The purpose of this multipart investigation will be
two-fold, where one we analyze what led to the 1941-1945 pacific war starting with
the discussions following the Treaty of Versailles in context of which Erez
Manela in his epic book 1 pointed to 1919 as the "Wilsonian
Moment" whereby the purpose of this is too to understand potentially could
lead to a futures second pacific war if China follows up on its threats to
attack Taiwan with as a purpose to take control of what China terms the South China Sea.
The term South China Sea itself did not exist before
the 20th century and was first established as a regional concept in Japan or as
the preface to Yoshaburo Takekoshi's 1910 bestseller Nangokukki [Outline of the
History of the South Seas], Tokyo: Niyousha, 1910, indicated that "in the
last twenty years the name `South Seas' has come into general use" which
suggests that this term may have been re-imported to China from Japan.
For many Chinese in the early twentieth century, the
nation-state system was full of contradictions and incongruities. On the one
hand, it was a “measurement of civilization” in a hierarchy in time denoting
human progress from barbarism to civilization and from primitive production to
industrial manufacturing. As a measurement of civilization, the nation-state
system invited everyone, Africans, Asians, Europeans, to join the global march
to achieve “liberty, fraternity, and equality.” On the other hand, especially
after World War I, the nation-state system became a symbol of a hierarchy in
space in which strong nations acquired more land and resources at the expense
of weak nations. The geographical size of a nation became a measurement of
wealth and a symbol of power.
Driving this tension between connectivity and geo-body
was the conflict between the lofty goal of safeguarding the national
independence of all legitimate nations, as eloquently spelled out in Wilson’s
Fourteen Points, and the harsh (if not dark) reality of the imperialism where
strong nations continued to invade and occupy the land of weak nations. One may
say that this conflict had existed long before World War I. But for the
Chinese, especially the cultural elites, this conflict became apparent in the
Versailles Settlement, where the Allied Powers decided to give the German
colonies in Shandong to Japan. It was the tension between a hierarchy in time and a hierarchy in
space that was pivotal to the change in how the Chinese looked at
Japan. When the Chinese understood the nation-state system as a hierarchy in
time for human evolution, China would join the community of nation-states by
modeling itself after Japan’s “East Asian modernity.” When the Chinese
understood the nation-state system as a hierarchy in space for acquiring wealth
and land, they saw Japan as an aggressor and a competitor. With this
understanding, we must look at Chinese nationalism more carefully. Before we
blame the Chinese for narrowing their horizon and adopting a victim mentality,
we should first examine the nation-state system that caused confusion and
frustration due to its conflicting goals.
As we have seen in part one and part two, the Paris Peace Conference and its immediate
aftermath have contributed to how East Asians re-defined “Asia” and how this
new consciousness of Asian commonality, usually with Japan and China at its
core, has influenced ideas of revised postwar world order. Most important were
its effects on redrawing of what led to the contours of present-day China.
This whereby one shouldn't forget that Chinese
linguists generally agree that the total number of languages used by
China's ethnic groups is over 80, with some ethnic
groups using more than one language. Among these different languages,
30 have written forms. Regarding language genealogy, they are categorized into
5 different families: the Sino-Tibetan, Altai, Austro-Asiatic, Austronesian,
and Indo-European.
To this, we could also add that China was
traditionally an elite-dominated society; it looked to the elite to rule and
guide, a reliance that continued after The Republic of China (ROC) was founded
in 1912. Sun Yat-sen, who initially headed the left-wing section of his party although he
thus vowed to fight for a democratic China, in reality, was also really an
elitist.
With all of this, however, Japan loomed large in
China’s foreign affairs and in the construction of Chinese national identity in
positive, both beneficial and constructive, and negative, both damaging and
contrasting, ways from the 1890s onward. Its actions at Versailles had a
catalytic effect on the May Fourth Movement and the thinking of Chinese
nation-builders. However, the changes we analyze were not solely or inherently
dependent upon Japan, much as May Fourth was not merely an expression of
anti-Japanese sentiment. Japan’s prominence made it a focus of Chinese
attention and thus a particularly useful interlocutor for
understanding deterritorialized Chinese national construction, but
the central concerns of jurisdiction and sovereignty had as much to do with
Chinese engagement with the Western nation-states as they did with Japan.
