By Eric Vandenbroeck and
co-workers
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.
The Asian Monroe Doctrine
When during the First World War, the Chinese government sent
laborers to France to help boost British and French human resources for the
first time in its modern history, China articulated a desire to join the world
community as an equal and took action to do so. This effort tried to correct
the near-fatal mistakes made in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when
it refused to accommodate the new international system. This time, the
international system refused to accept China, but at the Paris Peace
Conference, the Chinese fought back. Their refusal to sign the Treaty of
Versailles marked the first time since the Opium Wars that China had stood up
to certain European countries and the US now too.
As we have seen in part one, Japan and the United States
came to the Paris Peace Conference with two divergent world visions. Japanese
leaders, who were beginning to embrace particularistic regionalism based on
their national identity, were determined to take over Germany’s Asia-Pacific
Empire and advance their vision of a Japan-centric regional order in Asia by
establishing Japan’s supremacy over China under slogans such as “kyōson kyōei” (coexistence and
co-prosperity) or the Asian Monroe Doctrine. The United States, under President
Wilson, on the other hand, tried to achieve the liberal peace program
manifested in the president’s Fourteen Points anchored on the creation of the
League of Nations. Wilson, a champion of the Open Door in China, applied the
ideal of self-determination unilaterally to China. Western imperialist powers
and Japan still claimed various rights and concessions that infringed on the
Chinese sovereignty. Wilson resisted Japan’s claims to the German rights in
Shandong and the German Pacific islands north of the equator as much as he
could. After a heated debate at the negotiation table, the Versailles Treaty
allowed the German rights in Shandong to be ceded to Japan with the
understanding that Japan would eventually return Shandong in full sovereignty
to China and retain only the economic privileges granted to Germany and the
right to establish a settlement in Qingdao. To the dismay of the Chinese
delegation, Wilson convinced himself that the League of Nations would police
Japan's future behavior in China.
Much of what took
place in East Asia displayed the influence of the shared historical background,
and the persistence of political and intellectual formulations, among China,
Japan, Korea, and the peoples and emerging states of Inner Asia. The deep historical roots of common
features of the Chinese cultural system, combined with more recent developments
such as the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), the Russo-Japanese War
(1904–1905), or the racialization of East Asia into a purportedly monolithic “yellow race,” meant that much of what happened
after Versailles Treaty of 1919 in the region was internally generated and
not in response to the external stimuli from developments in the West.
The Central Kingdom
A centuries-long historical chronology of Chinese predominance,
relations between China and Japan from the 1890s onward transformed the region
in ways that left a powerful legacy. New ideas of race and racial hierarchies
profoundly informed relations within East Asia and between East Asians and
Euro-Americans. New concepts of nationalism and
sovereignty (initially introduced to modern Chinese vocabulary through
William A. P. Martin's translation of Henry Wheaton's Elements of International
Law in 1864) altered the internal dynamics of states, both functional and
nascent. Still, in ways that curiously replicated earlier regional political
configurations.2 Considering the Longue durée of East Asian history, it is
appropriately axiomatic to say that China and its cultures held paramount
influence within that regional framework. Just within the context of China’s
last dynasty, the Qing (1644–1911), it gained
sovereignty over vast new territories, including what is now Mongolia, and
strengthened a long-standing—but highly variable—tributary order. The prolonged
decline of that system, which occurred as European empires turned tributary
states into colonies, pushed Joseon (Choson) Korea
(1392–1910) closer to the Qing. Even well into Japan’s Meiji era (1868–1912),
leading Japanese intellectuals continued to grapple with
the long-standing mental construct. China was, in a literal translation of
its name, the Central Kingdom.3 Therefore, Japan’s emergence as first a
regional and then a global power disrupted the established order in fundamental
and contradictory, ways. On the one hand, the Meiji model and the numerous
instances of positive Japanese engagement with China based on a common past and
ideas of racial solidarity facilitated a peak of Sino-Japanese comity that
lasted into the 1920s, perhaps as late as Sun Yat-sen’s 1924 speech on Asianism in Kobe, Japan. On the other hand, Japan’s victory
and acquisitions in the Sino-Japanese War and its subsequent Twenty-One Demands
of 1915 fomented deep-seated feelings of betrayal. As a result, the perceived
insult from Japan’s demands for Germany’s territories in the Shandong Peninsula
at Versailles meant that China’s May Fourth Movement was not just a proximate
Wilsonian response but had deeper roots and longer implications. As suggested
by the evolving ideology of pan-Asianism and the
concept of yellow race solidarity, race, and racialist ideas deeply informed
interactions within East Asia and between East Asia and the West. In somewhat
of a contradiction, Japanese imperialists predicated their vision of empire
upon ideals of racial commonality and practices of distinction. In contrast,
Japanese ideologues and officials grounded their great power diplomacy in the
principle of racial equality.
