to police symbols was restricted. In the end, it had to be satisfied with a nominal acceptance of the official version by particularly defiant subaltern groups. This was precisely what made the arena of superscription so lively: it was an arena in which subordinate groups, such as the Buddhists of the plague text, were able to mobilize the hegemonic image to their own considerable


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benefit, but also one where both dominant and subaltern groups could draw on each other’s image for their own purposes. By participating in the interpretive arena of the myth, the Confucian imagery could even occasionally have its authority enhanced by its deployment for non-hegemonic ends. Much of the strength of the Qing state at its height derived from its ability to represent its authority in popular culture, particularly with the techniques of superscription. Superscription enabled the imperial state to create an authoritative image of Guandi with which rural elites could identify, and which peasants and other social groups could acknowledge without renouncing the dimensions of Guandi that were more immediately relevant to them. However, consider what happened to the Chinese state when it sought to transform society while undermining the interpretive arena in which it had once participated – in other words, when it attempted to change society and culture simultaneously. The twentieth century in China was a time when the Guandi cult and, indeed, most other religious cults had begun to wane.59 The origins of this decline can be traced to the turn of the century, when the Qing state and its republican successors launched on a course of modern state-building. Modernizing state-builders in North China sought to confiscate temple properties and destroy the institutions of village religion in order to use the resources to build modern schools and police forces. As ideological modernizers, the republican regimes also carried out several campaigns against popular religion and ‘superstition’, inadvertently clearing the ground for the communists in the process. These regimes probably had little knowledge of the momentous consequences their actions would have. Overtly, superscription of the Guandi myth was not abandoned. The republican state continued to honor him, and it is even said that the bonds of loyalty among the Guomindang secret police were written on earlier superscriptions of the Guandi myth by members of the secret societies. But in assaulting such community institutions as temples and religious associations, which had been the foundations of the Guandi cult, the modernizing regimes were destroying the institutional underpinnings of mythic superscription, and attacking one of the most important means by which both state and elite had been able to reaffirm continuously their alliance and their conception of the social order. They eliminated the means of maintaining the authority of the state in local life at a time when this very state was engineering important changes in rural society. The only way a modernizing regime could launch a simultaneous attack on social arrangements and the domain of culture was by building strong organizational foundations in local society. None of the republican regimes was ever able to build such strong organizations. Lacking these foundations, the government needed at least to sustain, if not to strengthen, its authority in the cultural realm in order to engage social and political issues. Yet by assaulting religious institutions, these regimes undermined the very means of communicating their authority in Chinese society. The bleak record of republican regimes in rural areas has a good deal to do with their inability to

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create a viable alternative to the Guandi myth to serve as a symbolic framework of identification and communication between state and peasant. Unlike the top-down administrative transformations sought by many developing and modernizing regimes across the world, the Chinese communist revolution sought to remake society and the human being from below and within, that is, by affecting or generating a certain degree of voluntarism for the people without history. This included not only indoctrination through the ritual theater of rebirth (fanshen) and performance of ‘speak bitterness’ (suku) narratives in the mass criticism and struggle campaigns, but also a colossal reproduction and resignification of peasant culture that had been destroyed during the Republican period and the revolution itself – a kind of reconstitution of the cultural nexus of power. The selection and redaction of popular cultural products – songs, stories, drama, ritual – and their circulation through a host of new media accompanied Mao’s call to indigenize and popularize (minzuhua) socialism. The CCP’s ability to penetrate popular society through these cultural media doubtless contributed to its ability to achieve many of its developmental and nationalist goals. But the rewriting of older stories and symbols was rather more extreme than the older forms of superscription. At best, one could think of it as one-way effort, a largely unilateral superscription. Haiyan Lee has analyzed the different versions of the famous play, opera and film The White Haired Girl (Baimaonü). She shows how a local story about a white-haired ghost of a young girl in a temple becomes transformed through the different media into one against superstition and rape, and ends up celebrating class struggle and patriotism.60 Similarly, when one thinks of the myths of labor heroes such as Lei Feng, they do not appear to be dialogical, but rather saturated with communist ideology. Whether or not some of these modern myths had their desired effects, the state’s domination of the technical media and other institutions such as schools and workplaces (in the case of the communist state) suggests a far more powerful apparatus for creating hegemony in the modern nation. Finally, although this study has not been explicitly comparative, or followed particularly the outside-in track, my understanding of the three-way relationship between the late imperial state, elites and popular society in this work has fundamentally affected my contrastive understanding of the relationship between these three elements in twentieth-century Indian society. As I argue in Chapter 8, one of the most important reasons for the greater visibility of critiques of modernity in Indian society has to do with precisely the different outcomes of the impact of secularizing forces on the three-way relationship in the two societies.

5

Deconstructing the Chinese Nation How Recent Is It?*


When I first wrote this essay in the early 1990s, I was determined to discern what was modern or alien about twentieth-century nationalism in China from the forms of political community in late imperial society, especially the Qing (1644–1911). I continue to be in full agreement with the analyses and conclusions I developed in the original essay. Perhaps if I rewrote it today, I might emphasize the traffic of global ideas in the formation of Chinese nationalism, but the virtue of the essay as it stands is to show us how Chinese historical ideas of community and political belonging have, to a considerable extent, also structured and legitimated the inflow of powerful modern ideas. I seek to develop an understanding of nationalism in China that charts an alternative path to both the nationalist self-understanding of an ancient, continuous political community and the modernist understanding of a radically novel type of community and identity. I argue that both conceptions view community and identity as more cohesive than warranted. In effect, they impose unity spatially and temporally. In the first case, this cohesion of the ‘national subject’ is projected back in time to a primordial condition; in the second case, the cohesion is reserved for the modern nation-state. In most theories of nationalism, the nation-state embodies a moral force that makes it superior to dynasties and ruling segments which are seen as merely partial subjects representing only themselves through history. By contrast, the nation is a collective subject – the national people – poised to realize its historical destiny in a modern future.1 To be sure, modernization theory has clarified many aspects of nationalism. But in its effort to see the nation as a collective subject of modernity, it obscures the nature of national identity. I propose, instead, that we view national identity as founded upon fluid relationships; it thus both resembles and is interchangeable with other political identities. If the dynamics of national identity lie within the same terrain as other political identities, we will need to break with two assumptions of modernization theory. The first of these is that national identity is a radically novel form of consciousness. Below, I will develop a crucial distinction between the modern nation-state system and nationalism as a form of identification. As

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identification with a political community, nationalism is never fully subsumed by the nation-state, and is best considered in its complex relationships to other historical identities. The second assumption is the privileging of the grand narrative of the nation as a collective historical subject. Nationalism is rarely the nationalism of the nation, but rather represents the site where very different views of the nation contest and negotiate with each other. At the same time, participation in the global nation-state system distances the institutions, technologies, ideologies and goals of the emergent nation from its historical predecessor.

Historical identities in China


Scholarship of modern China in the West has chosen to see nationalism in China as a modern phenomenon. Joseph Levenson observed a radical discontinuity between a nationalistic identity, which he believed came to Chinese intellectuals around the turn of the twentieth century, and earlier forms of Chinese identity.2 The high culture, ideology and identification of the mandarin, he believed, were principally forms of cultural consciousness, an identification with the moral goals and values of a universalizing civilization. Thus the significant transition here is from ‘culturalism’ to nationalism, to the awareness of the nation-state as the ultimate goal of the community. Culturalism referred to a natural conviction of cultural superiority that sought no legitimation or defense outside the culture itself. Only when, according to Levenson, cultural values sought legitimation in the face of the challenge posed by the Other in the late nineteenth century do we begin to see ‘decaying culturalism’ and its rapid transformation to nationalism – or to a culture protected by the state. Although they may be analytically separable, it is very hard to distinguish ‘culturalism’, as a mode of consciousness, from ethnic or national identification.3 In order for culturalism to exist as a pure expression of cultural superiority, it would have to feel no threat from an Other seeking to obliterate these values. In fact, this threat arose historically on several occasions, each time eliciting reactions from the Chinese literati and populace. First, there was a rejection of the universalist pretensions of Chinese culture and of the principle that separated culture from politics and the state. This manifested itself in a form of ethnocentrism that we will consider in a moment. A second, more subtle response involved the transformation of cultural universalism from a set of substantive moral claims into a relatively abstract official doctrine. This doctrine was often used to conceal the compromises that the imperial state had to make in its ability to practice state-sanctioned values, or to conceal its inability to make people who should have been participating in the cultural–moral order actually do so. Consider the second reaction first. For instance, during the Jin and Mongol invasions of north China in the twelfth century, the Song literati was confronted by the invaders’ scant respect for Chinese culture and the

Deconstructing China: how recent is the Chinese nation?

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relativization of their conception of the universal empire (tianxia). In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, these Confucian universalists could only maintain their universalism by performing two sleights of hand: connecting individuals to the infinite (severing theory from fact), and internalizing the determination of personal values. Both of these represented a considerable departure from the traditional Confucian concern with an objective moral order. During the Ming dynasty (the Han Chinese dynasty that succeeded the Mongols), Chinese historians dealt with the lack of fit with the Chinese worldview simply by maintaining a silence.4 When we look at the tribute trade system, which is often cited as the paradigmatic expression of universalistic claims to moral superiority, we see that the imperial state adapted readily to the practical power politics of the day. In the early nineteenth century, the tiny northwestern khanate of Kokand (like the Jesuits, the Russians and several others before) successfully challenged the Qing tribute system and had established all but a formal declaration of equality with the Chinese empire. The Qing was forced into a negotiated settlement, but it continued to use the language of universalism – civilizing values radiating from the son of heaven – to conceal the altered power relations between the two.5 Thus the universalistic claims of Chinese imperial culture constantly bumped up against, and adapted to, alternative views of the world order, which it tended to cover with the rhetoric of universalism: this was its defensive strategy. It is evident that when the universalistic claims of this culture were repeatedly compromised, and efforts were made to conceal these compromises, advocates of universalism were operating within the tacit idea of a Chinese universalism – which is of course nothing other than a hidden form of relativism. We have tended to accept Chinese declarations of universalism at face value far more readily than we do other official doctrines. I do not mean to dispense entirely with the notion of culturalism. Many, perhaps even most, people often experienced the world through civilizational values. There was no credible outside to these values. In today’s world, we may say that it is History – in the sense of national entities evolving differentially over time toward the end(s) of History – that has no significant outside. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri refer to a contemporary version of this condition simply as ‘Empire’, a logic of capitalist rule that lacks boundaries and a center, but encompasses the entire world. But even if there may be no credible outside, there is always an Other, however unknown; and as in the case of the fundamentalists and terrorists of today, this Other has a way of making itself felt.6 For this reason, it is better to view culturalism (or universalism) as a Chinese culturalism, that is, not as a form of cultural consciousness per se, but rather as a criterion defining a community. Membership in this community in imperial China was defined by participation in a ritual order that embodied allegiance to Chinese ideas and ethics centered around the Chinese emperor. While this conception of political community may seem rather distant from nationalism, one should consider the fact that the territorial

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boundaries and peoples of the contemporary Chinese nation correspond roughly to the Qing empire, which was held together ideologically precisely by these ritual practices. A look at the ideas of Confucian modernizers writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as Kang Youwei and Zhang Zhidong, reveals that the national community they had in mind was established on Confucian cultural principles that would include ethnically non-Han peoples such as the Manchus, as long as they had accepted Chinese cultural principles.7 This was challenged by the 1911 revolutionaries, who saw nationhood as based on inherited ‘racialist’ (or ethnocentric) not cultural traits. However, it is important to note that after 1911, the revolutionaries themselves reverted to the boundaries of the Qing empire to bound their nation. Moreover, the communist version of the nation builds on a conception grounded in the imperial idea of political community. Just as significantly, during the Jin invasion of the twelfth century, segments of the scholar class completely abandoned the concentric, radiant concept of universal empire for a circumscribed notion of the Han community and fatherland (guo) in which the barbarians had no place. This ethnocentric notion of Chineseness was, of course, not new. Chinese authors typically trace it to a quotation from the Zuo Zhuan: ‘the hearts of those who are not of our race must be different’.8 Others, such as Yang and Langlois, located it still earlier in the concentric realm of inner and outer barbarians found in the Shang Shu: pacific cultural activities were to prevail in the inner part, whose inhabitants were not characterized as ethnically different, with militancy toward the outer barbarians who appeared to be unassimilable.9 Trauzettel believes that in the Song, this ethnocentrism brought together state and people. The state sought to cultivate the notion of loyalty to the fatherland downward into peasant communities, from among whom arose resistance to the Jin in the name of the Chinese culture and the Song dynasty.10 While we see the ethnic nation most clearly in the Song, its most explicit advocate in the late imperial period was Wang Fuzhi. Wang likened the differences between Manchus and Han to that between jade and snow, which are both white, but are different in nature – or, more ominously, between a horse and a man of the same color, whose natures are obviously different.11 To be sure, it was the possession of civilization (wen) by the Han that distinguished them from the barbarians, but this did not deflect Wang from the view that ‘it is not inhumane to annihilate (the barbarians) … because faithfulness and righteousness are the ways of human intercourse and are not to be extended to alien kinds (i-lei [yilei])’.12 Although Wang may have espoused the most extreme view of his generation, several prominent scholars of the Ming–Qing transition era held onto the idea of the fundamental unassimilability of the yi (barbarian) by the hua (Chinese).13 Despite the undoubted success with which the Qing made themselves acceptable as the legitimate sons of heaven, they were unable completely to


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suppress the ethnocentric opposition to their rule, either at a popular level or among the scholarly elite. The anti-Manchu writings of Wang Fuzhi, Huang Zongxi and Gu Yanwu during the early period of Qing rule, together with collections of stories of Manchu atrocities during the time, were in circulation even before the middle of the nineteenth century.14 Zhang Binglin, for instance, claims to having been nourished by a tradition, both in his family and in wider Zhejiang society, to the effect that the defense of the Han against the barbarians (yi xia) was as important as the righteousness of a ruler.15 Certainly, Han ethnic consciousness seems to have reached a height by the late eighteenth century, when the dominant Han majority confronted the non-Han minorities of China in greater numbers than ever before over competition for increasingly scarce resources.16 Thus it is hardly surprising to find resistance to the increased foreign presence after the Opium Wars through to the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 among both the elite and the general populace.17 At least two conceptualizations of the political community in imperial Chinese society can be discerned: the exclusive, ethnic-based one founded on a self-description of a people as Han; and one based on the cultural values and doctrines of a Chinese elite. What has been described as culturalism is an assertion that Chinese values are superior but, significantly, not exclusive. Through a process of education and imitation, barbarians could also become part of a community, sharing common values and distinguishing themselves from yet other barbarians who did not share these values. In these terms, culturalism is not significantly different from ethnicity, because it defines the distinguishing marks and boundaries of a community. The difference lies in the criterion of admissibility: the ethnocentric conception refused to accept as part of the political community anyone not born into the community, despite their educability into Chinese values, whereas the cultural conception did accept such people. Despite these shared characteristics of political community in national and imperial societies, the impulse in modern scholarship is to view the two as fundamentally different. This is not confined to scholarship on China, but informs the most influential studies of nationalism today. Two such studies, by Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner, have stressed the radically novel form of consciousness represented by national identity. Both analysts identify national consciousness conventionally as the co-extensiveness of politics and culture – an overriding identification of the individual with a culture that is protected by the state. Both also provide a sociological account, stressing that only in the modern era was such a type of consciousness – where people from diverse locales could ‘imagine’ themselves as part of a single community – made possible. Gellner provides a full account of this discontinuity. Pre-industrial society is formed of segmentary communities, each isolated from the other, with an inaccessible high culture jealously guarded by a clerisy – Gellner’s general term for literati ruling elites. With the growth of industrialism, society requires a skilled, literate and mobile

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workforce. The segmentary form of communities is no longer adequate to create a homogeneously educated work force in which the individual members are interchangeable. The state comes to be in charge of the nation and, through control of education, creates the requisite interchangeability of individuals. The primary identification with segmentary communities is transferred to the nation-state.18 In Anderson’s view, the spread of print media through the capitalist market made possible a unity without the mediation of a clerisy. Print capitalism permitted an unprecedented mode of apprehending time that was ‘empty’ and ‘homogeneous’ – expressed in an ability to imagine the simultaneous existence of one’s co-nationals.19 I believe that this claim of a radical disjuncture is exaggerated. The long history of complex civilizations such as that of China does not fit the picture of isolated communities and a vertically separate but unified clerisy. Scholars have filled many pages writing about complex networks of trade, pilgrimage, migration and sojourning that linked villages to wider communities and political structures. This was the case, as well, in Tokugawa Japan and eighteenth-century India.20 Moreover, recently developed notions of the culturestate21 indicate the widespread presence, even if the reach of the bureaucratic state was limited, of common cultural ideas that linked the state to communities and sustained the polity. It was not only, or perhaps even primarily, the print media that enabled Han Chinese to develop a sharp sense of the Other, and hence of themselves as a community, when they confronted other communities. The exclusive emphasis on print capitalism as enabling the imagining of a common destiny and the concept of simultaneity ignores the complex relationship between the written and spoken word. In agrarian civilizations, this interrelationship furnishes an extremely rich and subtle context for communication across the culture. For instance, in pan-Chinese myths, such as that of Guandi, the god of war (see Chapter 4 in this volume), not only were oral and written traditions thoroughly intertwined, the myth also provided a medium whereby different groups could announce their participation in a national culture even as they inscribed their own interpretation of the myth through written and other cultural media, such as folk drama and iconography.22 These groups were articulating their understanding of the wider cultural and political order from their own particular perspective. There were large numbers of people in agrarian societies who were conscious of their culture and identity at multiple levels, and in that sense were, perhaps, not nearly so different from their modern counterparts. The point is not so much that national identity existed in premodern times; rather, it is that the manner in which we have conceptualized political identities is fundamentally problematic. In privileging modern society as the only social form capable of generating political self-awareness, Gellner and Anderson regard national identity as a distinctive mode of consciousness: the nation as a whole imagining itself to be the unified subject of history. There is a special and restricted sense in which we can think of a unified


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subjectivity; I review it below in my discussion of nationalism as a relational identity. But this restricted sense of unity is not unique to modern society.23 The deeper error, however, lies in the general postulate of a cohesive subjectivity. Individuals and groups in both modern and agrarian societies identify simultaneously with several communities that are all imagined. These identifications are historically changeable, and often conflict internally and with each other. Not only did Chinese people historically identify with different types of community, but, as we shall see, when these identifications became politicized they came to resemble national identities. To be sure, this does not validate the claim of some nationalists that the nation had existed historically as a unified subject gathering self-awareness and poised to realize its destiny in the modern era. Premodern political identifications do not necessarily or teleologically develop into the national identifications of modern times.24 A new political system with a powerful new narrative of history selects, adapts, reorganizes and even recreates these older identities. Nonetheless, the fact remains that modern societies are not the only ones capable of creating self-conscious political communities. At the same time, we can see that modern nations, too, are unable to confine the identity of individuals exclusively, or even principally, to the nation-state. All over the world, nation-states face one challenge or another to their claims to sovereignty, whether in Scotland, Kashmir or Tibet. More subtle are the changing relationships between both old and new subgroups and the nation-state, such as the waxing and waning of Scottish nationalism or southern Chinese ‘regionalism’. Finally, all good nationalisms are also disposed to a transnational ideal, whether it be anti-imperialism, panEuropeanism, pan-Africanism, pan-Islamism, Shiism or Judaism. Sun Yatsen and other Chinese nationalists believed that it was in the interest of Chinese minorities to join with the Han majority against the imperialists during the war-ravaged republic because of the security bestowed by numbers. When the imperialist threat faded, it became easy for these minorities to perceive the threat from the Han majority in its multitudes. When these political identifications are viewed in dynamic or fluid terms, it becomes clear that what we call nationalism is more appropriately a relationship between a constantly changing Self and Other, rather than a pristine subject gathering self-awareness in a manner similar to the evolution of a species.

The modern nation-state system and historical identities

What is novel about modern nationalism is not political self-consciousness, but the world system of nation-states. This system, which has become globalized in the past hundred years or so, sanctions the nation-state as the only legitimate form of polity. It is a political form with distinct territorial boundaries within which the sovereign state, ‘representing’ the nation-people, has steadily expanded its role and power. The ideology of the nation-state system has sanctioned the penetration of state power into areas that were

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once dominated by local authority structures. For instance, ‘children’ have come increasingly under the jurisdiction of the state as the institutional rules governing childhood were diffused to all types of nation-state over the past hundred years.25 The term nationalism is often confused with the ideology of the nation-state, which seeks to fix or privilege political identification at the level of the nation-state. The slippage in this relationship is a principal source of the instability in the meaning of the nation. The lineage of the sovereign territorial conception may be traced to what William McNeill has characterized as the system of competitive European states. From as far back as 1000 AD, each of these states was driven by the urge to gain an edge over the others in resources, population and military technology. In their competition, these states gradually became dependent on capital markets, both externally and internally, which further propelled the development of their economy and the competition between them.26 In time, the Church came to sanction some of these emergent regional states by endowing them with a theory of sovereignty without at the same time obliging them to achieve universalizing empire. This was possible because of the separation of temporal and spiritual authority; in other words, separation of the source of legitimacy from the actual exercise of power.27 The culmination of this conception of the nation was first seen in the French Revolution and exemplified in the idea of citizenship for all within the territory.28 Elsewhere in the world, competition was never institutionalized in the same way. For instance, in China during the many periods of interdynastic struggles, the divisions of the empire were brought to an end by a victor who established a command polity that squelched the dynamic of competition among states. Similarly, although regional successor states emerged from the disintegration of the Moghul empire in eighteenth-century India, the competition between them was not institutionalized in the same way. Moreover, from the point of view of sovereignty, legitimacy in China necessarily resided in the imperial center, in the son of heaven, and thus regional states were never able to claim any durable sovereign status. Likewise, the most powerful successor state of the Moghuls, the Hindu Marathas, strove not for territorial sovereignty, but toward the Brahmin ideal of a universal ruler.29 However, no contemporary state is a nation exclusively in this territorial sense. Among the early modern European states, European dynasts had to combine the theory of territorial sovereignty with ethnicity to create modern nation-states.30 While most historical nations, defined as self-aware and even politicized communities, lacked the conception of themselves as part of a system of territorially sovereign nation-states, modern nations embody both territorial and ethnic conceptions. It is certainly true, as Étienne Balibar points out, that the nation-state has developed the ability to have territorial boundaries acquire a salience and have its citizens develop powerful attachments to these boundaries.31 Yet even these territorial identifications have to come to terms with historical understandings, as we shall see in the case of the Chinese republican revolutionaries. More generally, territorial


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identifications have to bear some relationship to an inherited sense of the ‘homeland’ – even if this sense is a highly contested one. During the years before the republican revolution of 1911, when modern nationalism took hold among the Chinese intelligentsia, the debates among them about the nature of the future Chinese nation were shaped as much by modern discourses of the nation-state as by the historical principles involved in defining community that we have traced above. The constitutional monarchists, represented by Kang Youwei, inherited the Confucian culturalist notion of community. Although Kang was influenced by modern Western ideas, the conception of political community that he retained drew on culturalist Confucian notions. We see this in his lifelong devotion to the emperor (for example, in his founding of the Protect the Emperor Society), which in the political context of the time meant more than a nostalgia for monarchy. That the monarchs were Manchu and not Han implied that Kang was convinced that the community was composed of people with shared culture and not restricted to a race or ethnic group, imputed or otherwise.32 Revolutionaries such as Zhang Binglin and Wang Jingwei articulated their opposition to this conception by drawing on the old ethnocentric tradition, which acquired new meaning in the highly charged atmosphere of the 1900s. To be sure, Zhang was a complex figure whose thought can scarcely be reduced to any single strain. But he and his associate, Zou Rong, succeeded in articulating an image of the new community that was persuasive to many in his generation. At the base of this reformulation of the old ethnocentrism was a dialectical reading of Wang Fuzhi’s notions of evolutionism, plus a new Social Darwinist conception of the survival of the fittest races. The complex architecture of Zhang’s ideas of the nation uses modern ideas to justify an ethnocentric celebration of the Han, selectively using the past to ground the present. Modern nationalists such as Kang and Zhang were each engaged in dialogues with disputed legacies that were, nonetheless, authentic and by no means completely assimilable by modern discourses. The strong critique in scholarly writings on nationalism of the antiquity of the nation should not divert our attention from the simultaneously strong contrary urge within nationalism to see itself as a modern phenomenon. While, on the one hand, nationalist leaders and nation-states glorify the ancient or eternal character of the nation, they simultaneously seek to emphasize the unprecedented novelty of the nation-state, because it is only in this form that the ‘people’ have been able to realize themselves as the subjects or masters of their history. The discourse of the people as sovereign, which the nation-state promotes (without always questioning too closely the fact of the nation-state’s representation of this sovereignty), remains the single most important source of legitimacy of the nation-state within the nation. There is thus a built-in ambivalence in modern nationalist ideology toward the historicity of the nation, which we can sometimes see in the writing of a single figure. In the writings of Sun Yat-sen, the ambiguity is concealed through a political attack on his enemies. Sun argues that China, which for

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him is the Han nation, is the world’s most perfectly formed nation, because the people are bound together by all the five criteria that (for him) form a nation: blood/race, language, custom, religion and livelihood. At the same time, Sun is unclear on whether the nation is already fully awakened, or whether national consciousness needs to be further aroused. He is torn between these options because, on the one hand, nationalists like himself could fulfill their mission only if the Han people still suffered from a ‘slave mentality’ with no national consciousness, while on the other hand, the pre-existing fullness of China as a nation was necessary for the legitimacy of any nationalist rhetoric. Initially, Sun maintained both positions by arguing that the awakening was also a reawakening. There had been difficult historical periods when the Han people had risen to the occasion and revealed the fullness of their national being, as during Han resistance to the Jurchens or the Mongols. Ultimately, Sun concealed this ambiguity by transforming it into a problem inherent in Confucian cosmopolitanism: the original spirit of Han independence had been weakened by a cosmopolitanism that accepted alien rulers like the present Manchu regime as rulers of the Chinese people. This was precisely the cosmopolitanism advocated by his reformer enemies, who advocated a China composed of all of the ethnic groups of the old empire. Sun and the republican revolutionaries sought to mobilize a particular history, not only to serve as the foundation of the new nation-state, but to delegitimate the ideological core of the alternative territorial and culturalist conception of the nation. This ambivalence between old and new presents us with a window through which to view history not as something merely made up, but as the site of contestation and repression of different views of the nation.33 The ambivalence about the historicity of the nation reveals a fundamental aporia for nationalists: if the people-nation had always been present historically, then on what grounds can the present nation-state make a special claim to legitimacy as the first embodiment of the people-nation? We have seen the elaborate rhetorical strategy that Sun employed to address this ambiguity. In other cases, such as in Israel or India, the tensions between the claim for an ancient and pristine essence of the nation and the claim for the new and modern cannot be contained by the rhetoric of nationhood, and erupts into political conflict. An important aspect of the ideological struggle between the CCP and the KMT – both ardent nationalist groups – centered on how much of the ‘historical’ nation (or which historical nation) needed to be transformed or revolutionized. Thus nationalists have not been able fully to control the meaning of the nation’s history. The real significance of this aporia lies in the possibilities it generates for contested meanings of the nation. Modernist and postmodernist understandings of the nation tend to view history epiphenomenally – as the space for forgetting and recreating in accordance with present needs. A more complex view of history suggests that if the past is shaped by the present, the present is also shaped by the past as inheritance, and the most fertile questions lie in understanding how this dialectic is articulated in the contest over the significance of national history.


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Toward an analytics of national formations: identity and meaning


Social science explanations of political identity – ethnic and national – have centered around the debate over whether these are primordial or instrumentalist. Neither has much use for historical process, since the primordialists simply assume an essential and unchanging identity, whereas the instrumentalists, who usually attribute the creation of such identities to manipulation by interested elites or others, often find the past to be irrelevant. However, it remains unclear in the instrumentalist view what it is that is being manipulated. The alternative strategy that I have been proposing in this chapter posits a plurality of sources of identifications in a society, not necessarily harmonizing with one another. Thus, while a nationalist identity may sometimes be entirely invented, more often than not its formulators are able to build it upon, or from among, pre-existent loci of identification. Building this identification entails obscuring and repressing other expressions of identity, whether these are historical vestiges or whether they evolve as oppositional forms. In this way, historical agents are constantly in dialogue with a past that shapes but does not determine them. Identifying the processes by which nationalisms and nation-views are formed and repressed, negotiated and delegitimated is a complex problem that involves relinking issues that the study of nationalism had considered separate, such as ethnicity and nationality, and empire and nation. Consider now the more subtle relationship between identity and meaning. The argument is often made about nationalism that, while one can have different ideas of the nation, the sense of identification with the nation overrides the differences. It is doubtless true that there are times when one simply feels Australian or Chinese, and indeed, when faced with a common outside threat, differences about what it means to be an Australian or Chinese are often temporarily submerged. This is what we mean by nationalism as a relational identity. But the strength of the feeling for the nation – which is also exactly what passionately divides fellow-nationals – derives from what it means to be Australian or Chinese. Although identity and meaning are thought to belong to different realms of the human psyche, they are so mutually influencing and interpenetrating that it is difficult to separate them on the ground. The instances I recount below of what it means to be national derive from powerful globally circulating narratives that are engaged with historical symbols to create national identities. At the same time, however, the historical engagement can also produce such vastly different conceptions of what it means to be Chinese that it can even lead to a split in the nation, as it did between the PRC and the ROC on Taiwan. How can we grasp historically how meanings are mobilized and counter-mobilized, but also authorized and fixed to generate national identities over time and space? For analytical purposes, I will separate meaning – what the nation means to the people – into two areas: discursive meaning and symbolic meaning. In

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the first realm, I include such subjects as language, rhetoric and ideology – subjects that have traditionally fallen within the scope of the intellectual historian. In this sense, the nation is a product of the rhetoric and ideas of nationalist intellectuals and pamphleteers. In the realm of symbolic meaning, I include the ensemble of cultural practices of a group, such as rituals, festivals or work habits, which are multivalent symbolic practices but also potential carriers of the nation’s cultural distinctiveness. While the two realms are inseparable in the way the nation is imagined by the people, it is useful for the historian to be able to separate and subsequently recombine them, in order to conceive better the formation/repression process. In the discursive realm, the meanings of the nation are produced mainly through linguistic mechanisms. These are the narratives,34 the signifying chains of metaphors, metonyms and binary oppositions that give meaning to the nation, and vice versa.35 Among narratives of the nation are not only the historical narratives of individual nations, such as those of Nehru and Sun Yat-sen, but also narratives of the future. One such narrative by which early twentieth-century Chinese nationalists constructed their understanding of modern nations and the nation-state system was the story of evolutionary ranking and competition as the road to success, drawn in major part from Western social Darwinism. This narrative was fused with ideas from Chinese evolutionary thought, most notably from the writings of Wang Fuzhi, but the basic meaning of a ‘civilized’ nation derived from the model of Western nation-states. Subsequently, this narrative was both countered and intertwined with a story of victimization and redemption: the narrative of antiimperialism. By the 1920s, the writings of Sun Yat-sen indicated that it was not enough for China to aspire to the goal of an industrial civilization. China would fulfill its ‘sacred mission’ by supporting weak and small nations and resisting strong world powers. It would do so by transcending Western goals of materialism and violence, and seek to realize its own cultural destiny in the way of the sage kings (wang dao) of ancient China.36 Whereas scholarship has posed class as the antithesis of nation (the two vying for the role of historical subject in the modern era), we can also see how, through a variety of rhetorical mechanisms, the trope of class and class struggle has given meaning to the nation. Li Dazhao imagined the nation in the image of a class on the international stage: the Chinese people were a national proletariat (within an international proletariat) oppressed by the Western capitalists.37 Abdullah Laroui writes about ‘class nationalism’ as a widespread phenomenon in the anti-imperialist movement in which revolutionaries include all parts of the human race exploited by the European bourgeoisie.38 The class-nation of the international arena also has a domestic expression. In this conception, the supposed attributes of a class are extended to the nation, and the measure to which a person approached this class ideal governed admissibility to the national community. This is true in the case of Chinese communism, especially during the Cultural Revolution, when the


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goal was to purge or disenfranchise undesirable classes in the nation and strive to shape the nation in the image of the idealized proletariat. Here the idea of the nation becomes the site of a tension between a revolutionary language, with its transnational aspirations, and the reality of national boundedness. Yet another means whereby the language of revolutionary class struggle comes to define the nation is the process of placing the ‘universal’ theory of class struggle into a national context. The elevation of Mao to the role of supreme theorist (together with Lenin and Stalin) and the creation of the ‘Chinese model’ of revolutionary transformation in the late 1930s mark the sinification of Marxism, in which national distinctiveness is embodied in the particular model of class struggle pioneered by the Chinese. Another important element in the generation of discursive meaning is gender. That the nation is a linguistically gendered phenomenon is evident even from the simple fact that its most common signifier is fatherland or motherland. The master metaphor of the nation as family in turn yields a variety of strategies and tactics for incorporating women into the nation. Historically in China, the purity of the woman’s body has served both as metaphor and metonym of the purity of the nation.39 The bodies of Chinese women raped by foreign invaders – Mongol, Manchu or Japanese – were both symbol and part of the national body violated by these foreigners. However, as Lydia Liu has recently shown, at least some women registered a strong ambivalence and, in the case of the writer Xiao Hong, a rejection of nationalism’s incorporation of women. In most modern nations, the family was valorized as embodying national morality and the obligation to educate and ‘emancipate’ women, derived from the imperative to produce more efficient mothers.40 Wendy Larson has revealed that in China there existed another strategy among the May 4 generation of cultural iconoclasts, whereby women were incorporated into the modern nation. These radicals sought to absorb women directly as citizens of the nation (guo) and thus force them to reject their kin-based gender roles in the family or jia. The vitriolic May 4 attack on the family as site of the reproduction of hierarchy in society may have been the reason why the radical intelligentsia found it almost impossible to ‘identify women’s role within the jia as a position from which to initiate a positive re-theorization of “women”’.41 In doing so, they degendered women (who were to be just like male citizens of the nation), and many important women writers, such as Ding Ling, ultimately abandoned writing about the problem of gender. Nonetheless, Larson observes a kind of resistance among some women writers to this mode of incorporation as they began to reject ‘nation’ as an overarching concept within which to frame ‘woman’.42 Thus, while it is rhetorical structures par excellence that generate meanings of the nation, these structures are by no means closed universes. In every case, we see how language offers the means to construe the nation differently. Even where this variety is still restrictive, as for the women writers above, they were able to refuse to participate in the dominant and

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dominating metaphors of the nation. But there are other, subtler means of registering difference by inflecting and improvising upon language. For instance, the social Darwinist narrative had provided the categories for Chinese nationalists such as Yan Fu to conceive of national survival in a struggle of nations by arguing for pursuit of wealth and power by the nationstate. However, the young republican revolutionaries, who had become committed to the idea of a racially pure Han China, derived from this same rhetoric the necessity for the survival of races and the expulsion of Manchus and others.43 Yet another improvisation on this authoritative narrative was performed by the advocates of an emergent, province-based nationalism, such as Ou Qujia, to validate their view of the nation. Ou argued that the unity of China’s vast, ancient land instilled a sense of security that prevented a healthy competition among its provinces, which in turn inhibited contact, knowledge and ultimately a sense of closeness among the different provinces. Since love for the nation was not as intimate as love for the province in which one was born, he urged Chinese to invest their energies in developing the competitiveness and independence of the province. In the strivings and competition of the provinces, those that were unable to establish their own independence would be merged with (guibing) the successful ones, and on the bases of these strong independent provinces could be built a federated independent China.44 I have highlighted the openness of language to strategic appropriations to indicate the variety and contestation of nation-views. At the same time, it is instructive to see how certain deployments of language could be attacked, and the nation-view embedded in that language driven into oblivion. This is exemplified in the contest between centralizers and federalists in the first 20 years of the twentieth century. Most nation-builders in republican China shared more with the imperial state than we have recognized: the depiction of the telos of Chinese history as the maintenance of unity under the centralized state. Their opponents, the above-mentioned federalists, sought to build a federated structure from the bottom-up, with autonomous provinces determining the nature of the federal state.45 The federalists fought a hard political battle for their cause, especially in the provinces of Hunan, Guangdong and Zhejiang, but were ultimately defeated in the northern expedition by the combined centralizing forces of the CCP and the KMT in 1926–27. Yet one could argue that the greatest failure of the federalists lay in their ultimate inability to appeal to a historical narrative that would legitimate their cause. Thus they were always subject to the charge made by the centralizers that a federalist polity represented a veiled program for the ‘feudalization’ of China and the violation of its historically sacrosanct unity. Indeed, the federalist did initially appeal to political ‘feudalism’ – fengjian – but this word no longer bore the meaning that they hoped it would carry. In imperial China, especially in the hands of such statesmen as Gu Yanwu and Feng Guifen, the word fengjian had developed a historically critical role as a check on absolutist power.46 By the


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1910s, the same signifier returned by way of Japan to denote a completely different referent. Now fengjian and its associated vocabulary in China came to carry the more familiar negative meaning as the Other of modernity and the Enlightenment that grew out of the history of Europe. This transformation of the sense of the word fengjian cost the federalists most dearly, for it effaced an entire tradition of political dissent with which they might otherwise have been able to associate themselves. It also deprived them of a rhetorical strategy whereby they could claim to be the legitimate successors to this tradition and thereby mobilize history on behalf of their cause. These narratives and the rhetoric of nationhood – particularly historical narratives that are able to speak to present needs – are only one means of articulating the nation: the discursive means. Of course, for some individuals, a historical narrative may itself be sufficiently powerful to command identification, even where no other cultural commonalities exist. This is the case with non-practicing, non-believing Jews who might nonetheless make great sacrifices for the historical narrative that legitimates the present nation-state of Israel. More commonly, as we shall see in the next section, the coming into being of a nation is a complex event in which an entire cultural apparatus – the realm of symbolic meaning – is mobilized in the task of forming a distinctive political community. This mobilization must be performed in accordance with the narratives we have outlined above. In turn, these narratives achieve depth only when they are embodied in a culture. Thus the manner in which a nation is created is not the result of a natural process of accumulating cultural commonalities. Rather, it is the imposition of a historical narrative or a myth of both descent and dissent – or what we can call discent – upon often heterogeneous cultural practices: a template by which the social cloth will be cut and given shape and meaning. When a mytho-historical narrative is imposed on cultural materials, the relevant community is formed not primarily by the creation of new cultural forms – or even the invention of tradition – but by transforming the perception of the boundaries of the community. This is not only a complex process, it is also fraught with danger. Narratives, as we have seen, are necessarily selective processes which repress various historical and contemporary materials as they seek to define a community; these materials are fair game for the spokespeople of those on the outside or margins of this definition, who will seek to organize them into a counter-narrative of mobilization.

