The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 5 | Issue 4 | Article ID 2407 | Apr 02, 2007

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The Politics of Imagining Asia: Empires, Nations, Regionaland Global Orders

Wang Hui

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

Wang Hui

Translation by Matthew A. Hale

Following the recent trends of globalizationand regionalization, the idea of Asia has beenrevived in political, economic, and culturalfields. This essay examines some of the multipleuses of the idea of Asia in modern East Asianand especially Chinese history. It consists offour parts. Part One discusses how the idea ofAsia developed from modern European history,especially the nineteenth century Europeannarrative of "World History," and points outhow the early modern Japanese "theory ofshedding Asia" derived from this narrative. PartTwo studies the relationship between the ideaof Asia and two forms of Narodism against thebackground of the Chinese and Russianrevolutions. One, exemplified by RussianNarodism, attempted to use Asian particularityto challenge modern capitalism; the other,represented by Sun Yat-sen, attempted toconstruct a nation-state on the basis of asocialist revolutionary program, and to developagricultural capitalism under the particularsocial conditions of Asia. Part Three considersthe differences and tensions between the"Great Asianism" of Chinese revolutionariessuch as Sun and the Japanese idea of Toyo(East Asia), and discusses the need toovercome the categories of nation-state andinternational relations in order to understandthe question of Asia. Part Four discusses theneed to go beyond early modern maritime-

centered accounts, nationalist frameworks, andEurocentrism in reexamining the question ofAsia through historical research by focusing onthe particular legacies of Asia (such as thetributary system) and the problems of "earlymodernity."

The “new empire” that has re-emerged in the“war on terror” follows naturally upon the heelsof neoliberal globalization. The latter seeks torestructure various social traditions accordingto neoliberal market principles such as thelegal protection of private property, the state’swithdrawal from the economic sphere, and thetransnationalization of productive, commercial,and financial systems. The former uses theviolence, crises, and social disintegrationcaused by the processes of neoliberalglobalization as pretenses to reconstruct amilitary and political “new empire”. These twoapparently different discourses cooperate toknit together military alliances, economicassociations, and international politicalinstitutions in the construction of a total orderat all levels– political, economic, cultural, andmilitary. That new order may, therefore, becalled a “neoliberal empire/ imperialism”.

In h i s ar t i c le “Why Europe Needs aConstitution,” Habermas argues that it isnecessary to organize nation-states into aunified political community in order to upholdthe European social model and its modernachievements (Habermas 2001). In order todefend the European way of life in terms ofwelfare, security, democracy and freedom,Habermas proposes three major tasks in theconstruction of a “post-national democracy”: to

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form a European civil society, to build aEurope-wide political public sphere, and tocreate a political culture which all citizens ofthe European Union would be able to share. Herecommends that Europe apply to itself “as awhole, ‘the logic of the circular creation ofstate and society that shaped the modernhistory of European countries’ ” so as toestablish a unified constitution by popularreferendum. A Europe formed according tothese three main tasks resembles a super stateor empire: its component societies retain theirown characteristics and autonomy to a certaindegree, but on the other hand it has unifiedinstitutions that carry out governmentalfunctions, including a unified parliamentaryand legal system, and it is supported andsafeguarded by a historically formed civilpolitical culture and social system.

Mirroring the progress and crisis of Europe’sunification is a two-fold process taking place inAsia. On the one hand is the concentration andexpansion of a new kind of power network withthe USA as its center. For instance, in theAfghanistan War, many Asian countries activelyparticipated in the US-centered war alliance fortheir own particular economic or politicalreasons. On the other hand consider theadvance of Asian regional cooperationfollowing the 1997 financial crisis. In June2001, China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan,Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan founded the“Shanghai Cooperation Organization,” and inNovember 2001 China reached an agreementwith the ten countries of ASEAN sign a freetrade agreement in ten years. This plan rapidlyexpanded from “10 plus 1” to “10 plus 3”(ASEAN plus China, Japan and Korea),eventually to “ 10 plus 6” (ASEAN plus China,Japan, Korea, India, Australia, and NewZealand). A Japanese news agency published anarticle saying that “If the unification of Asiaaccelerates […] the sense of distance betweenJapan and China will disappear naturally in theprocess of regional unification; eventually,based on the first occasion of regional

negotiation excluding the United States –-aconference that joins ASEAN and the summit ofJapan, China, and Korea, […] Japan and Chinamay achieve an ‘Asian version of thereconciliation between France and Germany’”(Nishikyo 2002). Since the views of China,Japan, and the ASEAN countries on regionalprogress are not entirely consistent, theexpansion of this regional plan (the addition ofIndia, Australia and New Zealand bring themembership to sixteen) indicates not so muchthe spread of the idea of Asia as the product ofthe power dynamics among the region’s variousnation-states.