The important Chinese factions beyond 1919
As we have seen, in standard historical accounts, “May
Fourth” (五四运动, Wusi Yundong) means both the “May Fourth
Movement” (student protests in 1919) and the “May Fourth New Culture Movement”
(language reforms and cultural renaissance from 1915 to 1923).2 This doubling of the meanings of “May Fourth” is by no
means accidental. It is to highlight two different meanings of the 1919 moment
in China. It was, in the short run, a political movement driven by anticolonial
nationalism3 and, in the long run, a cultural
awakening when China’s role in the world was drastically changed from the
center of “all under heaven” (Tianxia 天下) into a single nation-state (guojia 國家) among many.4
Founded in 1911, the Republic of China (ROC) was the
first Republic in Asia. However, this event did not end the increasingly severe
crisis in politics and culture in China since the Sino-Japanese War of
1894–1895; on the contrary, it intensified the anxiety of Chinese people
regarding the polity, morality, ultimate faith, and so on. The situation was
true as Kang Youwei summarized, “The old machine has been dismantled
and cannot be reassembled, the only way left is to stop working; the old house
has been destroyed and cannot be rebuilt, we can do nothing but sleep in the
open . . . today’s peril and turmoil are one hundred times more than the late
Qing Dynasty.”5 In general, the focus of all thoughts in the early years
of the ROC was how to reestablish the authority of politics and morality and
how to prevent the social order from falling apart after the collapse of twenty
centuries of imperial regimes. This chaos in politics and thought only began to
clarify itself after the May Fourth Movement (MFM), when all the major
political parties that influenced twentieth-century China emerged and all the
major schools of thought that constructed the intellectual world of the
twentieth-century Chinese intelligentsia fully formed. An important sign of
this transformation was the rapid rise of the leading figures of the MFM and
“New Culture,”6 as their activities at the center of the cultural stage
displaced those of the intellectual elites of the Wuxu period. Wuxu was
the year 1898, when “the Hundred Days of Reform” took place.
Between June and September 1898
the Guangxu Emperor issued more than 180 reformist edicts, making
sweeping changes in areas including government, the bureaucracy, education, and
the military. The dimensions and the pace of these reforms angered and
threatened conservative ministers, bureaucrats and military officers. Some of
them lobbied for action from Dowager Empress Cixi. On September
21st, Cixi acted. Backed by conservative military leaders, she forced
the emperor to abdicate all state power in her favour. The emperor was
held under house arrest and most of his reforms were either abolished and wound
back...
The Left and Right New Culture Movement
In accordance with the demarcation in
Feng Youlan’s History of Modern Chinese Philosophy, the New Culture
Movement (NCM) could be divided into Left and Right factions. At first, the two
parties cooperated with each other in a journal, New Youth, but their conflicts
came out into the open after 1919. The NCM Left believed that “the major cause
of the poverty and backwardness in China was the invasion of imperialism,” and
accepted “Marxism as the guiding ideology in politics and academics,” whereas
“the school who neither believed the former nor accepted the latter belonged to
the NCM Right.”7 The representatives of the Left were Chen Duxiu (1879–1942)
and Li Dazhao (1889–1927),
while Hu Shi (1891–1962) and Liang Shuming (1893–1988) represented
the Right. This demarcation was simple and effective but too ambiguous. As a
matter of fact, although both leftists Chen Duxiu and
Li Dazhao studied in Japan and both were founders of the Communist Party
of China (CPC), Chen was more thoroughly trained in classical Chinese learning,
while Li acquired more systematic proficiency in Marxist theory. There was, of
course, a non-reconcilable conflict between the Left and the Right, such as the
dispute over “Problems and Doctrines” led, respectively, by
Li Dazhao and Hu Shi. The Rightist Hu Shi, who represented the
liberalist trend that endorsed Westernization, and the Rightist
Liang Shuming, who represented the New Confucian trend that defended
Eastern culture, were completely incompatible and opposed each other in the
famous polemics on Eastern and Western cultures in the 1920s. The multiple
discrepancies between the NCM Left and Right reflected a complex spectrum
inherent in twentieth-century Chinese thought and culture. However, no matter
how big the gap was, both parties showed very similar attitudes on the critique
of Kang Youwei, the intellectual leader of the Wuxu period,
especially on the Confucianism Movement he oriented.