Hard and soft boundaries An incipient nationality is formed when the perception of the boundaries of community is transformed: when a narrative of discent transforms soft boundaries into hard ones. Every cultural practice is a potential boundary marking a community. These boundaries may be either soft or hard. One or more of the cultural practices of a group, such as rituals, language, dialect, music, kinship practices, and leisure or culinary habits, may be considered

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soft boundaries if they identify a group but do not prevent the group from sharing and even adopting, self-consciously or not, the practices of another. Groups with soft boundaries between them are sometimes so unconscious of their differences that they do not view mutual boundary breaches as a threat, and could eventually even amalgamate into one community. Thus differences in dietary and religious practices may not prevent the sharing of a range of practices between local Hui Muslim and Han communities. The important point is that they tolerate the sharing of some boundaries and the non-sharing of others. When a master narrative of discent seeks to define and mobilize a community, it usually does so by privileging a particular cultural practice (or a set of practices) as the constitutive principle of the community – language, religion or common historical experience typically serve such a function – thereby heightening the self-consciousness of the community in relation to those around it. What occurs, then, is a hardening of boundaries. Not only do communities with hard boundaries privilege their differences, they tend to develop an intolerance and suspicion toward the adoption of the other’s practices, and strive to distinguish in some way practices that they share. Thus communities with hard boundaries will the differences between them. It will be noted that the hardening of boundaries is by no means restricted to the nation or to the era of the nation-state, but the principle of national formation necessarily involves the closing off of a group whose self-consciousness is sharpened by the celebration of its distinctive culture. Because a narrative privileges certain cultural practices as the constitutive principle of a community, it shapes the composition of the community: who belongs and who does not, who is privileged and who is not. Thus if a common history is privileged over language and race (extended kinship), language and race always lie as potential mobilizers of an alternative nation that will distribute its marginals differently. Therefore, within the hard community there will always be soft boundaries that may potentially transform into hard boundaries, or new soft boundaries may emerge and transform into hard ones. Moreover, boundaries between communities exist along a spectrum between hard and soft poles, and are always in flux. This is as much the case in the modern nation as in premodern societies. The growth of group self-consciousness does not entail the equally emphatic rejection of all others. A community may occupy a position on the harder side of the spectrum with respect to community A than with community B, and these positions may change over time as well. Not only do soft boundaries harden, but hard boundaries soften as well, as when a prolonged conflict against a common enemy submerges the differences between two erstwhile foes now united in their common opposition. This mode of analysis challenges the notion of a stable community that gradually develops a national self-awareness. It is true that there must be some prior agency that gives meaning to a cultural practice, in turn affecting the relative closure (relative to a variable other) of the collectivity. But of


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equal significance is the fact that the group is constituted only when certain cultural practices begin to function as markers. So what is the nature of the collectivity before it is marked? It is precisely a group with multiple orientations and identifications – the hardening of its boundaries represents the privileging of one of these identifications, but in time, too, the privileged practices that organize this identification will change. Consider the relations between Manchu and Han in late imperial China. The ruling Qing dynasty (1644–1911) was from a Manchu ethnic community that maintained an ambivalent attitude toward the numerically dominant Han culture that it ruled. In the early stages of its rule, it actively sought to maintain Manchu distinctiveness through a variety of means, including a ban on intermarriage and on Han migration to Manchuria, and the fostering of different customs. In time, however, not only was the ban on migration and intermarriage ignored, but the Manchu embrace of Chinese political institutions caused it to blur the distinctions between the ruling elite and the communities it ruled. More importantly, and unlike the Mongols, the Manchus recognized early the roots of politics in culture, and rapidly became the patrons of Han Chinese culture. I refer here not merely to its patronage of classical Confucian learning, but to its efforts to reach into local communities through the institutions of popular culture, especially those of religion and kinship. Local communities that had patronized popular gods and heroes such as Guandi, Yue Fei and Mazu encountered versions of their gods and myths revised by the imperial state and its orthodoxy, which these communities in turn adapted to their own purposes. In this process, although groups managed to sustain their own versions of the god, a shared cultural format of communication emerged that did much to soften the boundaries between the Manchus and the Han.47 The history of the Manchu community in China from the eighteenth to the twentieth century furnishes a good example of the multiplicity and changeability, but also the hardening of identity that we have been speaking of. There is no question that by the eighteenth century, in terms of their social and cultural relations, the Manchu communities resident in the hundreds of garrisons outside their homeland in the northeast were melding into the general Han populace. Not only were Manchus violating the ban on intermarriage, they were losing their ability to speak and read Manchu and contact with the folk traditions of their clans. Indeed, the hero of Manchu children in Hangzhou was Yue Fei, a symbol of Han opposition to the Jurchen, the purported twelfth-century ancestors of the Manchus themselves.48 At the same time, though, powerful counter-tendencies worked to shore up – or reconstruct – a Manchu identity. Most noteworthy, if not the most effective, were the efforts of the Qing court, especially those of the Qianlong emperor (1736–95), to introduce the idea that race should be the constitutive principle of the peoples of the empire. In part, this was motivated by a fear on the part of the emperor of the total cultural extinction of the Manchus. But it was also part of a grand narrative of rule which

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eschewed, or rather encompassed at a higher level, both ethnic exclusivism and cultural universalism as principles defining Chinese community. Pamela Crossley suggests that the Qianlong emperor imposed a novel cultural structure upon the polity, attempting to harmonize ‘race’ and culture with the emperorship as its integrating center. In this structure, every ‘racial’ group – Manchus, Mongols, Tibetans, Han, the various gradations of acculturated and unacculturated Chinese from the northeast, the central Chinese, the Turkic peoples of Central Asia – had its proper status according to race (not culture). The Manchus as a race were seen to reflect the culmination of an imperial tradition and civilization dating to the Jin in the northeast, independent of the Chinese tradition. These different races bore a relationship to the emperor set by the historical role of their ancestors in the creation and development of the state.49 Thus, in this conception, universal emperorship required ‘not the attenuation but the accentuation and codification of cultural, linguistic and racial sectors of the population’.50 While this conception would have long-term implications in the way it endorsed race as a constitutive principle of community, it was not the only cause for the tragic flowering of Manchu identity in the nineteenth century. Manchu identity grew in large measure as a reaction to a Han ethnic exclusivism that became most evident during the years of the Taiping Rebellion. We have observed how Han ethnic consciousness was probably heightened by increasing settlement of peripheral areas inhabited by non-Han in the late eighteenth century, and how Han anti-Manchuism had been kept alive throughout the period at both scholarly and popular levels. In the days before the British attack on the lower Yangzi city of Zhenjiang during the Opium War, the tension in the city led to hostility between the Manchu soldiers in the garrisons and the civilian Han populace, with countless Han slaughtered by Manchu soldiers on the allegation that they were traitors. Mark Elliot shows that the entire event was interpreted as ethnic conflict by both survivors and local historians.51 This simmering tension culminated in the horrifying massacres of Manchu bannermen and their families during the Taiping Rebellion, and again in the Republican Revolution of 1911.52 Manchus in the republican era sustained their identity only by hiding it from public view and by quietly teaching the oral traditions to their children and grandchildren within their homes. Today, Manchu identity finds expression not only in the Manchus’ status as a national minority in the PRC, but also in such forms as the Manchu Association, founded in Taipei in 1981. And yet it would be wrong, and untrue to the mode of analysis I have tried to establish here, to posit an essentializing evolutionary trend in the growth of Manchu identity and the worsening of Han–Manchu relations. Important leaders of the Confucian intelligentsia were committed to a cosmopolitanism in their nationalism that included the Manchus as Chinese. Perhaps least appreciated in this regard are the Boxer ‘rebels’ of the turn of the century, who actually sought to support the Qing court, as the representative of Chinese culture, in the effort to expel the hated foreigner. The


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Boxer movement not only gives the lie to the dichotomy between a populist racist nationalism and a more enlightened, elitist one. Boxer nationalism was arguably less racist than the violent anti-Manchuism of the republican revolutionaries – but reveals the appeal of an assimilationist, culture-based nationalism among the populace as well. The Manchu search for a separate identity may be traced back to an older narrative that privileged ‘race’ as the definer of community. This was a contribution of both the Qing court’s ingenious discovery of race and the surfacing of Han racial nationalism. The tragedy of it was that this rhetoric forced a highly, if ambivalently, assimilated people to turn their backs on what had, after all, become their culture. Moreover, the effects of the emphasis on race were not to end with the Manchus alone. Partly as a result of the Qianlong ideology of rule, most of the large minority communities viewed their incorporation into the Qing empire as being on a par with the enforced incorporation of the Han; they did not equate the Qing empire with Zhongguo (China). The overthrow of the Qing in 1911 created for these minority communities the possibility of independence through the hardening of boundaries that was encouraged by the revolutionaries’ rhetoric of racialist nationalism. A kind of racial identity politics preceding the advent of modern nationalism was quickly overtaken, intensified and resignified by a social Darwinist nationalism that relegated not only the Manchus, but all the non-Han minorities in the Qing empire, to the status of historically backward races. The growing Mongol independence movement, the establishment of an independent Mongolia in 1911,53 and the threatening situation in Tibet and Xinjiang could not persuasively be countered by the republican revolutionaries, since they had espoused the principle that the new nation-state was to be constituted by race. It was in these circumstances that Sun Yat-sen and the leaders of the new republic sought to switch quickly to the narrative of the nation espoused by their enemies – the reformers and the Qing court itself. The Chinese nation was now to be made up by the ‘five races’ (Manchu, Mongol, Tibetan, Muslim and Han), and so it happened that the boundaries of the Chinese nation came to follow the outline of the old Qing empire. Later, the principle of race as constitutive of the nation would be submerged (although not very effectively) in a larger nationalist narrative of the common historical confrontation with imperialism.

Conclusion

I began this chapter by exploring the gap between the Chinese nationalist view and the scholarly, including Sinological, view of Chinese nationality. In my opinion, both accounts are flawed because they subscribe to the view arising from within nationalist ideology itself, namely that nationalism is constituted by a single national subject – whether it had been gathering selfawareness for thousands of years (the Chinese nationalist view) or was recently constituted.

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Instead, I argue that all complex societies have conceptions of bounded political community, even when they espouse a universalist or ecumenical vision of the social whole. These conceptions are embedded within the cosmological vision, the official rhetoric of which modern scholarship has taken far too literally. These political conceptions often flare up during moments of crisis or opportunity under foreign occupation. Thus the idea of a radical break in self-consciousness may be rather exaggerated. I have also tried to emphasize that, just as with modern nationalism, conceptions of political community in imperial China were also multiple and highly contested, and could be actually divisive of this community. Nationalism as a site of contested nation-views precludes the idea of a cohesive and unified national community, be it over the long durée or in the current era. We explored the case of Manchu–Han relations during the Qing period to reveal the hardening of communal identities even before the advent of modern nationalism. In the effort to deny that there existed some conceptions of bounded political community, scholars tend to displace the nature of the most important difference between prenational and national communities. The novelty arises from the compelling discourses and practices of modern nationalism circulating from powerful and imperialist nation-states. To be sure, these discourses, such as social Darwinism, still have to engage with historical conceptions of political community in China, as elsewhere, to become politically viable. Finally, I have sought to demonstrate an alternative to the evolutionary model of nation-building as a self-gathering of common cultural or other interests. By deploying a narrative of discent upon the multivalent cultural and social practices in a society, nationalists and other communal activists create a political community with hard boundaries. Thus the old model of a movement toward the ideal of a unified communal subject must instead be understood as a specific mobilization toward a particular source of identification at the expense of, or by repressing, others. At no other time is this multiplicity of political identities, with its ambivalences and conflicts, clearer than in our own confused time, when the nation-state is as much in the ascendant as it is in decline.

6

‘Tradition within Modernity’ Women and Patriarchal Regimes in Interwar East Asia*


This chapter seeks to understand a patriarchal conception of woman as the figure of ‘tradition within modernity’ in China, Japan and the puppet state of Manchukuo. In this conception, women were expected to embody ‘the truth’ or ‘the Way’ of East Asian civilization. Although this was a deeply conservative conception, it was also a dynamic one. Surrounded by emergent conceptions and new habits of working women in the urban public sphere, the figure was principally an effort by political regimes in these societies to contain the effects of these historical developments by a controlled adaptation of the behavior of women. Many women also drew on this conception of ‘tradition within modernity’ in their self-formation. But they often approached this ‘pedagogy of the self ’ in creatively adaptive ways and found unexpected opportunities for advancement and freedom. Toward the latter part of this chapter, I study the recorded narratives of a group of women in the 1930s belonging to the redemptive society called the Morality Society or Daodehui in Manchukuo to illustrate this approach. In 1997, over 50 years after the collapse of Manchukuo, I had the opportunity to visit and interview one of these women, whom I shall call Mrs Gu, in Taiwan. Born in 1915, Mrs Gu lived in Manchuria until the communists took over the mainland; she then moved to Taipei. Here she re-established the Morality Society, and was its vice-president at the time of our meeting. Today in Taiwan, although the Wanguo Daodehui still holds international conferences, imparts moral education, and owns some splendid property, it is much reduced in scope and has become primarily a daycare provider and a women’s recreation organization. Its role has been affected by changed ideas regarding the role of women and by the much more spiritually charismatic and socially active Buddhist societies. Nonetheless, Mrs Gu remained a highly dedicated and passionate activist for the cause. As she recounted the story of her life in the organization, surrounded by several attentive younger members, her pride and reverence for this form of self-sacrificing activism, superior to any political loyalty, became evident. Let me present some of her own words to sound out the ironies in the concept of ‘tradition within modernity’:

The Global and Regional in China’s Nation-Formation In 1933, I joined the Daodehui, when I was 18 years old. Since my childhood, I have had a strong and independent personality and did not want to suffer the restraints of the old family system. I believed that women should be independent (zili), not be dependent on parents, husbands, or children. I never wanted to marry. At that time, my father was the village headman and since he had many connections with the KMT, he was arrested by the Japanese. I was very anxious, but luckily there was a member of the Daodehui called Mr Zheng Zhidong, who knew a Mr Ono in the military police (xianbingdui). Through him, we were able to secure my father’s release and save his life. Upon his release, we all joined the Daodehui. After this event, I was sent to Shenyang to receive training for six months. During the day, we turned the mill, washed the floors, cultivated patience, and in the evenings we studied the lectures. We certainly did not believe the kind of talk about ‘virtue lay[ing] in women not having talents’. Once a group of seven of us (five girls, one man, and one leader) went out on a lecture tour and met some bandits on the way. We were terrified, and the young girls fled, but our leader lectured to them about Confucius’s teachings, changed their hearts (ganhuale) and succeeded in getting them to give up their habits. In 1934 and 1935, every locality set up branches of the Society. I also resolved to set up ten lecture units. I already had a small reputation by then. When I was in Daxiguan, a scholar (xiucai) wrote a poem for me. I returned to Shenyang after spending three years in a humble store. I lectured so much that I lost my voice. … In 1939, I was a lecture manager and lectured on the importance of female virtue (fudao), breast-feeding (rudao), women’s education, and prenatal education (taijiao). I told my listeners that women should go out and suffer in order to be happy, should preserve the good heart in order to establish resolve and achieve great results. … After Japan’s defeat, I advocated the takeover of the Japanese shrine (lingmiao) for the Society as its Welfare Center, and spent money to establish the management council. When the new government took over the shrine, I protested the confiscation daily, saying ‘those who want to make revolution may have their heads chopped and their blood may flow, but they will not abandon the Northeast’. The committee to oversee the reconstruction of postwar northeast China had no choice but to return the shrine to us. Later, even Mrs Chiang Kai-shek summoned (zhaojian) me in recognition of my efforts. … The Society was popular in Shandong and Huabei and there were 58 units in the city of Shenyang alone. What it meant by Datong is world peace and opposition to struggle. It is a moral force (wuxingde wuqi; literally a formless weapon). It cultivates the public heart (gongxin): to give up the private and preserve the public for the sake of the greater self and the masses. When people are old, we realize that truth is in public service. Women should be wise mothers and virtuous wives.


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Women and Patriarchal Regimes in Interwar East Asia

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To many contemporary readers, this juxtaposing of the self-sacrificing and traditional against the fiercely independent and even revolutionary woman may sound a little incongruous, but it was an important model of womanhood in much of China and Japan in the first half of the century. It is the figure of woman as embodying tradition within modernity, or as the KMT leader Wang Jingwei put it, ‘inheriting the past to enlighten posterity’. In a lecture delivered at a girl’s school in 1924, Wang observed that the conflict between the old and the new in society could be seen as the clash between the school as the nucleus of the new thought and the family that preserved the old ways. In order for China to progress in this competitive world of nation-states, it was important for students to take control over society and reform its evil customs. He recognized that it was easy for girls to succumb to the control of the family and be assimilated into society, but he implored them not to take this path. It was particularly important for girls’ schools to nourish a spirit of social reform among their students, since in their present state they stood as obstacles to national progress.1 Having framed his talk within the evolutionary discourse of modernity, Wang’s second theme was the importance of choosing the right kind of education. Although Chinese tradition included a lot that was bad, it had one strength: the cultivation of a long tradition of willing self-sacrifice (xisheng) among females, whether for the sake of their parents in their natal home, of their husband after marriage, or of their sons in old age. Doubtless, the old society often used blind self-sacrifice to bury women’s freedom. But women should know that the responsibility of the individual was heavy, and should not be exploited (liyong) by society. If they genuinely felt (zhenzhende qinggan) the spirit of sacrifice, then such conduct was proper and, indeed, highly admirable. The spirit of self-sacrifice actually formed the indispensable basis of all morality – Confucian, Buddhist and Christian.

Chinese women are rich in the spirit of self-sacrifice. If we can properly direct this spirit towards [the collectivity] … and use it, then we can on the one hand perhaps preserve a little of the essence (jingsui) of the teachings of several thousand years, and on the other still plant the roots of modern liberatory thought. In seeking education for girls I hope we can uphold our mission of inheriting the past to enlighten posterity [chengxian qihou]’.2

The Chinese woman, for Wang, was both modern citizen and locus of authenticity. Nationalist patriarchy crafted the self-sacrificing woman as a symbol of national essence. Compared with the writings on the emergence of the modern woman in China associated with the May 4th Movement (1917–21) – widely regarded as China’s Enlightenment – about the radically anti-Confucian, indeed antifamilial, nationalist woman, contemporary scholarly attention to the kind of woman Wang was trying to shape is still relatively rare. It is beyond the

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scope of this chapter to explore which model of the modern woman was more relevant to the middle classes in Republican China. Suffice it to say that the political establishment of the early twentieth century – including both the late Qing and the KMT regime – favored Wang’s model. This model of womanhood first emerged during the late Qing, when reformers and statesmen began to accept the importance of modern education for girls and a limited public role for them. The Japanese influence on the emerging discourses and institutions of modern China during this period was particularly deep in this realm. During the middle years of the Meiji period (1868–1912), as the Japanese state consolidated and centralized its rule, it launched a series of laws denying women (together with other categories of people) political rights and barred them from joining political associations. Bureaucrats appealed to the Japanese ideal of the ‘good wife and wise mother’, arguing that political involvement would only divert them from fulfilling these roles.3 In this way, the historical ideal of the self-sacrificing and frugal samurai woman became generalized in the Meiji era as the model of feminine virtue for the nation as a whole. Women were represented as having to transcend petty politics in their role as ‘officials’ of the household, which, in the emergent family-state ideology of the period, was seen as the microcosm of the nation-state.4 Recent work on late Qing education of girls in the first decade of the twentieth century has given us a detailed picture of how this Japanese model penetrated China among intellectuals and reformers as well as policymakers. To be sure, this was a process of selective borrowing in China and had different consequences, but the ideology of the ‘good wife and wise mother’ was received enthusiastically because, Joan Judge argues, as an amalgamation of East Asian and Western ideals, past and present values, ancient female ethics and contemporary nationalist concerns, Japan provided China with a most suitable gender ideology.5 The Japanese model was less threatening to a still largely patriarchal Chinese elite than the more radical models of female education in the West – even as it satisfied this elite that the model was acceptable to a nation as modern as Japan. The Japanese influence was transmitted by returning Chinese students educated in Japan, and most especially through the widespread translation of Japanese texts and their dissemination through specialized educational journals and the wider press, including the highly influential Japanese-owned newspapers such as Shengjing Shibao (from Mukden or Shenyang) and Shuntian Shibao (Beijing). There were also very great numbers of Japanese teacher-trainers, educational advisors and teachers active in schools in China, including those for female education.6 Perhaps the most significant single figure behind the transfer of role models for women was the educator Shimoda Utako. Shimoda was dedicated to the task of creating a pan-Asian modernity, and worked closely with Japanese and Chinese politicians to create educational institutions to instill East Asian values. Working within the civilizational


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discourse of East versus West, she was determined to ‘strengthen Asia’ by extending education to all women, while at the same time preserving the Confucian conception of female virtue. Thus Shimoda’s ideal East Asian woman would simultaneously practice feminine virtues and serve the nation; she would serve the nation not by rejecting traditional virtues of self-sacrifice, but, in a move that was echoed by Wang Jingwei and countless others, by reorienting these virtues towards patriotism. Shimoda was very influential among both official and unofficial circles concerned with educational reform for girls. This influence was evident in the conservative proposal of 1904, ‘Memorial on Regulations for Early Training Schools and for Education on Household Matters’, drafted by prominent statesmen such as Zhang Zhidong and others, and her ideas had a strong impact on the empress dowager Cixi.7 In 1908, Zhao Jingru, the principal of Fengtian (Shenyang) Normal Girl’s School, visited Japan and paid her tribute to Shimoda, declaring, ‘Since the condition of women’s education and the fate of the nation are intimately connected, the spirit of peace [in East Asia] rests on the shoulders of Shimoda.’8 Peace would turn out to be a distant dream, but the state in East Asia would find the controlled figure of woman as ‘tradition within modernity’ a highly desirable means of penetrating society and shaping the nation. Modern patriarchy

Women have been represented as the embodiment of the essential truth of a nation or civilization, not only in China and Japan, but in many parts of the modern world. Recent studies of gender histories in the West (and especially in Latin America) have shown how women and their bodies, systematically excluded from the public sphere during much of the modern period, have served as a crucial medium for the inscription and naturalization of power: ‘Explored, mapped, conquered, and raped, the female body and its metaphorical extension, the home, become the symbols of honor, loyalty, and purity, to be guarded by men.’9 Partha Chatterjee has drawn our attention to how modern nationalists in late-nineteenth-century India appropriated the middle-class production of a sphere that he calls the inner domain of sovereignty of nationalist ideology. Like Chinese nationalism, Indian nationalism was built on a duality of the material versus the spiritual and cultural. Thus, while the Indian nation had much to learn from the material and scientific civilization of the West, in spiritual matters India had the upper hand and a contribution to make to world civilization.10 Chatterjee’s particular contribution is to show how this dualism was organized so as to create an inner realm of national life that could not be contested by the colonial power. Nineteenth-century Bengali middle-class intellectuals had reworked certain historical texts to define the ‘ideal woman’ and distinguish her from depictions of the ‘traditional’ (that is, recent historical, rather than quintessential) Bengali woman, from depictions of

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contemporary lower-class women, and from the figure of the Western, materialist and masculinized woman. Modern Indian nationalism found this trope of the enlightened but quintessentially ‘traditional’ woman highly congenial, and appropriated it as the core of the essential nation. Tradition thus came to mark a realm of inner sovereignty that was simultaneously demarcated as domestic, spiritual and feminine. The Hindu nationalist representation of woman – educated and educating, but personifying the spiritual virtues of domesticity – gave body to this national essence. While on the one hand this lofty idealization of the Hindu woman provided new aspirations for some women, we can assume that it was patriarchal because it was an image shaped by men for women to follow.11 In East Asia, this representation of woman was less directly connected to colonialism, but it was decidedly a response on the part of a patriarchal elite to manage the shift to a more Westernized society and changing relations between the genders, and between the domestic and public spheres. In China, we can understand this phenomenon precisely as the nexus between a global process and historical institutions of gender relations. Most of the early nationalists and reformers emerged from the habitus of the gentry and inherited the patriarchal traditions of this society and its ideals of womanly virtue. The rhetoric of female virtue and sacrifice, exemplified most particularly in the cult of chaste widows and virtuous wives, was pervasive in late imperial China.12 During the early twentieth century, when the increasing integration of China into global capitalism produced rapid change in gender relations among urban families, this patriarchal legacy surfaced in a novel context and was sustained in the heightened concern with preserving female virtues. ‘Virtuous and chaste girls’ schools’ (zhennü yixue, baonü yixueyuan) sprouted everywhere in this period, and the journals about women, such as the Funü Zazhi of the early 1920s, were filled with anxious essays about the problem of gender-mixing.13 Female virtue became a metonym for timeless Chinese civilizational truths. Nationalists made great efforts to improve the status of women in order to attain the higher goal of national strengthening. Women’s education, the abolition of foot-binding, and the need for prenatal care became major issues in the reform movement of the turn of the century, led by Kang Youwei and his colleagues, because, as Kazuko Ono writes, these issues became ‘linked to the nation’s survival or demise, its strength or weakness, through the education of children’.14 While there were some notable efforts by women writers themselves to undo the connection,15 throughout most of the twentieth century the legitimacy of women’s issues continued to remain dependent on the primacy of the national cause. As in many other early twentieth-century patriarchal nationalisms, women were to be liberated for the nation. They were not to shape the nation in their own image, but rather to be shaped and protected by the nation in its image. This same primacy authorized nationalism to demand a self-sacrificing woman to incorporate its essence.


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Women were doubtless hypostatized because of their institutionalized dependence on men in China, as in most other historical cultures. But they were also perceived as key to maintaining the stability of the family, that bedrock of Confucian society. Thus the figure of timelessness was also to serve as a performing role model. Needless to say, the pressures on such a figure were enormous. The human embodiment of authenticity – mirrors of the true, hence enduring, self – is susceptible to the inevitable failure of human lives to live up to idealized representations. Strains arose not only from the impact of outside influences and market forces on family and gender relations, but also because the reformist, developmental side of Chinese nationalism itself channeled women into the public sphere, thus exposing them to transformation and ‘contamination’. For instance, nationalists in both China and Japan were mindfull that women not only should be involved with reproduction functions in the domestic sphere, but also should contribute to production in the modern sector in order to strengthen the nation. Weikun Cheng writes that even the involvement of females as students and teachers in the segregated girls’ schools and professional associations entailed a certain level of participation in the public sphere.16 Moreover, the alternative model of the progressive woman, backed by her increasingly acceptable status in the West, was readily available in the media and attracted many younger women. In Japan, by the 1920s the Modern Girl, active in the public sphere of work and politics, came to threaten ‘the patriarchal family and its ideological support, the deferring woman who was presented in state ideology as the “Good Wife and Wise Mother”’.17 According to Miriam Silverberg, she became the symbol of all that was nonJapanese and modern, in contrast to the Meiji image of the woman who served as “the repository of the past’, standing for tradition when men were encouraged to change their way of politics and culture in all ways.18 The Modern Girl of the 1920s became the target of conservatives appalled by rapid change all around them, but she became so only because she, no less than the Meiji woman, occupied a special place within the order of authenticity, a place she was beginning defiantly to transgress. In China, the popularity of the model of the liberated woman reached its great height among educated young women in the May 4th Movement. Indeed, through the 1920s and beyond, perhaps the greatest threat to the conservative model of womanhood came from the May 4th Westernized, anti-traditional model of woman. The two models were intimately implicated in the political and ideological battles of the period, leading sometimes to a great deal of violence inflicted upon women. After the split between the KMT and CCP in 1927, thousands of ‘modern’ women were killed by the KMT forces because they were accused of ‘free love’, or sometimes simply because they had bobbed hair, unbound feet, or a local reputation for opposing familial authority.19 While they were surely killed because they were marked by these signs as communist (whether or not they were), the causal logic worked in both directions. Communism itself was illegitimate

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significantly because such women and their behavior despoiled the innermost purity of Chinese culture. Aside from such dramatically violent episodes, the tension in gender conceptions underlying these conflicting models was pervasive in urban, middleclass China. The great May 4th writer Lu Xun reflected deeply on the gender issues of his time, and directed some of his most acid writing at modern gentry patriarchs such as Kang Youwei (who became president of the Morality Society in the 1920s), who, he believed, employed the language of traditional essences to ultimately exploit and dominate women.20 There is perhaps no better description of the tension than his story ‘Soap’. Lu Xun’s protagonist Simin has bought a cake of foreign, scented soap for his wife. His wife is pleased, but also embarrassed by the coded message that she should make herself cleaner and more alluring. When Simin had insisted on opening the package of soap at the store to check its quality, he was taunted by some schoolgirls with bobbed hair using a foreign word he did not understand (it turns out to be ‘old fool’). Highly agitated, he now orders his school-going son to check its meaning, and begins to rave and rant about the moral havoc that the new schools are wreaking on China, especially the schools for girls. He says: Just think, it is already in very poor taste the way women wander up and down the streets, and now they want to cut their hair as well. Nothing disgusts me as much as these short-haired schoolgirls. What I say is: there is some excuse for soldiers and bandits, but these girls are the ones who turn everything upside down. They ought to be very severely dealt with indeed.21

Simin then contrasts this behavior with that of a filial beggar girl aged 18 or 19, who turned over all the money she received begging outside a store to her blind grandmother. The crowds that gathered to watch the two not only did not give much money, but made jeering remarks about how the girl would not be bad at all if she were scrubbed up with two cakes of soap. Simin sees this as evidence of the catastrophic decline of morality in modern China. Later, at dinner, when Simin’s wife can no longer take Simin’s irritability, she hints that he secretly longs for the beggar girl and is trying to cover this up by exalting her filial and self-sacrificing conduct. In utter frustration, she exclaims, ‘If you buy her another cake and give her a good scrubbing, then worship her, the whole world will be at peace.’ Later she adds, ‘We women are much better than you men. If you men are not cursing 18- or 19-year-old girl students, you are praising 18 or 19-year-old girl beggars: such dirty minds you have.’ At this moment, Simin is rescued from this tirade by the arrival of some friends who have come to remind him about the urgent need to publicize an essay and poetry contest for their Moral Reform Literary Society (Yifeng Wenshe). The title for the essay had already been drafted as ‘To beg the


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President to issue an order for the promotion of the Confucian classics and the worship of the mother of Mencius, in order to revive this moribund world and preserve our national character.’ Thinking about the beggar woman, Simin suggests that the poem should be titled the ‘Filial Daughter’, to eulogize her and criticize society. In the following exchange, one of his friends laughs uproariously upon hearing the jeering comments about giving her a good scrubbing. Simin is acutely pained by his friend’s laughter because, as Lu Xun hints, it suggests to him the truth of his wife’s words, which he had repressed. Lu Xun sets up the duality between Chinese and foreign, East and West, old and new as the basic framework of the story. The foreign and new – schoolgirls, bobbed hair, modern education, English words, the heavy sound of leather shoes worn by Simin’s son – are an intrusive and disruptive presence for Simin. Lu focuses our attention on the power of a new (if seemingly insignificant) commodity, soap, to disturb his protagonist by its capacity to arouse desire and throw his world out of kilter. It is clear that what Simin finds most disturbing is the unmooring of gender and sexual norms by the changes he sees around him. He responds vituperatively, denying the need for girls to go to school (thus keeping them within the domestic sphere) and valorizing the conduct of the pure and filial beggar woman. For Simin, she represents everything that is eternal and pure in Chinese tradition, and he wants the poetry contest to immortalize her purity. This effort to restore the moral authenticity of the nation via the beggar woman thus has to exalt her poverty (filial even in desperate need) and desexualize her as the object of men’s (especially his) desire.22 Although he satirizes it as a ridiculous failure, Lu Xun’s jibe about the poem on the ‘Filial Daughter’ incidentally reveals one of the means whereby the conservative model of woman sought to prevent her from ‘contamination’ when she emerged from the home. Modern patriarchy permitted women’s involvement outside the domestic space, but sought to wrap the woman-in-public with the flag of civilizational authenticity represented by the historical rhetoric of self-sacrifice and virtue. We might try to imagine this strategy spatially, as one where women’s bodies move within a larger public space in rhetorically encased units. This perspective permits us to see how such a protective strategy was continuous with the organizational strategy of segregation. Segregated organizations, such as virtuous girls’ schools, women’s professional associations, and even the women’s wings of the redemptive societies, were the other way in which women’s involvement in the public sphere was contained in signifying encasements. As we shall see, redemptive societies were for men extended means of monitoring and control; but for women this mode of involvement in the public sphere could also be empowering. Women in these societies often desired separate organizations. Take the case of the Red Swastika Society. Reports and queries from separate women’s groups within this society begin to appear in the records around 1932 from cities and towns in China and Manchukuo. The mother

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organization (muyuan) of the World Women’s Red Swastika Society was created in Jinan in February of that year, and its headquarters later established in Beiping. A report from the women’s group (nüshe) of the Mouping Daoyuan to the general assembly insisted on the clarification of the status of women’s groups in the Society. It noted that while all the formal niceties of the new organization had been decided, the question of whether or not separate and parallel women’s organizations should be established at each administrative level had not. The places for women to gather for selfcultivation and to conduct research and philanthropic activities were not ideal, since the women had to share these places with the original men’s organization.23 Separately, the southeast branches headquartered in Hangzhou reported the difficulties in the procedures for conducting women’s worship when originally women had not made offerings at the same altars (shenkan). It also reported the need to expand the size of worship halls in order to accommodate the rising number of worshipers.24 The Mouping proposal strongly urged that the organizations and locations be separated and the constitution of the Society be amended to reflect these changes. The assembly resolved that preparatory offices (choubeichu) and committees formed of the leading women in the Beiping office and representatives from the localities be set up. They formulated the rules and bylaws for the 70 new women’s branches that they hoped to set up. In addition to the general relief work and lectures that the women’s organization shared with the men, its special philanthropic activities included managing schools, childcare, and research, education and mobilization around women’s concerns.25 Judging from the reports, and the large number of proud photographs of women-only branches in the records, it appears that women favored segregated organizations, perhaps not only as the appropriate means to enter public life, but also to limit the interference of men in the organization. It was their conditioned engagement in the public world that would shape their understanding and practice of the civilizational pedagogy that sought to mold their lives and self-conceptions. At the same time, these signifying ‘women’s spaces’ became targeted by regimes in Manchukuo, Japan and China as the organizational means of penetrating and restructuring the family and redefining the relationship between private and public, although these efforts were hardly always successful.

Governmentality and modern patriarchy

Michel Foucault has suggested that in the West the status of the family transformed from a model of governance – for instance, in the thought of Machiavelli – into an object and instrument of governmentality.26 Later work has elaborated this process: The everyday activities of living, the hygienic care of household members, the previously trivial features of interactions between adults and


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children, were to be anatomized by experts, rendered calculable in terms of norms and deviations, judged in terms of their social costs and consequences and subject to regimes of education and reformation. The family, then, was to be instrumentalized as a social machine – both made social and utilized to create sociality – implanting the techniques of responsible citizenship under the tutelage of experts and in relation to a variety of sanctions and rewards.27


State policies towards the family in interwar East Asia followed a similar path, but the power of the historical representation of women in the domestic sphere ensured its conspicuousness in the ideology of state power, especially as the latter sought to penetrate, transform and deploy the family as an instrument of governmentality. Governmentality has the effect of nucleating, rationalizing, standardizing and institutionalizing the family as a means to shape individual subject formation, whether to extend life, guide consumption or channel political loyalty. In democratic regimes, this function is distributed between the state and relatively autonomous societal associations, whereas in non-democratic regimes of the interwar years the autonomy of social organizations was much reduced.28 Particularly noteworthy about the three regimes in Japan, KMT China and Manchukuo were the common elements within the ideological and institutional means of this reshaping effort. The elements relevant to this essay are the ideological figure of woman as the self-sacrificing representative of ‘tradition within modernity’, the government-administered mass organizations for women, and related civic societies such as the Daodehui. These elements came together as the regimes sought to engage women activists in the transformation of family and society. Whether they were expected to embody the gendered ideology of womanhood or retain it in segregated organizations, these women were perceived as more susceptible to state directives than either the uneducated working woman or the Westernized Modern Girl. We have noted how the model of ‘good wife, wise mother’ came to stand for everything that the Modern Girl in 1920s Japan was not: Japaneseness and the past, as well as the new, enlightened domesticity.29 Silverberg believes that it was the threatened militancy of the working woman that generated the image of the Modern Girl, relentlessly depicted in the press as promiscuous and non-national. In contrast, the 1920s state cult of domesticity targeted the ‘housewife’ of the rapidly proliferating middle-class, nuclear family to implement its policies of improving domestic life, encouraging rational consumption, and fostering scientific attitudes, thrift and the like.30 While women’s associations were engaged in enhancing the public role for women, including the suffrage movement, the majority of these associations also appear to have operated voluntarily within the state’s ideology of ideal womanhood. Indeed, women activists even argued that the Japanese women’s movement was different from Western women’s movements because the Japanese recognized the difference between men and women and the special role of the

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mother’s love in social development.31 In a context where motherhood was increasingly becoming the central image of the 1930s revival of the Meiji period family-state ideology,32 such declarations indexed the extent to which the family had become the instrument of a state-driven governmentality. Sheldon Garon has suggested that the Japanese state was able to penetrate the household to achieve its goals of resource extraction and hygiene improvement to an unprecedented degree after the 1920s, because of the emergence of women as intermediaries in the project of social management.33 Whether as housewives or in segregated associations, these women tended to conform to the ideology of womanhood contained and guided by the state-mandated demarcation of public and domestic as separate spheres for men and women. Although the KMT in China was a much weaker state, I believe we can see a similar strategy by this regime to utilize segregated women’s organizations to extend the ideological roles and norms of domestic womanhood (nursing, educating, nurturing) into the public. Conversely, it sought to turn these women, contained ideologically in segregated organizations, back toward the family in order to achieve the goals of the state. Thus did the state seek to control the increasingly unstable boundaries between the public and the domestic. To be sure, different women’s groups and publications loosely affiliated with the KMT expressed radical and feminist points of view, but the dominant political tendency represented the view of a modern patriarchy. Karl Gerth shows how the ‘national products’ (guohuo) movement, led by the KMT to boycott foreign goods and encourage consumption of domestic products, spotlighted the authentic national woman, described as the xianqi liangmu (virtuous wife, good mother). She was a figure who promoted national consumption not only by her own consumer practices, but by guiding household consumption of domestically produced goods and reproducing nationally minded consumers. New Life women’s associations were critical to the promotion of the movement of national consumption in the family, and engaged in such tasks as organizing exhibits of national products for women in the provinces.34 The obverse of this figure, like the Modern Girl in Japan at the same time, was bitterly attacked for selfishly consuming foreign products and neglecting the family and national duties. Underscoring the trope of authenticity and purity associated with the Chinese woman, these women were denounced as prostitutes who had sold out to the outsider.35 The KMT’s New Life movement, launched in 1934, was a campaign to revive traditional values for the purposes of governmentality. It thus fits well the model of ‘tradition within modernity’, which allowed the state to serve as the custodian of authentic tradition while deploying that tradition for the KMT’s disciplinary project of modern subject formation. As Chiang Kaishek put it, ‘Today we all recognize the important place of the (ancient) ideals of li, yi, lian, chi (propriety, justice, honesty and shame/modesty) in revolutionary nation-building (geming jianguo)’.36 And Madame Chiang Kai-shek, better known in China as Song Meiling, described these Confucian ideals as the inner counterpart of spiritual and moral renovation (gexin)


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to outer political and economic reform.37 Founded initially to rehabilitate the communist-dominated region of Jiangxi, which the KMT had ravaged, the campaign was extended to the entire country, drawing on ideals of self-discipline and moral regulation – allegedly the factors behind China’s historical greatness – to produce a new citizenry dedicated to the collective. As Arif Dirlik says, ‘Its basic intention was to substitute “political mobilization” for social mobilization, thus replacing revolutionary change from the bottom (which threatened the social structure) with closely supervised change orchestrated from the top (which served the goals of the state).’38 Like other fascistic regime-administered mass movements, its ideal of mobilization included the total transformation of the individual through reform of customs and everyday practices relating to personal hygiene and moral improvement. Women were particularly important in the New Life movement because so much of individual transformation was expected to take place in the family. Before the outbreak of war in 1937, women were not particularly discouraged from working outside the home, but the overwhelming tone of the writings by political leaders and intellectuals celebrated the great contributions that women could make to the nation by focusing on their role as mothers. Song Meiling, the driving force behind the movement, recognized that ‘intelligent and educated’ women should not have to restrict themselves to the home, but urged that the main task of women was to manage the household and the children’s education. She appealed to them to infuse a spirit of self-sacrifice, extirpate the habits of ignorance and laziness, and manage the household in an orderly and scientific manner.39 From 1937, when women were urged to come out of the home to participate in the war effort, Song clearly identified the patriotic and self-sacrificing woman – against both the comfort-seeking, parasitic and unpatriotic women and the ignorant rural women – as one to target for productive service.40 Such New Life women’s organizations as the Women’s Service League (Funü fuwutuan) and Women’s Life Improvement Society (Funü shenghuo gaijinhui) sought to play an important role in the institutionalization and standardization of domestic life. As the 1934 report on the Nanchang Women’s Service League declared, the method for achieving the goals of the movement was first to develop professional (elite) women’s organizations and then penetrate the domestic sphere (tui zhi jiating shehui) through them. New Life groups sought to establish standard family guidelines regarding clothing, diet, hygiene, production, child-rearing, education, economy, medication and sociability (zuoren).41 The movement hoped to be able to educate and exhibit 200,000–201,000 ‘standard families’ as models to be followed. New Life organizations intervened to regulate marriage age and registration, the promotion of (economical) group weddings, the abolition of ‘superstitious’ or ‘unhygienic’ rituals, and even the standardization of the kind (domestically made) and length of the qipao, or Chinese women’s dress.42 The Women’s Life Improvement Society also set up several subdivisions, such as the Domestic Affairs Study Society, handicraft cooperatives, the Women’s

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Labor Service League, and others. During the war years, women’s associations were expected to nurse wounded soldiers, attend to their families’ needs, mobilize and train rural women in the production of various goods (especially textiles), and undertake educational and family improvement projects, as well as to educate and propagandize among local minority people in the wartime KMT regions.43 In Japan, as in China – and, as we shall see, in Manchukuo – the advent of war brought women out of the home in increasing numbers to fulfill the goals of the wartime state. But the fundamental conceptions of women, and strategies for directing their role in society, appear to have not so much changed as intensified, extended and expanded to deal with the new circumstances. Women continued to be mobilized through segregated organizations and to serve in gendered roles and functions, and these services continued to be directed at the family and other women’s communities, such as textile workers. Through these means, the regimes sought to protect the gendered ideology of women as embodied cultural assets. Different ministries in Japan sponsored several different women’s mass organizations in the 1920s and 1930s. The Greater Japan Federation of Women’s Associations (Dainihon rengofujinkai), sponsored by the Ministry of Education, flourished during the Great Depression as a means to promote the household economy, health and morality. During the 1930s, it was gradually displaced by the Defense Ministry’s National Defense Women’s Association (Kokubo- fujinkai), which advocated traditional morality and exhorted women to fight the ‘world economic war’ and ‘world thought war’ in the kitchen. As the war deepened, this defense association, which counted 7.5 million members by 1938,44 brought the women out of the home to support the war effort through the segregated institutions that extended the modern ideology of domesticity into the public sphere. Women’s associations were involved in the conscription effort through functions consonant with women’s roles as nurturing wives and, especially, as mothers.45 Members provided comfort packages for troops, visited hospitals and graves, educated soldiers, inspected youth training, and celebrated the departure and return from battle of every soldier. They reinforced the symbolism of the home and ideals of self-sacrifice by wearing plain white aprons that, according to Kasza, were designed to avoid ‘kimono competition’ and other signs of luxury consumption.46 At the same time, they were expected to represent the state in resolving the crises of wartime families. They addressed family problems such as the not-unusual rape by the father-in-law of the absent soldier’s wife, and conflicts between the wife and the family of the dead soldier.47

Women in Manchukuo The status of Chinese women in Manchuria into the early years of the twentieth century was greatly affected by the frontier circumstances of the settler population. Owen Lattimore observed that among the older settlements in