Of course, the
salience of racialist discourse in East Asia may have been more generalizable
to South and West Asia, Africa, or Latin America than was the Euro-American
pursuit of internationalist peace embodied in the League of Nations because the
movement from colony to a nation-state was mediated through the racist
ideologies of an empire. In this sense, both the weaknesses of the interwar
period's internationalist institutions and the origins of the postcolonial
world order of nation-states rested not merely in anti-colonialist opposition
to Euro-American hegemony but also in the pursuit of Asianism
and the debate over racial equality during 1919 and beyond the Versailles
Treaty.
From the hierarchy of time to the hierarchy of space
The surge in
nationalist activism and the intensified insistence on establishing and
preserving sovereignty around that time reflected key transformations and
continuities. It marked a shift in conceptions of organizing world societies
from a hierarchy of time, which was based upon the idea of progression from
barbarism to civilization, to a hierarchy of space that emphasized the right of
self-determination and the defense of a conjoined territorial and political
integrity.4 This transition in worldview led to nation-states' production that
greatly resembled the sovereign units of the prior tributary order. That is, a
modern China filled most of the space of the old Qing Empire; a modern Japan
occupied slightly more than the Tokugawa bakufu; and the two modern Korean states that emerged
after 1945 were built out of competing visions of what should replace the
Joseon kingdom (or the Korean Empire, as it became in 1897) on the peninsula.
Similar developments occurred across Southeast Asia, along with creating new
entities, such as Mongolia, through the same
concept of the sovereign nation-state. These new nation-states owed much to the
Wilsonian ideas of national self-determination and international order
circulated at the time. To pick two examples, the anti-Japanese protests in
Korea (see more about that below) and China in 1919 expressed strong currents
of the new nationalism. Both Chinese leaders and Korean nationalists sought
validation and support at Versailles. But Wilson was not the architect of these
movements. Although a chief legacy of the 1919
Treaty of Versailles was the regional political order of 1945 and after,
the striking similarities between that postwar system and the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries again challenge Eurocentric narratives of international
history. The new nations of East Asia and their interactions held stronger ties
to the old regional system than they did to the Paris Peace Conference.
In making these
larger points, we contended that the 1919 moment, broadly defined to extend beyond the calendar year, held tremendous
importance in East Asia and for East Asians, in part because what came
after can fairly be referred to as a new era.