Kang Youwei was the leader of the above
referred to Wuxu Reform. His works, such as On the Forged Classics in
Xin Dynasty, On Confucius as a Reformer, and The Book of Great Harmony,
announced radical reform schemes that wholly accepted modern Western political
forms and culture, which incurred violent resistance from Confucian
Conservativism. Kang fled into exile abroad, traveling in more than thirty
countries in Europe and North America, where he gained a deeper understanding
of Western politics and culture. When the ROC was founded in 1911, he strongly
argued that its administrative defects resulted from the lack of a power center
possessing symbolic force and democratic principles and advocated for a
“Republican Monarchy,” like the British Constitutional Monarchy under which the
King had no legislative and administrative authority. He instructed his
disciple Chen Huanzhang (1880–1933) to establish the Confucian
Association and masterminded two movements for Confucianism as a national
religion in 1913 and 1916. He proposed the transformation of the polity from
absolute monarchy to republicanism and the coexistence of reform in secular
politics and preservation in spiritual faith, stating, “morality and politics
are like the two wheels of a wagon running together.”8
Regardless of their factional allegiances,
Chen Duxiu, Li Dazhao, Hu Shi, and Liang Shuming all
attacked Kang Youwei fiercely during the NCM. Both the NCM Left and
Right attempted to portray Kang as a diehard conservative. Even more
significantly, when the four people criticized one another, they all attacked
their ideological foes for purported similarities to
Kang Youwei’s ideas. That is to say, Kang became a symbol for the
disputes within the NCM. These accusations both targeted Kang and exemplified
their mutual disputes. Thus they provide a window into China’s 1919
moment.
From Kang Youwei's Wuxu to
the May Fourth Movement
Instructive here is the continued changes in the
spheres of Chinese politics and thought from Wuxu to the MFM, and how
those important schools of thought connected to the modern transformation of
the Confucian tradition. Moreover, no matter whether explicit or implicit, the
four people’s attacks on Kang Youwei and against each other took
place from 1916 to 1925. That is to say, before or after 1919, both their own
political claims and the contents of these disputes changed significantly.
Discussing these disputes chronologically, analyzing the causes, backgrounds,
and influences of these conflicts, reveals how the European 1919 moment
impacted China and transformed into China’s 1919 moment, by which we then could
conclude that 1919 was indeed an epochal shift at the center stage of modern
China’s intellectual and social history.
Somewhere between the last days of the Qing and the
early days of the Nationalist government, Chinese nationalists had moved
Chinese overseas from a matter of concern and wellspring of resources to
something more essential to the nation-state, and I argue that the key years
were the post–World War I May Fourth Era. This extended moment in time lay
within a much longer temporal arc, in which the Chinese gradually transformed
their worldviews and ideas about jurisdiction and sovereignty. It was during
the First World War that Chinese governments and elites became
fixated on gaining equal status within the international system and that
exporting almost 150,000 laborers to the trenches of France was one way in
which China sought to enhance its global position and gained international
recognition.9 Whereby the first two decades of the twentieth century was a
peak for attempts by nationalist Chinese to create
a deterritorialized nation through appeals to Chinese
overseas.10 In this context we can also see the 1910s as the era in which
diasporic nationalism, that is, Chinese nationalism among Chinese overseas, reached full flower, partly as the
result of earlier outreach from the same transnationalism and the predicament
of sovereignty.11
The Republic of China and the alleged Han Chinese
The beauty of the ‘Han race’ idea for the
revolutionaries created a huge community of potential supporters who could be
mobilized against a declared enemy: the ruling Manchu elite. If
the Manzu were excluded, then so were the Mengzu (Mongols)
and the non-Chinese-speaking minorities. Indigenous groups were relegated to
the status of ‘browns’ or ‘blacks’ for whom Social Darwinism predicted only one
fate: they could be ignored in the coming struggle. Increasingly, the
revolutionaries – mainly young, male students living in exile in Japan, mixed
old ideas of lineage, zu, with new racial ideas of biological race –
Zhong. The fusion of Zhong and Zu was made possible by the imaginary figure of
the Yellow Emperor: Huangdi became the father of the zhongzu. However, the
question of who was and was not, a member of the zhongzu (种族 zhǒngzú) was not always so easy to answer.