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the southern regions of Liaoning province, the considerable influence of Manchu customs on Chinese women led to their being less dependent on the patriarchal system than in China proper. He cites as instances the early abandonment of bound feet among Chinese women and their relatively free interaction with men in this region.48 In the other regions of Manchuria, where the process of Chinese settlement had begun more recently, the relative scarcity of women led both to a greater valuation of women, and to widespread prostitution – prevalent even in villages of 40 or 50 households.49 The city of Harbin, already a cosmopolitan city with an elegant downtown by the 1920s, had a flourishing prostitution trade divided by class and ethnicity, with separate quarters for Chinese, Korean, Russian and Japanese prostitutes. Indeed, the Manchukuo government levied a progressive tax on brothels based on the class of their service and clientele.50 During the first few decades of the twentieth century, the formation of an urban middle-class cultural consciousness among the Chinese and the much smaller Japanese communities led to a discourse on womanhood and a civilizing project to erase the stigma of the frontier. This discourse followed to a considerable degree the model of the figure of tradition-within-modernity that permitted a controlled and limited reform of women’s conditions. Records of the Morality Society give us a glimpse of the beginnings of this development. In the 1930s, the Society sought to honor those among its members and their forebears who, during the first two decades of the century, had made contributions to the Society’s ideal social vision. Most were local elites who expressed their social commitments, not as they had traditionally, by building and maintaining temples, but by establishing, managing and contributing money to the new ‘virtuous and chaste girls’ schools’.51 Virtuous girls’ schools in the Manchurian context were not merely a means of containing (and managing anxiety about) women in the public sphere; they represented a civilizing strategy for the frontier.52 Segregation, together with the application of a civilizing rhetoric, worked upon the bodies of these women. Thus one woman claimed that she only really understood what it meant to read after her father transferred her from a regular school to a virtuous school. Learning to read was not true learning unless such reading could shape the body and its conduct (xing dao shenshang, na jiao shizi).53 The Morality Society, which honored the virtuous school-building elite, was thus also continuing the project of attaining civilized respectability. The discourse of female virtue found here is clearly continuous with the cult of chaste widows and virtuous wives of late imperial times.54 But, inevitably, there was also a shift in its meaning. Just as nationalists such as Wang Jingwei in the KMT reorganized the role and meaning of the ideal woman, so too in Manchuria we find a new awareness of women’s issues and their role in the public realm. The most widely read Chinese newspaper in the region, the Japanese-owned Shengjing Shibao, established in 1906, registered this growing awareness. Coverage of women’s education and their role in the family became frequent and systematic after 1916, and picked up

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significantly after the May 4th Movement in 1919. During this period, reports and editorials in the newspaper tended to the more conservative view of women, but favored some reform. While they frequently praised filial and self-sacrificing women as models of virtue, they also praised women’s education insofar as it would strengthen and enlighten the family. Women’s direct involvement in the public sphere frequently brought disapproval. The British American Tobacco Company, which employed hundreds of women workers, apparently attracted crowds of gawkers at the factory gate during shift changes. The paper found this most unseemly and recommended banning women’s employment for the sake of public morals. Women walking around in bobbed hair and leather shoes invited the comment that the women’s movement had only converted them into men. Opposition to women’s involvement in politics, especially in the students’ movements of the early 1920s, was particularly vociferous. A Shengjing Shibao editorial entitled ‘Beijing University and Women Students’ opined that this trend was an overreaction to the earlier closeting of women in the inner chambers. The commentator believed that the reform of women’s condition should be encouraged in the family and society, but their participation in politics should be discouraged.55 These views were probably not inconsistent with those of the middle class elsewhere in China. At the same time, the model of the modern, liberated woman also began to appear in the 1920s and 1930s. The Chinese intelligentsia in Harbin was deeply affected by Russian émigré culture. Writers such as the feminist Xiao Hong and her partner Xiao Jun, nourished on Gorky, Gogol and other European writers, produced a radical literary culture that survived even after their departure from the region in 1934.56 Cities such as Dalian also produced independent Japanese women. Perhaps the best known of these was the editor of the Dairen Women’s Times magazine and journalist with the Manchuria Daily, Hoshina Kiyoji, who wrote widely on women’s conditions in Manchuria and advocated a greatly enhanced role for women in society.57 Until 1937, this variety of views on gender issues was represented in Manchukuo newspapers. While the Shengjing Shibao continued to be conservative, others were more progressive. The Datongbao discussed women’s issues in the 1930s, initially in a section called modeng (modern), which later changed to xiandai (contemporary), and finally appeared in a specialized segment simply called funü, or women. Letters, essays and editorials in this section reflect a range of concerns, from health issues to the problem of arranged marriage. Some essays emphasized the need for women to understand that it was acceptable to serve society and the nation by producing good sons, citing such exemplary historical figures as the mothers of Mencius and Yue Fei.58 By and large, however, the editors denounced the traditional (zongfa) conception that women were to serve the extended family. A man who wondered if the upwardly mobile city girl he was considering marrying would be happy looking after his parents in the village received the firm response that marriage was not about the extended family, and that he


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should hire someone or look after his parents himself. The editors exulted in a letter from a 15-year-old girl who opposed her parents’ decision to force a marriage, writing, ‘we cannot suppress our marvel at how advanced women’s consciousness has developed when we hear a 15-year-old say things like “deciding my fate is a critical issue” or “my mother did not seek my agreement on the matter of my own marriage” ’. When responding to this genre of letters, the editors remarkably and frequently emphasized the illegality of forced marriage by parents, recommending that the women take legal or quasi-legal action by sending their own letters to the man’s side breaking the contract, and keeping copies of such letters as evidence.59 A two-part article written in October 1936 evaluating the old family system came out strongly on the side of the nuclear family and individual choice of partner. Although it urged people not to overlook the advantages of the old system – particularly its usefulness in caring for the old parents – the advantages it lists for the new family are overwhelming. The paper continued to carry sympathetic essays about the struggle for women’s rights in Europe and elsewhere.60 These views appeared to coexist with more conservative measures and policies undertaken by the Ministry of Culture and Education (Wenjiaobu). The Ministry pursued programs to honor filial children, virtuous wives and chaste widows, although it also prescribed appropriate physical and athletic activities for schoolgirls to make them strong and healthy citizens.61 The Datongbao, of course, reported the Ministry’s promotion of traditional virtues, but it was able to discuss these programs without relinquishing its views on the importance of the ability of women and youth to make independent choices.62 After 1937, and especially after 1941, the autonomy of the press in Manchukuo was severely curtailed, but even so, the regime’s attitude toward women was by no means a mere return to the past. The ideal was not to confine women to the home, but to contain and deploy them in the public in a way that would serve state and regime interests. For the moment, I want to note that the conservative model of women – as the essence of tradition within modernity – was not the only one available in Manchukuo, even though the regime sought to cultivate it. The women we shall discuss in the Morality Society were surrounded by images, views, and the reality of women making decisions and life choices in relative independence. In terms of the extant models of womanhood, there is no reason to think that the situation for women in Manchukuo through the 1930s was significantly different than in other parts of China. Although the May 4th model of the Westernized woman certainly existed, middle-class society and the rural elites were prepared to tolerate only limited reform of women’s conditions and involvement in the public realm. Whereas certain ministries, such as Social Welfare or Defense, and the Concordia Association may have favored the model of ‘tradition within modernity’ so as to deploy women in governmentality, others, such as the Ministry of Culture and Education, emphasized the ideology of woman as the soul of East Asian civilization – in significant part because of the

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common cause that the regime had made with the middle-class and rural elite. Thus this model of woman served the regime’s sovereignty claims. We can imagine the extent to which the historical image of woman as embodying a precious and violable cultural essence pervaded the middle classes when we encounter it in the writings of even progressive nationalists in Manchukuo. In a short story called Children of Mixed Blood (Hunxie er), written in 1943, Shi Jun reflects on the question of intercultural marriages in the region. His protagonist, a Chinese magistrate in a border town, helps out the Russian widow of a Chinese man and her children. Thinking about his conversations with her, the magistrate expresses his feelings about mixed marriage. He is gratified by the woman’s praise of responsible Chinese men in contrast to drunkard Russian men. But a fury rages in his heart when she innocently inquires why it was alright for Chinese men to marry Russian women, but not for Chinese women to marry Russian men. The thought that the Han people, with their rich history and culture, could give up their women and progeny to such barbarians was deeply insulting to him. The Manchukuo police censors who regularly went through the writings of suspected Chinese nationalists by this time interpreted the story as a thinly veiled expression of anti-Japanese nationalism.63 Neither censors nor the predominantly male literary establishment seemed at all struck by this mercantilist characterization of women as precious national resources to be taken and not given. Whereas this model of woman may well have been deployed in an anti-Japanese allegory, the Manchukuo government seems to have gambled on the strategy that supporting the conservative view of womanhood would yield more by way of a shared discourse than its occasional deployment for nationalist goals. The controversy over the short story Blood Lineage (Xiezu) by the woman writer Dan Di, published after the fall of Manchukuo in December 1945, reveals the extent to which the model of the self-sacrificing woman became implicated in the nationalist rhetoric of the period. The story is told from the point of view of a sickly younger sister who is forced by necessity to live with her impoverished and unhappy brother and his small family. The brother tries to improve their situation by raising chickens in the house, but without much success. In contrast, the chickens raised by their Japanese neighbors are plump and productive. As the hot-tempered brother becomes more and more frustrated, he vents his anger on the family, and in a climactic scene beats his sister. She leaves the household and meets with her father, who advises her, even as she shows him her bleeding hand, not to let this sorrow enter her heart, because her brother is, after all, a blood relative (xiezu). It was the pressures of life that had made him so mean-spirited. When the brother shows up, she forgives him, but resolves not to marry.64 Dan Di was educated in Japan, and is said to have exercised an important influence on women’s literature when she returned to Manchukuo during its last years. While it is hard to fathom her literary impact, Dan Di’s fictional account is remarkably continuous with the kind of letters to the editor that


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one finds in the women’s section of Manchukuo newspapers, protesting or airing grievances by women wronged by their families. Dan Di herself suffered repeatedly at the hands of men who abandoned her.65 Here we glimpse how public writing by women across both genres was a mutually influential mode of self-expression and coping with modern patriarchy.66 Critics from the Northeast consider her writing to be melancholic and individualist, taking the reader into a feminine world where ‘women’s feelings (nüxingde chujiao) explore fantasies in a shattered reality’.67 They have recently also included her among the group of progressive writers in the region, a coded designation of her present (posthumous) acceptability.68 But Dan Di may have been most representative of the tragedy that befell writers during the tumultuous years of regime change, as she was imprisoned by each of the regimes in Manchuria from the 1940s: the Japanese, the KMT and the CCP.69 Immediately upon publication, Blood Lineage was attacked in a mainland paper as reflecting the slavish mentality of the colonized for admiring the Japanese and speaking in the language of the Xiehe or Concordia. In response, Dan Di and a number of writers and readers from the Northeast defended the story as a critique of Japanese imperialism and an exposé of the miserable conditions for Chinese in Manchukuo. There were also angry responses protesting the spiteful nationalist tendency to charge as traitors those very people ‘who had suffered under the cold window’.70 I think we can safely agree with Dan Di and her defenders that the little story is more liable to be read as a critique of conditions in Manchukuo than a defense of Japanese imperial ideals. If so, might we be right in suspecting that the unmentioned eye of the storm in the story is none other than ‘blood lineage’ itself ? After all, the revelation of the cost of the blood tie could not have been comforting to a patriarchal nationalism. In The Field of Life and Death, the more famous Xiao Hong had also concluded her devastating critique of the violence in the Manchurian countryside – both of the animal struggle for existence and the brutal Japanese occupation – with a rape committed not by a Japanese soldier but by a Chinese man. Lydia Liu has shown how nationalists have tried to smooth over the tension between feminism and nationalism in the novel and to frame it entirely as a patriotic novel.71 Dan Di’s story can be seen as a critique of a patriarchy that was inherited by both Chinese nationalism and civilizational discourse in Manchukuo. It is a cruel irony that the nationalists attacked her for criticizing the very same patriarchal relationship that the Manchukuo regime had sought to utilize for its sovereignty claims.

State, family, and woman in Manchukuo As in China and Japan, the model of woman as representing ‘tradition within modernity’ was important to the regime in Manchukuo, both for its sovereignty claims and as a strategic lever to penetrate the family. Whether from the perspective of governmentality or the regime’s immediate concern

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with its own stability, the family was of central importance in Manchukuo. The family-state imagery, derived from Japan, was pervasive, especially after the war in Asia, and the family became the root metaphor for loyalty to the state. Demands of unconditional loyalty to the nation-state were premised upon the unconditional loyalty of the individual to the family in official declarations.72 While the family formed the basis of the political community, it was also clear that the nuclear family was the norm of modern society – and ought to be the norm in Manchukuo – whereas large families and lineages were characteristic of backward places without a modern nation-state.73 Indeed, the regime revealed an enormous appetite for knowledge about the family. Within a year of its establishment, the statistical department of the General Affairs Board of Manchukuo began its annual surveys of family structure and economic life known as the Household Statistical Survey Reports (Jiaji diaocha baogao/kakei cho-sa ho-koku). These were extraordinarily detailed statistical reports, largely from urban areas, collected by data-gatherers dispatched by city and county government offices on a regular basis. After collection, meetings were held at different administrative levels to process the data into information.74 The declared purpose of the surveys was to obtain information on household income and consumption in order to evaluate the degree of satisfaction of urban households and the possibilities for economic growth. The surveys were relatively complex, differentiating spending patterns by generation and household size, among other criteria. It is also easy for us to imagine how, through these and other intrusive means, the family could become the target of surveillance and be restructured to be made more responsive to the needs of the regime and governmentality. The main agencies for penetrating, mobilizing and reforming the family were the Concordia Association and the redemptive societies. As in China and Japan, the new regime seized the ideal of self-sacrificing women for this task. I examine more closely the relationship of the regime with the Morality Society as a way to explore attitudes and policies towards gender, domesticity and the public realm in Manchukuo. The Society not only focused a great deal of its activities on women, it had a large number of women activists whose views we have an opportunity to hear. In Manchukuo, the Morality Society underwent rapid growth in the mid1930s when Wang Fengyi, already renowned as a local sage (shanren) in the northeast, took over its leadership. Wang’s mission was to restore Chinese civilizational values and ‘transform the world’ (huashi). Women were particularly important to the new society that Wang conceived – one that would combine modern ideas with enduring Chinese ideals of selfhood and the world.75 Wang had been at the forefront of the development of virtuous girls’ schools, having established 270 of them by 1925; they all became part of the Morality Society when he joined it around that time.76 While the importance of gender segregation doubtless derived from Wang’s commitment to classical morality, he was also clearly committed to a conception of woman as linking the past to the future. He reported a conversation with a


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Christian pastor in which Wang exposes the insufficiency of historical religions. All religions certainly pointed to the same Way (dao), but they neglected or demeaned women in the education of the Way. He insisted that women be educated and independent (liye) so that they could understand the Way.77 If women’s education and limited participation in the public sphere were necessary to the redemptive mission of the Society, such a role was quite compatible with the needs of the fascist regime. The two parties converged on an image of woman as representing a pristine East Asian traditionalism while she was simultaneously inserted into a program of modernization. The Manchukuo regime stressed the Society’s role as a mediator between state and family. The summit meetings of the Society drew such high-level figures as Tachibana Shiraki, now leader of the Concordia Association, and other top officials. The Manchukuo police were closely associated with the project for moral renewal of the citizenry. The head of the Capital Police Bureau declared that in order to attain national goals and renew the people, it was first necessary to cleanse the people’s hearts. While this was the indirect responsibility of the nation-state, it was more directly the responsibility of such jiaohua agencies as the Morality Society. These societies should bond the people to the state (guanmin yizhi) by nourishing ethical attitudes and duties toward the family, society and the nation.78 Employing an orthodox Confucian rhetoric, officials repeatedly emphasized the central importance of the five ethical relationships in constructing a chain of loyalty to the state.79 This is how Tachibana formulated the logic: Superstition has no basis in morality, but morality is the basis of belief. The youth at home must believe in the elders, the wife in the husband, and the husband in the wife. If there is no harmony within the family, then there will be no harmony in society and no harmony in the nation. The Morality Society thus represents the progress (jinbu) of morality.80

It was through the representation of the family, and the special role of women within it as repositories of the essence of tradition, that the new middle-class patriarchy made common cause with the Manchukuo state. Woman became the upholder of the ‘new family’, which was the basis of citizenship. The new family was morally pure, selfless, and committed to the moral regeneration of the world by adhering to the ‘kingly way’ (wangdao).81 Weddings were to be frugal and unostentatious, since the goal was to achieve love and righteousness between the couple.82 Women (and, to a lesser extent, men) were encouraged to rid themselves of jewelry and other accoutrements so that they could come to know their inner selves.83 The Morality Society not only conducted lectures and ran schools, it organized many ‘family research groups’ (jiating yanjiushe), in which the roles of model wife and mother were investigated. It is from these research societies that the righteous girls’ schools received the knowledge to improve women’s service to the family and nation without necessarily having to leave the home.84

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In this representation, the goals of the nation-state could be fulfilled only when the family was strong, when husbands were righteous and wives obedient. The oral records of the morality seminars of the Third Manchukuo Morality Society (Disanjie Manzhouguo Daodehui daode jiangxi yulu, or DMDY), which were held in 1936 in Xinjing (Changchun), is an extraordinarily revealing text of over 300 pages of personal narratives and testimonials from members of the society who taught in its righteous schools and traveled the country giving lectures on morality.85 Participants in the seminar made presentations about how their lives were guided by the appropriate moral doctrines of the Society. We hear the life stories of about 25 women and an equal number of men, including government officials. Within the family, the ideal moral roles for men and women were very different. From the speeches and narratives of the officials and leaders of the Society, we learn that the masculine virtues were loyalty, incorruptibility, bravery and self-restraint. On several occasions in their narratives, men recounted as virtue the self-control by which they restrained the urge to beat their wives. One of them indicated that in showing restraint he was expressing his filiality, because both his marriages had been arranged by his mother.86 Director Feng (Feng zhuren) was once faced with a serious moral crisis when his youngest wife threw his baby son on the floor: seized by a desire to avenge his progeny, he was about to strike her when he recognized the virtue of self-restraint.87 Female virtue often entailed following the three obediences (sancong). The locus classicus of this doctrine is the Book of Rituals (Yili sangfuzhuan), which holds that a woman should obey her father before marriage, her husband upon marriage, and her son upon the husband’s death. But in the pedagogy of the Society, as we shall see, obedience on the part of women did not necessarily entail confinement to the household. Rather, the ideal woman was shaped (or regulated) by the virtues of the family and by the reproduction of these virtues in the righteous schools and the Morality Society itself. Having outlined the ways in which the pedagogy of the regime and the Society constituted women as subjects, let me turn to the personal narratives of the women. The bulk of their narratives are organized around the five conducts (wuxing) drawn from the classical tradition. They are zhiming (to know your fate); zhixing (to know your nature); jinxin (to devote your heart and mind, to devote oneself); lishen (to establish your self or body), in turn divided into lizhi (to resolve your will) and liye (to fulfill an enterprise or profession); and finally zhizhi (to know your limits).88 My goal in retelling the stories of these women is to see them neither as unwilling victims of a fascist regime nor as collaborators with an alien power. Nationalism was clearly less important to them than being able to pursue their religious mission and personal goals, and there are also suggestions that they stopped cooperating when it became impossible to pursue their mission. Although it is difficult to evaluate their efficacy as agents of the state and the Society, they were clearly identified with the avowed goals


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of the regime. As a result, these women represented the relative success of an East Asian model of womanhood that became the means of ordering gender roles and domesticity. What interests me in their narratives is the extent to which these women fashioned their lives and actions in accordance with a pedagogy that sought to control them. To what extent is the technique of self-knowledge subordinated to the pedagogy of the three obediences? What was the nature of the gap between the constituted subject and the enunciating subject?89 I am not suggesting that we can find, in this gap, some kind of subaltern agency or independence from the structures of domination. Rather, I will try to show how the self is fashioned not only by the dominant representations of truth and power, but by a range of practices outside their ambit as well.


Women and techniques of the self Who were the women who joined these societies, particularly as lecturers? As lecturers they must, at some level, have believed in the pedagogy. Like teachers everywhere, they expressed demoralization when few attended their lectures and were gratified by a large turnout. Many of them were women with much grief in their lives. There were those whose children had died young, those locked in loveless marriages, those who sought solace because a younger wife or concubine had been brought in to replace them, younger wives bullied by older wives and in-laws, and many others. Many were devout Buddhists and found the Society to be basically compatible with their Buddhist faith. These were women for whom the Morality Society offered a rationalization or justification of their fate, a means of coping with their difficult lives, a missionary sublimation, and spiritual solace. A woman named Tu declares that hers is the fate (ming) of a stepmother. Neither the old nor the children treated her well, no matter how hard she tried. But she had come to understand her fate and had resolved her will (lizhi). Whereas earlier she had been addicted to drugs, she had become a vegetarian and felt no need for drugs. Indeed, she had acquired such strength and influence in her household that no one there took drugs.90 A Mrs Zhao states simply that earlier she would be sad when people called her ‘wife number two’ (er taitai). Now she had learned to live with her fate (tianming) and was happy.91 Mrs Liu’s in-laws got a ‘little sister’ (a concubine) for her husband who was filial and sisterly, and so she had to learn to be a good elder sister. She decided to make up to her in-laws and husband by performing service to society, and had done so for the past ten years.92 But resignation, coping, and solace from grief and mistreatment were not the only meanings that women derived from their participation in the Morality Society. The narratives also reveal various strategies whereby women were able to maneuver the goals of the Society to secure advantage for themselves and for other women. This was hardly easy, as many women must have experienced the pedagogy as a form of objectification.

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Counter-representations of the modern, Westernized woman were readily available to these women. Newspapers in Manchukuo, we have seen, debated the issue of women’s liberation, and until 1941 at least often carried positive images of liberated, Western and Westernized women. Indeed, it was the often unacknowledged irruption of elements of this discourse into their own that enabled some of their maneuvers. Yet it is also clear that they accepted the virtue of filiality and even obedience to patriarchs. Most of all, they appeared to derive their inspiration and strength from the spirit of devotion and self-sacrifice – from that space of authenticity sanctified by the pedagogy of the Society. How could they be true to their beliefs when they were surrounded by messages about their domination? The first, and perhaps most important, difference between the discourse of these redemptive societies and the historical, Confucian or patrilineal discourse on women was that the rhetoric of confining women to the home in these societies was balanced or countered by a valorization of public or social service.93 Not only did these societies have an ideal of public service, they were themselves part of the new public sphere. As such, women who participated in them as members, as audience, or as lecturers were ipso facto involved in activities outside the home, albeit through segregated organizations. Recall that even in the official articulations of society’s duty to create a nested hierarchy of moral obligation linking the individual to the state, the family was not directly linked to the state. The relationship was mediated by the need to fulfill a moral obligation to society. The realm of society or shehui as a positively evaluated sphere of human – male and female – interaction represented a significant, though not necessarily recognized, departure from earlier historical discourses containing women within the domestic sphere.94 Mrs Zhao was one who did recognize the significant difference: Those of you under the age of 40 have had the benefit of a modern education and may work outside of the home. Those of us over 40 are barely literate and we know little about affairs outside the home. Now this Society allows us to exchange knowledge. I can go to your home and you to mine; we are not restricted by being rich or poor. … From this it is clear that the future of women is bright. We can come and hear lectures every day; we can obtain morality. The young can be filial to the old and the old can be kind. I hope my sisters will strive to build the future.95

The realm of the social, however, was rife with ambiguity and a dangerous capacity to erode the virtues cultivated in domesticity. Even in Mrs Zhao’s comments, which reveal a deeply felt sense of liberation, moral development afforded by the emergence of the social was ultimately brought to bear to restore filiality. While many of the men acknowledged the importance of service to society, they believed that confining women (although not necessarily to the home) was the best possible way for society to develop. Just as


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the virtuous girls’ school was the way to regulate the behavior of girls who were exposed to society, so too, for some of these men, women’s participation in the Morality Society was itself an ideal way to control their activities outside the home. The director of the society, Mr Feng, had four wives – all of whom, he claimed, were happily involved with the Morality Society and regularly ketou (kowtow) to its teachers.96 However, this mode of containing women in the public sphere did not necessarily result in the kind of abject dependence that Mr Feng’s words might lead us to believe. Takizawa Toshihiro, who investigated social welfare organizations in Manchukuo, reported an episode from one of the virtuous schools that he visited in 1937 in Liaoyuan county. The school and its dormitories were basically well maintained. The school derived its income from a wool-weaving workshop and a grain store. It had separate lecture halls for women citizens (funü shimin), appointed with a picture of the emperor Pu Yi and an altar to Confucius. On one of the days he was there, a vigorous discussion on the subject of ‘the spirit of nation-building and women in the family’ (jianguo jingshen he jiating funü) followed a talk by a lecturer from Fengtian. Takizawa was impressed by the dedication of the students and teachers of the school to popular enlightenment, and the way they criticized the old-fashioned attitude of the lecturer. Takizawa recommended that rather than preach homilies to these children, the Society should emphasize the teaching of practical life skills. In this way, they would learn from the scienticization (kagakuka) of everyday life.97 The very involvement of girls and women in a public organization, however segregated, could transform domesticity and the self-image of the women. The positive evaluation of social or public service in modern discourse, together with the ambivalence of the leaders (contrast Feng’s behavior with Wang’s comment on religions restricting women), created opportunities for these women, which they seized and utilized to the fullest extent. A Mrs Bai decided to give up the life of the inner quarters because she realized that the world of women was a very grasping one, in which one could not be ethical. By giving public lectures, she could make a living that permitted her to support both her mother and mother-in-law. Thus she could be filial and moral without being dependent on anyone, either husband or children.98 A recently married woman described the foreordained nature of the daughter-in-law as like water: to serve all in the family with devotion – to be filial to her in-laws, help her husband attain a Buddhist nation, be kind to her children – and rid herself of vain desire. At the same time, women could follow the men and devote themselves to social good. Indeed, once one had satisfactorily served the in-laws, it was incumbent in the next phase to serve the world.99 Mrs Chen reveals the significance of public service and the independence that it can bring to women. She emphasizes the utility and value of women in the family and the importance of these qualities in purifying the world and resolving to do good for society. She begins her narrative with an

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account of how her father-in-law brought her into the household because the education she received from her mother would bring good values into their home. These were the qualities that permitted lishen, the ability to establish oneself. In earlier periods, lishen, to the extent that it referred to women, referred to feminine bodily comportment within the domestic sphere. In a booklet of moral instruction for women that circulated in the late imperial period, lishen is described as a


way of being tranquil (qing) and chaste (zhen). Tranquillity brings purity (jie) and chastity brings honor (rong). While walking, do not turn back your head; while speaking, do not expose your teeth; while sitting, do not move your knees; while standing, do not raise your voice. … When of necessity you have to go out, be sure to veil your face. … Only when you establish your body in such proper and upright ways can you be a person (lishen duanzheng fang ke weiren).100

The close connection between personhood and bodily comportment has not disappeared in the time of the Morality Society: recall the comment of the woman who learned the true meaning of reading only after applying it to her bodily conduct. But this is not how Mrs Chen uses lishen. Personhood for her is dependent on material independence; the best means of lishen is to set up a livelihood of one’s own (liye). Now that Manchukuo has entered the era of Datong or the Great Unity, Mrs Chen avers, women have plenty of opportunity to make a livelihood. Once they have set up a living, they can devote themselves to the task of purifying the world (huozhe neng sheshen shijie). In this way, because one would not be working for money or fame, one could rid oneself of greed. Was this not the best way to lishen?101 Several points in this personal narrative deserve attention. First, observe the ease with which the meaning of lishen in one context (home) is transferred to another (society), where it may be subversive of the original context. Crucial to this transfer (and subversiveness) is not simply the valorization of social service, but the corollary notion of financial autonomy. The notion of liye, often treated in these narratives as a subset of lishen, becomes one of the most important concerns of these women as they seek to establish a material base to enable their role as moral citizens of the Society and the world. Second, note the appropriation of the rhetoric of the Manchukuo state. Many women were purposeful in their use of state rhetoric, and tended to seize any rhetorical openings to advance the condition of women. Finally, there is the conflation of service in the outside world and moral purification of it. This suggests that participation in the social world is subordinated to ethical and religious goals. These goals occupy the space of authenticity and inner meaning for the individual woman, but it is a space framed by the new patriarchy of the middle class and the state. The interweaving of these three elements – appropriation of the rhetoric; carving out a space, role and basis for independent social action; and


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employment of this autonomy to achieve the moral and religious goals of the Society – is, adjusting for individual details, a recurring pattern in the women’s narratives. Note how grandmother Cai elides her unfiliality in an era when universal education has become an unquestioned value. At the age of 33, grandmother Cai confesses, she defied the wishes of the elders and went off to study. Now it is her responsibility to devote herself (jinxin) to the education of her children and grandchildren. She closes with the comment that she is a vegetarian, is deeply religious, and has tried to rid herself of vain desires. Here the value of women’s education in wider society, both in the modernist rhetoric of the Manchukuo state and in the vision of the Morality Society, allows her to justify an earlier act of unfilial behavior. She finesses filiality, however, with recourse to the superior values of universal education and devotion to spiritual virtues.102 The strategy in these ‘games of truth’ is to detach oneself from one kind of pedagogical value, but continue to derive meaning from the constitutive representation by emphasizing another of its qualities or values.103 Thus Mrs Li, like several others, uses filiality to trump unquestioned obedience to her husband. Ever since she heard how a leader of the Society cared for his own mother, Mrs Li determined to set up her own source of livelihood (liye) to care for her ailing mother. Since she had to go out of the home, her husband yelled at her and accused her of being unfaithful. She says that she had never loved any man other than her husband. But now her loving heart had set.104 Mrs Sun had to care for her sick father and student brother. Her husband had problems at work and could not provide for all of them. She had been inspired by the wise words of Wang Fengyi – ‘In devoting herself, the woman must not weary the husband; rather she should be able to help the husband obtain virtue’ – to set up an independent means of livelihood.105 The ideal of moral autonomy within lishen is sometimes interpreted in such a radical way that it subverts the very basis of the pedagogy: family values. Thus, one Ms Liu declares that her understanding of lishen includes the philosophy of single living (dushen zhuyi sixiang) – the merits of remaining unmarried.106 We also see a kind of feminist filiality overcoming patriarchy. A Mrs Liu recalls that her mother was ordered back to her natal home. She and her brother were not permitted to visit her. Later she and her brother devoted themselves to restoring the family, and she established a source of livelihood for her mother.107 This woman goes on to challenge the sages, who ask us to follow the three male figures (sancong) and learn from our husbands. We listen to our husbands, but they do not hear us. My husband eats meat and is not very virtuous, whereas I have only eaten meat once and I am a filial daughter-in-law. Should I not be the one from whom he should learn the Way? But he has been formed early and I am incapable of helping him. Anyway, I am not much concerned about my marriage.108

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Note, however, even in this last episode, the filial link to the mother, as much as enlightenment in the Way, appears to be the driving sentiment for Mrs Liu. Perhaps the episode that best reveals the inseparability of the search for autonomy and commitment to the moral values of the Society is narrated by the same Mrs Chen who urged women to take advantage of the job opportunities for them in Manchukuo.


I was once sent to Beijing to lecture, but my husband followed me and insisted that I return home. Why is it that men can bully women so? I asked the teacher (shanren) if I should return. He replied, ‘You may return. What do you have to fear? All you have to know is whether or not you have the will.’ I returned. In Tianjin I was asked whether I returned of my own will. I nearly wept. I had resolved to return because I remembered that I could not violate my parents’ will (ming). The next time I left, I went away for four years. And so I am what I am today. The important thing is to know your own will (zhi). It is how and why people make up their minds that is important, not the decision itself. I believe it is important to be filial. … When you have an independent income you are not only, as the teacher says, the iron master (tie caizhu), you become the golden master (jin caizhu).109

I want to dwell on this complex narrative not because of the way in which these women have grasped the importance of outside service and financial independence, or because of the continued importance of filiality. Rather I am struck that the source of strength and resolve for this woman derives precisely from the very ideology that constrains her in so many other ways. It is by knowing her mind and cultivating her resolve (lizhi) – the Way – that she is able to establish her independence from her husband despite the constraints. The segment in the records of the proceedings of the conference that is most restricting for women is the one titled zhizhi, to know the limits. The doctrine that is invoked most often as a constraint, and indeed as selfconstraint, is that of the three obediences, or sancong. When faced with such constraints, one as strong and gifted as Mrs Chen can still pick her way around them, but that is not necessarily true for many other women. Mrs Chen acknowledges the importance of the obediences but she does not dwell upon them at length. From our fathers, she says, we can know our nature, from our husbands our fate, and through our sons we can establish ourselves (lishen). She does not elaborate on what she means by lishen here, but moves immediately to the differences between the ways in which her parents were ‘good people’ and the way she can be a morally pure person. Her parents were good people of a village or county; she is a good citizen of the entire nation, and indeed the world.110 Once again she invokes the expanded community of moral service to elude constraints. But not all the women were as skillful as Mrs Chen. Mrs Zhao says that her greatest aspiration is to be a man, so much so that she sometimes forgets


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that she is a woman. But her nature is that of a woman, her mind is that of a woman, and her body is that of a woman. She needs to remind herself constantly about these constraints.111 Another woman cites the sages to acknowledge to herself that a woman must recognize her limits in her duty to observe the three obediences.112 Mrs Liu believes that, having a woman’s heart, she was not filial to her in-laws and did not obey her husband (congfu). Consequently, they brought a ‘sister’ into the household. Now she has tried to be a good wife and obeys her husband dutifully. Although they are poor, they are pure inside.113 Thus we are returned to the pedagogy of authenticity. The figure of woman as the essence of ‘tradition within modernity’ addresses most fundamentally the anxiety faced by individuals and regimes in societies driven by a conception of historical time as the constancy of flux. As the anchor of an eternal, civilizational essence – guarded during her movement out of the home – woman was expected to function as the figure of authenticity for both individuals and the regime. I have tried to examine the relevance of the regime of authenticity in the lives of these mostly ordinary women of the Morality Society, and have found it to be quite complex. On the one hand, as our concluding passages indicate, the ‘truth’ of the doctrine was a powerful source of the sense of the self and its mission. Even more, we have seen how the pedagogy did indeed shape the behavior of these women in ways that were intended. But a life is scarcely shaped by a pedagogy alone. Pedagogy is grasped in the environment of its performance, in the spaces and practices of everyday life. Both the Society and the regime conceived of a modern role for women in public spaces, but they also sought to contain and control them through segregated organizations and an ideology of domesticity. Even with this limited participation in the public world, women could garner sufficient moral and economic resources to conceive the Way ‘strategically’ and fashion their lives at some distance from the pedagogy.114 This is how they learned to live by the authentic and live in their time. For the regime in Manchukuo, as much as in China and Japan, the figure of woman as authentic – developed as part of its sovereignty claim – became a significant constituent of a symbolic regime of authenticity. As its custodian, the state possessed the ability to deploy it for purposes of both governmentality and short-term regime goals. In particular, it sought to use segregated women’s organizations to control and penetrate society. By extending the domestic into the public and turning the domestic-in-public back toward re-forming the family, it manipulated the changing interface between domestic and public spaces. The sign of civilizational authenticity and the lever for state manipulation converged in the virtue of self-sacrifice. The historical discourse of the self-sacrificing woman was inherited by modern patriarchies in all the modern states in East Asia, and represented a paradigmatic model of individual self-sacrifice for the nation. A similar pattern of political participation, in which state power sought to control the

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relationship between personal authenticity and sovereignty, linked nationbuilding, state penetration and citizenship in the three societies. As the work of Meng Yue and others shows, this pattern remained paradigmatic for the communist state in China during much of the Maoist period. According to Meng, in the literature of the PRC before 1980, the triumph of class struggle was secured through the figure of woman as desexed, non-material and pure. Ideally, both men and women gained their sense of the authentic communist self (the self that realizes the abiding, if latent, collectivism and selflessness of the propertyless) through the model of the self-denying, sacrificing, sexless woman. Meng writes:


On the one hand, the state’s political discourse translated itself through women into the private context of desire, love, marriage, divorce and familial relations, and on the other, it turned woman into an agent politicizing desire, love, and family relations by delimiting and repressing sexuality, self and all private emotions.115

Meng Yue’s analysis is not directly concerned with the problem of timeless authenticity, but we can see that not only did such a woman enshrine all that was pure and true in communist discourse, she also symbolized that unchanging core – the stillness of the true – whereby communism could recognize itself in the march of change. It thus appears that the Maoist regime shared with the evidently different prewar regimes in East Asia a historical, if subterranean, conception of women as lacking political agency specifically as women.116 In both Maoist China and non-communist East Asia, it was women’s passivity, their being spoken for, that represented the political meaning of their gender. I have deliberately stressed the common elements in the discourse of and policies toward gender, domesticity and the public realm in Japan, China and Manchukuo in order to show how shared nation-work belies the narratives of national distinctiveness that it produces. To be sure, there were several distinctive features regarding this cluster in Manchukuo. Perhaps most distinctive was the government’s propaganda whereby cross-ethnic marriages and adoptions were seen as the expression of an ideal of ethnic harmony – contradicted in practice by the considerable separation and hierarchy among ethnic communities, especially in relation to the Japanese.117 A more subtle expression of this duplicity was the phenomenon of the cross-ethnic actress Li Xianglan, or Ri Koran. Of Japanese parentage, but born and raised as Chinese in Manchuria and Beijing, Li acted as a Chinese in Japanese-produced films promoting themes of pan-Asian womanhood, family values and amity. Given her considerable popularity among Chinese audiences, who mostly did not know of her Japanese background, we are led to believe that national differences were probably not as salient as the common cultural and historical framework through which these films were viewed.118 Perhaps just as distinctive of the gender–family complex in Manchukuo was the wide-ranging


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role played by women of the redemptive societies, particularly the Morality Society and the Red Swastika Society. In neither China nor Japan were such originally independent societal groups entrusted with such extensive functions of governmentality and loyalty-building for the regime. It is thus entirely possible to see the women’s associations as collaborating with an unmitigated evil, the occupying enemy force. But such a view derives from a nationalist perspective, and few of these women saw themselves from this perspective at the time. Indeed, most important for them was the Way, knowledge and practice of which would lead to the salvation, not just of the nation, but of the world. The rhetoric of the ‘kingly way’ and ‘Great Unity’ promoted by the regime suited the worldview of the redemptive societies, and the Manchukuo government was the first in recent history to have created a legitimate space for them to function and flourish. They – the women in particular – responded with considerable enthusiasm to the opportunity to serve their cause in public; however, this may have also served the regime. Mrs Gu, with whom we began the chapter, tended in fact to see the Japanese as following the Daodehui, rather than the other way round. She saw little contradiction in serving different regimes as long as she could continue her mission. However we view the politics of such an alliance – as collaboration or partnership – it is undeniable that, as in China and Japan, the regime used these women for its purposes. At the same time, note that the women were also able to use the resources of the regime – ideological and institutional – to fashion their lives in a way meaningful to themselves and their ideals. The nationalist condemnation of such people poses a conundrum: can Chineseness be denied to those who seek their identity in their own cosmopolitan traditions?


Part III


China in Comparative Perspective


7

Between Sovereignty and Capitalism The Historical Experiences of Migrant Chinese


In this comparative part of this publication, Chapters 8 and 9 seek to tell the story of two vast empires trying to transmute into nation-states. The comparability between India and China is largely due to the convergent challenges instituted by the historical process of globalization, and by the divergent responses produced by the different historical structures. In this chapter, I compare the experience of Chinese laborers in the USA and the Dutch Indies. To be sure, the order of the comparison between this and the other two essays is quite different: in one, we have a dependent variable of a largely laboring population of a few millions; in the other two cases, I study elite self- and nation-formation within civilizational areas. Yet from their different angles, each comparison reflects how the variables of capitalism, nationalism and Enlightenment history interact with the particular historical locus to produce a shared but distinctive history. The present moment is one of high visibility of diasporic and migrant communities. They are often celebrated as cosmopolitan, in-between communities of self-starters and drivers of success of the countries from which they or their ancestors emigrated. Yet to this day, there are entire classes of immigrants who occupy a desperate niche in the economic and political system of nation-states that is a kind of purgatory. It is estimated that about 100,000 Chinese are smuggled out of China every year by Triads and other snakeheads under the most dangerous conditions that make human smuggling during the early twentieth century seem benevolent. The conditions of work in the sweatshops are numbing and unhealthy, and intermittent raids by the authorities make their lives full of terrifying suspense.1 I want to argue here that this class of migrant has played an essential role in capitalist societies, yet its fate has been different in different types of polity. Nation-states and nationalist polities, including democratic ones, sometimes presented more disadvantages for migrant communities than either the prenationalist or capitalist colonial states. Although I argue here that laboring Chinese migrants to the USA (before 1943) were worse off in many respects than those in Southeast Asia, I do not want to suggest that nationalist polities are generally worse than colonial ones; nor did the majority of European voluntary migrants to the USA occupy the niche that the Chinese did.

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Rather, I want to show that the relational dynamics between nationalism and capitalism produces a class of laboring immigrants that occupies what Agamben has called the ‘state of exception’. Colonial states, on the other hand, are not organized around a discourse of rights or the lack of them. Exploitation and domination are typically organized through a hierarchical order of races and religious and other groups. By comparing the salient features of the experiences of Chinese labor in the USA and the Peranakan community in the Dutch Indies, we can try to grasp the differential relationships that capitalism has forged with nationalism on the one hand and colonialism on the other.