Leninist and Wilsonian Internationalism
Moreover, this period
also marked the shift in the center of gravity of international power from the
Eastern to the Western shores of the Atlantic Ocean. As such, numerous scholars
have made the Treaty of Versailles and its
consequences a subject of intensive scrutiny, with particular attention to the
diplomatic processes that shaped the post–Great War world, the fierce
ideological and political debates that took place between Leninist and
Wilsonian internationalism, and the rise of nationalistic movements among
peoples under the sway of colonial rule. Scholars have examined the transition
from the imperialistic “old diplomacy” to the more liberal internationalist
“new diplomacy” that occurred across 1919.5
Although President
Wilson helped to forge a new set of standards for the conduct of nations in the
arena of international relations, while publicly repudiated gunboat
diplomacy (alias Dollar Diplomacy), he acted as had his predecessors to
maintain U.S. supremacy in Central America and the Caribbean and enforced
racially discriminatory federal policies at home that seemed out of step with
the idealism of his Fourteen Points.6
Others have focused
on the Wilsonian Moment's global reach, in which
Chinese, Koreans, Egyptians, and Indians all seized on the promise of
self-determination and launched anti-colonial
movements for gaining national independence.7
Thus could argue that
the new internationalists of the twentieth century, which was a reaction
against nineteenth-century proletarian internationalism and cosmopolitanism,
were shaped alongside nationalism by a realist vision and languages of race and
civilization. At the end of The First World War, the principle of nationality
and the League of Nations were the shared basis for the new international world
order. The new liberal internationalism, of course, underlay among
others that institution.8
Thus, the prevailing
understanding of 1919 needs a corrective that shifts attention outside of the
Northern Atlantic to include East Asia. Much of this historiography has been
national and/or nationalist in focus, particularly in the cases of the substantial
literature around Korea’s March First Movement and China’s May Fourth Movement
and that links East Asia to other parts of the globe at this time in meaningful
ways.9
Generally omitted
from earlier accounts are Japan’s considerable efforts to shape the postwar
international system, the voices of East Asian nationalists and
transnationalism who found new validation—but not unprecedented inspiration—for
their struggles in some of Wilson’s pronouncements, and the objections that
East Asians raised to Euro-American dominance that would shape international
and transnational movements from that point onward. The period under discussion
was when the non-Western world
focused increasingly upon issues of race and ethnicity, on nationality and
sovereignty, as demonstrated by the widespread attention and support that Japan
received when it proposed adding a racial equality clause to the League’s
convention. That is but one example of the multiple ways East Asians formed and
re-formed their own realities in the wake of the First World War. States,
private individuals, and social groups in Japan, China, Korea, and Mongolia
encountered East Asia’s post-1919 in dialogue with the agendas advanced by the
Western powers, but from a position of an agency that facilitated advocacy of
their own interests rather than passive reception of the programs of others.
Western and
Eastern Sovereignty
Sovereignty, which was
characterized by the definition and defense of spaces and peoples over which
emergent nation-states asserted solitary control; Nationalism, for which 1919
served as the context for both immediate and very long-range efforts at
nation-building; Asia- Pacific Ascendancy, seen in the articulation of
principles and strategies to promote Asian leadership in world affairs, or at
least an equal share thereof; and Peace and Reconstruction, in which new
opportunities for rebuilding the region, and the world, existed and the new
initiatives were proffered to actualize those possibilities.
As we have seen in China's
case, sovereignty does not inherently depend upon the nation's ideas. As
the cases show, Chinese intellectuals and political leaders grappled with
differing forms of sovereignty, imperial, national, legal, administrative,
individual, as they refashioned China and its place in the interwar world.
It was the attacks by
Europeans and Americans on “China Proper” after 1840 and then defeated by Japan
in the war of 1895 that forced the Qing to engage with
the outside world on new terms. Those clashes fused pre-existing Sinitic
ideas of an “all-powerful” ruler with Western ideas of states' separateness to
create an idea of sovereignty as a moral order rather than simply a legal
arrangement. In contemporary China, sovereignty is defended as a moral
imperative, a matter of life and death, rather than a convenient way to
organize a complex international society. The word 主权 - sovereignty was
initially introduced to modern Chinese vocabulary thru William A. P. Martin's
translation of Henry Wheaton's Elements of International Law in 1864.
Previously it was also translated as 薩威棱貼. Martin's translation became definitive and also
traveled to Japan. So this most important term in the international relations
of modern China was coined by an American.
It is only after the
Republic of China's founding and its intellectuals who had traveled abroad and
were able to look back on their homeland from afar that promoted the
establishment and formation of the concept of “Chinese nation.” This included the
construction of China through government actions toward overseas Chinese.
The first to put
forward and use the concept of Nation of China(中国民族) was Liang Qichao in
1902. Soon after, Liang mentioned “Chinese nation” several times in Observation
of Nations in China in History (1904) and made investigations on problems such
as whether the “Chinese nation” was originally a single nation or was formed by
multiple ethnic groups through fusion. This led him to consider that if it was
formed by multiple ethnic groups through fusion, whether there was a “most
important ethnic group” and “why it was the “most important ethnic group.” Thus
Liang created a continuity story: the expansion of a civilized territory
outwards from its cradle in the Yellow River valley.
