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?
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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