ASEAN + 3

The course of Asian regional integrationincludes many complex, contradictory features.On the one hand, in the name of the region or“Asia” it appeals to supra-national interests,but on the other hand, it incorporates nation-states into a larger, protective community. Onthe one hand, this regionalism includes theintent to challenge global hegemony throughconstructing regional autonomy, but on theother hand, it is the product of global marketrelations under “new imperial” dominance.From a historical perspective, the discussion of“Asia” is not an entirely new phenomenon. Inthe early modern wave of nationalism weencountered two sharply opposed visions ofAsia: the colonialist vision developed fromJapan’s “continental policy,” and the Asian

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social revolution vision centered on nationalliberation and socialist movements. The formerconstructed the idea of Asia (Yazhou or Toyo)based on the binary between East and West,whereas the latter discussed the issue of nationfrom an internationalist perspective. Discussionof Asia, therefore, cannot avoid reviewing theearly modern colonialist and nationalistmovements.

I Asia and Toyo: Questions of Derivation

Historically speaking, the idea of Asia is notAsian but, rather, European. In 1948, TakeuchiYoshimi wrote in an article called “What ismodernity?”: “[If we want to] understand EastAsia (Toyo), [we must appreciate that] whatconstitutes Asia are European factors existingin Europe. Asia is Asia by dint of its Europeancontext” (Takeuchi 2005:188). This view canalso help us to explain Fukuzawa Yukichi’snegative way of defining Asia, i.e. through hiscall to “shed Asia” [datsu-a] (Maruyama1997:9-11). Scholars have various opinionsabout the role of “On Shedding Asia” (datsu-aron) (published March 16th, 1885) in thedevelopment of Fukuzawa’s thought. As I see it,however, the important question is why theslogan developed from this article, “shed Asiaand join Europe” (datsu-a nyu ou) (althoughFukuzawa never actually used the words “joinEurope”), became a recurring theme of modernJapanese thought. In the framework of “OnShedding Asia,” the notion of Asia included twolevels. First, Asia referred to a region with ahigh degree of cultural homogenization, i.e.Confucian Asia. Second, the political meaningof “shedding Confucianism” was dissociationfrom China-centered imperial relations andconstruction of a European-style nation-stateoriented towards “freedom,” “human rights,”“national sovereignty,” “civilization,” and“independent spirit.” In the context of thecontinuous expansion of “the state,” this newpolitical form and its power relations, “Asia”was fundamentally negated as a cultural andpolitical model opposed to the nationalist vision

of modernization. According to the logic ofTakeuchi’s comment that “Asia is Asia by dintof its European context,” the notion of Asia’sessence implied by Fukuzawa’s proposal to“shed Asia,” e.g. Confucianism and its socialsystem, is actually internal to Europeanthought. If “what constitute Asia are Europeanfactors existing in Europe,” the birth of “Asia”must result from Asia’s negation of itself. Inthis sense, Fukuzawa’s proposal to “shed Asia”and Takeuchi’s proposal both derive from thenineteenth century European conception of“world history.”

Fukuzawa on Japan's 10,000 yen banknote

Just as European self-consciousness requiredknowledge of its “outside,” “shedding Asia” wasa way of forming self-consciousness based ondifferentiating Japan from Asia. From theperspective of “shedding Asia,” this proposal ofearly modern Japanese particularism, in factderived from early modern European historicalconsciousness. In other words, Japaneseparticularism derived from Europeanuniversalism. In the words of Karl Jaspers,“Dissociation from Asia was part of a universalhistorical process, not a particularist Europeangesture towards Asia. It took place within Asiaitself. It was the path of humanity and the truepath of history.” He continues:

G r e e k c u l t u r e s e e m s t o b e aphenomenon of the Asian periphery.Europe disengaged from its Asianmother when it was not yet mature. Aproblem emerges: at which step, whichtime, and which place did this rupture

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occur? Could Europe get lost in Asiaagain? Is there a lack of consciousnessin the depths of As ia? Does i tsd e g r a d a t i o n e q u a l a l a c k o fconsciousness?