The context of Chinese migration


As is well known, internal and external migration in China from the early modern – roughly the Qing (1644–1911) – period has been a continuous process. The overseas migrations from the late Ming, but especially from the post-Opium War period, to Southeast Asia and elsewhere has to be seen in the context of migration to Sichuan, the northwest and particularly Manchuria, which had been officially closed to Han Chinese until the late nineteenth century. Indeed, while overseas emigrants from China between 1850 and 1925 were about 35,000 per year, this was a small fraction of the migration to Manchuria around the same period, which amounted to 500,000 per annum.2 This kind of movement of people was a product not only of land shortage as a result of population growth in China during this period, but of other factors as well, including wars, trade dislocations, and massive rebellions such as the Taiping uprising in the south during the later half of the nineteenth century. Just as important for the late nineteenth-century overseas emigration was the demand for this labor generated by the spread of global capitalism and the infrastructure of capitalist development through colonial and nation-states. The plantation economies of the Dutch, the British and the French in Southeast Asia and the Americas, and the railroads and mines in the USA and other parts of the Americas, were among the most important destinations for Chinese emigrants. The Europeans exerted considerable pressure on the Chinese government to release labor for migration throughout the nineteenth century, and facilitated the development of networks, both foreign and Chinese, to recruit this labor. It is important to differentiate the emigrants during this period, because their different statuses influenced the experience they were to have in their host societies. Our general image of overseas Chinese traces them to the Pearl River Delta and particularly the siyi counties. These migrants developed patterns of migration based on familial and native place networks. Many moved to developed capitalist societies such as the USA (especially Hawaii) and Australia. Before 1875, migrants to the USA, Hawaii, Australia and Canada represented about one-third of emigrants. After 1876, this group

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became a very small part of legal migration representing only about 3–4 per cent of the total emigrants.3 The second group is the communities and networks of the pre- and earlynineteenth-century emigrants that were composed mainly of Chinese merchants in Southeast Asia who took part in the intra-Asian maritime trade that had flourished – albeit with ebbs and flows – since at least the Song period. These included the (Chinese) mestizo community in the Philippines, which constituted about 5 per cent of the population of the islands in 1877, the Chinese Peranakans in the Indies, and the Babas who constituted about 10 per cent of the population in the Malacca Straits in the 1890s.4 Historically, there were powerful Chinese merchant communities in Thailand and Cambodia who were, however, more integrated with the local populace than in the Southeast Asian colonial societies. In this second group, the Babas and the Chinese of Thailand and Indochina were particularly important to the way in which the later overseas communities developed, but it is important to keep in mind the distinct nature of these historical communities. The bulk of emigrants from China after the 1870s – the third group – went not to the developed economies, but to other colonized societies and plantation economies, and traced their homelands to places all over China. We have little information on the importance of family and native place networks for them, but they were doubtless important. This is the group that went largely as coolies or indentured labor on the credit-ticket system. And it was they who suffered most under exploitative recruitment systems, harsh conditions of transportation, work and life, and isolation and racist prejudice in all the places they went. Yet by the time of World War II, this group began to have very different experiences depending on the parts of the world to which they migrated. They were much more successful in Southeast Asia than in the Americas. In part, this had to do with the pre-existing structure of the merchant community (or group two) in the region; but equally, it had to do with the political system of their host societies. The arrival of Chinese in states where nationalism was developed presented a different order of difficulties for them than in societies with colonial or prenational polities. The development of indigenous nationalism in Southeast Asian societies – that became institutionalized after independence – occurred a little after the rise of nationalism in China and the emergence of nationalism among Chinese communities in Southeast Asia. This indigenous nationalism presented difficulties that make them more comparable with the earlier situation in the Americas.

Migrants between capitalism and nationalism In the late nineteenth century, the world became unified through colonial capitalism. These colonial states were also nation-states, but the world they colonized was composed of non-nation-states, a factor that served as justification for their colonization. By the beginning of the twentieth century, it

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seemed clear to most of the colonized that the only means to exercise agency and survive in a competitive capitalist world was to become a nation-state. Ironically, to become a nation-state a society had to give up much of its historical culture, and create institutions and culture that were structurally akin to other nation-states. To do so was not only the means of competing for survival or advantage in the world, but the only means of being recognized as a player in the system. In other words, the nation-state, like capitalism, became equally, albeit differently, an agency of globalization. This was revealed most dramatically in the case of the late Qing government and the overseas Chinese. The Qing state had forbidden, at the pain of death, those who had left the empire to return to it. The Chinese overseas were not amenable to the structures – particularly the tribute system – designed to regulate the flows of people. As the Qing, in its last years, turned to a nationalist model of sovereignty, ironically it reversed the policy of prohibition on travel; it sought instead to recognize the importance of the wealth and worldly knowledge of the overseas community for purposes of state- and nation-building. They actively courted the community, granting honors and ceremonial privileges for their contributions to the state and investments in their country. Even more, it encouraged them to furnish the necessary global knowledge and skills (through military espionage, if necessary) in order to build China as a modern nation-state. The transformation was completed with the Qing passage of the Nationality Law of 1909 which, following the principle of jus sanguinis, defined as a Chinese citizen anyone who was born of a Chinese father (or mother, if the father could not be identified) regardless of territory, and thereby included the bulk of Chinese living abroad.5 The story of the emergence of the nation-state system as a fully global order by the end of World War II is well known. As discussed in Chapter 1, the spread of the nation-state system was accompanied by the intensified circulation of practices, conceptions and norms of what has been called ‘world culture’ in the formation of nations. We have referred to the overhauling of older societies to conform to standardized conceptions and norms for most aspects of society, from the concept of the ‘child’, to statistical norms of poverty and growth, to legal conceptions of civilization, and so on.6 This is the phase of ‘cognitive globalization’. The dissemination of these practices and norms was frequently undertaken by non-state agencies such as professional associations or advocacy groups, but nation-states, old and new, and even would-be nations among the colonies (such as India and Egypt), often accepted these concepts and standards in order to be practically accepted and recognized in the system of nation-states. In a similar way, the conception of a national history or civilization in the twentieth century also conformed to a globally disseminated norm or desideratum that nations have unique cultures and civilizations as a precondition of recognition and belonging in the system. But while it is practically an agent of globalization, the nation-state is also constituted as the authority – indeed the only legitimate authority – to


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contain the effects of global competitiveness, regulate the flow of global resources, and reshape culture and identity to attain both global and national goals. In Chapter 1, I discussed this dual and sometimes contradictory function of nationalism as enabled by a systemic misrecognition. While world culture has been the source of many circulatory practices transforming societies into nations, and interstate recognition has been a crucial source of national sovereignty, the advent of nationalism as a world ideology, on the other hand, tended to misrecognize sovereignty as lying solely within the people and culture of the nation. In this more immanent conception, sovereignty derives from the preconstituted communal body of the nation. During much of the twentieth century, world culture as a source of sovereignty was frequently obscured – or recognized only tacitly – by nationalists. It is largely as a response to the competitive and expansionist nature of capitalist globalization that the state is frequently compelled to fall back on narratives of immanence and authenticity to shore up its autonomy and authority. Cultural traditions, institutions and even their human embodiments – including physical types during periods of overt racism – are identified as the markers and symbols of the authenticity of the nation. These symbols and idealized embodiments constitute the ‘regime of authenticity’ that authorizes and guards the nation’s sovereignty. Those who can represent themselves as the custodians of the authenticity of the nation’s culture or civilization are authorized not only to demand loyalty and sacrifice from those within, but also to regulate and declare inviolability in relation to outside powers and outsiders in general – to the inauthentic. Most nations also sustain a population of ‘internal others’, an entire class of people who are actually or potentially classified as threats to the authenticity of the nation. This tension between nationalism and capitalist globalization is objectified most acutely in the immigrant. As mobile labor, the immigrant ideally responds to the basic demand of capital to be deployed wherever the latter can make its greatest profits. At the same time, in societies where nationalism is highly developed, the regime of authenticity restricts or deprives the bare human rights of the migrant, particularly where the migrant cannot be subsumed within the pale of authenticity. With no communal, national or state guarantees, the migrant is among the most vulnerable figures in the world of nation-states. She occupies what Giorgio Agamben has called the state of exception. According to Agamben, the sovereign state brings ‘bare life’ (zoe) from the private or household sphere into the public or the sphere of the polis (life as bios). In the modern state, life as such becomes the object of the rationalities of state power, a conception reminiscent of Foucault’s governmentality. Yet Agamben focuses on the ‘exception’ as constitutive of the sovereign order. Drawing from Carl Schmitt, he suggests that the sovereign is sovereign by virtue of his power to suspend the juridical order by proclaiming a state of exception.

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But the people or beings in the state of exception are not entirely excluded from the juridical order because the exception ‘maintains itself in relation to the rule in the form of the rule’s suspension. … Confronted with an excess, the system interiorizes what exceeds it through an interdiction and in this way “designates itself as exterior to itself”’. The sovereign brings the excepted bare life into its jurisdiction by excluding its rights (bios or qualified life). In the state of exception, bare life (zoe) comes to occupy a novel relationship of vulnerability to state power without the rights possessed by citizens.7 Agamben has powerfully illustrated the conditions of exception by examining the life of refugees or internees in Nazi camps or in Guantanamo Bay. He also argues that the exception is becoming more and more a part of the norm itself, the condition of a ‘legally sanctioned absence of law’.8 At the same time, however, Agamben’s work tends to be based on abstract logic, and the exception is insufficiently grasped in its historical circumstances. As critics have pointed out, most states of exception in democratic societies have taken place in response to labor strikes. In this chapter, the laboring migrant exemplifies the condition of exception, but in specific historical circumstances. Unlike slaves or refugees, these migrants express a degree of voluntary mobility, although the 1877 California Senate Memorial to the US Congress preferred to call them ‘voluntary slaves’. If capitalism creates the conditions for migration, it is the regime of authenticity that specifies how or why it should be the particular migrant who becomes the object of exception. Their status as exception has to be grasped within this political economic configuration as the ‘internal other’, or the ‘indispensable other’, or what Mae Ngai has called ‘impossible subjects’.9 While juridically they occupy the status of the exception in the sovereign order, the historical configuration generates a negotiated and messy condition of exception, which permits these rights-less laboring migrants to manipulate the system to an extent, albeit often under fugitive circumstances.

Chinese labor in the USA

The Chinese had been recruited to work in the USA from the midnineteenth century, and the traffic was legalized by the Burlingame Treaty of 1868. As is well known, large numbers of laborers worked on the transcontinental railroads, mines and farms of the west coast and elsewhere. By the 1870s, however, violent anti-Chinese protests developed in California and led to a series of exclusion laws that severely curtailed the rights of Chinese laborers in the USA. Among the harshest of these laws was the 1892 Geary Act which, among other things, obliged Chinese to obtain certificates of residence and subjected them to imprisonment with hard labor and deportation if they did not register. This act was challenged by the Six Companies, the Chinese representative and contracting agency, but the Supreme Court rejected the appeal. In its verdict, the Supreme Court stated:


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It is an accepted maxim of international law that every sovereign nation has the power, as inherent in sovereignty, and essential to self-preservation, to forbid the entrance of foreigners within its domains, or to admit them only in such cases and upon such conditions as it may seem fit to prescribe … (A)s they (Chinese laborers) have taken no steps to become citizens, and are incapable of becoming such under the naturalization laws, they remain subject to the power of congress to order their expulsion or deportation whenever, in its judgment, such a measure is necessary or expedient for the public interest. [emphasis added]10


This declaration reveals the subjection of the Chinese laboring migrant to the state of exception as starkly as any other. Not merely are they excluded from citizenship, they are incapable of becoming citizens; yet they remain subject to the power of congress to deport or keep them under conditions it judges expedient; that is, they remain ‘in relation to the rule in the form of the rule’s suspension’. The subjection of the migrant to the power of exception was designed to maintain the precarious equilibrium between nationalism and the capitalism in the nation-state. In the1850s, there was apparently widespread support for the recruitment and import of Chinese labor because of labor shortages for certain types of work;11 but soon after, large segments of the population in California began to oppose it. The landmark event was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which prevented Chinese from becoming citizens, a law that remained until 1943. Chinese immigrants were also prevented from reentry unless they had been citizens before 1882, or owned property. Legislation particularly discouraged the immigration of Chinese women, who were said to be prostitutes, and they remained few in numbers. Opposition to Chinese labor developed particularly among organized labor, but also among various Anglo-Saxon groups, racist groups such as the Order of Caucasians in the Monterey Bay area, and other populist forces from the south and rural constituencies through the country. Support for recruitment by this time came to reside in capitalist groups such as railroad developers, mine-owners and large landowners, for whom Chinese labor represented a steady supply of cheap and dependable labor. Other groups, such as the Catholic Church and urban political machines, also sought to oppose the restrictions.12 The reasons for the opposition were also economic: workers believed that they could not survive under conditions of ‘(s)ervile labor which to them is their natural and inevitable lot’.13 But economics was inseparable from ideologies of race, religion and class. It is these ideologies that incapacitated them from becoming citizens. Testimonials presented to Congress alleged that the Chinese were incapable of adapting to American institutions. ‘They never rise above the condition in their native land and by the inexorable decrees of caste, never can rise … Neither is there any possibility that in the

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future education, religion or the other influences of our civilization can affect any change in the condition of things.’14 There was a significant group of converts to Catholicism, but even here the testimonials claimed that it was a ‘professed’ adherence and merely brought the church closer to paganism. In every respect, then, Chinese labor migrants remained outside the pale of national and civilizational authenticity. The only partial exception to the state of exception was the matter of class. A testimonial suggests ‘It may be polite and wise to admit the immigration of a certain class of these people in limited numbers.’15 Merchants and railroad developers who employed labor made certain arguments that resonate with debates even today. Much of their exploitation, some claimed, derived from the recruiters themselves, notably those associated with the Six Companies, who duped these laborers and kept them in continued debt bondage by fostering gambling and opium habits among them. We know that Western recruiting and shipping houses in Hong Kong, and the US Consul there, also levied high fees that the recruiters passed on to the laborers.16 Other supporters, such as Charles Crocker, a railroad builder, argued that the employment of Chinese labor enabled white laborers to get more and better jobs. While the Chinese performed the jobs involving hard labor and drudgery, the white men become employed in large numbers as mechanics and foremen. He noted that if 75,000 Chinese were driven away, 75,000 white men would have to perform drudge labor from their elevated level of work today.17 Frederic Bee, counsel for the Six Companies at the Senate hearings of 1877, described their plight. Laws were passed in California to tax those occupations and activities in which only the Chinese engaged, or that were enforced only upon the Chinese. Chinese immigrants had to pay a special Foreign Miners’ tax that was imposed on no other foreigners. Local Californian laws prohibited Chinese immigrants from testifying against whites in California courts, carrying poles on sidewalks, wearing queues or exhuming the bones of their dead. When they were permitted to ship the bones home, they were taxed yet again. Bee reported, ‘I have seen them stoned from the time they passed out of the ship, rocks thrown at them, until they reached Kearney Street. I have seen them leaning over the sides of the wagons with their scalps cut open. I have seen them stoned when going afoot from the steamships. No arrests were made, no police interfered … They do not seem to have extended to them the protection of the law in any particular.’18 To be sure, the understanding of the non-citizen as less than human was not necessarily axiomatic for citizens of the time. The dissenting opinion of Mr Justice Brewer during the verdict of 1892 reminded his fellow citizens that the US Constitution did not permit expulsion on the basis of race. According to the Burlingame Treaty, Chinese laborers were to receive rights and privileges accorded to all citizens and subjects of the most-favored nations.19 The reality, however, did not begin to change until 1943 when,


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during World War II, the Chinese government became allies and Chinese were permitted to become citizens. Occupying the space of exception did not of itself discourage continued immigration into the USA. Nor did it deny agency to the migrants. The Pearl River Delta Chinese demonstrated extraordinary ingenuity in using the situation to their best advantage. Through the use of fake papers, coaching books and aliases, Chinese laborers from the Pearl River Delta continued to enter the USA as the infamous ‘paper sons’. Men in possession of paperslots for sons of immigrants from before 1882 could enter the country legally. These were often transferred or sold to others from the native place, and it is estimated that 90 per cent of those who entered after the Act did so on fake papers. In 1901, a federal judge commented that if ‘the story told in the courts were true, every Chinese woman who was in the United States twenty five years ago must have had at least five hundred children’.20 These young men were lured by the often illusory pot of gold to be made in the USA, and the even more illusory hope of returning rich and comfortable to their community in the Delta. Most did not make the pot, and many (perhaps as many as two-thirds) hardly made it back.21 Lured by dreams in a capitalist society, most made meager earnings and moved between low-end jobs in laundries, restaurant work and domestic service. Unable to bring wives, they were forced to live in bachelor communities and were tempted into dead-end vices such as opium-smoking, prostitution and gambling. They lived shadowy lives, always under the legal radar, giving different names to the police, white society, their networks of passage, and their real families to avoid identification.22 Many were forced not only to leave behind their families, but also to break away from their social networks of passage because the immigration authorities were extremely suspicious of these networks. As Adam McKeown has put it, ‘It was a betwixtand-between period of invisibility, unfamiliarity, and the suspension of normal relationships and responsibilities. The migrants were left only to ponder the fabrication of their new fictional families.’23 Such, then, were the conditions of agency in the state of exception. Cut off from home and community, and not allowed to integrate into the host society, the identity of this laboring group always hovered beneath the radar of nation-states. Even when they dreamed of home and its comforts, it was the native-place and not the nation that remained the focus. Madeline Hsu has shown how the main tie to the home was the native-place paper or journal, the Taishan Qiaokan, the Siyi Zazhi or the Huang Clan Monthly, among many other immigrant papers. Although these papers sometimes solicited contributions from their expatriates for local schools or charities, up to the war with Japan in the 1930s they ‘remained more closely akin to a village newspaper, containing no vision of a reinvigorated Taishan but full of news and gossip about local events of interest to Taishanese across the globe’.24 Suspended from the laws of nation-states, the migrant laborers became fugitives from modern regimes of identity.

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Peranakans in the Indies


In this section, I want to show that Western colonial polities in Southeast Asia had different consequences for the immigrant population, in significant part because host societies were not nation-states. Although here, too, Chinese were segregated and used by the colonial rulers, the political and social process had different implications for their status and identity in these societies than in the USA. Once nationalism became an important force both in Southeast Asian states and among the Chinese, they again became extremely vulnerable to arguments of national authenticity and the state of exception. Recall the three groups of Chinese identified earlier, particularly the mestizo or Peranakans and the later Chinese immigrants in Southeast Asia. In the twentieth century, the tendency among Southeast Asian Chinese – and the goal of Chinese nationalists – was to integrate the different groups and subgroups within them. The coolie labor that arrived from China by utilizing the credit-ticket system suffered atrocious conditions of work that have been well documented. But what is notable is that large numbers of them were able to pay off their debt-bondage and work their way up the ladder of social mobility in these colonial societies. Quite apart from the legendary qualities of hard work and thrift of Chinese workers, an important condition enabling mobility lay in the presence of extended communities of different Chinese groups who could absorb these workers, often through family, marriage and native-place connections.25 This was perhaps the most significant difference for Chinese workers in the USA and colonial Southeast Asia. Unlike the migrants in the USA, many Chinese were able to flourish economically, gain opportunities, and even further their rights. Under the different circumstances in Southeast Asia, they were able to play an active role in the creation of a public sphere, a critical media, and pressure groups to work on the colonial governments. But if this process created some form of national– ethnic integration, however fragile, it became inserted into a dynamic of nationalism in the region. Later, this very transformation of the colonial space into a national space would turn the Chinese into the exception. In order to explore the historical experience and changing identity of Chinese overseas during this period of transition from colony to nation-state, I examine the case of the Indies Peranakans who, for a host of historical reasons, remained distinctive. The Peranakans derived from the pre- and early-nineteenth-century community of immigrant traders who were active in Southeast Asian kingdoms and sultanates, often as notable merchantofficials. Later in the various colonies, they became intermediaries between the indigenous people and the colonialists, and still later, between the colonialists and the later Chinese immigrants known as sinkeh or totok. G. William Skinner has presented the most coherent analysis of this community which he calls ‘creolized Chinese societies’. These communities created a ‘third culture’, different from both historical Chinese and host societies, by


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melding Chinese and indigenous elements into an everyday language and culture. While Peranakan men often married local women, they married their women either to Chinese from the mainland or to mestizo sons. Unlike in mainland Southeast Asian kingdoms of Thailand or Cambodia, where Chinese frequently indigenized after a few generations, the colonial administration in the Philippines, the Dutch Indies and British Malaya established rigid laws of racial and/or religious hierarchies, which separated the Creole communities from the local inhabitants and Europeans and strongly discouraged assimilation. Further, they were crucial to the colonial regimes’ strategies of accumulation. In the mines and plantation economies oriented to global markets, and in revenue farming projects, the Peranakans were trusted and favored middlemen, even while they also often had to take the blame for the ills of the colonial system by serving as its most proximate instrument of exploitation.26 In all three cases, however, the wider Chinese diaspora not only survived but flourished, both despite and because of the colonial structure. This structure had advantages and disadvantages that were considerably different from the US system. Most fundamentally, perhaps, the colonial system was premised upon a system of ethnic, cultural and racial difference, in which Chinese occupied a status in an ordered system of otherness. US national society, on the other hand, excluded most Chinese as rights-holders, but utilized their labor at will. In the former case, the Chinese had the ability to mobilize and claim rights, as did Indonesians and Malays, within an autocratic political structure, whereas in the USA, political participation in a democratic national system by the ‘excepted’ depended on the whim of sovereign power (as during the wartime alliance with China). Developments in the twentieth century affected the three creolized communities differently. Large-scale arrivals of new Chinese from the mainland, and the fitful transformation of China itself into a nation-state, were perhaps the most important of these developments. In the Philippines, the mestizos became absorbed among the local elites in the struggle against the Spanish, and the new immigrants dominated the Chinese community. In British Malaya, the Baba Peranakans gradually became re-Sincized by intermarriage with the new Chinese or sinkeh. Only in Indonesia did the creolized Peranakan community survive, although their numbers today do not exceed 3 per cent of the population. They spoke bazaar Malay, the lingua franca of urban Indies, and Peranakans wrote their literature in this market Malay as opposed to the Chinese written by totoks and the court Malay favored by the Indonesian elites.27 In 1920, fewer than a third of all Chinese in Indonesia used Chinese as their main language or everyday speech. Even in the 1930s, about 80 per cent were born in Indonesia, and 80 per cent of those had a father born in Indonesia.28 The history of this ‘survival’ has been a complex and painful one for many Peranakans, who have felt themselves buffeted by three forces: colonial western powers, the indigenous population, and the new Chinese presence.

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The survival of Peranakan culture and identity has to do with the history of the Dutch Indies in the first half, even the first decade, of the twentieth century. The early Chinese revolutionary nationalist Hu Hanmin noted that in 1908, when he came to organize the Chinese in Indonesia and raise money for the revolution, except for the queue, which to the revolutionary Hu was probably a mark of Manchu overlordship, the Chinese overseas had few Chinese traits in their thinking and language. They even found it strange to be asked their Chinese name and, according to Kwee Tek Hoay, the very name Zhonghua was strange to them because they called their ancestral land by the Western and pejorative name Tjina.29 Denys Lombard and Claudine Salmon have shown that historically there was a strong mixing of Chinese and local Muslim communities, both at the elite and popular levels, for hundreds of years. Although Dutch colonial policies segregating the communities tended to stabilize the Creole culture discussed by Skinner, Lombard and Salmon detect a distinct movement towards integration with Indonesian culture, particularly in response to the dakwah or Muslim proselytizing movements right up to World War II.30 Compared, however, with the impact of the Chinese demographic and politico-cultural wave that hit the shores of the Indies by the late nineteenth century, the Islamicizing trend remained minor. But, as I shall try to show, it was subtle and pervasive. Hu Hanmin may have been right about the general Peranakan population being relatively oblivious to the Chinese mainland, but there were significant efforts to create a new Chinese identity among them since at least the formation of the Tiong Hoa Hwe Koan (THHK) in 1900, although some would date it still earlier. As Peranakan leaders came into contact with intellectuals from China, Singapore and elsewhere, they were inspired to create a pan-Chinese movement to advance their cause. Because of both actual connections and the synchronous rise of Asian national movements, the national movements developed almost simultaneously in China and Southeast Asia and contributed to each other in ways that are still not fully understood. The most successful Chinese nationalists in Southeast Asia during the first decade of the century were the reformists led by Kang Youwei. After the failure of the 1898 Reform movement, Kang created the Baohuanghui (Protect the Emperor Society) and a Confucian religion movement that resonated with the Peranakan elites. Kwee Tek Hoay (1886–1952) was a leading Peranakan writer, dramatist and community leader. He published a history of the modern Chinese movement in Indonesia in the late 1930s to record the achievements of the ‘awakened’ Peranakan leaders ‘to create a religion or a moral system that was pure for use as a guide and a source of improvement in their social lives’. Kwee identifies this movement with the establishment of the THHK in 1900, the goals of which were to propagate the Confucian religion, support Chinese education and reform the customs of the Chinese.31 Education and reforms were clearly important priorities for the THHK, but Kwee is equally clear about the centrality of religion. Indeed, there is a


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tension between religious and reform goals, and the THHK (or rather, Kwee) determines to resolve the tension by reiterating that reforms must be undertaken ‘insofar as possible in keeping with those principles of the prophet Confucius so necessary to civilized conduct’ [emphasis added].32 Confucianism represented a nationalist ideology for the THHK. It must sanction reform and also create an authentic foundation for Chinese identity; but if reform and change erode the authentic, they threaten identity. This is a classic aporia of nationalist ideology, and among the Peranakans it is overlain with layers of historical meaning. First, reform. Educational opportunity was a key demand of the Peranakan community as the best means to improve their situation. Denied quality Dutch education, the THHK launched Chinese schools to improve their educational opportunities. This was initially quite successful, and had the effect of pressuring the Dutch to introduce Dutch education for Chinese as early as 1905. Ironically, if not entirely unpredictably, this had the further effect of reducing enrollments in THHK Chinese schools, and the educational enterprise of the THHK was widely regarded as a failure. But since it was designed to pressure the Dutch, its failure was also its success. At the same time, it reinforced the Dutch or non-Chinese orientation of the Peranakans.33/34 Reform of customs was a huge concern of the THHK. The listing and reforms of ‘superstitious and burdensome customs’, especially in the area of funerals and marriages, goes on for a third of the book. This was not just a modernizing project, but an ethnic one as well. Reform of customs enabled the THHK to make their community both modern or Western and Chinese. Customs and rituals were perceived to make the Chinese Chinese, and the leaders now saw the centuries of mixing with indigenous cultures (as well as popular Chinese elements such as divination and use of joss sticks) as so many impure accretions that had eroded true Chinese civilization. Armed with translations of the Lunyu and the Xiaojing in Malay, they proceeded to declare eight out of 24 customs unsanctioned or condemned by Confucius and Mencius. The most proximate targets of the THHK reformers were the ‘conservative’ or older Peranakan political educational structure known as the gongguan that had been supported by the Dutch administration; the other target was the womenfolk of the Peranakan community who, hailing from local cultures – or having local ancestors – and being uneducated, were held to be responsible for superstitions and accretions. While Kwee felt only pride in which the THHK trounced the gongguan through a combination of political influence and chicanery, he admits defeat of many of the reforms as a result of the influence of the women and the ability of the elders to portray the progressives as ‘unfilial’. It is also clear from his descriptions that many of the reforms, especially of popular festivals, involved considerable spending cuts and rationalizing discipline that were likely to have been generally unpopular. For instance, the THHK provided an alternative marriage ceremony, which was similar to a civil ceremony. Kwee admits that it did not have many takers, and only about six ceremonies were performed over many

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years. It appears true, as he claims, that many of the marriage customs reforms penetrated the community anyway, but it is not clear that they were seen as redounding to Confucian or even Chinese ideas.35 The re-sinicization, or perhaps just sinicization, of Peranakan society thus encountered various countervailing forces. But perhaps most interesting of all was the very effort to Confucianize the community. As we have noted, the attempt to make Confucianism into a religion was taking place in China at the same time under the leadership of Kang Youwei. This is a complex movement, which we cannot enter into in the present chapter, but suffice to say that it developed in response to Christian notions of ‘modern religion’ as part of the perceived desideratum of a modern nation-state. Kwee’s history shows clearly the impact of Christian missionary activities and conceptions among the early leaders of the THHK; there were also many debates in its journals about the spiritual virtues of Christianity versus Confucianism. Yet perhaps the most striking dimension of the THHK conception of Confucius was its characterization of him repeatedly as the ‘prophet’ (the translator informs us that Peranakan intellectuals reserved the term nabi, or the prophets of the Koran, exclusively for Confucius). Moreover, if the Christian faith emphasized monotheism, as did the reformers, the THHK also insisted on an iconoclasm that the Confucian religionists in China could not quite understand.36 After his exile from China, Kang Youwei visited the Chinese community in Batavia around 1900. He was enormously popular, and the halls of THHK were thronged at his lectures. During the visit, Kang was approached to resolve a dispute among THHK members about whether the THHK hall and school should admit portraits at the altars of Confucius and Zhuxi. Kang had no objection at all to the idea, and rebuked those opposed to the images. Pointing his finger at them, he said, ‘You are like the historical figure that prohibited people from worshipping Confucius because it cost too much. As a result, people who felt spiritually deprived prayed at all sorts of temples.’ According to Kwee, the objectors later persuaded Kang that an altar in the THHK building would make it difficult to prevent people from coming to pray for favors, wealth and so on. It would become just another temple in Batavia.37 It is not hard to see that the iconoclasm of this rationalizing Confucian religion emerged from its deep-rooted ties with Islam. In this the Confucian movement was responding much more to its particular environment, even if in their perception it was distancing itself from it. The movement did not seem to make much headway, and we soon see Kwee himself counter Christianitization and Islamization by propagating the more popular ‘three-in-one religions’ (Sam Kauw Hwee or sanjiaoheyi, which advocated the shared truths of Daoism, Buddhism and Confucianism) in the mid-1930s as providing a more broadly based Chinese religious identity for his community. Although the syncretic Sam Kauw Hwee was closer to the existing culture of the people, and outgrew the Confucian Association in popularity by the 1950s, it was still an effort to formalize, systematize and rationalize this


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religious culture into a respectable pillar of identity that could withstand the challenge of Christian and Islamic modernism as well as the materialism of the West.38 Despite the plentitude of gods and practices, the aim of Sanjiao was to show that there was a single goal and a single god beyond all these manifestations. This was none other than Tian or heaven which is equivalent to Allah and Jesus. In this way, the Peranakan leadership could sustain both the ethnic and scientific positions. The religious iconoclasm, deism, and the turn towards notions of interior faith and self-reliance marked another aspect of Kwee’s identity that we see more clearly in a different context. By the 1920s, control of THHK was increasingly slipping out of the hands of the Peranakans and into those of the totoks, who were fundamentally China-oriented. Most Peranakans sought to make their lives in Indonesia.39 In 1928, after the establishment of KMT power under Chiang Kai-shek, Kwee wrote a sharp essay denouncing the nationalist clamor urging Chinese to return to China and fully embrace the national project in the motherland. After outlining the hardships that returning Chinese, and particularly Peranakans who did not read Chinese, had experienced, he pressed for self-reliance. He argued that the Chinese overseas could best help China by going out into the world and becoming successful. The territory of China had no mystique for him. ‘If his heart remains Chinese his thoughts and sympathies will remain with the fatherland. Remember, a Peranakan Chinese of Trinidad who cannot read Chinese like Eugene Chen is worth more than a million indigenous inhabitants of China of the caliber of a Chang Tso Lin.’40 He reinforces his case for an interior – or non-territorial – sense of Chineseness by comparing it with religion. Many people, he says, believe that salvation or benefit will come from devotion to Buddha, Christ or Mohammed, or by building and repairing temples to Toapekung (Dabo gong), the local Chinese name for deities. ‘In truth the salvation or damnation of a man depends upon his own deeds … The gods only point the way. This is because the destiny of every man is in his own hands … The blessing of eternal salvation can only be gained by striving for it within oneself.’ Similarly, Kwee urges, the Chinese in Indonesia ought to look within themselves, depend on their own abilities, improve their position in this country, and accommodate themselves ‘in a group of various races’. In the end, his nationalism becomes modeled upon the principle of religious interiorization. Just as the advent of secularism demanded the interiorization of faith and devotion, so too did a minority seek to prepare itself for a nationalist society by delineating the inner self that could adapt in another’s nation.41

Conclusion By the late nineteenth century, the opportunities of capitalism in both colonial societies and nation-states attracted large numbers of immigrants. But if we focus on Chinese emigrants in particular, their different experiences in the

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two types of society become abundantly clear. Nationalist polities tend to operate within a binary framework of rightful citizens and outsiders. Yet, as Agamben demonstrates, sovereignty appears in the authority to create the exception who is beholden to state and national power, but bereft of the right to security of life and family. Colonial societies tend to operate within hierarchical orders that are frequently more brutal and racist, but also tend to devolve authority to self-governing communities. The segregated communal societies, while typically hierarchical within, are formed of networks, supports and alliances that provide for safety nets or channels of upward mobility. This appears to be true widely for the Chinese overseas in Southeast Asia, where elite structures were relatively open to later, poorer migrants through kinship, native place and marital alliances. Even though they lived in colonial societies, the relatively modern, urban institutions necessitated by capitalist enterprises enabled the Chinese in British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies to organize themselves through the media and associational politics. In the global age of nationalist identity politics, this scarcely developed in a colonial vacuum, but against the background of rising nationalism among Malays and Indonesians as well as the awakening of China. The locally based associational politics of many Chinese overseas became entangled in the repellent dynamics of exclusivist nationalism. We briefly traced the evolution of the Indies Peranakans from their role as creolized middlemen to their emergence as a Chinese community distinct from indigenous as well as other Chinese groups. While their identity was shaped by their responses to opportunities provided by the colonial state as well as the surrounding Islamic communities, it is notable that they and other Chinese communities could shape their identity and their role to a considerable degree in colonial society. Meanwhile, indigenous Southeast Asian nationalist groups, fearful of local Chinese economic power and responding to earlier efforts of Chinese nationalists to mobilize local Chinese, began increasingly from the interwar years, and especially after independence, to treat the Chinese not simply as the other, but as the exception – albeit as the exception with economic privileges but few rights. Under these circumstances, the Peranakans sought to fashion themselves as a minority: Chinese in the innermost self, but self-reliant and accommodating. As became clear in Indonesia of the 1960s and again in the late 1990s, this selffashioning did not save them from the fate of the Chinese ‘exception’ in the USA. Under what conditions self-fashioning is proceeding today is, then, a matter not of idle inquiry, but of life and death.

8

Critics of Modernity in India and China*


In the course of this work, I have traced the ways in which a linear and progressive History charts the evolution of the national subject expressed in discourses of social Darwinism, anti-imperialism and even Marxism, mostly in the context of East Asia. We have seen how this History figures the national subject in the imagery of race, class and the state. While the evolution of the national subject can be complex, partial and circuitous, in most cases the telos of the narrative remains modern self-consciousness. In its imperialist expression, this narrative of History was presented to the colonial and semicolonial world as the history of Western, Enlightenment civilization. Here I consider another discourse – of culture or civilization with a small c – which gains greater visibility in China, by comparing it with the Indian historical case. In these two final chapters, I compare how the leadership of these two societies adapted to the advent of nationalism and capitalism. In this chapter, I compare the critique of linear history in the two societies, mainly during the interwar years, while in Chapter 9 I study the movement away from this critique and adaptation to world systems during the postwar decolonization era and after. The notion of an alternative discourse to the linear history of Civilization, centered around the notion of ‘culture’, is not new. The early use of culture to oppose evolutionism can be found within Europe in the writings of Johann Gottfried Herder. Those figures in Asia whose alternative ideas I try to understand were, perhaps, mostly unaware of Herder’s usage, but the circumstances of its appearance in the two contexts have much in common. According to George Stocking, in the late eighteenth century Herder reacted against the cultural imperialism of the French and Scottish Enlightenment conception of universal progress and the implicit hierarchy of cultural achievement. He emphasized the variety of national character, each national culture an expression of its own unique Volkgeist, all equally manifestations of the divine realizing itself in the spiritual development of humanity as a whole. To be sure, while Herder may be seen as a source of pluralism and anthropological relativism, his notion of culture never closed the back door to racialist evolutionism. Each national spirit evolved from an ‘internal prototype’: Jews would retain the spirit of their ancestors, blacks could never

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acquire the ‘finer intellects’ of the Europeans, and so on.1 Thus, if ‘culture’ presented an oppositional stance towards the Enlightenment discourse of ‘civilization’, which since Hegel we have identified as History, it was also capable of recalling this evolutionism as a supplement. Within Asia, this oppositional mode gained salience during the years after World War I. Because of the barbarism of the war, Western Enlightenment civilization was considered in many quarters of the globe to have forfeited the right to represent the highest goals or ultimate values of humanity; ‘the civilizing mission’ was no longer worthy of being desired or even recognized by those in the colonies. This gave an impetus to the recognition of other world civilizations, which had since the nineteenth century led a shadowy existence in the penumbra of Enlightenment civilization. The alternative – notably Indian and Chinese – notions of civilization, often interchangeably called ‘culture’, became tied to the sovereignty claims of the new nationalist movements. But like Herder, while these notions challenged linear, evolutionary conceptions of Western civilization, they targeted one or more dimensions while reproducing other assumptions of the dominant narrative of History. Thus Chinese thinkers such as Zhang Taiyan and, occasionally, Lu Xun denied progress while accepting evolutionism,2 while Liang Shuming and the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore in their own ways denied comparability while accepting progress. Mahatma Gandhi was one of the only significant figures to deny History in toto. The latter half of this chapter seeks to understand the significance of Gandhi’s thought, as well as the mirror in which his total and determined opposition to History was reflected. Modern scholarship has not been particularly sympathetic to these critics of the Enlightenment project. For example, history textbooks in America, India and China either ignore most of these figures, or, where they are unable to ignore them, as in the case of Gandhi, assimilate their actions and ideas into the narrative of national liberation, or into a lesson on moral courage. There is a tendency to pass over the critique of modernity. Until recently, the dominant narrative of Chinese history since the midtwentieth century, in both China and the West, has been the narrative of modernization. This has been seen as a painful and uncertain process, which has nonetheless inched toward a full modern consciousness in distinct phases. These phases are familiar enough, and I will just outline them. The narrative begins with the Opium War of 1840, and the initial refusal of the imperial state and the mandarinate to recognize the challenges posed by the West. This was followed by the self-strengthening movement, which attempted to confine Western learning to practical matters designed to strengthen the empire, while Chinese learning was reserved for all essential matters – the classic ti-yong dichotomy. With the increasing failure of the self-strengtheners to overcome the military challenges of the late nineteenth century, segments of the literati and progressive bourgeoisie began to advocate institutional reform without challenging the basic principles of the


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Confucian imperial system. The exemplary representative of this phase is Kang Youwei and his experiments during the 100 Days of Reform. The 1911 Republican Revolution challenged the traditional political system, but it was left to the May 4th Movement of 1917–21 finally and systematically to attack the very cultural underpinnings of the old system. In fact, this simple linear narrative does not do full justice to the complex responses to modern discourses that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Those who responded by questioning the project of total modernization in China have been called conservative, although Benjamin Schwartz has observed that their responses are very modern.3 Particularly in the Chinese political context, they have been painted in negative colors as people opposed to the epochal trends of progress and freedom. I would like to extend Charlotte Furth’s very useful distinction between two forms of ‘conservatism’, or what I call questioning narratives of modernity in China.4 The first form is one that tried to separate culture from politics, and thus was able to find compatibilities between science, rationality and traditional culture. In this form, culture was often subordinated to the needs of politics and technology. In Levenson’s terms, it represents the subordination of history (Chineseness) to value (modernity). The second form of conservatism finds this distinction difficult to sustain because it sought to exalt spiritual culture over materiality. For the second group, the authenticity of spiritual culture (in the case of Gandhi this was religious) could not tolerate the separation between it and the governing institutions of a society, and would necessarily shape certain essential aspects of political and material life. Represented by the national essence school (guocui) of thinkers such as Zhang Binglin and Liu Shipei, the first type, according to Furth, was concerned with the preservation of those cultural ideals seen as embodying the historical genius of the Chinese people.5 This school was not opposed in principle to modernity, but questioned its adequacy for the life of the nation and the individual. At its edges, I find that this nationalist critique tended to merge with formulations of the ‘East versus West’ binary, which depicted the East as the source of spiritual culture and the West as the source of material or scientific culture, both of which were necessary for humanity. Thus the critique of History through culture, while used mostly to anchor the nation on alternative grounds, was also linked to a redemptive universalist model. Most of the critiques of modernity we encounter in both China and India are versions of this form. The ideas of Liang Qichao exemplify this model of (national) culture with aspirations to redeem the universe. On his return from Europe after witnessing the devastation of World War I, Liang believed that Chinese (and Eastern) civilization had a great responsibility toward the world to counter the destructiveness of Western civilization.6 This model received much patronage from visiting Western philosophers such as Russell and Dewey, and from its most ardent advocate, Rabindranath Tagore, whose pan-Asianism was deeply affected by his personal friendships in China.7 Although Tagore’s last visit to China in 1929 was

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welcomed by neither the CCP nor the KMT, even the KMT leader Dai Jitao espoused the theme of Asian spiritual unity in the magazine New Asia during the early 1930s, where he depicted Sun Yat-sen as the father of a panAsianism focused on China’s cultural values. In Dai, anti-imperialism and the discourse of culture coalesced into what was at the time a popular Chinese view of the entire society as a ‘proletariat responsible both for the Asian anti-imperialist struggle and for preserving the purity of Asian culture’.8 The second type of critique of modernity was embodied in what Furth calls the neotraditional Confucianism of figures such as Kang Youwei and Liang Shuming, and was centrally concerned with religious and spiritual questions. Although neotraditionalists were not necessarily opposed to modernity, they perceived the religious truths of Confucianism as occupying not only a separate, but a more elevated plane than did science. In other words, this realm embedded Truth that theoretically could not be judged by the standards of science or History. For twentieth-century Confucianists, culture could not be completely separated from politics, since the religio-moral values of Confucianism could not but inform the polity and society. This was not true for the adherents of the national essence school, because the culture they advocated was in some senses subordinate, or at least adaptable, to the requirements of modernity. They could choose the substance or content of culture to suit the requirements of the age in ways that a Confucianist, who sought to carry over certain substantive values and an orientation to the world, could not. Because he was inspired by the evolutionism of History, scholars have tended to regard Kang Youwei as operating essentially within its problematic. Certainly, he reveals some of the most unfeeling racial prejudices of evolutionism. In his vision of utopia in The Great Unity, Kang writes that the inferior races (all but the white and yellow) will be decimated by the natural principle of the strong prevailing over the weak. For instance, the ‘fierce and ugly’ races of India, who die by many thousands in epidemics each year, will hardly be able to overcome the British; since the bodies of Negroes ‘smell badly’ it is difficult for the racial barrier against them to be leveled. Those few of the black and brown races who are not annihilated will marry with the lighter races and will ultimately become amalgamated with the white people.9 And yet the intensity with which he subscribed to evolutionism should not blind us to another dimension of his thought that emphasized love and equality of all in the world. Chang Hao stresses the indeterminacy of Kang’s ideas, drawn from different Confucian schools and Buddhism as well as Western thought.10 Thus Kang’s evolutionism coexists (not without tension) with a moral quest and activism derived from a Confucian ‘cosmic imperative’, while his utopia is informed by the moral values of ren (benevolence, altruism).11 Indeed, if one views Kang not only as a political thinker, but as a philosopher and religious leader, as did his disciples such as Liang Qichao, then we have to see his ultimate goal as the spread of Confucian moral and