During the First
World War, China’s political leaders and private citizens learned an important
lesson from their historical experiences with extraterritoriality practices.
They learned that a key marker of a nation’s sovereign status was its assertion
of sovereignty over those it claimed as citizens beyond its territorial
borders. In the process, by 1923, overseas Chinese had become an important and
often effective venue for nation-state construction from both the state outward
and the society inward. Turning from the international arena to more
prominently domestic contexts, and the transition from a hierarchy of time to a
hierarchy of space that was concretized by a shift to
locating it in the field of geography.
The crucial March First and May Fourth movements
Thus the May Fourth
Movement contained both an anti-colonialist nationalist movement and a cultural
awakening, which combined to mark the transformation of China from a hazily
defined as 'All-Under-Heaven' to a nation-state with attempted (more on that
in part three) a demarcated geo-body. A generation of China’s cultural elite,
disillusioned with the oft-advertised civilization of the imperialist world
system and betrayed by Japan’s demands for Chinese territory at Versailles,
altered its views of the world and China’s place in it during the decade or so
following 1919. No longer embracing the “community of nations” that promised
respect and security for all members, many Chinese now viewed the international
system, particularly Japan, as predatory. The best defense was to
reconceptualize China, not as an empire based on principles, but as a
nation-state located in a fixed, though expandable, territory, with inviolable sovereignty over all that occurred within
its boundaries.
This also underlaid
the vociferous attacks leveled at the doyenne of Chinese reformers, Kang Youwei, by representatives of both the Left and the Right
factions of the New Culture Movement (1915–1923). People like Chen Duxiu and Li
Dazhao on the Left and Hu Shi and Liang Shuming on the Right. They attacked traditional
Confucian ideas and exalted Western ideas of liberalism, pragmatism,
nationalism, anarchism, and socialism. Much of their discourse was framed in
terms of varied critiques of Kang’s ideas. Each figure attempted to link their
ideological opponents to Kang to distance themselves from his outmoded
thinking. And while advancing ideas like Marxism, and thus the salience.
Eachas, they also demonstrated the internal dynamics through which these
intellectuals drew upon China’s intellectual past even as they attacked Kang
for his devotion to the Great Harmony of the Confucian worldview—China as “all under
heaven”— alias the hierarchy of the time. Thus 1915–1923 was a
turning point in China’s modernization and transformation into a sovereign
nation-state.
Similarly, for Korea
in 1919, there were massive March First demonstrations in Korea and the
Shanghai Provisional Government's creation. Also known as the Sam-il (3-1)
Movement (Hangul: 삼일 운동; Hanja: 三一 運動), was one of the earliest public displays of Korean
resistance during the rule of Korea by Japan from 1910 to 1945—continued to
resonate through the regimes and political debates from the government of Syngman Rhee through the student movements of the
1980s to the twenty-first-century disputes around South Korea’s relations with
the North. The figure of Syngman Rhee, the Christian convert with strong ties
to the United States who became the first president of the Shanghai Provisional
Government, and the Constitution of that administrative, state-like entity,
sits at the core of Lee’s study. Lee argues that all of the postwar political
tumults can be traced back to how particular regimes or factions assess and claim
(or reject) Rhee's inheritance, the Constitution, and the March First Movement.
For example, Rhee’s ascendancy after Korea’s liberation from Japan, the
enshrinement of the 1919 Provisional Constitution and Rhee's March First in the
1987 South Korean Constitution as its antecedents, and President Moon Jae-in’s
seemingly pro-unification efforts toward North Korea are all manifestations of
Korean contestation over three key issues: anti-Japanese nationalism,
single-race ethnonationalism, and the importance of the U.S.-Korean alliance.
Lee’s evidence and analysis are complex, and contemporary domestic and
international politics loom large. Still, he offers a compelling conclusion
that an emerging new Cold War system, in which South Korea leans toward North
Korea and China and away from the United States and Japan, has its historical
origins in the events of 1919.