If the West emerged from the Asianmatrix, its emergence appears to be abold movement in the liberation ofhuman potential. This movement entailstwo risks: first, Europe could lose itsspiritual basis; second, as soon as theWest becomes conscious, it continuallyrisks falling back into Asia.

However, if the risk of falling back intoAsia were actualized today, this riskwould be actual ized under theconditions of new industrial technologythat would transform and destroy Asia.Western freedom, individualism, manyWestern categories, and enlightenedconsciousness would be abandoned, andthey would be replaced by Asia’s eternalcharacteristics: its existing forms ofdespotism, its fatalistic tranquility, itslack of history or volition. Asia would bethe enduring world influencing thetotality. It is older than Europe and,moreover, it includes Europe. All thatderives from Asia and must return toAsia is temporary. […]

Asia has become a principle of depth.When we objectively analyze it as ahistorical phenomenon, it disintegrates.We cannot treat its opposing term,Europe, as a transcendental entity, soEurasia becomes a dreadful specter.Only when we treat them as theepitome of certain historically specific,ideationally coherent things, ratherthan as a perception of the whole, thenthey become a determinate language ofdepth, and a code representing truth.Eurasia, however, is a code coexistingwith the whole of Western history

[Jaspers 1989:82-3].

If “shedding Asia” is not the premise forJapanese particularism but rather a particularstep in Europe’s universal progress, what kindof European thought gave rise to this“universal progress”?

Eurasia relief map

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, theEuropean Enlightenment and colonialexpansion provided conditions for thedevelopment of a new system of knowledge.Historical linguistics, race theory, moderngeography, political economy, theories of state,legal philosophy, the study of religion, andhistoriography all rapidly developed hand inhand with the natural sciences and constructeda new worldview in every aspect. The notions ofEurope and Asia were both products of thisprocess of knowledge construction. In theworks o f European wr i te r s such asMontesquieu, Adam Smith, Hegel, and Marx,[1] the core of the construction of thisEuropean notion of Asia had the followingcharacteristics: multi-national empires asopposed to European modern or monarchicalstates; political despotism as opposed toEuropean modern legal and political systems;and nomadic and agrarian modes of production

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completely different from European urban andcommercial life. Since the European nation-state and the expansion of the capitalist marketsystem were considered an advanced stage orte los o f wor ld h i s tory , As ia and i t saforementioned characteristics wereconsequently relegated to a lower stage. In thiscontext, Asia was not only a geographiccategory, but also a form of civilization: Asiarepresented a political form defined inopposition to the European nation-state, asocial form defined in opposition to Europeancapitalism, and a transitional stage betweenprehistory and history proper. Throughout mostof the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,discourse on Asia was embedded within auniversalist narrative about Europeanmodernity that defined the apparently opposedhistorical blueprints of both colonists andrevolutionaries. The three central themes andkeywords of this narrative were empire, nation-state and capitalism (or market economy).

In many nineteenth century European texts onhistory, philosophy, law, state, and religion,Asia was presented as the “center” of allnations in the world and the “starting point” ofworld history. But in the framework of“shedding Asia”, the Confucianism of Chinawas regarded as the “source of history”. Thisview of “source” or “starting point” arose froma double need that required both connectionand breaking away. From the discovery byhistorical linguists of the connection betweenEuropean languages and Sanskrit, we couldexamine how a political economist like Hegelwould connect this linguistic discovery withnineteenth-century European racial theoriesand state theories so as to define “Asia as thestarting point of history”:

It is a great discovery in history—as of anew world—which has been madewithin rather more than the last twentyyears, respecting the Sanskrit and theconnection of the European languageswith it. In particular, the connection of

the German and Indian peoples hasbeen demonstrated, with as muchcertainty as such subjects allow of. Evenat the present time we know of peopleswhich scarcely form a society, muchless a State, but that have been longknown as existing…. In the connectionjust referred to, between the languagesof nations so widely separated, we havea result before us, which proves thediffusion of those nations from Asia as acen te r , and the so d i s s im i l a rdevelopment of what had beenoriginally related, as an incontestablefact [Hegel 1899:60].

Asia must, therefore, meet two conditions inorder to constitute the “starting point” of worldhistory. First, Asia and Europe must be twocorrelated organic parts of the same historicalprocess. Second, Asia and Europe must occupytwo drastically different stages of this historicalcontinuum, and the main standard forevaluating these stages must be “the state.”The reason Asia marked the “starting point” orprehistorical stage in Hegel’s view was that itstill lacked states and had not yet formedhistorical subjects. In this sense, when Asianregions complete the transition from traditionalempires to “states,” from agrarian or pastoralto industrial or commercial modes ofproduction, from village to urban or “civilsociety” forms of organization, then Asia wouldno longer be Asia.