Zhang Taiyan tried to establish a social, cultural, and spiritual
identity of Chinese, which could counterbalance the West's dominant influences.
The Republic of China is the name he gave to a newly emerged Chinese nation
after the overthrow of the Qin Dynasty.
The need to create a new Nation-State
China’s self-definition in the system of nation-states
underwent tremendous changes in the 1920s and 1930s after the Versailles
Settlement. China was in the process of adopting a myth of the
nation-state. It is a myth because it assumes that “cultural identities
(nations) coincide with political sovereign entities (states) to create a
series of internally unified and essentially equal units.”12 Adopting the
European argument for social evolution and open competition, many Chinese
concluded that forming a nation-state was the only way to be a member of the
modern world. For them, the nation-state was a “measurement of civilization” in
the early twentieth century, and China had no choice but to follow the
“universal principle” in order to join the “civilized community.”13
Having aspired to be a member of the civilized
community by adopting the Western political and social norms, the Chinese now
discovered that the nation-state system was not fair and open; rather, it was
dominated by Western powers eager to protect their own interests the Chinese
realized that Westernization alone would not win them recognition in
international affairs. Instead, they focused on recovering national sovereignty
through diplomatic negotiations and treaty revisions. Paradoxically they
believed that although the nation-state system was a tool used by the Western
powers to control the world, the system allowed a discussion of national
sovereignty as expounded in Wilson’s Fourteen Points.14 To
them, the only way to beat the system was to protect China’s territorial
sovereignty. In the early 1930s, as the threat of the Japanese encroachment
intensified, the Chinese increasingly fixated on territorial sovereignty.
Rather than viewing the nation-state system as an advanced stage of human
evolution, they saw it as the tool of the imperialists to dominate the world.
This shift from joining global evolution to protecting China’s geo-body fueled
an intense anti-imperialist nationalism in China, even though the Chinese were
still determined to building a strong nation-state as a symbol of
modernity.15
Chinese historian/politician
Liang Qichao also asserted the Manchus created ‘greater China’. Once
we understand the ‘messiness’ of these twenty centuries, we can see that it
takes considerable imagination, of the kind that can only be provided by
nationalism, to discern within them an essential ‘Chinese’ nation that endured
throughout.
In 1910 they saw the system as a collection of hybrid
networks of physical and human connectivity, facilitating labor migration,
capital movement, and information sharing. In the 1920s, however, they saw the
system as patches of “geo-bodies,” dividing the earth into distinct territorial
units safeguarded by armed forces.
Among Chinese intellectuals in the 1920s. Overwhelmed
by foreign threats in Manchuria and the southwest, they saw their country under
siege. They felt that foreign powers, particularly Japan and Britain, were ready
to take over China. In their mind, they were reminded of the 1919 moment when
the Allied Powers partitioned the lands of the crumbled Austro-Hungarian and
Ottoman Empires in the name of promoting national independence.16 They
feared that this version of the 1919 moment would soon visit China if they did
not do enough to protect their country’s territorial sovereignty.
Compared with the writings of
Miao Fenglin and Zhu Kezhen of
the early 1920s, Tan Qixiang expressed an even more radical and
bellicose form of anticolonial nationalism. He believed that China would soon
be turned into a colony of Japan, as Korea and Manchuria had been in 1910 and 1931,
respectively.17
In the 1920s, Miao Fenglin and Zhu Kezhen were not shy
from relating their discussions of geography to contemporary political affairs
such as the Versailles Settlement and the Washington Conference. Nonetheless,
they did not explicitly advocate taking up arms to protect China’s territory.
In contrast, Tan Qixiang was deeply concerned by threats to the security of
China. He was worried that the Chinese nation would soon be absorbed into the
rapidly expanding Japanese Empire. To support his argument, he called attention
to the political implication of the term “China Proper,” frequently used by
Japanese scholars in the late 1920s and 1930s. He cautioned his readers that
the Japanese were making plans to annex Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet, which
were outside of “China Proper,” the land where he believed Han Chinese lived.