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spiritual teachings in order to save the world.12 It will be recalled that Kang Youwei not only led the Confucian Religion movement, but went on to become the president of the redemptive Morality Society (Daodehui) from 1921 until his death in 1927. However, few Confucianists of the twentieth century were practically able to realize this religio-moral vision, at least in a form that made it recognizably different from the modern vision of society. Were they perhaps content with Feng Youlan’s suggestion that ‘the sage within is simply a man whose outer kingliness lies in the fact that he does what everyone does but understands it differently’?13 Liang Shuming may have been among the few who insisted that the sage’s actions in the world must be realized in the form of a Confucianist moral community. Liang’s rural reconstruction institutes were inspired by Mencius: the elite were to be the teachers, responsible for leading the masses and for their ethical transformation. In this sense, the teacher was to aspire to be a sage; the central institutional agent of the government was to be the school; and the cadres were to be the spiritual hierarchy of dedicated students. He loathed the self-interested, competitive spirit of Western capitalism and attacked the Westernized educational system for creating a privileged class that had lost the tradition of the morally perfect junzi.14 He sought to reorganize society on the basis of traditional ethical bonds through such hallowed institutions as the eleventh-century xiangyue (village compact), so that society and moral instruction ‘could make an indivisible whole’.15 At the same time, like Kang, Liang Shuming never really parted with the evolutionist perspective. But his was an evolutionism that was reworked to rid it of any value hierarchy. The three stages of Will that he wrote about – the Western stage, the Chinese stage and the Indian stage – were all validly concerned with the problems of humanity at the appropriate stage of development. As Alitto points out, none of this critique prevented Liang from identifying the essence of Chinese culture as an absolute value.16 Many of the same processes and tendencies can also be found in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century history of India, but the narrative has not been emplotted in the same way. Here, for reasons we will soon encounter, the critique of modernity has almost as much visibility as the narrative of progress, although the sting of the former has often been removed. We may see the narrative of progress as tied together at three points by the figure of Ram Mohun Roy (1772–1833) and the Bengal Renaissance, by the moderate wing of the nationalist Congress Party at the turn of the century, and by Jawaharlal Nehru, first prime minister of India. But the shadow of a parallel process (not quite narrativized) of the critique of History allows us to see how the orderly succession of a linear narrative, as in the progression to modernity in Chinese historiography, may be bifurcated by relating each of these developments to a reaction or counter-movement in a parallel process. The climax of the Chinese narrative, represented by the birth of full modern self-consciousness in the May 4th Movement, actually begins the narrative in the Indian case. The Bengal Renaissance of the first half of the

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nineteenth century, championed by its initiator and central figure, Ram Mohun Roy, upheld reason and individual rights against ‘superstition’ and the hierarchy of caste and family. True, Roy held on to Hinduism, but this Hinduism was transformed into unitarianism and the repository of reason. Moreover, by virtue of the very rationalistic methods whereby he sought to establish his case, he revealed himself to be a modernist, and is popularly known in India as the ‘Father of Modern India’. Roy and his followers advocated the improved status of women, the adoption of the English language, and scientific education in Bengali.17 Even more radical than Roy was the Young Bengal movement of the 1820s, a smaller-scale but more thoroughly iconoclastic movement of the Westernized Bengali youth, led by the Anglo-Indian Henry Vivien Derozio (1809–31). Influenced by the philosophy of Hume and Bentham and radical thinkers such as Tom Paine, they claimed to measure everything with the yardstick of reason. Their attitude to religion, which was informed by Voltaire, led them to denounce the Hindu religion with great fervor.18 For the Derozians as for the May 4th iconoclasts, the total rejection of the old was matched only by the total affirmation of the new. As the nineteenth century drew on, however, the early form of radical iconoclasm against Hinduism and tradition in general subtly began to give way to more complex, if not always more nuanced, responses to modern ideas and practices. Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay (1838–94), perhaps the most acclaimed man of letters in the Calcutta of his day, and who had once described himself as a member of the Young Bengal group,19 articulated one such response to modernity, which was to find many adherents among the intelligentsia of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century India as a whole. Chattopadhyay acknowledged the significance and desirability of science and rationality. The West had achieved progress, prosperity and freedom because it had placed reason at the heart of its culture. But the West was superior only in the culture of material life, and had little to contribute to the spiritual aspect of life. Here it was the East that had the upper hand. Man was imperfect if he had developed only one side, especially the material. The perfect and complete man combined the religious truths of Hinduism with the love of reason. To be sure, figures such as Chattopadhyay, just as much if not more than the Chinese, were affected by European Orientalists who, it might be said, projected a yearning for a ‘lost spirituality’ into Oriental societies.20 Chattopadhyay and like-minded thinkers such as Aurobindo Ghosh and Swami Vivekananda occupy a place in the trajectory of opposition to modernism somewhere between the national culture group and the neotraditional Confucianists. Like the former, Chattopadhyay recognized the significance and necessity of modern ideas: rationalism, progress, individualism. But his nationalism led him to claim that a purified and regenerated Hindu ideal was far superior as a rational philosophy of life to anything Western religion or philosophy had to offer. Like the cultural essence school, Chattopadhyay distinguished modernism from Westernism, and claimed that modernism


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could become part of a transcendent Hindu cultural ideal. But in practice, the tensions in his thought led him to oppose reformers who advocated reform of Hindu customs and practices by appealing to the colonial state on the basis of enlightened reason. Chattopadhyay did not oppose reform in principle; but he believed that change would and should follow from the new moral consensus that would emerge from the rejuvenated national culture, or national religion as he preferred to call it.21 Thus, as with Liang Shuming, politics and culture could never really remain separate: the religo-moral insight would necessarily shape the vision of the ideal society that had to be realized. In the history of Indian nationalism, the early twentieth century is seen as marking a political break between the extremists and moderates – between those who wanted immediate independence and would use agitational politics to achieve it, and those who sought more gradual, constitutional modes to attain concessions toward ultimate independence. From the perspective of culture, this political break also fits, albeit imperfectly, with the incorporation within mainstream nationalism of a discourse of the nation founded in Hindu culture as opposed to the European model of civilizational progress for the colonies. The assumptions of the latter are captured in the moderates’ critique of ‘the unBritish rule of the British in India’, to which moderates such as G. K. Gokhale and Nehru’s father, Motilal Nehru, subscribed. Hindu nationalism was exemplified by Gokhale’s fellow Maharashtrian, the extremist B. G. Tilak, who took nationalist rhetoric out of the lawyers’ chambers and into the streets to mobilize Hindus during their communal festivities. Although Gandhi drew his ideas from a variety of sources and evolved a unique blend, he too drank deeply from this trope of ‘culture’, of an irreducible (Hindu) spirituality as a foundation for his nationalism. At this point, the Indian narrative of national modernization becomes complicated. We are at a crossroads: should we focus on Jawaharlal Nehru as the flowering of modern consciousness, or on Gandhi, who turns his back on History? We could, by focusing on Nehru and the segment of the intelligentsia favoring the vision of a fully modern society (which dominated certain strategic points of Indian public life through most of the independence movement), develop the narrative of emancipation. To be sure, even among this group there were few who advocated the kind of break with history that we have seen in the May 4th Movement or even among the Derozians. For Nehru, the significance of traditions lay not in a transcendent spiritual or moral telos but in the historical development of the nation. All the great rulers of Indian history, such as Asoka, the Guptas, Akbar and several of the Moghul emperors, attempted to develop a political framework to unite the cultural diversity of the subcontinent. This History, while giving the Indian people their unique qualities, also placed them within the progressive and emancipatory project of the Enlightenment.22 Nehru saw the historical nation through the biological metaphor of growth and decline. The great heights of Indian thought, culture and science had been reached as early as the eleventh century, and subsequently entered

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a long, dark period of rigidity and stagnation.23 There were short cycles of creativity thereafter, especially during the reign of Akbar and some of the other Moghul emperors, but until the modern period, which was uniquely the period of vigor and dynamism of the Europeans, there was no basic growth in India. From even this brief outline, we may see that Nehru displays an ambivalence regarding the question of a preformed national subject of ancient times. The end of creativity coincides roughly with the advent of the Islamic period, but individual Muslim monarchs were able to regenerate society periodically. Certainly, there was no question of the substance of an ancient culture reappearing in Nehru’s Discovery of India. That was left to Hindu nationalists of different stripes, from the benign to the savagely vengeful. For Nehru, even more than for the cultural nativists, culture and politics were separable. Indeed, not only were they separable, but culture occupied a distinctly subordinate position in relation to History. And as with the Chinese Marxists, a national culture may once have embodied (and will again embody) the supreme ideals of its age. In the way he sustained the idea of the uniqueness of national culture within a modernist vision of History, Nehru resembled the Chinese Marxists when they were not violently antihistorical. Perhaps we can place his ideas somewhere between the nativists and the Marxists in China. But the narrative has to confront the figure and impact of Gandhi. He is perhaps among the most difficult political figures to understand in terms taken from modern discourses. My reading of Gandhi here owes much to works by Partha Chatterjee24 and Ashish Nandy.25 What were Gandhi’s basic ideas about modern civilization? For Gandhi, the religo-moral vision was so compelling that it could not brook the separation of politics and culture, a distinction regarded by true believers – whether Gandhi or the variety of religious fundamentalists that we encounter in the world today – as a particular imposition of modernism itself. In Hind Swaraj, published first in 1909, Gandhi launches a total indictment of modern civilization as it has developed in the West and subsequently been brought into India. Gandhi pursues a line of argument that can be found in the Western romantic tradition as well as in certain Hindu and Buddhist texts. His argument, however, is not founded on a textual or scriptural tradition, but rather on a universalist moral philosophy. According to Gandhi, the modern organization of society, designed to release its productive potential and produce increasing wealth and comfort for all, is ultimately self-destructive. Modern civilization actually makes the individual a prisoner of his or her own craving for luxury and self-indulgence, generates a destructive competitiveness, and brings about poverty, inequality and large-scale violence.26 Unlike the Marxists, who critiqued colonialism for its class character, but praised it for unleashing new productive forces and technology in ‘stagnant, feudal societies’, Gandhi criticizes precisely these productive forces. Modern machinery can only create the desire for more goods, it can never satisfy it. Worse, industrialism brings destruction, exploitation and disease to a society,


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and creates an especially exploitative relationship between the city and the village.27 If modern industrialism cannot find a place in Gandhi’s religiomoral vision of society, nor can the modern state. For Gandhi, whose anarchism was influenced by Tolstoy, the critique of the modern state flows logically from his ideas about industrialism. The modern state was necessary only because of the needs of industrialism and the coordination of largescale organizations. Parliamentary representation does not improve Gandhi’s image of the state because representative politics is based on a competitive individualism. In the new independent India, the state could never be the appropriate machinery for the rejuvenation of village society and economy. More importantly, the state as a coercive agency could not claim an inalienable authority, for that authority lay in the law of Dharma or moral duty, which resided outside the state.28 Only religion possessed that transcendent authority by which the existing establishment could be challenged. Gandhi proposed a utopian society called Ramarajya (or the kingdom of Rama, the legendary sage-king). This society, composed of largely autarkic village communities, was to be a patriarchy in which the ruler, by his exemplary moral qualities, expressed the collective will. It is also a utopia in which the economic organization of production, arranged according to an idealized varna form of organization with a perfect system of reciprocity, would ensure that there would be no competition and differences in status. The ideal conception of Ramarajya, in fact, encapsulates the critique of all that is morally reprehensible in the economic and political organization of civil society.29 The similarity of this vision to a Mencian conception of society is striking, but its similarity to a Maoist utopian vision is even more intriguing. If we temporarily free Mao from the narrative of modernity and slice Chinese historical materials from the angle of a counter-narrative, we can make much sense of both Gandhi and Mao. Both were in search of alternative forms of community, alternatives to competitive – in particular, market – models of society implicit in the emancipation ideal. Although Mao held on to the notion of economic progress, their common concern for economic and politically autarkic communes, their loathing of urban domination, their mistrust of technological expertise, and their belief in the superiority of spontaneously self-governing communities over systems of representation (whether the Party or Parliament), confirmed for both the necessity of subordinating politics to a communal morality, the fusion of moral authenticity with politics. Frederic Wakeman30 has shown us that while History itself, for Mao, remained within the progressive linearity of the Hegelian–Marxist formulation, the question of human will as the counterpoint to the automaticity of the unfolding of History remained unresolved in Mao’s thought, as it did in the Hegelian–Marxist project generally. The understanding of will in Mao provides an opening to influences from Chinese intellectual and moral traditions, including those from Wang Yangming to Kang Youwei. Wakeman tracks this influence particularly through Kang Youwei’s synthesis in the early part of the century. Although we have seen this synthesis to be

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incomplete, it identified the telos of evolution as the morality of ren. We may see this preoccupation in Mao’s view that the ability to make History demanded the possession of a moral force, ‘a kind of revolutionary sincerity’ or purity among individuals.31 Thus it is the irruption of an obscured genealogy of ren into the dominant narrative that moved Mao, perhaps despite himself, to subvert the telos of progressive History by the quest for a moral community. Yet Mao was not an anti-modernist, while Gandhi most definitely was. Mao’s communal utopia was not transcendent; indeed, it was immanent and, alarmingly, imminent. Gandhi’s utopia was based on a distinctly transcendent foundation, and he was able to resist assimilation into the romantic critique of modernity. Chatterjee argues that European romantics critiqued science and rationality from within the Enlightenment discourse. They never called for the ultimate abandonment of reason, but rather were torn between the demands of reason and morality, progress and happiness, historical necessity and human will. These tensions did not trouble Gandhi, as they did many other Indian thinkers and leaders, including Tagore.32 The foundation of Gandhi’s views of society derived fundamentally from his composite religious vision of Truth, denying History and defying the Enlightenment problematic of his age. But the nation was not denied, at least not for the moment. Having no anchor in History, or even in history (which has no permanent anchor), the nation would have to embody transcendent Truth. What makes it possible for someone like Gandhi and his ideas to occupy the supremely important place that they do in Indian society and history? It is most unusual to find such anti-modern ideas accorded general acceptability and prestige among people educated in modern society in other parts of the world. The contrast is particularly striking in comparison with China. Although I have compared Gandhi with Mao, the comparison must break down with respect to Mao’s ultimate adherence to the Enlightenment project and his violent rejection of the past. Then, of course, there is the case of Liang Shuming, who has been compared with Gandhi, and liked to regard himself in this way. But the comparison with Liang Shuming is telling, because Liang’s influence or prestige among China’s intelligentsia is but a fraction of Gandhi’s in Indian society. Practically speaking, Gandhi accommodated, and was happily accommodated by, many modern forces. Not least of these was the emergent Indian industrial bourgeoisie, especially the house of the Birla, which came to be ranked among the top industrial houses in the country. But regardless of whether or not his ideas are practiced in India today, the relative prestige that they occupied itself needs explanation. Moreover, although we are often reminded that Gandhi’s political and economic ideas are no longer, nor were they really ever, influential in India, they have been a strong oppositional force criticizing the establishment. Oppositional groups inspired by Gandhian ideas seek to critique the most extreme effects of modernity and provide ways of mitigating its most destructive results, whether they be the social costs of large-scale industrialism and urbanism, the untrammeled growth of


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state power in the name of progress, or the unforeseen devastation of the environment. In particular, the environmental movement, especially in India, has led to a resurgence of interest in Gandhi’s critique of modernity. The critique of modernity may finally have been domesticated by Indian nationalism, but it has not disappeared. I propose two strategies to explain the differences in the weight and influence of anti-modern ideas in India and China among the intelligentsia and elites more widely. I wish to underline that my strategies refer particularly to the ways in which these politically active elites – the designers of new nationstates – represent themselves and their visions of political community; they do not refer to some abstract entity such as Indian or Chinese political cultures. The first strategy will seek the possible institutional anchors for such anti-modernist perspectives in the different political cultures of these elites. This strategy will provide us with a necessary but not sufficient condition to explain the difference. The second strategy considers the particular ideological conjuncture in which Gandhian ideas emerged and took root. This had much to do with the specific circumstances of imperialism and modes of resistance in the two countries: with Gandhian resistance to direct British rule, and, on the Chinese side, first the response to indirect imperialism and then the military and ideological resistance to Japanese imperialism. The first strategy appeals to an argument for institutional difference in the way the elite was integrated with the polity, the second to differences in ideology and cultural strategies of resistance. Lin Yu-sheng33 has argued that the totalistic iconoclasm of the May 4th Movement was itself made possible by the organic unity of the cultural and political order in the Chinese imperial system. In this system, universal kingship integrated the cultural–moral order with the socio-political order. The collapse of this pivot in the system led to the collapse of the legitimating principle of this elite’s cultural–moral order, subsequently enabling the totalistic attack on the traditional order.34 There is a remarkably symmetrical argument made for Indian society by the Indologist Louis Dumont. Dumont35 argues that it is religious ideas, especially of hierarchy and pollution, and the Brahmin priesthood that held together the entire system. Kingship and politics, although protecting religion, were fundamentally dependent on religious ideas and the ritual activities of the Brahmin priesthood for their legitimation. So where in Lin’s account the cultural and moral as well as the more broadly social spheres in China were dependent upon the imperial institution for their legitimation, in Dumont’s view of India, politics and society depended upon religious institutions and ideas. Thus in India ‘religion encompassed the political’, whereas in China it was the political that encompassed the religious (or moral culture). Both views may be criticized for essentializing complex cultural traditions, for reducing the enormous diversity of China and India to simple and, some would say, simplistic principles. I have found some value in their formulations as ways of understanding how elites perceived and integrated

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themselves with political power. Regarding Lin’s formulation, we may better think of the organic unity as a representation that informed the worldview of the literati elite and upwardly mobile segments of society. As for Dumont, we need to qualify his assertion about religion sanctioning politics by the extent to which this relationship was relevant to the self-understanding of different, particularly lower-class, groups. By understanding these formulations as hegemonic elite representations rather than as socially given conditions, we may also see how differently these elite representations have tried to shape the emergent nations in the two societies as the new sources of sovereign authority. In the comparison that follows, I turn to a study by Arjun Appadurai of the history of a south Indian kingdom and temple community from the eighteenth until the early twentieth centuries. For China, I use my own research and other materials from the north China plain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Appadurai’s study of the Sri Partasarati Svami temple in Madras gives us a clear picture of how authority was constructed in this society. Before the British took over the area in the late seventeenth century, a triangular relationship obtained in the community between the kings, the sectarian priests of the temple, and the temple community, the latter of which also happened to be subjects of the kingdom. A set of transactions, material and symbolic, held the three together. Sovereignty actually lay with the deity of the temple. By providing royal gifts and protection (other patrons might grant more generous gifts but could not provide protection) to the temple, the king, who demonstrated the highest form of service to the deity, came to share in the paradigmatic royalty of the deity. ‘By being the greatest servant of the deity, the human king sustains and displays his rule over men.’36 Thus the authority of the rulers in the kingdom was, in practice, crucially dependent upon their patronage of the temple. Behind the conferral of these ritual honors, and critical to the link between the temple community and the king and the royal bureaucracy, were the sectarian managers of the temple, who were also the religious leaders of the community. While the king was granted the authority to be the ultimate arbiter in temple disputes, the actual day-to-day managerial authority of the temple community lay with these leaders, and the monarch could not encroach upon the prerogative. As Appadurai puts it, ‘the ceremonial exchanges of honor between warrior-kings and sectarian leaders rendered public, stable and culturally appropriate an exchange at the level of politics and economics. These warrior-kings bartered the control of agrarian resources gained by military prowess for access to the [symbolically] re-distributive processes of temples, which were controlled by sectarian leaders. Conversely, in their own struggles with each other … sectarian leaders found the support of these warrior-kings timely and profitable.’37 With the expansion of the colonial British state and the growth of its control over the most intimate spheres of life, especially in the late nineteenth century, this particular interaction of religious and political structures of


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authority fell away, and the triangular relationship was replaced by a state– civil society model of authority. At the structural level, the British dispensed with temples as the authoritative basis of rule in south India. Moreover, reversing the pattern of the past, the colonial administration sought increasingly to control the day-to-day affairs of the temple, thereby encroaching upon the authority of the temple leaders and generating enormous conflict and unending litigation. The historical process we have outlined was an effort at classic state-building, whereby the state attempts to appropriate authority in local communities – albeit in the colonial context. What was the effect of this state-making upon the religious structures of authority? Needless to say, the old triangular relationship collapsed. Moreover, the authority of the sectarian leaders was being increasingly challenged. Yet this temple, and Hindu temples all over India, continued to play a vital role in electoral politics, political mobilization, and politics in general. Cut off from state power, sectarian Brahmin and other social elites sought to reinforce their authority within the community and temple by championing religious issues in the emergent modern public sphere. Control of temples continued to generate intense competition between local power-holders, their lawyers and publicists. In the south, temple honors were valued cultural markers not only because they brought enhanced status to the recipient, but because they also brought control of temple resources, their followings and their allies.38 Moreover, because British colonial authorities were often associated with Christian missionaries, Hindu religious championing also took on a nationalist flavor.39 Thus the continued importance of religious institutions in the power and self-perception of an important segment of the Indian elite would ensure religious ideas played a role in the emergent narratives of the nation. Let us now consider the way in which religious and political structures of authority were articulated at the local level in China, both before and after the process of modern state-making took hold. In the villages of north China during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, patronage and management of the religious sphere of activity – endowing and managing temple lands, building and repairing temples, organizing temple festivities, serving on temple management committees – clearly brought honor and status to those engaged in them. These activities were monopolized by the village elite, who in terms of leisure and resources were best able to undertake them. In many villages, these activities in the religious sphere provided the framework for managing the public affairs of the village – for instance running the crop-watching association or the self-defense corps of the village. Moreover, in some villages, temple committees also functioned as the ultimate tribunal, judging offenders in the village under the watchful eyes of the gods.40 I have argued that the active role played by the village elite in the religious sphere was sanctioned by the cosmology of a universal bureaucracy headed by the emperor, but composed of both earthly and godly bureaucrats mediating the relationship between spiritual and temporal worlds.41 The

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activities of this universal bureaucracy provided a model for leaders to represent their authority and exercise their responsibilities. For whatever practical reasons, the village elite performed their activities in the religious sphere, and the bureaucrats’ patronage of officially sanctioned gods and the gentry’s sponsorship of both official and non-official gods communicated a clear message to the elite about the style and responsibilities of political leadership in society (See Chapter 4 on Guandi). Such patronage also alerts us to the way in which authority in the religious sphere at the local level was symbolically dependent on the pivotal role of universal emperorship and, more widely, on the ritual activities of the imperial bureaucracy. This is brought home most sharply when we see how the modernizing state began to send a different message regarding the religious sphere in the villages, and urged village leaders to transfer their allegiance from the religious realm to the more secular activities of the modern regime. At the turn of the twentieth century, the provincial administration of Zhili and Shandong, under the initial leadership of Yuan Shikai, sought to implement a series of modernizing reforms at the village level, targeting the old religious sphere as the source of ‘superstition’, but also substantial economic resources. The success of this administration in appropriating temples and temple property was not inconsiderable. This was due largely to cooperation by the village elites, who saw new channels of social mobility in the schools, titles and programs that came down to the village came from a national authority. These resources functioned to certify and bolster the authority of the village elite, who monopolized official positions in this initial period.42 In other words, the rural elite turned out to be extremely adaptive and responsive to state demands: they were able to transfer their allegiances from the religious sphere to the secular relatively painlessly, because for them it had been the political within the religious that had been salient in the first place. The religious domain had ceased to be a factor in the political role of the elite. What does this comparative excursus tell us about the greater prominence of critiques of modernity in India? Surely it does not illustrate the simplistic proposition that religion is necessarily anti-modern. Religion, in and of itself, is scarcely incompatible with modernity, as the increasingly popular role of religion in the USA, Japan and Taiwan reveals. In India, the most economically developed state is the Punjab, where Sikh religious revivalism prevailed during its greatest growth. In China, the areas that have prospered most in recent years, such as the south and southeast coast, have also witnessed a massive religious revival. Rather, I believe the comparison tells us that where elites locate their authority outside the political power of the state, which often tends to be in organized religions, they are able not only to generate opposition, but also to articulate alternative narratives to the authoritative discourse located within this political power. Thus a state-building program in India did not foreclose, and may even have contributed to, the expansion of a space within which critical elite groups could engage in an indigenous critique of the narrative of History associated with the colonial power. This


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is also how we can understand the force of Gandhi’s resistance to granting moral authority to the state. In China, since universal kingship encompassed the religious and moral order, the source of authority for local elites as well as the intelligentsia resided principally in the political. We have seen how the pivotal role of the political shaped the allegiances of the elite at even the most local levels of rural society. The collapse of the political pivot, which made possible the radical iconoclasm of the May 4th Movement, also delegitimated critiques of the emergent order originating in the non-modern sectors of society. Redemptive societies and popular religious movements, such as those led by the Red Spears or Small Sword Society, continued to flourish and challenge the hegemonic discourse, especially as it pertained to popular religion. However, lacking links with the modern intelligentsia or acceptable channels of political mobilization, they were unable to articulate a counter-narrative of dissent that was acceptable in the public domain. The relative autonomy of religious authority in India enabled a man like Gandhi to be as influential as he was. But it would be a mistake to identify Gandhi entirely with the project of the nineteenth-century Hindu elite, who sought to found the nation in the idea of a ‘spiritual culture’ in opposition to History. Stephen Hay has revealed how the entire nineteenth-century Hindu renaissance was the work overwhelmingly of Brahmins in Bengal and South India. It was also largely the celebration of the high Brahminic philosophical tradition of the Vedas and the Upanishad. While at one level Gandhi, a nonBrahmin, drew from this tradition, Ashish Nandy points out that at another level he marked a break with this tradition, because Gandhi’s Hinduism affirmed the non-canonical and the folk.43 While this may make him similar to the Chinese nativists in search of traditional roots of a modern national culture, we should recall that for Gandhi, it was often the non-modern within these folk traditions that he valued. Gandhi’s critique of modernity derived its legitimacy in substantial part from the popular, sectarian religious traditions that continued to play a vital part in the area from which he hailed. This corner of Gujarat was an area of eclectic and competing religious cultures, including ascetic Jainism and Christianity, and his family was strongly influenced by the devotional tradition of monotheistic Hinduism known as bhakti. It was from this tradition that he derived his opposition to classical, caste-bound Hinduism and projected a religious nationalism based on non-violence and compassion. Most of all, the bhakti tradition gave him an orientation and style. By following in the path of bhakti teachers, walking about the land preaching his message, Gandhi, the latter-day saint, was able to reach out to the ordinary people.44 If the continued meaningfulness of religious traditions among segments of the elite leadership of the national movement in India created a space and an audience for the critique of modernity, the substance of Gandhi’s critique itself was not a necessary outcome of this space. The substance must be understood in the context of his encounter with colonial ideology. Ashish

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Nandy has argued that the psychological impact of colonial ideology is much more devastating and longer-lasting than its political or economic effect.45 This impact is felt both in the colonized society and in the colonizing society. The justification of world colonization by Western powers required the construction of an ideology of rule that not only transformed the representation of the colonized peoples, but also recast the self-image of Western society as one that was quintessentially and by definition the antithesis of the East. In the Indian context, the ‘natives’ were marked variously as cowardly, effeminate, naively childlike, superstitious, ignorant and the like. In turn, the West was characterized by the images of youthfulness, aggression and mastery, exemplified so well in the British public school. This opposition repressed many of the antinomian Dionysian features of Western society itself, such as femininity, childlikeness, passiveness and the positive qualities of age, at great psychological cost to the society. Nandy examines the crippling effects of this ideology on those at the interface of the encounter, such as Rudyard Kipling, E. M. Forster and C. F. Andrews on the one side, and westernized Indians such as Aurobindo Ghosh on the other. Gandhi was among the very few Indians successfully to resist their colonially constructed image. He was able to penetrate to the roots of colonial ideology, to see the linkages between progressive mastery at the heart of History and racism, between hyper-masculinity and adulthood,46 and so resist the traps inherent in these categories. His doctrine of passive resistance and non-violence sought to liberate activism and courage from aggression and recognize them as perfectly compatible with womanhood. Keenly aware of the disfiguring effects of colonialism on the British themselves, he pointed to the abandonment of true Christian values, which, he believed, could never justify colonialism. But (and this is not part of Nandy’s argument) Gandhi appears to have taken a final step of equating the irrationality and immorality of colonialism with that of modernity as a whole. So deeply implicated were the categories of modern thought with colonial ideology that to accept the Western criterion of a true antagonist – to be a player in the game of ‘modernization’ – would be to violate one’s own being, to remain imprisoned within the deforming categories of the other. Thus the sufficient condition enabling Gandhi’s critique of modernity lay in the encounter with colonial ideology and his ability to provide a psychologically valid alternative to it in his nationalism, especially for a middle class caught awkwardly between two worlds. In China, the imperialist presence was widely resented, and anti-imperialism was at the core of political movements for the first half of the twentieth century. But the absence of institutionalized colonialism in most parts of China also meant that colonial ideology was not entrenched among both colonizer and colonized in the same way as it was in India and other directly colonized countries. The opposition to imperialism was chiefly political and economic, and did not present the urgent need to root out imperialist ideology in the very self-perception of a people.


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It is interesting to speculate on the role and effects of Japanese imperialist ideology in the 1930s and 1940s. The scholarship, particularly with regard to mainland China, on this topic is still sparse, although work seeking to understand the Japanese construction of History and the Orient is growing. In the discussion of Stefan Tanaka’s Japan’s Orient in Chapter 1, we noted how the historical narrative of to-yo-shi combined linear History with the oppositional discourse of ‘culture’ in such a way that Japan could resist the hierarchies of universal History. It could thus establish its equivalence to the West and yet create its own superiority in relation to the rest of Asia – particularly China, which came to be designated in this discourse as Shina. As the foundation of an alternative History, the East was idealized (or Orientalized), and for figures such as Okakura Tenshin, Japan’s mission lay in reentering the Asiatic past and regaining the lost beauty of Asia. The dominant academic trend, however, tended to objectify Shina as Japan’s past, as a temporal inferior, even while claiming some of the timeless qualities of Asiatic ideals as being embodied in modern Japan.47 While it is important to recognize the indeterminacy of to-yo-shi discourse and the fact that it inspired many Japanese to reach out to other Asians to build a positive future, nonetheless there was, even among the most noble-minded of these figures, a paternalism towards Japan’s Orient that seeded the violent appropriation of this discourse by Japanese imperialism.48 From the outset, then, it would appear that Japanese colonial ideology took a different approach to its colonial subjects, an approach that would have made a Gandhian type of response inappropriate, if not meaningless. In proclaiming the establishment of the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere as the mission of Japanese rule in the 1930s and 1940s, the Japanese imperialists were appealing to the Orientalism of to-yo-shi, which celebrated an Asiatic unity. Idyllic village communities based on the spirit of age-old cooperation were to be the building blocks of the Japanese empire, the only force capable of resisting the corrupting influences of Western capitalism.49 Although there was a world of difference between Gandhi and the Japanese imperialists, the basis of a critique founded on alternative Asian values, which Gandhi also espoused, was arguably extremely suspect in China.

Conclusion

In Chapter 9, we will see how the legacy of Gandhi, Liang Shuming and other critics of capitalist modernity came to be abandoned in the course of these two countries’ incorporation into the global system of nation-states. I will conclude this chapter by suggesting the relevance and limits of this midcentury critique of modernity. Is Gandhi’s experiment still relevant to the world today? Does it help us to keep the dialogue open to the Other? Gandhi’s great contribution was to demonstrate that it may be possible to bring vast masses of people into the political mainstream without the same violent or wrenching transformation of their self-image that nineteenth-century

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imperialism had produced among the intelligentsia; to locate sources of selfempowerment (swaraj) not only in an external or elite discourse, but within their popular traditions; and to recreate the people without using them as instruments of goals alien to their lives. In these respects, he also resembled grassroots reformers in China such as James Yen and Liang Shuming, for whom the transformative impulse was balanced by the need to preserve the local as a value, even though he, Gandhi, was much more politically popular than they. The Gandhian conception of mass mobilization based on a noninstrumental view of the people and nature remains a vital issue today among non-governmental organizations in India and other parts of the world. In China, as well, in response to the recent degradation of rural life and the environment, there has been a revival of the rural reconstruction movement of the Republican period and interest in figures such as Liang Shuming and Jimmy Yan. A second contribution by Gandhi related to the critique of centers of power. In preserving the local – in Gandhi’s case expressed as sacred community – as a value, Gandhi was able to transform it into a space from which the dominant ideology of the state could be critiqued, a space similar in many ways to civil society in the West. We tend not to equate religious space with civil society because the Enlightenment project was directed against the authority of the church. If, however, we may step aside from the history of northwest Europe and seek our perspective from political developments for democratization in Eastern Europe, Latin America, Korea, the Philippines, or most recently in Burma, Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere, then we have to recognize that the critique of state and state ideologies often comes from religious sources such as the Buddhist, Catholic or Islamic religions and liberation theology. The power of emancipatory modernity in China rests in the fact that it has elicited the commitment of both the Chinese state and the modern intelligentsia. Its gains for the Chinese people in many areas of life cannot go unappreciated. Moreover, despite my criticism of the Chinese intelligentsia’s representation of the ‘people’, I believe that the highly elitist Indian intelligentsia and bureaucracy (outside the Gandhian satyagraha and some activist groups) can learn much from Chinese egalitarianism. Yet the consuming commitment of Chinese intellectuals to the narrative of modernity has tended to produce a monologism in which gradualist reformers such as Liang Shuming, James Yen, Tao Xingzhi and others (each of whom could perhaps have played the role of a Gandhi under different circumstances) have been marginalized. In the process, this narrative has obscured the vitality of popular culture, of religion and its associational life, and has delegitimated the critique of modern ideologies originating outside of modern discourses. Despite the repeated persecution of the intelligentsia by the Chinese state, it is this shared narrative that has thrown so many of them repeatedly into the arms of the state and at the same time alienated both the intelligentsia and state


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from the living cultures of the ‘masses’ and of ‘tradition’. While the state has made effective use of the narrative of modernity to expand its own powers, the Chinese intelligentsia has robbed itself of the alternative sources of moral authority that it might have found in history and popular culture. At the same time, Gandhi’s success in politicizing the people was limited by the all-consuming nature of his religious and moral vision. We may think of his mission as the production of a self that was not governed by external powers, but was morally self-aware and controlled. Indeed, such was his dedication to this disciplinary project that it became its own totalization and took its own toll. I find the sources of this totalization in the nature of his utopian thought, which was so radically oppositional that it reproduced the essentializing quality of modernity he sought to fight. Thus, by conflating colonialism with modernity as a single, given mode of being, he objectified it and did not attend to the historical tensions within that could unravel it. How would Gandhi have accounted for pacifist traditions in modern society, for the power of the environmental or feminist movements, for the increased visibility of androgyny, for the ‘age revolution’? Gandhi did not recognize that any deconstruction of a system of ideas must also fall prey to this system. To put it more affirmatively, ‘It is a question of explicitly and systematically posing the problem of the status of a discourse which borrows from a heritage the resources necessary for the deconstruction of that heritage itself.’50 In not posing the problem of his affiliation with that which he critiqued, Gandhi was unable to see that his holding the nation to the transcendent Truth was not greatly dissimilar to the teleological History of nationalisms. In this History, the national essence remained, even as all real histories were rewritten, dispersed or extinguished. In seeking to replace History with Truth as the foundation of the nation, Gandhi banished historicity itself and ended up with a transcendental ideal, impossible to realize. The nation exists as jostling representations expressing the aspirations and interests of particular groups and their views of the collectivity. As power, the nation conceals this agonism by using its political and rhetorical apparatuses to suppress the alternative visions of community. The history that we write, then, perhaps cannot be independent of the nation; it will be the bifurcated history of the nation as representations and power. It will be about that elusive reality that we have called the nation.

9

Visions of History, Trajectories of Power China and India since Decolonization*


The vision of Chinese and Indian leaders of the mid-twentieth century such as Gandhi and Mao was hardly limited to their nations alone. The epic proportions of their experimentation with social justice, and their selfperception as inheritors of two great world civilizations, ensured that they saw it as their destiny to transform not only themselves, but the world. As the decolonization process unfolded after World War II, their bona fide antiimperialist credentials presented an opportunity for these nations to offer an alternative to the colonial past. This chapter seeks to track the relationship between the two nation-states as uneasy partners and rivals in the projection of their ideals and power in Asia. Gandhi’s assassination in 1948, soon after independence, cut short the impact of his ideas on Indian nation-building. Although Jawaharlal Nehru, who became the undisputed leader and first prime minister of independent India, was committed to building a modern, industrialized state, he was nonetheless committed to several Gandhian goals with respect to decolonization. He was a committed anti-imperialist, supporting independence movements in Asia and Africa, the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, and the Civil Rights movement in the USA, and he was the most ardent spokesman for the non-aligned movement in its early years. Most of all, perhaps, Nehru was devoted to the Gandhian ideal of pacifism, an ideal that fellow Indians would blame for leading him unsuspectingly into the ‘betrayal by China’ in 1962. In the immediate post-war period, Nehru considered India to be just as qualified as China to lead Asia and the decolonizing world. Indeed, after 1949 Nehru sought to exercise this leadership precisely by bringing communist China into a realm of engagement with non-communist societies in Asia and the West. This scenario, however, changed rapidly during the 1950s, and India soon found itself preoccupied with issues in South Asia itself. By contrast, during the 1950s Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, who were largely responsible for designing and conducting the foreign policy of the People’s Republic, were more successful in extending the ideals of communism to several of China’s neighbors, while also increasing the position and prestige of China among the newly independent nations of the world.

China and India since Decolonization

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This chapter outlines how, in addition to extending its revolutionary ideals, the Chinese leadership was effective in utilizing a Westphalian-type Panchasheela model of international relations to further its interests among its neighbors, while confining India to South Asia. Improvement in the relations between the two nation-states in recent years, and the concomitant growth in the status of India in South, Southeast and East Asia, has led to a reconfiguration of the political scenario. Ironically, it is precisely at this present moment, when the two giants are developing the economic and strategic capacity to realize some version of the decolonization ideals, that these ideals have dimmed. The reconfiguration presents a cauldron of opportunities and risks for the region as a whole.

The early period: ideals and problems


The transformation of decolonizing societies into nation-states, a process that was rhetorically founded on the idealism of the anti-imperialist movement, actually generated inescapable tensions. The Westphalian system of nation-states, with its ideal of self-regulating, competitive, sovereign units, reflected only partially the range of relations between states, even during the twentieth century. Despite the theory of mutual respect, these states were engaged in a competition for resources and territory that entailed not only military conquest and colonization, but also annexation or domination of each other’s territories. The hegemonic powers within the Westphalian system always aimed to modify the internal behavior of other states and communities – a distinctly un-Westphalian activity.1 Viewed from outside, it seems that the Westphalian system had the unacknowledged function of restricting access to world resources differentially, particularly through colonial control. Not only were polities that were not part of – or allowed into – the system regarded as controlled colonial resources, but through both formal agreements and extra-treaty actions and violence, states established their political and economic dominance in the system. Resistance to hegemony by aspiring powers entailed considerable violation of the rules of the system, as in the well known cases of Germany, Japan and others. As I have argued in Chapter 2, by the late nineteenth century there developed an intrinsic relationship between imperialism and nationalism. In the competition for resources, mobilizing the nation meant marshaling material and psychological resources for imperialist conquest, while imperialism abroad furthered nationalism and national power. This kind of competitive pressure often led to the breakdown of the international system, as during the two world wars. Thus participation in a system of nation-states meant participating in a system that had historically been based on the integration of imperialism and nationalism.2 How, then, could the new states enter a competitive system without being imperialistic? One could argue that external competition was not necessary to the new iteration of the Westphalian system in the United Nations model.