There were crucial
events taking place in the decade after the Paris Peace Conference that deeply
fractured the framework of international relations and defined the fissures
that produced a tidal wave in the following decade. Like in the form of the Japanese
immigration issue—played in subsequent U.S.-Japan relations, including
within the Japanese Navy that appeared just at the moment when the United
States and Japan had emerged as the dominant powers in the Pacific.
As a victor of the
Great War, Japan emerged as the first non-white global power in 1919. However,
Japan quickly realized that membership in the Big
Five powers did not ensure complete equality with the white powers. Thus, Minohara examines the immigration issue between the United
States and Japan—which manifested itself in the form of the anti-Japanese
movement primarily in California—that resurfaced as a major point of friction
between the two countries as the war in Europe had concluded.
Japan failed to get
the racial equality clause included in the League Covenant but was unable to
halt the passage of the 1920 Alien Land Law in California. The choice to
apply the laws only to those aliens ineligible for citizenship rather than all aliens
meant that European aliens would not be affected. Because of this, the bill was
decidedly directed at Asians and specifically at the Japanese, who had become a
strong presence in the agricultural labor market as well as in the control of
farms.
Could the Pacific war Dec 1941-2 September 1945 be
avoided?
However, the Japanese
diplomats who valued strong U.S.-Japan relations were determined to find a
solution to the problem, which had been a sore point between the two nations
since 1906. These efforts led to the 1920-21 Morris-Shidehara
talks, but this diplomatic solution. This unfortunate political decision
would come to haunt U.S.-Japan relations a mere four years later with the
enactment of the Japanese exclusion act. Realizing that it could never break
through the racial glass ceiling, this clear rejection by the West became a
catalyst for Japan to vigorously return to Asia once again in the form of pan-Asianism.
The U.S.-Japan
rivalry escalated in the aftermath of the First World War to the point where
the new Republican administration under President Warren Harding felt that it
was necessary to initiate a naval limitation conference when strategic thinking
permeated the Japanese Navy. Of course, the Japanese Navy was far from being a
monolithic entity as illustrated by the clash between Admiral Katō Tomosaburō and Vice Admiral Katō Kanji, who differed
vastly in their view of global naval strategy and the future course that Japan
should take.
Pictured below is
Katō Tomosaburō, Prime Minister of Japan flanked
by Baron Shidehara, who would assume the position of Prime Minister in
1945, and Tokugawa Iesato, then the first Prince (公爵) of the Tokugawa clan.
Despite the vast
distance from the western front, Japan’s wartime contribution of naval power,
arms, ammunition, shipping, and capital catapulted it to a rank of global
prominence. Present at the Paris Peace Conference as one of five great powers,
the so-called Big Five, Japan was tasked with the most pressing global concern
of the day: establishing the foundations for lasting peace in Europe. Japanese
delegates eagerly joined the quest for national and global reconstruction as a
natural extension of wartime support for the allied cause and guarantee of
Japan’s new status as a world power. The Versailles and Washington systems
would eventually crumble in the 1930s, not because of a lack of Japanese
commitment to peace in the 1920s, but rather because of growing apprehension
among conservatives and the radical right in Japan of the political
implications of the new postwar infrastructure of peace. To forestall a further
erosion of their domestic politics reached fruition, the ideas and attempts
marked a significant departure from the pre-1919 or at least the prewar era.
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 3: The important
Chinese factions beyond 1919 and the need for China to create a new
Nation-State and how Japan, in turn, sought to expand into Asia through liberal
imperialism and then sought to consolidate its empire through liberal
internationalism were covered in: Part Three 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. See Sebastian
Conrad and Jürgen Osterhammel, eds., An Emerging Modern World, 1750-1870
(Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018).
3. Stefan Tanaka,
Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1993).
4. Tze-ki Hon, “From
a Hierarchy in Time to a Hierarchy in Space: The Meanings of Sino-Babylonianism in Early Twentieth-Century China,” Modern
China 36.2 (2010): 139–169.
5. 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).
6. See for
example Thomas J. Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for
a New World Order Revised ed. Edition, 1995.
7. 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.
8. See among others
Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia, PA:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), p. 5.
9. 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).
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