If indeed the Chinese had lost the battle over Manchuria, Feng warned his
countrymen that they should focus their attention on the next round in a great
war, the struggle over East Asia. Feng wrote;
Before the Sino-Japanese War [of 1894–1895], Japanese
scholars created a field of study called the “Korean Studies.” Shortly
afterward, Korea was annexed [to the Japanese Empire in 1910]. Before the
Russo-Japanese War [in 1904–1905], the Japanese scholars created a field of
study called the “Manchuria and Korean Studies.” Shortly afterward, the
Liaodong province was fallen. Before September 18th [the Mukden Incident of
1931], Japanese scholars created a field of study called the “Manchurian and
Mongolian Studies.” Shortly afterward, the four provinces [in Manchuria] were
annexed. Nowadays, the Japanese are energetically promoting “East Asian
Studies.” Looking at the direction of their swords, it is clear our country is
in grave danger. Let’s see who will rule East Asia. Countrymen, it is time to
wake up!18
Partly a heuristic device to mobilize the readers, the
last sentence in the quote (“Countrymen, it is time to wake up!”) highlighted
the acute sense of Chinese vulnerability. At a time when the nation-state
system was unable to resolve the contradiction between national independence
and imperialism. As in a famous line by Gu Jiegang and
Shi Nianhai in 1938, the purpose of clarifying China’s boundary was
“not to allow enemies to take away an inch of our land.”19
Japan
It has become conventional to study Japanese
modernization starting with the Meiji period. The Meiji reforms are often
considered as the watershed in Japanese history, a period of transition from
feudal and traditional society to a modern nation-state. In contrast, the
Tokugawa era is often described as premodern, feudal, and stagnant. Unlike the
conventional approach that sees this period as premodern ''tom by revolts,
factionalism, and civil war," there is now a growing tendency to consider
the Tokugawa regime a modern sovereign state even if it did not strictly
coincide with characteristics of the Eurocentric notion of modernity.20
Following the Meiji reforms. Japan sought to expand
into Asia through liberal imperialism and then sought to consolidate its empire
through liberal internationalism. However, when its imperial designs were
rejected by its Western foes and allies alike, Japan-centered
pan-Asianist ideology grew in strength.
Continued in part four, could the Pacific war Dec
1941-2 September 1945 be avoided?
Part 1: Overview of the discussions following the 1919
or "Wilsonian moment,” a notion that extends before and after that
calendar year: Part One Can a potential future
Pacific War be avoided?
Part 2: Issues like the Asian Monroe Doctrine, how
relations between China and Japan from the 1890s onward transformed the region
from the hierarchy of time to the hierarchy of space, Leninist and Wilsonian
Internationalism, western and Eastern Sovereignty, and the crucial March First
and May Fourth movements were covered in: Part Two
Can a potential future Pacific War be avoided?
Part 4: The various arrangements between the US and
Japan, including The Kellogg–Briand Pact or Pact in 1928 and The Treaty for the
Limitation and Reduction of Naval Armament of 1930. Including that American
policy toward Japan until shortly before the Pearl Harbor attack was not the
product of a rational, value-maximizing decisional process. Rather, it
constituted the cumulative, aggregate outcome of several bargaining games
which would enable them to carry out their preferred Pacific strategy was
covered in: Part Four Can a potential future
Pacific War be avoided?
Part 5: The Manchurian crisis and its connection to
the winding road to World War II are covered in: Part
Five Can a potential future Pacific War be avoided?
Part 6:The war itself quickly unfolded in favor of
Japan’s regionalist ambitions, a subject we carried through to the post-world
war situation. Whereby we also discussed when Japan saw itself in a special
role as mediator between the West (“Euro-America”) and the East (“Asia”) to
“harmonize” or “blend” the two civilizations and demanded that Japan lead Asia
in this anti-Western enterprise there are parallels with what Asim Doğan
in his extensive new book describes how the ambiguous and assertive Belt and
Road Initiative is a matter of special concern in this aspect. The Tributary
System, which provides concrete evidence of how Chinese dynasties handled with
foreign relations, is a useful reference point in understanding its
twenty-first-century developments. This is particularly true because, after the
turbulence of the "Century of Humiliation" and the Maoist Era, China
seems to be explicitly re-embracing its history and its pre-revolutionary identity
in: Part Six Can a potential
future Pacific War be avoided?
Part 7: Part
Seven Can a potential future Pacific War be avoided?