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To some extent, this is undoubtedly true. China, following the Soviet Union, was avowedly built on non-capitalist foundations, and the onset of the Cold War gave new nations such as India the ideas and space for autarkic development. Although capitalist economics may have been responsible for the institutionalization of competitive societies, the progressive vision of history that promised endless growth entailed competition (typically with other states), even among socialist societies premised on the rejection of capitalism. Growth entailed expansionism that was not only territorial and economic, but also had political and psychological dimensions. We have seen how the narrative of progress and competition in the People’s Republic sanctioned the mobilization of people to produce and sacrifice for the socialist nation. Although China was perhaps more successful than most other socialist nations in mobilizing the rural population on behalf of far-reaching social change and economic growth, the mass campaigns also led to considerable alienation of the party-state, especially after the disastrous Great Leap Forward. As discussed in Chapter 8, Gandhi had a deeper critique of modernity and its assumptions about history, masculinity and progress. But his program of self-sufficient communities was not a practicable one, and it was easily incorporated within, and marginalized by, Nehru’s vision of a modern industrial future for India. Economic development and the spread of social justice in India remained sluggish through the first three decades after independence. Under these circumstances, was there much room for alternative modernities? How did the structure of a competitive nation-state system constrain the ideological choices available to these societies? What were the alternatives? For China, the goal of its leadership of the anti-imperialist movement was to produce revolutionary socialist societies among the decolonizing nations. For India, the goal was to realize the Nehru–Gandhian ideals of peace, non-alignment and constitutionalism. From an outcome-blind 1950s perspective, India’s nuclear program was almost as unexpected as China’s turn to capitalism. The leaders of both states believed that their recent historical achievements, as well as their deeper historical greatness, entitled them to lead the new nations of the world along alternative paths. This postcolonial agenda is evident in Indian politics as early as 1947 with the First Asian Relations Conference in New Delhi, featuring a series of exhibitions revealing the greatness and influence of Indian culture, religion and trade, extending from the Himalayas to Southeast Asia, Persia and Central Asia. Indians were particularly proud of their historic influence in Southeast Asia. They imagined the perfection of Indian civilization in the past of this greater Sanskritic world, or even empire – one all the better for having been made not by power and wealth, but by ideas and values.3 The struggling KMT regime in China sent a delegation to the conference, and was quick to match the Indian claims to greatness with still more extensive ones. The Chinese narrative of greatness derived from imperial China not only having exerted a wide civilizing influence across much of Asia, but also


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having extended, through the tribute system, considerable political and economic power over the regions. To be sure, earlier Republican-era narratives of tributary sovereignty and heroic Chinese pioneers settling and civilizing the Southeast Asian region were not foregrounded by the communists. Indeed, both the Indians and the Chinese quickly learned that these civilizing narratives could be perceived by Southeast Asians only as reproducing familiar patterns of imperialist behavior. However, during the early years of the PRC, since China’s geopolitical influence was hampered in the east by Japan and in the north and west by the Soviet Union, its best chance to establish itself as a regional power, as Martin Stuart-Fox points out, was in Southeast Asia.4 I would add that the Himalayan region also represented another, though lesser, geopolitical zone of potential influence. Thus both societies had what we might call civilizational narratives that justified the leadership of each to the decolonizing world. Between the late 1940s and the Bandung Conference of 1955, each state conducted a flurry of diplomatic exchanges and events to build the organizational bases to achieve its goals. The government of India continued to hold conferences of Asian societies, whereas the PRC convened the World Federation of Trade Unions (an effort to bring trade unions across the world into a single international organization, not unlike the United Nations) in Beijing as early as November 1949. Burmese socialists also took the lead in organizing the Asian Socialist Conferences, which brought together Asian socialist parties and sought more actively to include Africa in the decolonizing movement, as well as to create the basis for China’s participation in the Bandung Conference.5 By the time of the landmark Bandung Conference, civilizational chauvinism was kept in check, and the leaders of the two nations unfolded their approaches and messages to the decolonizing world. As is well known, contrary to expectations it was Zhou Enlai who succeeded in attaining the moral high ground at Bandung, while Nehru was unable to extricate the Indian side from arguments with the Pakistanis. Indeed, I think it is fair to say that only recently has India’s status in Southeast Asia risen to any extent. From the end of the Bandung Conference, immersed in its problems within South Asia and the Himalayan region, India developed no coherent policy towards Southeast Asia, much less a sphere of influence, and declined in importance in that region. In part, the close relationship that developed between China and Pakistan succeeded in keeping Indian strategic concerns confined to South Asia for most of the post-independence period. At this juncture, it is necessary to explore the relationships between the two countries and temporarily bracket the comparative dimension. China became involved in the effort to engage Indian concerns within South Asia, and India found it difficult to exercise its hegemony even within that region. For over 30 years, India was unable to extricate itself or exercise sufficient leadership to break through this containment.

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Territorial consolidation of the nation-state


The alternative civilizational goals towards which the leadership of India and China aspired to guide the new nations remained in uneasy tension with the tasks of nation- and state-building. The first of these tasks was the definition and consolidation of the national territory. The PRC had the advantage of drawing upon a half-century of thinking on this question during the Republic and under the KMT. The KMT, which after 1947 controlled a small part of Chinese territory (Taiwan), nonetheless claimed not only the entire territory of the Qing empire, but regions that were part of the Qing and pre-Qing tribute system and beyond, including what they called the ‘lost territories’.6 The PRC tended to limit its claims to the extent of the Qing empire. However, the Qing empire was not a nation-state, and there ensued the problem of ‘incommensurable sovereignty’. For decolonizing nations emerging from old empires, such as the Qing or the British, the territorial problem was among the most enduring. Nationalists of the dominant ethnicity or group made claims on regions or territories of the old empire – the principle of uti possidetis. But it was practically difficult for Indian and Chinese nationalists to extend or sustain the principle of nationality in several parts of the old empires. The peripheral regions of the Qing empire, whether in Tibet, Mongolia or Xinjiang, had multiple and flexible political affiliations, and their incorporation into the empire was often based on patronage of common religious or other cultural symbols, rather than the modern conception of absolute belonging to a territorial nation.7 Similarly, the British Indian Empire incorporated regions and communities along lines of differentiation that enabled the Muslims of the empire to deny any obligation to the successor Indian state. The northern Himalayan states of Kashmir, Nepal, Sikkim and Bhutan remained nominally sovereign, but were dependencies of the British government in India. Strategically, this vast region and Tibet served as a buffer for the British imperial government, which was focused on protecting India from other, especially Russian, imperial powers.8 In other words, the principle of belonging to a national territory was incommensurate with the historical practice of loose affiliations and flexible incorporation into empire. Moreover, dominant nationalists were often making their claims on these regions precisely at a time when elites of these regions or communities – such as the Mongols or British Indian Muslims – were also developing a national consciousness. This was the basis, for instance, of the refusal by Muslims within the British Indian empire to join with the Republic of India; the Tibetan and Mongol refusal to participate in a Chinese nation; and so on. The contestation over claimed territories is also a reminder of the difficulty of separating or containing the differences between nationalism and imperialism.9 Between real independence for the periphery and its full incorporation, there were other modalities of dealing with the incommensurability problem,


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but they were often unsatisfactory. The Republic of India was forced to relinquish the territories to Pakistan, seized much of Kashmir (and several other princely states), and entered into treaties with Nepal, Bhutan and Sikkim that essentially restored their status as buffer states the British had created to the north (in 1973 India incorporated Sikkim into the Indian Union). China, too, developed border differences with most of its contiguous states, but the most publicized and dramatic problem was the Tibetan one. The history of the Chinese incorporation of Tibet is a well known one that I need not rehearse here. It is, however, instructive to follow how China sought to contain or limit the effects of its forceful integration of the periphery on its relations with its neighbors and sustain its anti-imperialist rhetoric. The doctrine used by the Chinese leadership to produce this effect was the doctrine of the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, or Panchasheela. The five principles include mutual respect among nations, peaceful coexistence, equality, mutual non-aggression, and non-interference in the internal affairs of others. It originated in a treaty known as the Agreement between the Republic of India and the People’s Republic of China on the Trade and Intercourse between the Tibet Region of China and India, signed on April 29, 1954. Later, Nehru would publicize it widely and make it both the core of the new India’s civilizational message in Bandung and the guiding philosophy of the non-aligned movement. As we know, it was also of great significance to the political philosophy of the Indonesian state. Panchasheela was a kind of Westphalian doctrine for the era of decolonization. The goal was to enable states to engage in relationships by setting aside troublesome or insoluble issues. In contrast to the Westphalian era, when most of the world was prey to the few nation-states, this time around, most of the world was dividing up into nation-states, making the Panchasheela doctrine seem comparatively fair. Nonetheless, it could still be used instrumentally, forcibly to incorporate a contested region and declare it to be part of the national territory, as both China and India were to do. While India flaunted the rhetoric, the Chinese government utilized the Five Principles more effectively. The clarity of the Chinese approach to the Five Principles emerged from its recent historical experience. Dong Wang has shown that as the Unequal Treaties in China took center stage in the rise of Chinese nationalist consciousness, a school of legal practitioners, including such figures as Wellington Koo, W. W. Yen, Alfred Sze and C. T. Wang, among others, emerged with a strong belief in the capacity of international law to rectify the inequality among sovereign states. From the Republic through the revolution, the KMT regime did succeed in gaining international recognition through legal processes. Of course, respect for international law was hardly seen as the only means to attain recognition and respect for the political values that China stood for.10 Communist revolution and nationalist resistance represented another means to achieve these international goals, and the Cultural Revolution represented their full ascendance, overwhelming law.

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But the 1950s were more circumspect; or to put it another way, if world Maoist revolution represented the civilizational goals of the PRC, Panchasheela represented its state-building goals, and the Maoist regime utilized both instruments with considerable success until the Cultural Revolution. I believe the idea of Panchasheela is continuous with this conviction in the demonstrated value of law as a means of securing state sovereignty. In the view of the communists, pre-World War II international law was imperialistic and could not fully secure China’s sovereignty. Panchasheela was better in that regard: it was anti-imperialist, but gave the state full autonomy within its claimed sovereign territory. Thus, once the Chinese government obtained recognition by India of its claim to Tibet in the 1954 treaty, it proceeded entirely on the supposition that China acted within Panchasheela principles. At the same time, it could claim that India, by asserting rights over the Himalayan states, was engaging in hegemonism. In staking this high ground, the PRC regime ignored two historical realities, neither of which was fully commensurable with modern principles. The first was that for most of the previous century, the entire Himalayan region had become a vast buffer zone separating the British, Russian and Qing empires. From the Indian perspective, the Chinese had acquired the largest of these buffers in Tibet; why should they deny the right of India to regard the Himalayan kingdoms as its buffer? Secondly, and more profoundly, there was an asymmetry in the Chinese perception of the two empires: The British Empire was regarded by the PRC as imperialist, whereas the Qing empire was seen as protonationalist. This distinction is not entirely credible, because the republican revolutionaries of 1911 saw the Manchus as barbarian alien conquerors. In India, Nehru, who appeared to determine foreign policy (like Mao and Zhou in China), has been castigated for a lack of statecraft. From Sardar Patel, the ‘iron man of India’, whose tough-minded advice on China Nehru never took in the 1950s, to Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh at the end of the century, critics of the early foreign policy of the Republic of India have seen it as overly influenced by unrealistic Gandhian notions of pacifism and idealism. The main charge has been that Nehru naively trusted the PRC leadership, beginning with his concession of China’s central demand regarding recognition of Tibet. Once this became a fait accompli, India had little basis on which to negotiate the border issues that became the cause of the flare-up in 1962. To be sure, the Indian leadership’s inexperience with foreign policy matters played a role in Nehru’s supposedly naive China policy. At the same time, however, bringing the PRC into the international arena dominated by the USA and the Western powers by promoting China’s cause in the UN, the Korean War, participation in Bandung, and so forth – the period known in India as Hindi–Cheeni bhai-bhai (brotherhood among Chinese and Indians) – was a crucial part of Nehru’s strategy for exercising leadership in the new bloc of decolonized nations. It is fairer to say that Nehru’s strategy backfired.11 The Sino-Indian conflict of 1962 caused a reversal in Indian attitudes toward China, and put Indian policy towards its neighbors firmly on a


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realpolitik track. The policies of militarily absorbing its small neighbors Goa and Sikkim, helping bisect Pakistan through military intervention, intervening militarily in Sri Lanka in 1987, imposing economic sanctions that crippled Nepal (when that country sought to develop independent military ties with China in 1987), and conducting nuclear tests in 1998 leave no doubt about India’s much tougher attitude toward the South Asian area, which it sought forcibly to establish as its sphere of influence. From another angle, Indian realpolitik may be seen to represent its containment in South Asia, and one might even see India as mired in an area much smaller than the expansive domain envisioned by Nehru and other founders. Two factors need to be considered in the shrinking of India’s Asian influence in South Asia. The first is a seeming failure to imagine a role in the wider region, especially after the disappointments of the non-aligned movement. India made no effort to join or forge any regional organizations in East or Southeast Asia after Bandung. Even with respect to people of Indian origins in the region, and in marked contrast to the Chinese efforts to protect and woo the overseas Chinese population in Southeast Asia since the early twentieth century (with the exception of the 1960s), the government of the Republic of India was decidedly myopic in its view of ethnic Indians in the region. Sir Badruddin Tyabji, a career diplomat, wrote, ‘I realized how superficial, how ill-informed, almost callous, that view had been; and above all, how far we had failed in utilizing this enormous reservoir of Indian capital (men, money, skills, energy and know-how) overseas for building up the new India of our Five-Year Plans, our foreign policy, and our conception of inter-national affairs.’ Indeed, the Indian Overseas Department established by the British Indian government was dismantled and replaced with consular institutions that tended to see these people as mere liabilities.12 The second factor has been the alliance between China and Pakistan, which has kept India busy in South Asia. John Garver argues that the SinoPakistani relationship has probably been the most durable of all of China’s foreign relationships. Pakistan has been the recipient of covert nuclear technology from China and is the largest recipient of Chinese military aid. Moreover, China has supported insurrectionary movements in India through the Cultural Revolution. India’s intransigence on China’s proposal to conduct an East–West swap on the Himalayan border issue, and China’s refusal to recognize, until recently, India’s claims of special relations with the Himalayan kingdoms have kept India focused on its vast northern border.13 The PRC strategy toward Asia during the Maoist period was scarcely consistently successful, but it demonstrated considerable vision and initiative to keep China as a major player while containing its competitors in the region, namely India and the Soviet Union. We have already considered the Chinese role in South Asia. In Southeast Asia, China had sought to lead one or another group of nations, giving it some leverage in the superpower game. In the early 1950s, China intervened in the Vietnam War, took a leading role in the 1954 Geneva peace negotiations, and built a successful relationship

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with Indonesia, Burma and revolutionary movements in the area. Although its status reached a nadir in the Cultural Revolution, it has recovered since the early 1970s. It built a relationship with the United States and gained recognition from Thailand and Philippines in its rivalry against the Soviet Union and Vietnam. It conducted what we might call a foreign policy of ‘walking on two legs’ – Panchasheela in state-to-state relations, and revolutionary support in party-to-party relations.14 By the selective application of the two legs of support for revolutionary activities and support for regimes (including pariah regimes in Cambodia and Burma), China succeeded in becoming a major world player even before the Deng Xiaoping era.

Asia after Deng Xiaoping


As is well known, the ascendancy of Deng Xiaoping in Chinese politics led to a sea change in Chinese foreign relations as well. Over the 1980s, the support of revolutionary movements in other countries was given up, a series of bilateral negotiations were initiated to ease border and political tensions, and the focus turned to trade and investment. Not only has this led to a significant reduction of fears about the Chinese threat over most of Asia, it inspired the Indians to respond and learn from the Chinese experience. Like the rest of Asia, India too has now become economically invested in the peaceful rise of China. There are two dimensions of this new historical chapter that appear significant to me. The first concerns the manner in which China has sought to resolve political friction. The watchword seems to be delink: set aside presently insoluble issues, and work on fronts that promote trade and other exchanges. While China has used this approach towards several countries, it has been particularly dramatic in the Indian case. Although China had made occasional overtures to improve relations with India, after the Tiananmen incident of 1989 Beijing intensified its efforts to reduce its international isolation by courting countries such as India. The rapprochement entailed, first of all, delinking the Sino-Pakistani and Sino-Indian relationships. India gained a small victory in the 1990s, when China refused to back Pakistan in internationalizing the Kashmir problem by insisting on the UN Declaration of Kashmiri plebiscite as the starting point of negotiations. The Himalayan border issues were also delinked from other matters, and in 1990 China and India cooperated in the London conference on the depletion of the ozone layer, jointly pressing the developed countries to transfer the necessary technology to the developing ones.15 Delinking has not necessarily led to a reduction in China’s support – including military and nuclear support – for Pakistan. Nonetheless, it is unquestionable that Chinese and Indian relations have improved to a degree unimaginable ten years ago, and have even weathered the Indian nuclear tests in 1998. China has since recognized Sikkim as Indian territory. The two countries have opened the Nathu-la Pass, made great progress on the border


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problems, and most of all, escalated trade between the two countries from $3 billion in 2000 to over $20 billion in 2006. Although still relatively small in comparison with China’s trade with many other countries, at 49 per cent, the growth rate of Chinese–Indian trade since 2000 is far more rapid than China’s global trade growth of 22 per cent from 2001–06.16 According to Zhibin Gu, Chinese–Indian trade is expected to touch $200 billion in a decade or so.17 Moreover, the two countries’ investments in each other’s economy have grown rapidly. Over 150 Indian companies have set up more than 1000 projects in China, and since 2005, India has become one of the most important foreign markets for Chinese enterprises’ project contracts. Indian and Chinese companies have contracts in each other’s countries worth $12 billion.18 The Indian minister of state for commerce, Jairam Ramesh, has popularized the notion of ‘Chindia’, a formation that combines the relative strengths of India and China in the world economy.19 Whether or not such a formation can emerge, there is no shortage of essays touting the unbeatable strength of companies capable of effecting such a combination. As Subir Roy has put it, Indians are good at the soft stuff (this goes well beyond software) and Chinese are good at the hard stuff (this goes beyond plants and infrastructure to hard policy decisions facilitated by one-party rule). China’s labor efficiency is said to be 55 per cent higher than that of India, while India’s capital efficiency is estimated to be around 45 per cent higher. Large Chinese firms have size and technology; Indians have managerial skills, research and development expertise, and free-market institutions and practices. Whether or not it is a harbinger of business synergy, on December 21, 2005, the Indian Oil and Natural Gas Corporation and the China National Petroleum Corporation jointly won a bid for Petro-Canada’s 38 per cent stake in the Al Furat oil and gas fields in Syria.20 In Southeast Asia, as well, China has succeeded in isolating contentious issues such as the Spratly Islands and other border problems, and has long given up its support for radical challenges to the Southeast Asian states. Moreover, the creation of the new Nationality Law of 1980 clarified the status of ethnic Chinese born in other sovereign states (they are citizens of those states, not of China). This has helped smooth China’s relationship with Southeast Asian states – except for a few, such as Indonesia – and enabled ethnic Chinese to take the lead in developing ties without undue suspicions about their loyalty. The booming economic relationships of these nations with China have produced a web of interdependence that ought to make it hard for any one state to act unilaterally.21 Needless to say, China’s warm embrace of global capitalism, and indeed of the neoliberal order in the world, has not steered it towards support of more democratic regimes. This brings me to the second point of historical significance. China’s own example does not support the idea of a relationship between liberal institutions and growth, and its historical critique of India’s development and ‘soft state’ leads rather to the opposite conclusion. Indeed,

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China’s rise presents the latest and perhaps most dramatic illustration of the alternative to the Washington consensus. It has combined spectacular economic growth with a strong and activist state in the economic domain.22 Given the strong correlation between domestic institutions and foreign policy, it is not surprising that the PRC supports monarchical and militarist polities in South Asia. This is also consistent with its emphasis on pursuing state-to-state relations on the basis of the Five Principles. Nowhere is this policy more evident than in Burma. Burma was historically a tributary kingdom of the Qing empire, and even in the 1920s Sun Yat-sen regarded it as part of China’s ‘lost territories’ (shidi).23 From 1949 until the 1980s, Burma maintained neutrality vis-à-vis India and China, while China followed its ‘walking on two legs’ policy of cordial state-to-state relations and simultaneous support, although mostly rhetorical, for the insurrectionary Burmese Communist Party. When the ruling junta (the State Law and Order Restoration Council) suppressed the Burmese democracy movement in 1988, India condemned its actions, and soon afterwards broadcast All India Radio programs from the border, expressing solidarity with and providing information to the democratic resistance. It even sponsored a UN resolution condemning the junta in 1992. The Indian stance had the effect of tilting the junta towards China, which was also drawn to the Burmese regime by the common fate of having been condemned by the international community for the 1989 June massacre. Improved relations between the two states resulted in a veritable boom in military and economic ties; China provided the military with large amounts of aid, equipment and training.24 China also constructed highways and shipping routes along the ‘Irrawady Corridor’ and planned a couple of new ports in the Bay of Bengal. Indians believe that Burma has leased its Coco Islands to China, enabling the latter to monitor India’s naval activity and its missile-testing site at Sriharikota.25 Until recently, Indian realpolitik was justified by its democratic values. In the cases of Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Burma and even Nepal and Sikkim, Indian officials claimed to be responding to calls by democratic groups in those countries to aid them in resisting authoritarian or military suppression. India’s claim has not necessarily enhanced its role as champion of democracy, nor has it gained many friends in the area. But perhaps the most striking about-face in recent Indian foreign policy may be seen in Burma. In response to the growing Chinese presence in Burma, the Indian position has changed dramatically. Through the 1990s, India developed a dual policy of dealing with the military junta, particularly on matters regarding the insurgent movements along the Indo-Burmese border. But it also saw fit to award the prestigious Nehru prize to Aung San Suu Kyi (1992). Since the early 2000s, and particularly following upon General Than Shwe’s visit to India in 2004, India has followed China’s policy of strict non-interference in internal Burmese matters. During the recent crackdown on monks in September 2007, the Indian government limited itself to expressing mild statements of


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concern.26 Moreover, India’s equally warm embrace of global capitalism in recent years has also induced its leadership to make deals with the junta regarding security, energy, trade and infrastructure projects, including a US $150 million gas exploration agreement concluded in November 2007.27 Whether we judge this development to be an exercise in delinking politics from economics and state rights, or as the abandonment of the democracy movement, depends on one’s point of view. Writing before 2001, John Garver laid out several possible scenarios for the future of the Indian–Chinese relationship. Arguing against what was becoming the common wisdom – that recent trends in Chinese foreign policy suggest that China would permit India to develop South Asia as its sphere of influence because of its greater interests in trade and economic relations – Garver opts for what he regards as the more consistent historical view, that the growing gap between Chinese and Indian strength and influence would reduce Indian autonomy even within South Asia, and that India would probably become a junior partner to China in the region.28 The impact of September 11th and the train of conflicts that erupted in its wake, as well as the robust Indian economic development in recent years, seem to make that proposition rather more dubious at present. After decades of isolating India and engaging in what the Rudolphs call ‘off-shore balancing’ in South Asia, the US administration has now selected India to become a strategic partner, and the two have signed a civilian nuclear deal of gigantic proportions. It also seems clear that, among other goals, the USA and Japan seek to develop India as a counterweight to China. Never in the history of the Republic has India had more propitious international circumstances. But in the long run, given that China will soon become India’s largest trading partner, and given their long-shared common border, China will probably be much more important to India’s economic and regional interests than any other nation. Moreover, while it may be true that China continues to increase its presence in South Asia (by its observer status in the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, for instance), it is also true that India is becoming involved in a similar way in Southeast Asia, as for instance in the ASEAN+6 formation, where it is seen as a balancing factor to Chinese dominance. I share Michael Vatikiotis’s view that the Sino-Indian relationship will, in the near future, be much more important to Southeast Asia. A healthy relationship between the two states will benefit Southeast Asia by, according to Vatikiotis, reviving the ‘historical synergies’ that were generated before the era of Western colonialism.29 This final comparative study has crystallized some of the major themes in this book. I began this chapter by exploring the idealism of the anti-imperialist decolonization movement, and traced the different ways in which it succumbed to the realpolitik demands of the competitive nation-state system. The doctrine of Panchasheela can be seen in several different ways, but it also furnished anti-imperialist nationalism with a new language and institutions to engage in the kind of forceful incorporation that had characterized

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imperialist nationalism. With China and India having joined the neoliberal world order, we appear to be back in the Westphalian system that creates a competitive pecking order but offers no alternative vision or route for the dispossessed and the politically oppressed. Is the emancipatory moment of decolonization over? The world may now be absorbed into the encompassing system of competitive nation-states – a self-enclosed legal and epistemological system. But challenges emerge from the crevices of the system, from the many open wounds within it, and from the very technological and information circulations that generated the nation-state and which the nation-state itself was designed to control to its advantage. These challenges remain connected, in several ways, to the ideals of the decolonization moment, the emancipatory vision of which had integrated alternative historical traditions with socialistic justice. Frantz Fanon and Jalal Ali Ahmed are reminders that Islamism stems from roots that are as radical as they are religious. A report from The Economist of November 3, 1955, entitled ‘Mao and the Moslem World’, expressed fears that the Chinese communists were banding together and creating a common agenda with Muslim anti-colonial movements across the Middle East. Historians recognize that no system is so closed that it cannot present opportunities for change – and therein lies hope. Even while recent developments suggest incorporation into the system, China has shown how important the non-isomorphic nature of the three systems – the nation-state, global capitalism, and the cosmology of history – has been in its twentiethcentury history. Maoism was inspired by an Enlightenment vision of history predicated on anti-capitalist development. Moreover, although the Panchasheela doctrine may have secured China’s national and strategic interests, it was also unquestionably innovative, and represented a more just system of rules regulating the nation-state system than the Westphalian system. The Deng Xiaoping experiment with delinking is an innovation that in some ways sums up the contemporary Chinese experience. China’s recent history may be seen as a form of controlled decontrol that, while marking certain areas as out of bounds, has unleashed unprecedented social change. Political innovation – combining historical ideas with new global goals – in modern China is hardly new. A little-known fact of the 1911 Republican Revolution in China is that the older Qing imperial confederation was successfully converted by a group of intellectuals and politicians into one of the first multinational republics in the world – the Republic of Five Nationalities – that preceded the Soviet state by five years. To be sure, it was treated as a mere political strategy by many Han Chinese leaders from the Chinese core, but it resulted in a political reality with significant consequences and responsibilities for China’s vast peripheral areas and people today, when the five nationalities have been recalibrated as 56. In many ways, as we have seen in Chapter 5, the core–periphery problem encountered by nation-builders at the beginning of the twentieth century remains with China. But the PRC


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government has also been able to respond to this spatial problem through, for instance, the policy of Developing the West. Looking historically and comparatively at the global incorporation of China, we also see a distinct pattern that ties it firmly to the East Asian region. The economic and political rise of China defies the Washington Consensus model because it combines economic liberalization and global economic integration with a highly interventionist state (which has no place in the Consensus). In several ways, China is repeating an older East Asian pattern associated first with the postwar Japanese state, and later with the East Asian tigers. As we saw in the chapters on imperialism and nationalism in Part I, these ideas of state and society linkages combined European, particularly Germanic, ideas with East Asian regional conceptions and practices. Viewed from the comparative angle of India, the rapid development of China has goaded the Indian state to achieve similar levels of development, and has even sought to follow Chinese policies in several respects, for instance in its policies towards Burma. For a variety of reasons often connected to its parliamentary system, India is unlikely to be able to sustain such a clear, strategic role of the state, whether with regard to transnational capital, labor deregulation, or the deeper social stratification that neoliberal policies often entail. Where India and South Asia in general may be able to innovate is in the expanding role of civil society. New modes of public– private partnership, grassroots innovations in microfinance and local governance, transnational social capitalism, targeting the base of the social pyramid, cyber-based development, and the sprouts of international civil society are flourishing in several of these societies. Whether or not these innovations in China and India will transform the nature of global hegemonic modernity remains to be seen. What we have seen is that a historical vision cannot survive the capitalist nation-state system intact, as a whole. What we have left are shards – shards that are both survivals and emergences in the experiments that are being conducted today. The flourishing NGO-based civil society in South Asia often takes its inspiration from Gandhian experiments with local community. So, too, has the PRC made effective use of historical structures, say of multinational governance not only among minorities but also with regard to different societies such as Hong Kong and Macao. Perhaps it can stretch this and other hybrid concepts to incorporate different communities of Chinese but also new types of cross-border communities that are emerging from the globalization process.

Notes

Introduction Arrighi 1994: 32–33. Wallerstein 1991: 81–82. Cohen 1984. See also Cohen 2003. Pomeranz 2000. I agree with Michael Geyer and Charles Bright, who see the developments of the mid-nineteenth century as a major turning point in world history. The selfstrengthening or self-renewal efforts of historical regimes in many parts of the world were responses to external and internal crises which were generated by the effort to absorb modern, Western institutions. These new practices and institutions would, however, link Western and non-Western, dominant and dominated societies within a common framework of technology and communication-based transnational regimes of control. Geyer and Bright 1995: 1034–60. See Bickers 2007. See also Stacie Kent, “Forging Free Trade in China, 1832–90: the creation and evolution of transparency, equivalence and calculability” unpublished seminar paper, University of Chicago. The website of the University of Bristol, Dept of Historical Studies, Chinese Maritime Customs Project contains valuable catalogues and other materials http://www.bris.ac.uk/history/customs. Sassen 2006. Raj 2007: 187–220. Duara 1995: Ch. 3. See “Little Brother’s wedding” in Frolic 1980: 87–99. See also Thornton 2007; Perry 2002; and Friedman et al. 1991. Lu Xun 1989b. Lu Xun 1989c: 7–30, 1989a: 31–45. For a fuller analysis of “In the Wine Shop” see Duara 2003. Mehta 2004: 349. Ibid., 356. Farriss 1987: 566–93; Taussig 1983. Perry 2008; Harrell 1995: 97–115 Yang 2004: 728, 750. Duara 1988. Weller 1994; Apter and Saich 1994. Gellner 1983 Fitzgerald 1998; Lee 2006. See also Lean 2007. Althusser describes the “interpellation” of the individual as the process of converting individuals into subjects governed by the state. He cites the example of how we turn around when a policeman hails us “Hey you” from behind. See Althusser 2001. See Weber 1978: vol. 1, 123–25.


1 2 3 4 5

6

7 8 9 10

11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

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1 The Global and Regional Constitution of Nations: the View from East Asia


* An earlier version of this chapter was published in Nations and Nationalism: Journal of the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism, 14.2 (2008): 323–46. 1 Fairbank et al. 1973; Rozman 1991. 2 Arrighi et al. 2003. 3 Saaler and Koschmann 2007: 12. 4 Hamashita 2003: 20. 5 Sakai 1964; Hamashita 1994: 92. 6 Trauzettel 1975: 199–214. 7 Shimazono 2004: 99. 8 Maruyama 1974: Ch. 4. 9 Schmid 2002: 207; Duncan 1988. 10 Indeed, when revolutionary leaders such as Sun Yat-sen sought to mobilize secret societies, they encountered a persistent backward-looking orientation towards earlier dynastic ideals among them (see Duara 1995: Ch. 4). 11 Pusey 1983. 12 Tsuzuki 2000: 84–85. 13 Hobsbawm 1990: 132; Giddens 1987: 234–39. 14 Weiner 1997: 108. 15 Hwang 2000: 9; Schmid 2002: 112–13. 16 Liang Qichao 1906: 87. 17 see also Duara 2003, 2006. 18 Gerth 2003; Kirby 1984; Zanasi 2006. 19 Chou 1996: 40–68. 20 Saneto- 1940; Reynolds 1993. 21 Chung 1995: 68–69. 22 Robinson 1984. 23 Meyer 1980: 109–37. 24 Liu 1999. 25 Dikötter 1992: 117. 26 Duara 2003: 3. 27 What I describe here as misrecognition is related to what Stephen Krasner has call ‘organized hypocrisy’ among states (Krasner 2001: 173–74). Krasner argues that states violate rule or norms of an international system because (1) different actors in the system have differential levels of power, (2) rulers in different polities will be responsive to different domestic norms, which may or may not be compatible with international norms, and (3) there is no clear authority structure that can resolve disputes about what rule or norm is applicable. While I agree with the conditions for ‘organized hypocrisy’ furnished by Krasner, I choose to emphasize the systemic conditions for misrecognition. Nation-states are formed in the competition for global power. While international recognition and resources create them as sovereign nations, it is often the immanent – or domestic – conception of sovereignty that grounds the authoritative structure necessary for their creation and functioning as globally competitive organisms. 28 Tanaka 1993: 41. 29 Weiner 1997: 104. 30 Tanaka 1993: 19. 31 Liang Qichao 1932 (1970 reprint): 10–11. 32 Zou Rong 1968; Chow 1997: 47–49. 33 Fu Sinian 1928. 34 Allen 1989; Robinson 1984b. 35 Henry Em, ‘Universalizing Korea’s Past: Paek Nam-un’s critique of Colonialist and Nationalist Historiography’, unpublished manuscript, 2003: 5, 24–25.

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36 Needless to say, not all historians, even in the early twentieth century, subscribed to such views. Some, like Gu Jiegang (1966 reprint), even attacked some of the more blatantly nationalistic assumptions. Nonetheless, most history was written within the broad contours of the national narrative. 37 Befu 1993: 123–25; Oguma 2002: Chs 10 and 11. 38 Schmid,2002: 183. 39 Duara 2003: Ch. 4. 40 Smith 2002. 41 Mackie 2003: 233–34. 42 Karl 2002. 43 Tipton 2002: 81–82. 44 Nish 2000: 182–89. 45 Garon 1997: 70–74, 85–86. 46 Gayle 2001: 1–10, 14. 47 Ibid.: 10. 48 Sun Yat-sen 1930: 2–7. 49 Mao Zedong 1940 (2002): 89. 50 Polanyi’s (1968) notion of domestic protection represents a necessary and positive argument for what I have called misrecognition. Yet, however necessary and positive it may be, its foundation in the doctrine or ‘regime of authenticity’ can also lead to narrow-minded nationalism. 51 Gayle 2001: 9. 52 Abelman 1993; Wells 1995; Choi Chungmoo 1995. 53 Karmel 2000: 38–62; Sautman 1998: 86–118; Guo Yingjie 1998. 54 Gries 2005. 55 Seo Jungmin 2005. 56 Cumings 2004: 384–410; Duara 2006. 57 Mackie 2003. 58 Wang 2008. 2 The Imperialism of ‘Free Nations’: Japan, Manchukuo, and the History of the Present * An earlier version of this chapter was published in Imperial Formations and their Discontents, edited by Ann Stoler, Carole McGranahan and Peter C. Perdue. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 2007. 1 Gallagher and Robinson 1953. Terminologically, the way I use ‘new imperialism’ should be distinguished from the older historiographical term ‘new imperialism’, referring to the late-nineteenth-century scramble for Africa and efforts to ‘slice the Chinese melon’ that destabilized the imperialism of free trade. Creating nominally sovereign modern nation-states was not part of either that imperialism or the imperialism of free trade. 2 Spengler 1962: 12. 3 Adas 1993: 101–21; Duara 2001. 4 See Chapter 1 for an account of these two movements. 5 Arrighi 1994: 34–58; Wallerstein 1991: 81–82. 6 See Hobsbawm 1990: 102; Arendt 1973: 152–53. 7 Constantine 1984: 25, 276; Havinden and Meredith 1993. 8 As quoted by Marshall 1973: 44. 9 Ibid.: 48, 224–26. 10 Eichengreen and Frankel 1995: 97. 11 Arendt 1973: 222–23. 12 See Overy 2001. 13 Park 2003: 5.

Notes

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

Ibid.: 19. Young 1929: 136–52. McCormack 1977: 7–8. On September 18th, 1931, the Japanese Kwantung army used the pretext of a bombing of the Japanese-controlled South Manchurian railroad line near Mukden (now Shenyang) to militarily occupy Manchuria. In February 1932, they proclaimed the puppet state of Manchukuo. Young 1998: 112. Matsusaka 2001: 214–23. Ibid.: 285. For similar views of Pan-Asianist economic and political thinkers, see the essays on Sugimoro Kojiro- and Ro-yama Masamichi in Saaler and Koschmann 2007. Schneider 1999: 122. Oguma 2002: 125–42. Komagome 1996: 236–37. Yamamuro 1993. Peattie 1975: 167, 281, 335. Morris-Suzuki 1998: 97–101. Shinichi Yamamuro’s Kimera emphasizes the parent–child relationship between the Japanese emperor and Pu Yi, but the image of brotherhood was also current, even in the passages that Yamamuro himself cites (Yamamuro 1993: 261–64). Oguma 2002: 337. See Duara 1995: Ch. 4. Chianbu keisatsushi 1940: 41. Young 1998: 183–84, 213–15; Jones 1949: 139. Sun 1969: 101–02. Han 1995: Chs 3–4. Ibid.: 414. See, for instance, Harris 1994. Han, op. cit.: Chs 3–4. Sun Yat-sen 1930: 2–7. Komagome 1996: 265. Yong 1997: 321. Tominaga 1943: 43–45. Peattie 1975: 171, 174. Further, creating similar institutions fostered a similarity of interests and goals between elites in the metropolitan and dependent societies. Thus Latin American societies have found it difficult to sustain socialist states, or even large-scale public expenditures, without incurring the disfavor of the USA, and the Soviet Union would not tolerate ‘market-happy’ bourgeoisies. Manchukuo, too, began to resemble (and in several instances, led) the military-dominated dirigiste economy and centralized political system that developed in Japan, beginning in the 1930s. See Marer and Poznanski 1986. Coatsworth 1994: 18–19, 52–53. Smith 1972: 273–75. Bacevich 2002: 115–16 (lines from Woodrow Wilson are quoted on p. 115). Coatsworth 1994: 90–91. Quoted by Smith 1972: 271. Parrini 1993: 7–9. Ibid.: 8–11; Cumings 1993: 53–54. Arrighi et al. 2003: 301. To be sure, even within the power structure in Manchukuo, there were forces working for autonomy. On several occasions, special Japanese rights were attacked by the Kwantung army, most notably in 1936 when extraterritorial rights


14 15 16 17

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53 54 55 56


for Japanese citizens were abolished, and a series of significant privileges began to unravel. The Japanese government also raised tariffs against the overwhelming exports from Manchukuo. In general, more recent research takes seriously the Kwantung army’s autonomy from the despised civilian governments at home – at least until the war in Asia (Han 1995: 257–58; Young 1998: 205, 211). Duara 2003: 67–70. Pagden 2006. This chapter appeared in a rather different form as a response to Pagden in the same volume of Common Knowledge (Duara 2006). For another expansive and revisionist view of empire, see also Cooper 2005. Komagome 1996: 356–70. We need only to glance at the record of atrocities and killings committed in Iraq and Afghanistan under the name of national security by the US-led coalition forces, or the growing nationalist rivalry between China and Japan in an economically highly interdependent East Asian region, to be persuaded of this.

3 Historical Narratives and Transnationalism in East Asia


* Forthcoming in Contesting Views on a Common Past: Revisions of History in East Asia, edited by Steffie Richter. Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus, in press. 1 A personal anecdote reveals the continued importance of national history. My wife taught legal English to a group of Chinese students in 1994. As an exercise, she asked the students to identify ten people representing their profession who, in the event of a nuclear war, ought to be saved in a nuclear bomb-proof capsule. Which ten would they be? To her surprise, many students identified a historian among the ten, because as they said, it would be important for the nation to know its true boundaries when they emerged from the holocaust. 2 See Duara 2003: Ch. 1. 3 Wang 2000. 4 See Johnson 1994. 5 In the creation of South Korea’s national identity during the Cold War, the emergence of Minjok Sahak (national historiography) scholars had a primary impact on the formation of postwar Korean national identity through the implementation of national education and cultural policies, racial history, the founding of museums and so forth. This became a primary means for authoritarian Korean governments to bolster their political legitimacy while promoting narratives against Communist others such as North Korea and China. Thanks to Taeju Kim for this research. 6 Hu Sheng 1959. 7 See Lei Yi, in press. 8 See Niedenführ, in press. 9 Thompson 1963; Hobsbawm 1959. 10 Zhao Shiyu 2002. 11 Feng Xiaocai 2005. 12 Yuan Weishi, undated. 13 For a remarkably similar critique, see the more recent protest voiced by Yu Jie 2008. 14 The historian Zhang Haipeng’s (2006) critique of Yuan’s article, published in the resumed Bingdian; see also Barmé 2006. 15 Flath 2002. 16 Lee 2006b: 40. 17 Flath 2002: 55. 18 von Falkenhausen 1995. 19 Ahn 2006. 20 Su Xiaokang and Wang Luxiang 1991: 131. 21 Chen Xiaomei 1995.

Notes

30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39

Su Xiaokang and Wang Luxiang 1991: 290–91. Sassen 1999: 151. Ibid.: 159. Hook 2001: 1–10. See also Chen 2000. Hook 2001: 12–14. Ibid.: 25–26. Chen 2000: 281–84. See, for instance, the essays by Hamashita and Sugihara in Arrighi et al. 2003; Mizoguchi Yuzo 1986. Ishihara 1991 (orig. 1989): 26, 124. Mohamad and Ishihara 1995: 5, 92, 141–43. Penney 2008. See Friedman 1999: 189; Farrer 2008. Tu Wei-ming 1991. Leibold 2006: 212. Consider an expression of this oscillation. In the 1999 US bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, many of the same protestors who demonstrated violently against the USA could also be found in McDonald’s restaurants, or outside the consulate applying for visas, in the next few days. I believe this reflects the systemic misrecognition at the heart of all nationalisms, particularly intense in China at this moment. Farrer 2008. Downs and Saunders 1999. See the author ‘Grindstone’ in 2006 in http://forum.xinhuanet.com/detail.jsp?id= 34364297 [no longer available at time of going to press].


22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

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4 Superscribing Symbols: the Myth of Guandi, Chinese God of War

* Originally published in The Journal of Asian Studies 47.4 (1988): 778–95. © 1988 Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1 Von Glahn 1991; Millward 1994; Cohen 2003. 2 Inoue 1941: 48; Harada 1955: 30. I have taken the liberty of superscribing the original miracle story with a few details from the fourteenth-century version of it contained in the Sanguozhi yanyi by Luo Guanzhong (1961: Ch. 77, 709–10). Although there are differences between the stele account and the one by Luo regarding the period and the identity of the monk, my borrowings from the later version do not affect the core message of the story in the stele. The differences between the two are discussed by Harada (1955: No. 9). 3 Johnston 1921: 88. 4 Burkert (1979: 23). In my usage, the constitutive elements of a myth that impart this sense of collective significance are its symbols, which may be embodied in particular images, events or event-sequences. I will be mostly concerned with these elements. 5 Chen Shou 1973. 6 Yang 1981: 68. 7 Inoue 1941: 48. 8 Weller 1987: 164. 9 Johnston 1921: 88. 10 Inoue 1941: 48. 11 Ibid.: 248; Johnston 1921: 56. 12 Inoue 1941: 250. 13 Yang 1981; Huang 1968: 12–14. 14 Huang 1968: 100, 122, 227–29. 15 Li Jinghan 1933: 432. 16 Huang 1968: 229.

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17 Yang 1967: 64. 18 We may also grasp this phenomenon with the help of the ‘religious economy’ model, in which religious competition tends to generate higher levels of religious activity than a religious monopoly (see Starke and Finke 2000). 19 Hansen 1987: Ch. 3. 20 Inoue 1941: 245. 21 Ruhlmann 1960: 174. 22 Inoue 1941: 49. 23 Ibid.: 259. 24 Huang 1968: 138–41; Inoue 1941: 249, 253–57. 25 Qingshi (History of the Qing Dynasty) 1961; juan 85: 1070. 26 Roberts 1976: 7. 27 Guandi shengii tuzhi quanji (A Complete Collection of the Writings and Illustrations Concerning the Holy Deeds of Guandi), 4th introduction. 28 Ibid. 29 Daqing lichao shilu (Veritable Records of the Successive Reigns of the Qing Dynasty), 1725 (1937 edn), juan 31: 3a. 30 Guandi shengii tuzhi quanji (A Complete Collection of the Writings and Illustrations Concerning the Holy Deeds of Guandi), 2nd introduction. 31 Shoujing daquan; Guandi shengii tuzhi quanji (A Complete Collection of the Writings and Illustrations Concerning the Holy Deeds of Guandi), 3rd introduction. 32 Guandi shengii tuzhi quanji (A Complete Collection of the Writings and Illustrations Concerning the Holy Deeds of Guandi), 4th introduction. 33 Daqing lichao shilu (Veritable Records of the Successive Reigns of the Qing Dynasty), 1725 (1937 edn), juan 31: 3a. 34 Feuchtwang 1977: 584. 35 Ibid.: 585. 36 Ibid.: 584. 37 The most important of these are the six-volume Japanese rural surveys known as Chu-goku no-son kanko- cho-sa (CN for short), conducted between 1940 and 1942 and first published in 1952. Other sources include the surveys of the Japanese scholar Yamamoto Bin, who collected folk tales and legends from all over North China during the 1930s and 1940s, found in his Chu-goku no minkan denshi (1976). (See also Li Jinghan 1933; Gamble 1968.) 38 Smith 1899: 140. 39 CN 1: 213. 40 CN 4: 390. 41 CN 4: 391. 42 Naquin 1976: 338–39. 43 Inoue 1941: 266. 44 CN 4:391; 1:192; 6:151–52. 45 Duara 1988: especially ch. 5. 46 Yamamoto 1976: 73, 75, 118, 151. 47 CN 5: 433. 48 Li Jinghan 1933: 432; CN 3: 55; 6: 84–85. 49 Harada 1955: 37. 50 CN 5: 377. 51 Alexeiev 1928: 1. 52 Huang 1968: 229; see also Harada 1955: 35. 53 Alexeiev 1928: 9. 54 Johnston 1921: 48, 85. 55 Huang 1968: 230. 56 Portengen 1898: 461–68. 57 Hsu 1983: 11–24, 35–50.

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58 In retrospect, I recognize that deconstructionists refer to a similar process, what Spivak has called the ‘exchange in the functions of signs’, to suggest how linear history, by grasping the past through the meanings of the present, tends to reduce the past to the present (Spivak 1988: 4). At the same time, I am more sanguine about grasping the connections between changing meanings. This perhaps brings me closer to Paul Ricoeur than to the deconstructive poststructuralism of Jacques Derrida. In Ricoeur, a metaphor posits a connection as much as a congruence or difference. Ricoeur seeks to stress the ‘similarity that rises out of the ruins of semantic impertinence’ (see Valdes 1991: 25). 59 Duara 1988: ch. 5. 60 Lee 1999. 5 Deconstructing the Chinese Nation: how recent is it?


* Originally published in the Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, No. 30, July 1993. 1 The Oxford English Dictionary (compact edition) defines the modern philosophical meaning of the ‘subject’ as ‘More fully conscious or thinking subject … the thinking or cognizing agent; the self or ego.’ (Vol. II, Oxford University Press, 1971, 3120). 2 Levenson 1964. 3 Trauzettel 1975. 4 Wang Gungwu 1968: 45–46. 5 Fletcher 1978: 351–408. 6 Neither does Empire, according to Hardt and Negri, have temporal boundaries; in this sense it is ‘outside of history or at the end of history’. However, the sense of being at the end or outside history remains a variant of the progressive conception of history, dependent upon its framework for meaning. In this formulation, progress has become self-sustaining to the extent that the vicissitudes and exigencies representing history are allegedly overcome (Hardt and Negri 2000: xv). 7 Onogawa 1970: 245, 249. 8 Dow 1982: 353; Li Guoqi 1970: 20. 9 See Langlois 1980: 362; Yang 1968: 20–33. 10 Trauzettel 1975. 11 Li Guoqi 1970: 22. 12 Langlois 1980: 364. 13 Onogawa 1970: 207–60; Wu Wei-to 1970: 261–71. 14 See Wu Wei-to 1970: 263. 15 Onogawa 1970: 216. 16 Naquin and Rawski 1987. 17 Esherick 1987; Wakeman 1966. 18 Gellner 1983. 19 Anderson 1983. 20 Bayly 1985; Bhabha 1990a. 21 See, for instance, Burton Stein’s (1980) concept of the segmentary state in India, and Stanley Tambiah’s (1985) galactic polity in the Thai kingdom of Ayutthaya. 22 See Chapter 6 in this volume. 23 Even a premodern village community has to be imagined. Étienne Balibar says about ‘imaginary’ communities that ‘Every social community reproduced by the functioning of institutions is imaginary, that is, it is based on the projection of individual existence into the weft of a collective narrative, on the recognition of a collective name and on traditions lived as the uxe of an immemorial past (even when they have been created and inculcated in the recent past). But this comes down to accepting that, in certain conditions, only imaginary communities are real.’ (Balibar 1990: 346).

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24 I hope the emphasis in this sentence can put to rest the question of whether I believe that nationalism and national identity in China was present before the twentieth century. The form of identity, based on a self/other distinction, was similar, but what it meant to be a Chinese national was clearly different, and the numbers of people for whom such an identity was politicized were clearly restricted before the twentieth century. This point is developed below. 25 Meyer 1980. See also Bennet and Meyer 1978. 26 McNeill 1982. 27 Armstrong 1982. 28 Eley 1981. 29 Embree 1985: 32. 30 Armstrong 1982. 31 Balibar 1990. 32 In his debates with the republican revolutionary Zhang Binglin, Kang cites Confucius in The Spring and Autumn Annals to argue that, although Confucius spoke of barbarians, their barbarism was expressed in their lack of ritual and civilization (see Onogawa 1970: 245). If, indeed, they possessed culture, then they must be regarded as Chinese. Since the Manchus had culture, they were Chinese (ibid.: 249). 33 The discussion is reproduced in the third lecture of nationalism in Sun’s Three People’s Principles, delivered in 1924. The attack against cosmopolitanism is also directed against the cosmopolitan strain in the May 4 ‘new culture’ movement. Incidentally, the English version of this lecture contains yet another level of repression, for it leaves out the vitriolic racialist language characteristic of the original Chinese text and omits many of Sun’s references to his debates with the reformist cosmopolitans in the early years of the century (Sun Yat-sen 1986: 41–42). 34 Bhabha 1990a: 291–322. 35 For a good example of a binary opposition defining the national identity of Australian settler culture, see Wolfe 1991. Australian settlers adapted the anthropological notion of ‘dream time’ and the dreaming complex – the precontact idyll in which the aborigines lived – as timelessness and spacelessness and counterposed it to their own idea of ‘awakenment’ embodied in the doctrine of progress and legitimation of colonization. By doing so, they were able to establish a claim to the land by romanticizing and thus excluding the ‘dreaming’ aborigines from any terrestrial claims. 36 Delyusin 1985: 190. 37 See Meisner 1967; also John Fitzgerald, who has explored the role of narrative as well as the problem of class and nation in Chinese nationalist thought with ingenuity and sophistication (Fitzgerald 1990). 38 Cited by Fitzgerald 1995. 39 Schoppa 1989. 40 Larson 1993: 58–73. 41 Ibid.: ii. 42 Ibid.: 13. 43 Pusey 1983: 327. 44 Ou Qujia 1971: 2–3. 45 Duara 1992. 46 Kuhn and Brook 1989: 92–112. 47 See Chapter 6 in this volume; also Watson 1985. 48 Crossley 1990: 3, 30. 49 Crossley 1987: 780. 50 In this view of the community, it is not shared cultural values that govern admission, but relationship to the emperor. Different peoples were to retain their unique traditions, but were held together by the institution of emperorship. The universal emperor expressed his universal sovereignty by assuming the manifestation appropriate for

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each group. It is, for instance, in this context that we can understand how the emperor portrayed himself in the nomadic world as a boddhisatva ruler: as the reincarnation of Manjusri, blending the Tibetan theory of the ruler as incarnation and the Chinese Manjusri cult of Mt Wutai in Shanxi (Naquin and Rawski 1987: 29). 51 Elliot 1990: 64. 52 Crossley 1990: 130, 196–97. 53 Nakami 1984. 6 ‘Tradition within Modernity’: women and Patriarchal Regimes in Interwar East Asia


* The original version of this chapter appeared as Chapter 4 in Duara, Prasenjit, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern. Boulder, CO: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003. 1 Wang 1924: 106–07. 2 Ibid.: 108. The notion of self-sacrifice pervades this entire topic and deserves more discussion. Several scholars have argued that self-sacrifice is critical to establishing the claim to nationhood (see Renan 1990; Malkki 1995: 216–18; Kelly 1995: 489). Martyrdom is the root sacrificial form that sanctions and sanctifies rights for the wronged. Historically, the sacrifice of the pure and authentic often redeemed the desire for wealth, lust and power (see von Glahn 1991). The same mechanism may perhaps be at work in the national martyr, but note that the sacrificial action also produces the authentic. 3 Garon 1997: 119. 4 Nolte and Hastings 1991: 157, 171–72. 5 Judge 2001: 771. 6 Saneto- 1940: 159–66, 260–64; Judge 2001: 773–83; Cheng 2000: 110–12, 117 n. 40; Reynolds 1993: Ch. 5. 7 Judge 2001: 15–16; Cheng 2000: 120; Ono 1989: 54–59; Reynolds 1993: 58–59. Judge discusses at some length the experience of Chinese women in Shimoda’s school for them in Tokyo. Ironically, many of these women rejected much of Shimoda’s pedagogy of traditional virtues, and were more impressed by Japanese women’s high levels of education. 8 Zhao Jingru, quoted by Saneto- 1940: 264. 9 Schirmer 1994: 196. 10 Chatterjee 1993: Ch. 6. 11 Chatterjee 1993: Chs 6 and 7. 12 Carlitz 1994: 101–24; Mann 1997: 37–56; Elvin 1984: 111–52. 13 Yan Shi 1923: 18–19; Wang Zhuomin 1918: 1–8. 14 Ono 1989: 27. 15 Li Youning and Zhang Yufa 1975: 463–67. 16 Cheng 2000: 132. 17 Silverberg 1991: 263. 18 Ibid.: 264. 19 Diamond 1975: 6–7. 20 Lu Xun 1989d: 1: 101–13. 21 Lu Xun 1960: 167; 1989: 4: 61. 22 I would like to acknowledge my debt to Carolyn Brown’s reading of ‘Soap’, which inspired my own analysis; see Brown 1993: 74–89. 23 Jinan Daoyuan 1932: 74–78. 24 Tongshihui zhiyin (Management Committee Printed), Wansi Chungshantang zhuankan (Pamphlet of the Wansi Chungshan Lodge), Hangzhou, 1935: 1–2. 25 Jinan Daoyuan 1932: 77. 26 In Foucault’s notion of governmentality, the welfare of the population, the improvement of its condition, the increase of its wealth, longevity and health

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27 28

becomes a goal of government. At the same time, governmentality is not benign. It is a ‘power knowledge’ that produces its own forms of domination and discipline (Foucault 1991: 100). Nikolas Rose, ‘Governing “Advanced” Liberal Democracies’, in Andrew et al. 1996: 49. The neo-Foucauldian view tends to minimize the relative autonomy of civil society and the importance of liberalism’s critique of state power as a short-lived moment in the nineteenth century. They emphasize the interdependence of state and social organizations in governmentality (albeit mostly in the post-World War II era). See Andrew et al. 1996: 8–10. In my view, the relative autonomy of societal organizations clearly had a different impact on people’s lives than did governmentalities where regimes controlled mass organizations. Silverberg 1991: 263–64; Garon 1997: 120. Garon 1997: 126. Ibid.: 131; and Miyake 1991: 274–76. Miyake 1991: 271. Garon 1997: 144–45. Yan Pinzao 1937: 114. Gerth 2003: 356, 366, 372. Chiang Kai-shek 1940: 84; see also Kirby 1984: 176–81. Song Meiling 1936: 112. Dirlik 1975: 947. Song Meiling 1936: 110–11. Song Meiling 1938: 114–17. MQX, 269–70. MQX, 193, 197; Fujiansheng xinyunhui 1937: 58–59; Guangdongsheng xinyunhui 1937: 60–64; Yan Pinzao 1937: 106–08; XSY, 12–17. MQX, 585; GWXSY, 298–303, 303–10; XSY, 24–28. Kasza, Conscription Society: 89. Miyake 1991: 277. Kasza, Conscription Society, 90–91; see also Garon 1997: 142–43. Kasza, Conscription Society, 99–100. Lattimore 1935: 268–69. Ibid.: 269; Lee, Manchurian Frontier, 86–91[0]. Clausen and Thogersen 1996: 103–06. DMDY, 1: 10–58. MDNJ, 7: 10–48, 8:23. DMDY, 4: 142. Elvin 1984: 104; Ko 1994. SJSB, 11 January 1919; 6 and 25 February and 20 March 1920. Lü Qinwen 1992: 129–30. Hoshina Kiyoji 1931, 1934. DTB, 23, 25, 28 March 1933; 2, 4, 10 October 1936. DTB, 4, 10, 15 March 1933. DTB, 8, 15 October 1936. WJYK, June 1934, 1951, 1953, 1966. DTB, 21–23 March 1933. Mita Masao, ‘Shukei tokuhipatsu’ (‘Capital Police Special Secret Publication’) No. 3650, 29 November (n.p.), submitted to the police headquarters (Jing wu zongjü), 1943. I am very grateful to Howard Goldblatt for supplying me with these police reports on Manchukuo writings. Dan Di 1945: 4–31. Dan Di’s real name was Tian Lin. For an account of her life, see Tian Lin. 1991: 244–48.


29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42


43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

64 65

Notes

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66 Observe, for instance, how one woman presents herself as caught between patriarchal values and her own future. ‘My family is truly representative of this transitional era. My father is a reputable merchant who is half-for and half-against a modern-style relationship between men and women. Once my father introduced me to the son of a friend from his home town. Later the boy wrote me an admiring letter and invited me to visit his school. My parents encouraged me to go, saying that there was no harm nowadays in a girl meeting a boy. Although we initially developed a friendship, I later realized how shallow he was and wanted to break it off. But my parents refused to let me, because we had already formed a relationship and, besides, he has a picture of the two of us together. They say this can bring shame on us. Dear Editors: Our earlier age was a lot better. If I follow [my parents], my future is finished; if I don’t, they will suffer. I feel I am riding a tiger I cannot get off’; DTB, 21 March 1933. 67 Huang Wanhua 1996: 12; see also Wu Ying 1944 (1996): 1: 347–48. 68 Bai Changqing 1996: 2: 9. 69 Tian Lin 1991: 246–48. 70 Hua Min 1946: 13. See also Dan Di 1946, and other contributions to the same issue (Dongbei Wenxue 1.2): Shao Ge, ‘Yougan yiti’ (The Topic of Feeling); and Jin Hua, ‘Bushi pian’ (Not Literature). 71 Liu 1994. 72 Chianbu keisatsushi 1940: 41. Moreover, the same text says ‘Just as a family can adopt a member, so too a nation can naturalize a citizen’ (ibid.: 43). 73 Ibid.: 5–6. 74 JTB; MSSJ, 2: 50–56. 75 In some ways, Wang’s ideas were remarkably similar to those of the earlier nationalist reformers. He believed that if women did not understand the Way, they would give birth to ignorant children, ignorance being handed on to ignorance, so that the whole world would end up ignorant (see Yong 1997: 307). Note here how the language is close to that of the early nationalist reformers, but where for them the cause was the nation, for Wang it is the world. 76 Yong 1997: 306–07. 77 DMDY, 4: 207. The gazetteer recorded how his female devotees went to hear him lecture on the way of ‘ordering the home and managing the country’; see Chaoyang xianzhi (Chaoyang County Gazetteer), comp. Zhou Tiejing and Sun Qingwei (1930), juan 35: 47a. 78 DMDY, 3: 4–5, 38. 79 Three of these relationships – between father and son, older and younger brothers, husband and wife – concern stabilizing family ties; the fourth relationship, between friends, connects horizontally across families; and the fifth, between subject and monarch, links the family to the state. 80 MDNJ, 11: 29. 81 DMDY, 4: 134. 82 MDNJ, 10: 6, 12: 24. 83 DMDY, 4: 151. 84 MDNJ, 2: 41, 4: 27. 85 Note that these materials are from a time (1936) before the war on the mainland. 86 DMDY, 4: 221–23. 87 DMDY, 4: 97. 88 The Hanyu Da Cidian quotes passages from the representative texts in which these categories occur: the first can be found in the Yijing, the second and third in the Mengzi, the fourth in the Xiaojing, lizhi in the Hou Hanshu, liye in the Hanji, and zhizhi in the Liji. 89 See Homi Bhabha on enunciation: ‘The reason a cultural text or system of meaning cannot be sufficient unto itself is that the act of cultural enunciation –

212



the place of utterance – is crossed by the difference of writing. … It is this difference in the process of language that is crucial to the production of meaning and ensures, at the same time, that meaning is never simply mimetic or transparent’ (Bhabha 1994: 36). 90 DMDY, 4: 90. 91 DMDY, 4: 94. 92 DMDY, 4: 138. 93 For patrilineal discourse, see Furth 1990: 187–211, and Mann 1997. To be sure, the recent work of Susan Mann and others has shown that the high moralism confining women to the home was a consequence of the Confucian ‘classical revival’ of the eighteenth century, and should not be viewed as an eternal feature of imperial society (ibid.: 22–31). This work has also shown that, despite all the rhetoric and measures designed to confine women to the home, there was still a great deal of physical mobility among women in late imperial society. 94 Furth 1990. 95 MDNJ, 11: 30. 96 DMDY, 4: 53. 97 Takizawa 1937: 94–95. 98 DMDY, 4: 185. 99 DMDY, 4: 134–35. 100 Song Ruohua c. 780 (1936). 101 DMDY, 4: 181. 102 DMDY, 4: 137. 103 Michel Foucault introduces the idea of ‘games of truth’: ‘what I have tried to maintain for many years, is the effort to isolate some of the elements that might be useful for a history of truth. Not a history that would be concerned with what might be true in the fields of learning, but an analysis of the “games of truth”, the games of truth and error through which being is historically constituted as experience’ (Foucault 1990: 6–7). 104 DMDY, 4: 140. 105 DMDY, 4: 139. A Mrs Zhu recalled being so driven by anxiety when her stepmother arrived after her mother’s death that she wore out fifteen pairs of shoes. Later she realized that her stepmother was not unkind and she herself had been unfilial. So in order to make up, she set up a business together with her stepmother and her selfish feelings have dissolved; DMDY, 4: 130. 106 DMDY, 4: 188. 107 DMDY, 4: 231. 108 DMDY, 4: 231. 109 DMDY, 4: 181–82. 110 DMDY, 4: 227–28. 111 DMDY, 4: 219. 112 DMDY, 4: 220. 113 DMDY, 4: 236. 114 ‘Strategically’, that is, in Foucault’s sense of the ‘games of truth’. 115 Meng Yue 1993b: 118. 116 Yang 1999: 44–46. 117 Shao Dan, ‘Gender in the Construction and Deconstruction of Manchoukuo’, unpublished paper, 2001: 5–6. 118 Stephenson 2000: chs 6 and 7. 7 Between Sovereignty and Capitalism: the Historical Experiences of Migrant Chinese 1 See, for instance, Chin 2000. 2 Pan 1999: 61–62; Duara 2003: 44.

Notes

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

35 36 37 38

Mei 1979. Skinner 1995: 58–61. Mackie and Coppell 1976: 9. Boli-Bennett and Meyer 1978. Agamben 1998: 17–18. Agamben distinguishes his position from that of Antonio Negri on the question of the relationship of constituting power and sovereignty. Negri suggests that constituting power is radically distinguished from sovereign power because the latter (which becomes an ontological category) marks the end of the creative freedom possessed by constituting power (Hardt and Negri 2000). Agamben avers that since the ‘ban-structure’ or power of interdiction is original to sovereign power, then perhaps there is no radical difference between it and the constituting power (Agamben 1998). As I understand it, sovereign power has to historically reconstitute itself, and does so by producing new ban-structures (creating new internal others). Seen as historical process, sovereign power cannot but be a constituting power. Ngai 2004. Fong Yue Ting v. United States, Supreme Court Reporter Vol. 13 (15 May 1893): 1016. Many of the documents in this section can be found in the source book (Kuhn 1998). United States Senate: Report of the Select Committee to Investigate Chinese Immigration (1876–77): 41. Lydon 1985: 117–18; Zolberg 1997: 134. Memorial of the Senate of California to the Congress of the United States, 1877: 6. Ibid.: 6–7. United States Senate: Report of the Select Committee to Investigate Chinese Immigration (1876–77): 27. Ibid.: 93–97. United States Senate: Report of the Select Committee to Investigate Chinese Immigration (1876–77): 667. Ibid.: 37; Lydon 1985: 117. Supreme Court Reporter 1893, 13: 1030. Hsu 2000: 75. Ibid.: 54, 68; Mei 1979: 116. Hsu 2000: 54, 88; Lydon 1985: 4. McKeown 2003: 401. Hsu 2000: 136, 127. Pan 1999: 60–61; 172–73. Skinner 1995: 50–63. Suryadinata 1993: 101–03. Mackie and Coppell 1976: 6–7. Hu Hanmin 1964: 475–77; Kwee 1936–39 (1969): 11. Lombard and Salmon 1994: 120, 128–29. Kwee 1936–39 (1969): 17. Ibid.: 6. Ibid.: 17–18, 62–63. In 1910, the Dutch also responded to the Chinese nationality law of 1909 by declaring the category of Dutch ‘subjects’, which included persons born in the colony of parents who were domiciled there. In practice, Chinese governments did not give up the claim of Chinese citizenship among Perankans until the Sino– Indonesian Treaty abolishing dual nationality in 1960 (Mackie and Coppell 1976: 9). Kwee 1936–39 (1969): 33–52. Ibid.: 6 n.13. Ibid.: 24–26. Suryadinata 1993: 48–50; Willmott 1960: 250–55.


3 4 5 6 7 8

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214


39 Suryadinata 1993: 39. 40 Kwee 1997: 26. 41 Ibid.: 46–47. 8 Critics of Modernity in India and China


* This is a revised version of an essay that first appeared in Duara, Prasenjit, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995. 1 Stocking 1987: 20. 2 Ogata 1984. 3 Schwartz 1976: 4. 4 Furth 1976: 39–41. 5 Ibid.: 31–32; see also Chang Hao 1987: 112, 150. 6 Hay 1970: 137–40. 7 Ibid.: 323–24. 8 Mast and Saywell 1974: 98. 9 K’ang Yu-wei 1958: 142–43. 10 Chang Hao 1987: 28–30. 11 K’ang Yu-wei 1958: 41. 12 Chang Hao 1987: 21–65. 13 Cited by Furth 1976: 41. 14 Alitto 1979: 200. 15 Ibid.: 206. 16 Ibid.: 84. 17 Ray 1975: 14–15. 18 Ahmed 1975: 99. 19 Raychaudhuri 1988: 203. 20 Ibid.: 8. 21 Chatterjee 1986: 73–79. 22 Nehru actually develops a variation upon the Hegelian progression of the universal ‘spirit of the age’, which the modern Indian nation must once again realize. 23 Nehru 1960: 121–28. 24 Chatterjee 1986. 25 Nandy 1983. 26 Gandhi 1938: 24–27, 44–45. 27 Ibid.: 68–70. 28 Iyer 1973: 253–60. 29 Chatterjee 1986: 92. 30 Wakeman 1973. 31 Ibid.: 324. 32 Chatterjee 1986: 99–100. 33 Lin 1979. 34 Lin argues further that, in the process of engaging in the totalistic attack, the 4th May revolutionaries reproduced the assumption of the very unity between culture and politics, seeking once again to legitimate culture by some other master narrative. 35 Dumont 1980. 36 Appadurai 1981: 51. 37 Ibid.: 74. 38 Washbrook 1976. 39 Van der Veer 2006: 23. 40 Duara 1988: Ch. 5. 41 Ibid.: 134–36. 42 Ibid.: 157.

Notes 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

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Nandy 1987: 155–58. Rudolph and Rudolph 1967: 158, 172. Nandy 1983. Ibid.: 100. Tanaka 1993: 19. Ibid.: Ch. 5. Hatada 1976: 10–15. Derrida, 1978: 282.

9 Visions of History, Trajectories of Power: China and India since Decolonization


* First appeared in Anthony Reid and Yangwen Zheng, eds. Negotiating Asymmetry. Singapore: NUS Press, 2008. 1 Watson 1992. 2 Duara 2003, Ch. 1. 3 Baruah 2005: 14–15. 4 Stuart-Fox 2003: 225. 5 Win 2004. 6 See the maps in Xie Bin (1936), which include within Chinese territory significant sections of Kazakhstan and North India. See also Kataoka 1984. 7 See, for instance, Esherick 2006: 229–60. 8 Mahajan 2002: 22. 9 See, for instance, Nakami 1984: 129–49. 10 Wang 2005: cf. 126 and passim. 11 Garver 2001: 117. 12 Tyabji 1972: 66–67. 13 Garver 2001: 238. 14 Stuart-Fox 2003: 158, 171, 199. 15 Garver 2001, 226–31. 16 UNCTAD 2007: 5. See also ‘India, China to achieve $20-b trade target ahead of schedule’ (Anon 2006) and ‘China’s trade growth with India exceeds its global trade growth’ (www.domain-b.com/economy/trade/20060214_growth.html). Also see ‘Explained: Sino-Indian ties in figures’ (www.rediff.com/news/2008/jan/10spec.htm) and ‘Sino-Indian trade jumps by 76.7 per cent in January’ (http://economictimes. indiatimes.com/Indicators/ Sino-Indian_trade_jumps_by_76.7_per_cent_in_Januar y/articleshow/2785897.cms) 17 Gu 2005. 18 www.rediff.com/news/2008/jan/10spec.htm 19 Ramesh 2005. 20 Anon. 2006; Ramesh 2005. ‘ONGC-CNPC wins bid for 38% in Syrian oil fields’, Times of India, New Delhi, 21 December 2005; Roy 2005. 21 Stuart-Fox 2003: 212–20. 22 Fernández Jilberto and Hogenboom 2007 (http://japanfocus.org/products/details/2611). 23 Garver 2001: 246–47. 24 Stuart-Fox: 212 25 Garver 2001: 258–70. See also Ramachandran 2006 26 Times of India, 26 September 2007. 27 See Ramachandran 2007. 28 Garver 2001: 370–77. 29 Vatikiotis 2006.

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DTB GWXSY

JTB

MDNJ

MGFH

MQX

MSSJ

SJSB WJY XSY

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Index

Aung San Suu Kyi 196 Australia 152, 209n.35 autarky: Cold War gives new nations space for 188; in Gandhi’s utopian society 175; Japanese strategic 47–8, 57; of Japan–Manchuria bloc 49, 50; new imperialism promotes 41; as response to heightened competition 44 authenticity: and misrecognition 31, 39; pedagogy of 145; regimes of authenticity 28, 31, 32, 36, 39, 75, 155, 156; in response to globalization 38, 75; sovereignty and personal 146; of spiritual culture 169; symbolic roles in 30–1; women as embodiment of 123, 128


Abe Iso- 32 Agamben, Giorgio 152, 155–6, 166, 214n.8 agrarianism (no-honshugi) 31, 32 Agreement between the Republic of India and the People’s Republic of China on the Trade and Intercourse between the Tibet Region of China and India (1954) 191, 192 Ahmed, Jalal Ali 198 Ahn, Yonsoon 67 Alexeiev, Basil 92 Alitto, Guy S. 171 Amaterasu 29, 30, 51 Anderson, Benedict 8, 21, 101, 102 Andrews, C. F. 182 anti-imperialist nationalism 33–5; at Bandung conference 61; in China 33– 5, 108; class nationalism in 108; Communists develop full-blown version of 31, 34; emergence of 24–5, 41–2; of Ishihara 72–3; and minzokushugi 33; of Nehru 186 Appadurai, Arjun 178 Apter, David 14 area studies model 60–1 Arendt, Hannah 44, 45 arranged marriage 9, 132, 138 Arrighi, Giovanni 3, 43, 57 ASEAN+6 197 Asia: after Deng Xiaoping 194–9; First Asian Relations Conference 188; see also East Asia; pan-Asianism; South Asia; Southeast Asia Asian Development Bank 72 Asianism 64 Asian Socialist Conferences 189 Asia–Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) 72

Babas 153, 161 Bai, Mrs 141 Baimaonü (The White Haired Girl) 96 Baima temple 85, 87 Balibar, Etienne 3, 104, 208n.23 Bandung conference (1955) 61, 189, 192 Bangladesh 196 Baohuanghui (Protect the Emperor Society) 105, 162 baojia 54 Bee, Frederic 158 ‘Beijing University and Women Students’ (Shengjing Shibao editorial) 132 Beiyang Navy 67 Bengali women 121–2 Bengal Renaissance 171–2 Bhabha, Homi 212n.89 bhakti 181 Bhutan 190, 191 Bingdian (Freezing Point) (journal) 66

238

The Global and Regional in China’s Nation-Formation CCP see Communist Party of China (CCP) Central America 56 Central Asia, secret mapping of 7 centralizers 110–11 Chamberlain, Joseph 44 Changbaishan, Mount 75 Chang Hao 170 chaste widows and virtuous wives, cult of 122, 131, 132 Chatterjee, Partha 121, 174, 176 Chattopadhyay, Bankim Chandra 172–3 Chen, Eugene 165 Chen, Mrs 141–2, 144 Cheng, Weikun 123 Chenghuang 88 Chen Shou 82 Chen Xiaomei 68 Chiang Kai-shek 128, 165 Chiang Kai-shek, Mrs (Song Meiling) 118, 128–9 Children of Mixed Blood (Hunxie er) (Shi Jun) 134 China: anti-Japanese demonstrations in 37, 67; capitalist economic transformation in 37, 188, 195; China-centered history 5, 61; closing to outside world 68; colonial ideology absent in 182; in comparative perspective 149–99; competition with Japan and Taiwan 75; criticism of modernization narrative in 168–71, 177–8; ‘cultural’ 74; since decolonization 187–99; delinking policy of 194–5, 197, 198; after Deng Xiaoping 194–9; dualism between desire for global and local culture in 30, 63; East Asia before nation-states 21; egalitarianism and collectivism of socialist 36, 63; emigration to Manchukuo from 52; entry into world systems of nations sought by 62; after fall of socialism 2; future of Indian-Chinese relationship 197; globalization and history writing in 64–8; globalization in popular culture in 68–70; historical identities in 98– 103; how recent is the Chinese nation? 97–116; imperial state 15; India compared with 16, 167–99; Ishihara on future of 73; ‘kingly way’ ideal of 53; Koguryo conflict 67, 75; leadership of decolonizing world


Birla, house of the 176 Blood Lineage (Xiezu) (Dan Di) 134–5 Book of Rituals (Yili sangfuzhuan) 138 boundaries, hard and soft 111–15 Boxer Rebellion 65, 114–15 Brewer, David J. 158 Bright, Charles 200n.5 Britain: Chinese migration to colonies of 152, 161, 166; Communists on empire of 192; empire’s value for military competitive purposes 44; hegemonic power in nineteenth century 43; Hong Kong colony 51, 58; investment in India 45; Japan allocated fewer ships than 49; rule in India 173, 177, 178–9, 190; sterling zone 57, 58 British American Tobacco Company 132 Buddhism: critique of the state by 184; Guandi and 80, 82, 85, 91, 93, 94; Mongols favor 85; Morality Society seen as compatible with 139; Nichiren sect 22, 50; in sanjiaoheyi 53, 164 Burke, Edward 58 Burkert, Walter 81 Burlingame Treaty (1868) 156, 158 Burma 194, 196–7, 199 bushido- 31, 32, 47 Cai, grandmother 143 Caishen 84, 91–2 California 156, 157, 158 Canada, Chinese migration to 152 Cao Cao 82, 86, 89 capitalism: China’s capitalist transformation 37, 188; Cold War protects decolonizing nations from 63; Concordia Association as anti-capitalist 54; European states become dependent on 104; Gandhi and Mao challenge hegemony of 16; linear time and logic of 8, 12; migrants in 151, 156, 157; migrants objective tensions between nationalism and globalization 153–6; nation-state as in tension with 4, 7, 12; as product of competition for global resources 43; in world systems theory 4; see also globalization Capital Police Bureau 137 Catholic Church 157, 158, 184

Index

deterritorialized 73–4; globalization heightens 37; interwar protests against Japanese 26–7; narratives of 108–11; popular movements and 38; seen as modern phenomenon 98; in Southeast Asia 162; women channeled into public sphere by 123; see also May 4th Movement Chi You 82 cholera epidemic of 1943 93 Christianity 164, 179, 182 citizenship 104, 137, 157 civilizations: in Chinese social Darwinist narrative 108; discourse of multiple 42; in evolution of national subject in linear and progressive history 167–8 ‘civilizing mission’ 42, 168 Cixi, Empress Dowager 65 class: incorporating into the nation 108–9; working-class nationalism 31–2 cognitive globalization 6–7, 154 Cohen, Paul 5, 79 Cold War 35–6, 63, 188 Cold Water Ditch village (Shandong) 89 colonization: China as semi-colony 25; Chinese migrants in colonized societies 153, 166; colonized states become nation-states 153–4; Gandhi counters colonial ideology 181–2; Gandhi equates modernity with colonialism 182, 185; Japan escapes direct colonial rule 25; justification of 23–4; see also decolonization Communist Party of China (CCP): antiimperialist nationalism of 31, 34; Asian strategy of 193–4; as centralizers 110; class nationalism of 31, 108–9; historical structures used by 199; historicity of nation in ideological struggle with Kuomintang 106; on international law 191–2; in mobilizing ideology against Japanese imperialism 25; ‘modern’ women associated with 123–4; percentage of population in 54; resignification of peasant culture by 96; in territorial consolidation of nation-state 190; in United Front against Japan 27; on women 146 community: hard and soft boundaries in defining 111–15; imagined 8, 103


sought by 189; lexicon of hegemonic modernity in 27; major twentiethcentury historical problems of 1; mobilizes masses for social change 188; modern historiography in 29; non-conformity with modernization in 9–10; Pakistan alliance 193; Panchasheela doctrine of 191–2; the political encompasses religion in 177, 179–81; postcolonial agenda of 188– 9; quest for identity in 64; rapprochement with US 2; as semicolony 25; as Shina in to-yo-shi narrative 183; Sino-Japanese War of 1895 26, 67; socialist anti-imperialism in 35; Southeast Asian strategy of 193–4, 195, 197; Soviet-Chinese debate about Chinese history 62–3; split with Soviet Union 34, 61; state socialism of 34–5; territorial consolidation of nation-state 190–4; ‘three revolutionary climaxes’ in 65; trade with India 195, 197; trade with Japan 75; tribute system 22, 72, 99, 154, 189; unequal treaties renegotiated by 42; ‘walking on two legs’ foreign policy of 194, 196; war with India of 1962 61, 192–3; Westphalian-type Panchasheela model of international relations of 187; woman as figure of ‘tradition within modernity’ 117–30; see also Chinese diaspora; Chinese nationalism; Communist Party of China (CCP); Kuomintang (KMT); Han Chinese; Hong Kong; Manchuria; Taiwan China National Petroleum Corporation 195 ‘Chindia’ 195 Chinese diaspora 151–66; Chinese labor in USA 156–9; context of Chinese migration 152–3; in ‘cultural China’ 74; Encyclopedia of Overseas Chinese 74; foreign investment in China 73; Greater China connects with 37; number of Chinese smuggled out of China annually 151; Peranakans in the Indies 160–5, 166 Chinese exclusion laws 156–7 Chinese nationalism: anti-imperialist 33–5, 108; anti-Japanese demonstrations of 2005 37, 67; in Chinese diaspora 153;

239

240

The Global and Regional in China’s Nation-Formation Daoism 53, 82–3, 91, 164 Datong (Great Unity) 142, 147 Datongbao 132, 133 debt bondage 158, 160 decolonization: decolonizing histories in China and India 61–4; early period of 187–9; Panchasheela as doctrine for 191 deconstruction 207n.58 deities: Song canonization of 84; see also Guandi (Guan Yu) delinking policy 194–5, 197, 198 Deng Xiaoping 194–9 Derozio, Henry Vivien 172, 173 Derrida, Jacques 207n.58 developmental state 25, 38, 52, 57 Dewey, John 169 difference: and boundaries between communities 112; fetishizing national 27–31; and hegemony 13, 31–3; in national identity formation 107–11; see also ethnicity; religion Dikötter, Frank 27 Ding Ling 109 Dirlik, Arif 129 ‘discent’ 111–12, 116 Discovery of India (Nehru) 174 discursive meaning 107–8 Doihara Kenji 49 Domestic Affairs Study Society 129 Dumont, Louis 177, 178 Dutch East Indies 161–5, 166 Du Weiming 74


competition: capitalism as product of competition for global resources 43; Cold War protects decolonizing nations from 63; within East Asia 75; in European state system 23, 104, 187; Gandhi seeks alternatives to 175; nationalism in intensifying 44–5; in nation-state system 33, 198 Concordia Association 54–5; control, surveillance, discipline, and mobilization by 57–8; in mobilizing and reforming the family 136; Tachibana as leader of 137; ‘tradition within modernity’ favored in 133 Confucianism: anti-Confucian nationalist women 119; Confucianizing Guandi 86–7, 89, 90– 1; cosmopolitanism of 106, 114; culturalism of 99, 105; in defining East Asia 21, 22; in deterritorialized Chinese nationalism 74; the family in 123; Japanese use rhetoric of in Manchukuo 51; Manchu patronage of 113; modernizers of late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries 100; neo-Confucian heritage and alternative modernity 72; neotraditional critique of modernity of 170–1; of New Life Movement 31, 128–9; versus redemptive societies on women 140, 213n.93; in sanjiaoheyi 53, 164; Tiong Hoa Hwe Koan propagates 162, 163, 164 constitutional monarchists 105 cosmopolitanism 106, 114, 209n.33 credit-ticket system 153, 160 Crocker, Charles 158 Crossley, Pamela 114 Cultural Revolution 108–9, 191, 192, 193, 194 Cultural Rule 48, 49 culture: in alternative discourse to linear history of civilization 167–8; attempts to separate politics from 169, 170, 173, 174, 177; Confucian culturalism 98–9, 101, 105; cultural nexus 13; dualism between desire for global and local 30, 63; in to-yo-shi concept 29, 183 Culture Power and the State (Duara) 13 culture-state 102 Dai Jitao 170 Dairen Women’s Times 132 Dan Di 134–5, 211n.65

East Asia: dialectic of statist and popular nationalism in 35–7; East Asian modern 27; Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere 33, 50, 51, 76, 182; historical narratives and transnationalism in 60–76; imperialism and nation-state in 23–5; before nation-states 21–3; relative autonomy of 37; repeatedly constituted as a region 5–6; women and patriarchal regimes in interwar 117–47; see also China; Japan; Korea East Asian Community 50 East Asian Economic Council 72 East Asian League 50 education: Japanese model of girls’ 120–1; Liang Shuming on Westernized 171; Lu Xun’s ‘Soap’ depicts modern girls’ 124; Tiong Hoa Hwe Koan on reform of 162, 163;

Index

Manchukuo 135–9; women’s importance to 109, 123, 127, 130, 137 Fanon, Frantz 198 Fan Wenlan 62 Farriss, Nancy 11 federalists 110–11 feminism: feminist filiality 143; Gandhi’s totalizing vision and 185; Japanese ‘New Women’ 32; Japanese women’s movement 127–8; in Kuomintang 128; tension between nationalism and, in Xiao Hong’s The Field of Life and Death 135 Feng, Director 138, 141 Feng Guifen 110 fengjian 110–11 Feng Xiaocai 65 Feng Youlan 171 Feuchtwang, Stephan 87 Field of Life and Death, The (Xiao Hong) 135 filiality 86, 138, 140, 143–4 financial autonomy 141, 142 First Asian Relations Conference (1947) 188 Fitzgerald, John 14 Five Nationalities, Republic of 4, 16, 114, 115, 198 Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence (Panchasheela) 191–2, 196, 197–8 Flath, James 66–7 foot-binding 122, 131 forced marriage 133 Foreign Miners’ tax 158 Forster, E. M. 182 Foucault, Michel 14, 126–7, 155, 210n.26, 213n.103 France: Chinese migration to colonies of 152; developmental client states of 57; empire’s value for military competitive purposes 44; French Revolution and territorial sovereignty 104; Herder on cultural imperialism of Enlightenment in 167 Fukuoka prefecture 71–2 Funü fuwutuan (Women’s Service League) 129 Funü shenghuo gaijinhui (Women’s Life Improvement Society) 129–30 Funü Zazhi (journal) 122 Furth, Charlotte 169, 170 Fu Sinian 29