Part 8: While initially both the nationalist Chiang
Kai-shek (anti-Mao Guomindang/KMT), including Mao's Communist
Party (CCP), had long supported independence for Taiwan rather than
reincorporation into China, this started to change following the
publication of the New Atlas of China's Construction created by cartographer
Bai Meichu in 1936. A turning point for Bai and others who saw China's need to
create a new Nation-State was the Versailles peace conference's outcome in 1919
mentioned in part one. Yet that from today's
point of view, the fall of Taiwan to China would be seen around Asia as
the end of American predominance and even as “America’s Suez,” hence
demolishing the myth that Taiwan has no hope is critical. And that while
the United States has managed to deter Beijing from taking destructive military
action against Taiwan over the last four decades because the latter has been
relatively weak, the risks of this approach inches dangerously close to
outweighing its benefits. Conclusion and
outlook.
1. Erez Manela,The Wilsonian Moment:
Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism
(Oxford Studies in International History), 2009.
2. For the double meaning of “May Fourth,” see Chow
Tse-tsung’s introduction to The May Fourth Movement.
3. For the global meaning of this political “May
Fourth,” see Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the
International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2007), 99–118.
4. For the intellectual and cultural significance of
China’s transition from the center of “all under heaven” to a “nation-state,”
see Joseph Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate: A Trilogy (Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 1968). For the political impact of this
transition, see John Fitzgerald, Awakening China: Politics, Culture, and Class
in the Nationalist Revolution (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
5. Kang Youwei “Zhonghua ji-uguo lun,"
in The Complete Works of Kang Youwei, vol. 9 (Beijing Renmin
University Press, 2007), 317-18.
6. To be precise the May Fourth Movement
(MFM) was not equal to the New Culture Movement (NCM). MFM
refers to a political movement triggered by the May 4, 1919 street
demonstrations. Whereby the NCM included a variety of new intellectual and
cultural trends like for example the anti-Confucianism and Literature
Revolution movements.
7. Feng Jiasheng,“Riren duiyu wo dongbei de
yanjiu jinkuang,” Yugong banyuekan 5.6 (1936): 6.
8. See for example Akira Iriye, After Imperialism: The
Search for a New Order in the Far East, 1921-1931 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1965).
9. See for example Thomas J. Knock, To End All Wars:
Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order Revised ed. Edition, 1995.
10. On this see for example Erez Manela, The Wilsonian
Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial
Nationalism (Oxford Studies in International History), 2009.
11. Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of
Nationalism (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); quote
on p.5.
12. Frederick R. Dickinson, World War I and the
Triumph of a New Japan, 1919-1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2013); Noriko Kawamura, Turbulence in the Pacific: Japanese-U.S. Relations
during World War I (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000); and Xu Guoqi, China and the
Great War: China’s Pursuit of a New National Identity and Internationalization
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
13. Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen, The Myth of
Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 1997), 8.
14. For a discussion of how the standard of
civilization shaped international relations during the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, see Gerrit W. Gong, The Standard of “Civilization” in
International Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. See also Han Ziqi 韓子奇 (Hon Tze-ki), “Jinru shijie de cuozhe yu ziyou—Ershi
shiji chude Dexue zazhi,” Xin Shixue 19.2 (June 2008): 156–66.
15. For an account of Chinese mixed feelings about the
nation-state system after World War I, see Guoqi Xu, China and the Great War:
China's Pursuit of a New National Identity and Internationalization (Studies in
the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare), 2005, 244–77.
16. Prasenjit Duara, “Transnationalism and the
Predicament of Sovereignty: China, 1900–1945,” American Historical Review 102.4
(October 1997): 1030–51; Duara, Sovereignty, and Authenticity: Manchukuo and
the East Asian Modern (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 1–40.
17. For a study of how the League of Nations
decided on the territories and the peoples of the crumbled empires, see Susan
Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire
(Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015), 17–106.
18. Ibid.,2.
19. Gu Jiegang and Shi Nianhai, Zhongguo jiangyu yange
shi (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuuan, 1938), 4.
20. Peter F. Komicki, "General
Introduction," in Meiji Japan: Political, Economic and Social History,
1868-1912, ed. Peter F. Kornicki (London: Routledge, 1998), xiv.
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