‘virtuous and chaste girls’ schools’ 122, 125, 131, 136, 137, 138, 141; Wang Fengyi on women’s 137; Wang Jingwei on girls’ 119, 120 Elliot, Mark 114 Encyclopedia of Overseas Chinese (Pan) 74 ‘end of history’ thesis 3, 60 Enlightenment: Civilization associated with 42, 70; Gandhi’s opposition to 176; Herder’s alternative discourse to 167–8; and historical globalization hypothesis 6; on linear progressive history 12, 167; Maoism inspired by 198; May 4th Movement compared with 119; and religious critiques of the state 184; to-yo-shi as alternative to universalism of 29; world system built on ideas of 4 environmentalism 38, 177, 185 eras 9 ethnicity: civic territorial versus ethnic/ cultural nationalism and nation-states 74, 101; ‘concord of nationalities’ in Manchukuo 33, 53–4; ethnocentrism 98, 100–1, 105; statist versus ethnic nationalism 32–3; and territorial sovereignty 104; see also race Europe: Chinese pressured to release labor by 152; historical narrative of progress in 61; recovery from World War II 60; territorial sovereignty in state system of 104; Westphalian system 21, 23, 187–8, 191, 198; see also colonization; Britain; Enlightenment; France European Union 58 evolutionism 44–5, 105, 167, 168, 170, 171 von Falkenhausen, Lothar 67

241

Falungong 9, 12 family, the: governmentality of 126–7; Japanese family-state 51–2, 128, 136; Manchukuo Household Statistical Survey Reports 136; May 4th Movement’s attack on 109; Morality Society as mediator between state and 137; Morality Society family research groups 137; in Morality Society morality seminars 138; nuclear 9, 58, 127, 133, 136; Shengjing Shibao coverage of 131–2; state, family, and woman in

242

The Global and Regional in China’s Nation-Formation Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere 33, 50, 51, 76, 182 Greater Japan Federation of Women’s Associations (Dainihon rengofujinkai) 130 Great Leap Forward 35, 188 Great Unity (Datong) 142, 147 Great Unity, The (Kang Youwei) 170 Gu, Mrs 117–18, 147 Guandi (Guan Yu) 79–96; common features of myth of 81, 84; Confucianizing 86–7, 89, 90–1; Daoists adopt 82–3; earliest temple dedicated to 82, 85; elevated to same status as Confucius 85, 92; filial piety attributed to 86, 91, 93; as folk deity 83; genealogy discovered 86; as god of war 85, 92, 93; as god of wealth 83–4, 85, 86, 87, 89, 91–2; growing popularity in Ming and Qing dynasties 83; history of myth of 81–4; image superscribed to fit group circumstances 83–4; and imperial state 84–7; imperial title di awarded to 85, 88; loyalty attributed to 86, 89, 93, 94; Ming worship of 85; official temples to 85, 87; oral and written traditions as intertwined 102; original story of 81–2; as outlaw 86; in plague epidemic of 1894 93; in popular culture 88–94; in popular morality books 91; as protector of local communities 83, 87; as protector of merchants 83–4; as protector of monasteries and temples 82–3, 85, 89, 94; Qing superscription of 85–7, 89–94, 113; as representative of Chinese culture 88–9; in republican era 95–6; rural elite as patrons of 90; seeks instruction in Buddhism 80; and Spring and Autumn Annals 86, 91; stelae dedicated to 89; in Taiping rebellion 85, 92–3; Temple of Military Culture 87; Tudi contrasted with 88; in White Lotus rebellion 90; Yuan Shikai creates temple of military heroes devoted to 80 Guandi shengii tuzhi quanji (A Complete Collection of the Writings and Illustrations Concerning the Holy Deeds of Guandi) 85–6 Guan Yu see Guandi (Guan Yu) Gu Jiegang 29, 202n.36 guocui (national essence) school 169


Gallagher, John 40 Gandhi, Mahatma 174–7; allconsuming nature of vision of 185; anarchism of 175; as anti-modernist 176; assassination of 186; bhakti tradition employed by 181; colonial ideology countered by 181–2; History denied by 168, 176, 185; on industrialism 174–5; Mao compared with 16, 175–6; mass mobilization concept of 183–4; on modern state 175; Nehru influenced by 186, 192; oppositional groups inspired by 176–7; preserves the local 184, 199; spirituality as foundation of nationalism of 169, 173; utopian society of 175, 188 Garon, Sheldon 128 Garver, John 193, 197 Gayle, Curtis A. 32–3 Geary Act (1892) 156–7 Gellner, Ernest 14, 101–2 gender 109 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade 57 Germany: Nazism 45, 50; regional bloc developed by 45 Gerth, Karl 128 Geyer, Michael 200n.5 Ghosh, Aurobindo 172, 182 von Glahn, Richard 79 globalization: Chinese nationalism as reaction to 37; in Chinese popular culture 68–70; cognitive 6–7, 154; commodification of the sign in 3; dialectic with misrecognition 38; East Asian nation-states adapt to 36–7; fall of socialism unleashes 2; historical globalization hypothesis 5–8; historical narratives affected by 60, 64–8; migrants objective tensions between nationalism and capitalist 153–6; modernization circulated by 9; nationalism as response to 74–5; versus national modernization paradigm 3, 5; nation-states as agents of 38, 154–5; socialist thought foresees 35; when it began 6 Goa 193 Gokhale, G. K. 173 governmentality 126–30, 155, 210n.26, 211n.28 Greater China 37

Index guohuo (national products) campaign 128 Gu Yanwu 101, 110

History 168, 176, 185; globalization and writing of 60, 64–8; historical narratives and transnationalism in East Asia 60–76; linear historical consciousness in East Asia 22–3, 28, 62; Mao’s progressive linear view of 175–6; modern historiography in East Asia 28–30; mythic versus historical change 79; professionalization of 60; public 66–7; reflects needs of the time 63; socialist linear 35, 63; in to-yo-shi concept 29, 183 History of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguozhi) (Chen Shou) 82 Hitonomichi 32 Hobsbawm, Eric 44, 65 Hong Kong: as British colony 51, 58; Communist Party’s relationship with 199; in ‘cultural China’ 74; foreign investment in China 73; migrant labor recruited in 158; relationship with South China 71; Yuan Weishi on textbooks from 66 Hoshina Kiyoji 132 Hou Lineage Camp village (Hebei) 91 Household Statistical Survey Reports 136 Hsu, Francis 93 Hsu, Madeline 159 Huang Clan Monthly 159 Huang Huajie 83, 92 Huang Zongxi 101 Hu Hanmin 162 Hunxie er (Children of Mixed Blood) (Shi Jun) 134 Hu Sheng 65


Hamashita Takeshi 72 Han Chinese: ethnic consciousness reaches its height 101, 114; in Five Nationalities 4, 114, 115, 198; in Greater China 37; Japanese historians underemphasize 29; Manchu-Han relations in Qing dynasty 113–15; Ming dynasty of 99; settlement in Manchuria 46, 151; in Sun Yat-sen’s nationalism 106; Wang Fuzhi contrasts Manchus and 100; Yellow Emperor as ancestor of 3, 74; in Zhang Binglin’s idea of nation 105 Hansen, Valerie 84 Harbin 131, 132 Hardt, Michael 99, 208n.6 Harrell, Stevan 11 Hawaii 152 Hay, Stephen 181 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 168 hegemony: and difference 13, 31–3; hegemonic modernity 8–12, 27; nationalism as product of European 43; nationalist and capitalist versus earlier 13; in superscription of symbols 94–5; in Westphalian system 187 Herder, Johann Gottfried 167–8 Heshang (River Elegy) (documentary series) 68, 70, 76 Hesitation (Panghuang) (Lu Xun) 10 Himalayan region 189, 190, 192, 193 Hindi–Cheeni bhai-bhai 192 Hindi film industry (Bollywood) 11 Hind Swaraj (Gandhi) 174 Hinduism: bhakti 181; Chattopadhyay on 172–3; encompasses the political in India 177–9; Gandhi and nineteenth-century renaissance of 181; Roy on 172 Hindu nationalism 122, 173, 174 Hirohito 51 Historical Association 33, 64 historical globalization hypothesis 5–8, 12 history: China-centered 5, 61; decolonizing histories 61–4; dialect of present and past 106; ‘end of history’ thesis 3, 60; evolution of national subject in linear and progressive 167; ‘from below’ 65; Gandhi denies

243

iconoclasm 109, 164, 165, 172, 177, 181 identities: historical Chinese 98–103; meaning and national 107–11; modern nation-state system and historical 103–6; unified subjectivity 102–3; see also ethnicity; identity movements; religion identity movements: as decentralized 64–5; fall of socialism unleashes 2–3; popular nationalism and 38; in prenational East Asia 23 imagined community 8, 103 imperialism: American 56; capitalist 7; as federalism 58; of ‘free nations’ (‘new’) 40–59; of ‘free trade’ 40–1, 203n.1; and historical globalization hypothesis 5, 7; interwar 41–6;

244

The Global and Regional in China’s Nation-Formation Islam: critique of the state by 184; Islamism 198; see also Muslims Israel 106, 111 Itagaki Seishiro 49 Japan: absence of direct colonial rule in 25; Chinese anti-Japanese demonstrations 37, 67; Chinese geopolitical influence hampered by 189; civilian government toppled 31, 47; Cold War historical writing in 63–4; competition with China and Korea 75; dualism between desire for global and local culture in 30; East Asia before nation-states 21; ‘family state’ model of 51–2, 128, 136; Fukuoka prefecture in Yellow Sea economic region 71–2; gender and environmental movements in 38; in global market economy 36; historical narrative of progress in 61; India seen as counterweight to China by 197; in intra-Asian maritime trade 22; investment in Korea 45; lexicon of hegemonic modernity in 27; Marxist academic historiography in 61; mediates global ideas and practices for China 4; mixed origins theory of 49, 51, 58; the Modern Girl in 123, 127, 128; modern historiography in 28–9; narratives of Asia of 72–3; nationalism in mobilizing resources for war 43; ‘New Women’ 32; quest for identity in 64; racism experienced by 49; recovery from World War II 60; restorationists and revolutionary nationalists 32–3; Russo-Japanese War 26, 34, 38, 46; Sino-Japanese War of 1895 26, 67; textbooks without acknowledgment of atrocities 75; trade with China 75; unequal treaties renegotiated by 37–8, 42; woman as figure of ‘tradition within modernity’ 117–30; women barred from political life in 120; women’s mass organizations of 1920s and 1930s 130; see also Japanese imperialism; Japanese nationalism; Manchukuo Japanese imperialism: Chinese resistance to 177; consolidates military, political, and cultural domination 38; contradictory nature of 40, 43; Cultural Rule policy 48, 49;


nationalism becomes driving force behind 44, 187; nation-states associated with 43; pan-Asianism as expressed in 49; socialist antiimperialism 35; see also antiimperialist nationalism; colonization; Japanese imperialism Imperial Maritime Customs 6, 7 India: British investment in 45; Burma policy of 196–7, 199; China attempts to confine to South Asia 187; China compared with 16, 167–99; China on Himalayan claims of 192; China’s delinking policy and 194–5; civil society’s expanding role in 199; cognitive globalization in 154; in colonial ideology 181–2; criticism of modernization narrative in 171–9; since decolonization 187–99; First Asian Relations Conference in 188; follows China in several respects 199; future of Indian-Chinese relationship 197; Hindi–Cheeni bhai-bhai 192; leadership of decolonizing world sought by 189; nationalism 173; nuclear program of 188, 193; postcolonial agenda of 188; realpolitik of 192–3, 196; religion encompasses the political in 177–9; Sikh religious revivalism 180; Southeast Asian influence of 188, 189, 193; tension between ancient and modern nationhood in 106; territorial consolidation of nationstate 190–4; territorial sovereignty not sought in 104; trade with China 195, 197; traditional woman in nationalism of 121–2; war with China of 1962 61, 192–3 Indian Oil and Natural Gas Corporation 195 Indian Overseas Department 193 Indonesia 161–5, 191, 194, 195 industrialism 174, 176 Inoue Ichii 83 intercultural marriage 134, 146 International Monetary Fund 57 “In the Wine Shop” (Lu Xun) 10 Investment Fund for Economic and Social Development 44 Iraq 58 Ishihara Shintaro 72–3 Ishiwara Kanji 49–50

Index

national studies 61; Japanese investment in 45; Koguryo conflict 67, 75; lexicon of hegemonic modernity in 27; March 1919 movement 25, 42, 48; modern historiography in 29–30; nationalism as response to Japanese colonialism in 26; seen as ‘lifeline’ of Japanese nation 46; statist versus ethnopopular nationalism in 32; see also South Korea Krasner, Stephen 202n.27 Kuomintang (KMT): as centralizers 110; at First Asian Relations Conference 188; and Guandi myth 95; historicity of nation in ideological struggle with Communists 106; legal approach to international recognition of 191; Manchukuo’s creation opposed by 26–7; in mobilizing ideology against Japanese imperialism 25; ‘modern’ women killed by 123–4; segregated women’s organizations utilized by 128; Taiwanese nationalism ignored by 36, 63; in territorial consolidation of nation-state 190; in United Front against Japan 27; and working-class nationalism 32; see also New Life Movement Kwantung Peninsula 26, 46, 49–50 Kwee Tek Hoay 162–5


economic bloc built in 1930s 45–6; geopolitical context of 25–7; Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere 33, 50, 51, 76, 182; historical forces shaping 40; ideology’s effect in China 183; in Manchuria 46–50; new imperialist ideas in 47–9; northeast Asia seen as outer zone of defense by 46; pan-Asianism in 42, 43, 45, 48– 50; race and colonialism of 8 Japanese nationalism: Meiji state-led 25; neo-nationalists on China 73; origins of 42–3; takes on life of its own 47; women channeled into public sphere by 123 Japan That Can Say No (Ishihara) 72 Jiang Taigong 85 Jiaozhou 26 Jia Zhangke 69, 70, 74, 75, 76 Jin Hua 212n.70 Jin invasion 98–9, 100 jinxin 138, 143 jiyu-minken undo- movement 24 Judge, Joan 120

245

Kang Youwei: in Chinese nationalism in Southeast Asia 162, 164; concubines of 67; Confucian culturalism of 100, 105, 209n.32; critique of modernity of 170–1; evolutionism of 170; Lu Xun on 124; Mao influenced by 175; as Morality Society president 124, 171; in 100 Days of Reform movement 162, 169; in revolutionary narrative of history 65; ultimate aim of 170–1; on women’s issues 122, 124 Karl, Rebecca 32 Kashmir 190, 191, 194 ‘kingly way’ (wangdao) 53, 137, 147 Kipling, Rudyard 182 KMT see Kuomintang (KMT) Koguryo 67, 75 Koiso Kuniaki 47–8 Kokand, khanate of 99 kokuminshugi 32 kokutai (national authenticity) 33 Komagome Takeshi 58 Koo, Wellington 191 Korea: Cultural Rule in 48, 49; as developmental state 25, 38, 45; East Asia before nation-states 21; emigration to Manchukuo from 52; historical attention focused on

Lane, Franklin 56 Langlois, John D., Jr 100 Laroui, Abdullah 108 Larson, Wendy 109 Latin America 56, 121, 184, 204n.42 Lattimore, Owen 130–1 Lebrun, Albert 44 Lee, Haiyan 14, 67, 96 Leibold, James 74 Lei Feng 96 Levenson, Joseph 98, 169 Li, Mrs 143 Liang Qichao 24, 29, 169, 170 Liang Shuming: on culture and politics as inseparable 170, 173; denies comparability while accepting progress 168; as evolutionist 171; Gandhi compared with 176, 184; marginalization of legacy of 183, 184; neotraditionalist critique of modernity of 170; revival of interest

246

The Global and Regional in China’s Nation-Formation Manchuria: Chinese women in 130–1; Han Chinese settle in 46, 151; Han immigration banned 46, 113, 151; Japanese imperialism in 46–50; Japanese investment in 46, 52; new imperialist ideas in 47–8; Zhang Zuolin’s alliance with Japanese in 46– 7; see also Manchukuo Manchurian Incident 47, 50, 203n.17 Manchus: Concordia Association represents 54; Confucian modernizers and 100; in Five Nationalities 4, 114, 115; Japanese historians emphasize 29; Manchu-Han relations in Qing dynasty 113–15; in People’s Republic 114; in republican era 114; seen as ‘barbarian’ invaders 22; Sun Yat-sen on Confucian cosmopolitanism and 106 Mann, Susan 213n.93 Mao Zedong: on anti-imperialism 34; commodification of symbols of 3; Enlightenment as inspiration for 198; Gandhi compared with 16, 175–6; increases China’s prestige in decolonizing world 186; progressive linear view of history of 175–6; and ‘red nostalgia’ craze 64; in sinification of Marxism 109 March 1919 movement 25, 42, 48 marriage: arranged 9, 132, 138; forced 133; intercultural 134, 146; single living 143; Tiong Hoa Hwe Koan provides alternative ceremony 163–4; weddings in Manchukuo 137 martial arts 12 Maruyama Masao 22–3, 32–3, 64 Marxism 61, 64, 109, 167, 174, 175 masculine virtues 138 Matsuoka Yosuke 48 Matsusaka Yoshihisa 47, 48 Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (Mehta) 11 May 4th Movement: anti-imperialist nationalism of 42; Bengal Renaissance compared with 171; collapse of cultural-political unity in rise of 177, 181; Derozians compared with 172; iconoclasm of 109, 172, 177, 181; intellectual vision versus actuality of 65; nationalist protests against Japanese of 26, 42; Sun Yat-sen attacks cosmopolitanism of 209n33;


in 184; rural reconstruction institutes of 171 Li Dazhao 108 Li Jinghan 83 Lin Yu-sheng 177, 178, 215n.34 Li Shaogeng 51 lishen 138, 142–3 Liu, Lydia 109, 135 Liu, Mrs 139, 143–4, 145 Liu, Ms 143 Liu Bei 80, 82 Liu Shipei 169 Li Xianglan (Ri Koran) 146 liye 138, 142 lizhi 138, 139, 144 Lombard, Denys 162 London Naval Conference 49 ‘lost territories’ 190, 196 Luo Guanzhong 83 Lu Xun 10, 124–5, 168 Lytton Commission 46

Macao 199 McKeown, Adam 159 McNeill, William 104 Malinowski, Bronislaw 81 Manchu Association 114 Manchukuo: brothels taxed in 131; Chinese opposition to creation of 26–7; common East Asian cultural repertoire in state-building in 31; Concordia Association 54–5, 57; ‘concord of nationalities’ in 33, 53–4; as developmental state 25, 38, 52, 57; establishment of 47; as exploited society 57; ‘family state’ imagery in 136; forces for autonomy in 204n.52; Household Statistical Survey Reports 136; immigration to 52; investments and resources flow into 41; Japanese violence in 52; legitimacy claims of 53–5; modern technologies of control and surveillance in 57–8; ‘new’ (‘free nations’) imperialism in 40, 45, 50–5; as polarized 55; police force of 52–3; press autonomy curtailed in 133; redemptive societies 53, 55, 57, 147; seen as break in Japanese imperial policy 47; state, family, and woman in 135–9; in wartime Japanese empire 58; woman as representing ‘tradition with modernity’ in 135–6; women in 130–47

Index

Manchuria 50, 55; modernization theory 5, 8, 10, 16, 61, 97–8; national modernization paradigm 2, 3, 5, 60; in new (‘free state’) imperialism 41, 43; in post–World War II nationalist historiography 61; Tachibana on Eastern values and 54; women inserted into program of 137; Yuan Weishi on Chinese 66 Mongols: Concordia Association represents 54; conservative historians on descent from Yellow Emperor of 74; in Five Nationalities 4, 114, 115; independence movement of 115; invasion of twelfth century 98–9; Japanese historians emphasize 29; Manchus contrasted with 113; seen as ‘barbarian’ invaders 22; temple to Guandi undergoes revival under 85; and territorial consolidation of nation-state 190 Monnet, Jean 58 Monroe Doctrine 56 Morality Society 136–9; family research groups of 137; honors virtuous school-building elite 131; Kang Youwei as president of 124, 171; as mediator between state and family 137; membership of 53; morality seminars of 138; personal reminiscence of 117–18; women’s personal narratives of 138–45 museums 66–7 Muslims: Concordia Association represents 54; in East Indies 162, 164; in Five Nationalities 4, 115; in Nehru’s view of Indian history 174; and territorial consolidation of Indian nation-state 190; see also Islam myth: as continuous and discontinuous 81; defined 81; discontinuous nature of 80–1; historical versus mythic change 79; as medium of communication in imperial China 79


underpinnings of imperial system attacked by 169; women in 109, 119, 123–4, 133 Mazu 113 meaning, in national identity 107–11 media: commercialization after collapse of socialism 3; Communists penetrate popular society through cultural 96; in emergence of nationalism 44; in growing popularity of Guandi 83; nationalism in Japanese 47; public history 66–7 Mehta, Suketu 12 ‘Memorial on Regulations for Early Training Schools and for Education on Household Matters’ 121 Mencius 163, 171, 174 Meng Yue 146 migrant Chinese see Chinese diaspora Millward, James 79 Ming dynasty: closing of China to world during 68; emigration during 152; Guandi’s popularity during 83, 85; Ming-Qing transition 22, 100; and universalism 99 Ministry of Culture and Education 133 minzoku narrative 64 minzokushugi 32, 33 misrecognition 28, 30, 31, 35, 38, 39, 63, 155, 202n.27, 206n.36 Mito school 22 Mizoguchi Yuzo 72 Modern Girl, the 123, 127, 128 modernity: Chinese intellectuals’ commitment to narrative of 184–5; critics of Indian and Chinese 167–99; East Asian modern 27; Gandhi as anti-modernist 176; Gandhi equates colonialism with 182, 185; hegemonic 8–12, 27; historical factors in 13, 15; nationalism sees itself as modern phenomenon 105; neo-Confucian heritage and alternative East Asian 72; woman as figure of ‘tradition within’ 117–47; see also modernization modernization: criticism of modernization narrative in China 168–71, 177–8; criticism of modernization narrative in India 171–9; East Asian nationalism as response to Japanese 26, 48; as hegemonic project in linear time 9, 11; Japanese military encourage in

247

Nandy, Ashish 174, 181–2 narratives: community composition shaped by 112; of discent 111–12; historical narratives and transnationalism in East Asia 60–76; in producing meanings of the nation 108–11

248

The Global and Regional in China’s Nation-Formation global capitalism 36–7; foreign ideas in formation of 28; Gandhi and Mao challenge hegemony of 16; historical identities and modern system of 103–6; imperialism associated with 43; and imperialism in East Asia 23–5; linear time and logic of 8, 12; migrant communities in 151; national integration 61–2; as nationalism’s goal 33, 97–8; as not declining in face of globalization 7; as not a self-sufficient system 16; novelty of 105; power of history writing of 60; rights associated with 24; socialism retains nation form 34, 35, 62; sovereign authority of 27–8, 154–5; transnationalism and territoriality of 70–2; Westphalian system 21, 23, 187–8, 191, 198; world system sanctions as only legitimate form of polity 103 Nazism 45, 50 Negri, Antonio 99, 208n.6, 214n.8 Nehru, Jawaharlal: as anti-imperialist 186; at Bandung conference 189, 192; on Chinese-Indian trade agreement of 1954 191; foreign policy criticized 192; Gandhi’s influence on 186, 192; in leadership of decolonizing world 186; narrative of modernization of 173–4, 188; narrative of the nation of 108; narrative of progress of 171; pacifism of 186 Nehru, Motilal 173 neocolonialism 41 neoliberalism 5, 7, 195, 198 Nepal 190, 191, 193, 196 New Asia (magazine) 170 New History (Xinshixue) (Liang Qichao) 29 New Life Movement 128–9; historical practices employed to produce new habits by 31; timeless past seen as embodied in 12; women’s associations in 128, 129–30 New Order 45 “New Year’s Sacrifice” (Lu Xun) 10 Ngai, Mai 156 Nichiren sect 22, 50 Nihonjinron 64 no-honshugi (agrarianism) 31, 32 non-aligned movement 186, 191 northern expedition (1926–27) 110


National Defense Women’s Association (Kokubo- fujinkai) 130 national essence (guocui) school 169 nationalism: ambiguity toward historicity of nation in 105–6; on authenticity 28; Central American 56; civic territorial versus ethnic/cultural 74, 101; class nationalism 108–9; in competition for global resources 24; defining goal of 33; deterritorialization of ideology of 70; dialectic of statist and popular 35–7, 38; as driving force behind imperialism 44, 187; dualism between desire for global and local culture in 30, 63; East Asian connectedness and 23; factors in emergence of 43–4; fall of socialism unleashes 2–3; fetishizing national difference 27–31; hegemony and difference in ideology of 31–3; Hindu 122, 173, 174; and historical globalization hypothesis 5; historical narratives of progress or modernization of 60; immanent conception of sovereignty of 63; imperialism and nation-state in East Asia 23–5; Indian 173; Korean 26; meaning in identity formation 107– 11; migrant communities and 151, 153–6; misrecognition of sovereignty by 28, 30, 155; in mobilizing resources for war 43–4; modular 21; nation-state formation as goal of 33, 97–8; power of history writing of 60; as relational identity 107; as response to globalization 74–5; sees itself as modern phenomenon 105; Southeast Asian indigenous 153; transnational ideals appealed to 103; variability of meaning in 13–14; on women 32, 122–3; see also anti-imperialist nationalism; Chinese nationalism; Japanese nationalism Nationality Law of 1909 154, 214n.34 Nationality Law of 1980 195 national modernization paradigm 3, 5 national products (guohuo) campaign 128 nation-states: as agents of globalization 38, 154–5; capitalism as in tension with 4, 7, 12; civic territorial versus ethnic/cultural 74, 101; colonized states become 153–4; as defining goal of nationalism 33; East Asia before 21–3; East Asian states adapt to

Index No to ieru Ajia (The Voice of Asia) (Ishihara) 73 nuclear family 9, 58, 127, 133, 136

Polanyi, Karl 36, 203n.50 Pomeranz, Kenneth 6 popular sovereignty 23, 24, 105 Portsmouth, Treaty of 46 post-structuralism 2 precipitation 14 prenatal care 122 print capitalism 102 progress: in Chinese socialist vision 34, 35; Enlightenment linear and progressive history 4, 8, 12, 15, 28, 60, 167; European romantics on 176; Herder’s reaction to 167; in historical narratives of new nation-states 30, 61; Mao on economic 175; in mobilization of the people 188; narrative of progress in Indian history 171; Zhang Taiyan denies 168 prostitution 131, 157, 159 Protect the Emperor Society (Baohuanghui) 105, 162 province-based nationalism 110 public service 140–2 Pu Yi 51, 141, 204n.27


Oath in the Peach Orchard 82 Oguma Eiji 51, 58 Ogyu Sorai 22–3 Okakura Tenshin 183 Okawa Shu-mei 49, 50 Omotokyo- 32 100 Days Reform movement 65, 162, 169 On New Democracy (Mao Zedong) 34 Ono, Kazuko 122 Open Door policy 56 Opium War 168 Order of Caucasians 157 Orientalism 172, 183 Ou Qujia 110

249

Pagden, Anthony 58 Pakistan 191, 193, 194 paleonyms, new historical 28 Pan, Lynn 74 pan-Asianism: of Concordia Association 54–5; Dai Jitao associates Sun Yat-sen with 170; Japanese discourse of 42, 43, 45, 48, 49–50; and ‘kingly way’ ideal 53; Li Xianglan (Ri Koran) in films promoting 146; in Shimoda’s educational theory 120–1; slippage in concept of brotherhood in 51; of Tagore 169–70 Panchasheela (Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence) 191–2, 196, 197–8 pan-Germanism 45 Panghuang (Hesitation) (Lu Xun) 10 pan-Slavism 45 ‘paper sons’ 159 Park, Sub 45 Parrini, Carl 56–7 Patel, Sardar 192 patriarchy, modern 121–6; in common cause with Manchukuo state 137; Dan Di’s critique of 135; governmentality and 126–30 Pearl River Delta 152, 159 Penny, Matthew 73 Peranakans 153, 160–5, 166 Perry, Elizabeth 11 Philippines 153, 161, 184 plague epidemic of 1894 93

Qianlong emperor 113–14, 115 qigong movement 12 Qing dynasty: boundary with Korean state 23; Communists on empire of 192; contemporary Chinese boundaries correspond to those of 100, 115; emigration during 152, 154; ethnocentric opposition to 100–1; Guandi’s growing popularity during 83; Manchu-Han relations in 113–15; Ming-Qing transition 22, 100; Nationality Law of 1909 154, 214n.34; reforms of 1902–9 62; superscription of Guandi during 85–7, 89–94, 113; and territorial consolidation of nation-state 190; tribute system 22, 72, 99, 154, 189, 190 questioning narratives 169

race: in Qianlong ideology 113–14, 115; in republican revolutionary ideology 110, 115; see also ethnicity; racism racism: of Boxer Rebellion 115; against Chinese migrants to US 157, 158; in colonialism 7–8; Ishihara on American 73; Japanese experience Western 49; of Japanese nationalism 43; Japanese nationalism as response to Western 42; of pan-Germanism 45

250

The Global and Regional in China’s Nation-Formation Sassen, Saskia 70–1 saturation 14 Schmid, Andre 23 Schmitt, Carl 155 Schneider, Michael 48 Schumpeter, Joseph 58 Schwartz, Benjamin 169 Scottish Enlightenment 167 self-determination 25, 26, 33, 54, 56 self-sacrificing woman: in common cultural historical reservoir 31; in Dan Di’s Blood Lineage 134; Japanese women’s associations and 130; in Lu Xun’s ‘Soap’ 124; in mobilizing and reforming the family 136; Morality Society women draw inspiration from 140; New Life Movement on 129; as representative of ‘tradition within modernity’ 127; scholarship on 210n.2; Shengjing Shibao on 132; Wang Jingwei on 119–20, 121 Self-Strengthening movement 65, 168 Shanghai 31, 37, 75–6 Shang Shu 100 Shao Ge 212n.70 Shengjing Shibao 120, 131–2 Shijie (The World) (film) 69–70, 74, 75, 76 Shi Jun 134 Shimoda Utako 120–1, 210n.7 Shin Chae-ho 29–30 Shuntian Shibao 120 Sikh religious revivalism 180 Sikkim 190, 191, 193, 194, 196 Silverberg, Miriam 123, 127 Sima Qian 86 Singapore 74 Singh, Jaswant 192 single living 143 sinkeh (totok) 160, 161, 165 Sino-Japanese War (1895) 26, 67 Six Companies 156, 158 Siyi Zazhi 159 Skinner, G. William 160, 162 Smith, S. A. 31 ‘Soap’ (Lu Xun) 124–5 social Darwinism: anti-imperialist nationalism challenges 34, 42; in Chinese nationalism 105, 108, 110, 116; in East Asian nationalism 23, 24; of Han racialist ideology 115; in linear and progressive history of national subject 167


Raj, Kapil 7 Ramarajya 175 Ramesh, Jairam 195 recognition 28, 39, 62, 74, 155 redemptive societies: collapse of cultural-political unity delegitimates critique by 177, 181; versus Confucianism on women 140; Guandi invoked in 91; in Manchukuo 53, 55, 57, 147; in mobilizing and reforming the family 136; segregated for women 125–6 Red Swastika Society 125–6, 147 regimes of authenticity 28, 31, 32, 36, 39, 75, 155, 156 religion: Catholic Church 157, 158, 184; Christianity 164, 179, 182; critique of the state by 184; Daoism 53, 82–3, 91, 164; encompassed by the political in China 177, 179–81; encompasses the political in India 177–9; Falungong 9, 12; see also Buddhism; Confucianism; Hinduism; Islam ‘religious economy’ model 206n.18 Republic of Five Nationalities 4, 16, 114, 115, 198 Resistance, Chaos, and Control (Weller) 14 Ricoeur, Paul 207n.58 rights 11, 24 River Elegy (Heshang) (documentary series) 68, 70, 76 Robinson, Ronald 40 Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguozhi yanyi) (Luo Guanzhong) 83, 86 Roy, Ram Mohun 171, 172 Roy, Subir 195 Rudolph, Lloyd I. and Susanne H. 197 rural reconstruction movement 184 Russell, Bertrand 169 Russo-Japanese War (1904–5) 26, 34, 38, 46 Saich, Tony 14 Salmon, Claudine 162 Sam Kauw Hwee (sanjiaoheyi) 53, 164–5 sancong (three obediences) 138, 144 Sanguozhi (History of the Three Kingdoms) (Chen Shou) 82 Sanguozhi pinghua (Story of the Three Kingdoms) 83 Sanguozhi yanyi (Romance of the Three Kingdoms) (Luo Guanzhong) 83, 86 sanjiaoheyi (Sam Kauw Hwee) 53, 164–5

Index

Spring and Autumn Annals 86, 91, 209n.32 Sri Lanka 193, 196 Sri Partasarati Svami temple 178–9 state of exception 152, 155–6, 157, 159, 166 stelae dedicated to Guandi 89 Stocking, George 168 Story of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguozhi pinghua) 83 Stuart-Fox, Martin 189 Sugihara Kaoru 72 Sun, Mrs 143 Sun Yat-sen: ambiguity in nationalism of 105–6, 209n.33; anti-imperialist narrative of 34, 103, 108; on Burma 196; on five races of Chinese nation 115; on Japanese victory over Russia 34; on ‘kingly way’ 53; pan-Asianism associated with 170; slippage in concept of brotherhood in 51 superscription of symbols: Communistera 96; continuity provided by 79, 94; of Guandi by different social groups 83; hegemony rarely absolute in 94–5; in imperial state’s involvement in Guandi cult 84; Qing superscription of Guandi 85–7, 89–94; as reconfiguration 81; republican-era superscription of Guandi 96 Su Xiaokang 68 symbolic meaning 107–8 Sze, Alfred 191


socialism: anti-imperialism in 35, 42; Asian Socialist Conferences 189; Chinese state socialism 34–5; Communist Party attempts to indigenize and popularize 96; egalitarianism and collectivism of Chinese 36, 63; linear history in 35, 63; nation form retained in 34, 35, 62; new concept of civilization of 42; visions of the nation in 32 Song Meiling (Mrs Chiang Kai-shek) 118, 128–9 South Asia: civil society’s expanding role in 199; Himalayan region 189, 190, 192, 193; off-shore balancing in 197; Pakistan 191, 193, 194; see also India South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation 197 Southeast Asia: Chinese migration to 152, 153; Chinese narratives of settling and civilizing 189; Chinese strategy in 193–4, 195, 197; India’s influence in 188, 189, 193; Peranakans in the Indies 153, 160–5, 166 South Korea: Cold War historical writing in 205n.5; competition with China and Japan 75; in global market economy 36; resistance to US-backed regime in 36; in Yellow Sea economic region 71–2 South Manchurian Railroad 46, 48 sovereignty: in imperial China 104; incommensurable 190–1; in India 178; nationalism’s immanent conception of 63; of nation-states 27–8, 154–5; personal authenticity and 146; popular 23, 24, 105; territorial 104–5; in Westphalian system 187 Soviet Union: anti-imperialist nationalism sanctioned by 42; Chinese conflict with 34, 61; in debate about Chinese history 62–3; East Asian nationalism affected by 36; mediates socialist ideas and practices for China 4; nationalism in mobilizing resources for war 43; new imperialism of 55; socialist antiimperialism in 35; as ‘union of nationalities’ 53–4, 55 special economic zones 71 Spengler, Oswald 42, 73 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 207n.58

251

Tachibana Shiraki 53, 54, 137 Tagore, Rabindranath 168, 169–70, 176 Taiping Rebellion 65, 85, 92–3, 114, 152 Taishan Qiaokan 159 Taiwan: assimilation of Taiwanese 49; business associations 72; competition with China 75; in ‘cultural China’ 74; denied international recognition 28; as developmental state 25, 38; foreign investment in China 73; Fujian relationship 71; in global market economy 36; Guandi as temple guard in 82; historical attention focused on national studies 61; Japan acquires 26; Japanese military recruitment in 25; Kuomintang control 190; Kuomintang ignore Taiwanese nationalism 36, 63; Morality Society in 117 Takizawa Toshihiro 141

252

The Global and Regional in China’s Nation-Formation United Nations 27 United States: anti-imperialist nationalism sanctioned by 42; Chinese exclusion laws 156–7; Chinese labor in 156–9; Chinese migration to 152; East Asian nationalism affected by 36; historical narrative of progress in 61; immigration restriction in 1920s 42; India as strategic partner in South Asia 197; Ishihara on racism of 73; Japan allocated fewer ships than 49; modernizing client states centered on royal identity 57; new imperialism of 55, 56; postwar prosperity of 60; rapprochement with China 2; ultraimperialism of 57; Vietnam War 193 universalism 29, 98–9, 109, 116, 174 uti possidetis 190


Tan’gun 30 Tao Xingzhi 184 Taussig, Michael 11 Temple of Military Culture 87 Third Manchukuo Morality Society 137 Thompson, E. P. 65 Three Kingdoms period 79–80 three obediences (sancong) 138, 144 Tiananmen Square protests 68, 194, 196 Tian Hou 88 Tibetans: in Chinese-Indian agreement of 1954 191, 192; conservative historians on descent from Yellow Emperor of 74; in Five Nationalities 4, 114, 115; republican revolutionary ideology and unrest among 115; secret mapping of Tibet 21; tensions between Chinese and 75; and territorial consolidation of nationstate 190, 191 Tilak, B. G. 173 time: linear historical consciousness in East Asia 22–3, 28; modernity’s linear conception of 8; multiple temporalities 10–12; print capitalism and apprehension of 102; socialist linear history 35; see also history Tiong Hoa Hwe Koan (THHK) 162–5 ti–yong dichotomy 30, 63, 168 Tominaga Tadashi 53–4 totok (sinkeh) 160, 161, 165 Towards the Republic (television series) 65 Toynbee, Arnold 42, 73 to-yo-shi 29, 183 transnationalism 60–76; in class nationalism 109; narratives in East Asia 72–6; nationalisms appeal to transnational ideals 103; and territoriality of the nation 70–2; see also globalization Trauzettel, Rolf 100 Triads 84, 151 tribute system 22, 72, 99, 154, 189 Tu 139 Tudi 88 Tumen River initiative 71, 76 Twenty-One Demands 26 Tyabji, Sir Badruddin 193 ultraimperialism 57 unequal treaties 25, 37–8, 42, 191 Unit 731 52 United Front 27

Vatikiotis, Michael 197 Vietnam War 193 ‘virtuous and chaste girls’ schools’ 122, 125, 131, 136, 137, 138, 141 Vivekananda, Swami 172 Voice of Asia, The (No to ieru Ajia) (Ishihara) 73 Volkgeist 167 Wakeman, Frederic 175–6 Wallerstein, Immanuel 3, 43 Wang, C. T. 191 wangdao (‘kingly way’) 53, 137, 147 Wang Dong 191 Wang Fengyi 136–7, 143, 212n.75 Wang Fuzhi 100, 101, 105, 108 Wang Jingwei 105, 119–20, 121, 131 Wang Yangming 175 war, nationalism in mobilizing resources for 43–4 Washington Conference 49 Washington Consensus 5, 196, 199 Weber, Max 16 weddings 137 Weller, Robert 14 Wen Chang 87 Westphalian system 21, 23, 187–8, 191, 198 White Haired Girl, The (Baimaonü) 96 White Lotus rebellion 90 Wilson, Woodrow 25, 26, 56 Window of the World theme park 69–70

Index

Yamamoto Bin 90, 207n.37 Yamato race 29 Yan, Jimmy 184 Yan Fu 110 Yang, Mayfair 12 Yang Lien-sheng 100 Yellow Emperor 3, 29, 30, 74 Yellow Sea economic region 71–2, 76 Yellow Turban rebellion 89, 93 Yen, James 184 Yen, W. W. 191 Yili sangfuzhuan (Book of Rituals) 138 Yin Chang 80 Young, Louise 52 Young Bengal movement 172 Yuanmingyuan 67 Yuan Shikai 65, 80, 180 Yuan Weishi 66, 75 Yuecheng 85 Yue Fei 113, 132


women 117–47; bodies as medium for inscription of power 121; Communist view of 146; confining to home 140–1, 213n.93; cult of chaste widows and virtuous wives 122, 131, 132; discouraged from emigrating to US 157, 159; in family stability 109, 123, 127, 130, 137; female virtues 138; incorporating into the nation 109; Japanese Modern Girl 123, 127, 128; in Manchukuo 130–47; in May 4th Movement 109, 119, 123–4, 133; in modern patriarchy 121–6; Morality Society on 136–9; nationalist views of 32, 122–3; in New Life Movement 128, 129–30; Peranakan 163; personal narratives of Morality Society members 138–45; segregated organizations for 125–6, 128; state, family, and woman in Manchukuo 135–9; in wartime 130; Westernized 127, 133, 140; working 117, 129; see also feminism; selfsacrificing woman Women’s Labor Service League 129–30 Women’s Life Improvement Society (Funü shenghuo gaijinhui) 129–30 Women’s Service League (Funü fuwutuan) 129 working-class nationalism 31–2 working women 117, 129 work-point system 9 World, The (Shijie) (film) 69–70, 74, 75, 76 World Bank 57 World Federation of Trade Unions 189 world systems theory 3–4, 43 World War I 24, 26, 43, 44, 47 World Women’s Red Swastika Society 126 wuxing 138

253

Xiao Hong 109, 132, 135 Xiao Jun 132 Xiezu (Blood Lineage) (Dan Di) 134–5 Xinjiang 7, 74, 115, 190 Xinshixue (New History) (Liang Qichao) 29

Zengfu 92 Zeng Guofan 64, 65 Zhang, Master 82–3 Zhang Binglin 101, 105, 169, 209n.32 Zhang Fei 82 Zhang Taiyan 168 Zhang Xueliang 47 Zhang Zhidong 100, 121 Zhang Zuolin 46–7, 48 Zhao, Mrs 139, 140, 144–5 Zhao Jingru 121 Zhao Shiyu 65 Zhenjiang 114 zhiming 138 zhixing 138 Zhi Yi 80 zhizhi 138, 144 Zhonghua minzu 74 Zhou Enlai 186, 189, 192 Zhu, Mrs 213n.105 Zhu Xueqin 75–6 zu 27 Zuo Zhuan 100

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