Because his account of civil society, market,and commerce derives from the Scottish schoolof political economy, Hegel’s notion of adespotic Asia is linked to a certain economicsystem. If we contrast Hegel’s historicalphilosophical account of the four stages—theOrient, Greece, Rome and the Teutonicpeoples, with Adam Smith’s delineation, fromthe perspective of economic history, of fourhistorical stages—hunting, pastoral,agricultural, and commercial, it is not difficultto discover internal relations between Hegel’s

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historical description centered on politicalforms and Smith’s historical stages centered onproductive forms. Smith treats the developmentfrom agricultural society to commercial societyas the transition from European feudal societyto modern market society. Thereby heinternally connects the ideas of modern era,commercial era and European society in theform of a historical narrative. The model ofmarket movement that he describes is anabstract process: the discovery of theAmericas, colonialism and class differentiationare all presented as an economic process ofendless market expansion, labor division,technology advancement, rise of tax andwealth. A kind of narrative on the circulativemovement of the world market is thusestablished through this formalist narrativemethod. This method regards the market modeas both the result of historical development andthe inner law of history; here the concretespatial relationship of colonialism and socialdifferentiation is transformed into a temporalprocess of production, circulation, andconsumption. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith’sdivision of four historical stages corresponds toa taxonomy of specific regions and peoples.When describing the “nations of hunters, thelowest and rudest state of society,” forexample, he mentions “the native tribes ofNorth America;” when discussing “nations ofshepherds, a more advanced state of society,”he names his contemporary Tartars and Arabsas examples; when describing “[nations ofhusbandmen,] a yet more advanced state ofsociety,” he turns backwards to ancient Greeceand Rome (in a previous chapter he alsomentions Chinese agriculture). As forcommercial society, he refers to Europe whichhe calls “civilized states.” (Smith 1976:689-92).In Hegel’s vision, all these issues wereincorporated into a political frameworkfocusing on the state. The reason “nations ofhunters” were “the lowest and rudest” form ofsociety was that the scale of their communitieswas too small to produce the political divisionof labor necessary for state formation. In

Gellner’s words, “for them, the question of thestate, of a stable specialized order-enforcinginstitution, does not really arise” (Gellner1983:5). Hegel’s narrative of world historytherefore explicitly excludes North America(characterized by hunting and gathering) andsituates the Orient at the starting point ofhistory. If Smith divides history into variouseconomic or productive modes, then Hegelnominates historical stages according toregion, civilization, and state structure, butboth correlate mode of production or politicalform with specific places (Asia, the Americas,Africa, and Europe), and both organize theseplaces within a chronological narrative.

The notions of Asia or China articulated byMontesquieu, Hegel, Marx, and recentlyFukuyama, all developed through comparativedescription of civilizations. In order toconstruct Asia as this particular type ofcivilization in contrast with Europeancivilization, it was necessary to elide itsinternal development and change; even thehistory of conflicts between northern andsouthern Chinese ethnic groups (i.e. whatEuropean writers called the conquering ofChina by the “Tartars” and vice versa) was notregarded as changes in “historical forms”. Inthe words of Montesquieu: “[T]he laws of Chinaare not destroyed by conquest. Their customs,manners, laws, and religion [were] the samething” (Montesquieu 1914). In this culturalisthorizon, Asia does not have history or thehistorical conditions or impetus for producingmodernity. The heart of this modernity is the“state” and its legal system, its urban andcommercial way of life, or its mechanism foreconomic and military competition based onnation-states. Perry Anderson wrote Incritiquing European notions of the “Asiaticmode of production” and its “despotism”, PerryAnderson pointed out that the concept of“despotism”, from its origins was an outsider’sappraisal of “the Orient.” As far back as ancientGreece, Aristotle had claimed that by their verynature barbarians are more servile than

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Greeks, and Asians are more servile thanEuropeans; hence they endure despotic rulewithout protest [Anderson 1974:463]. [2]

Early modern European notions of Asian statestructures were produced through the longhistory of the conflict of European states withthe Ottoman Empire. Machiavelli’s The Princefirst pitted the Ottoman state against Europeanmonarchies, arguing that the Ottomanmonarchical bureaucratic system wascategorically different from all European statesystems. Similarly, Bodin, often regarded as thefirst European theorist of sovereignty, alsocontrasted European “royal sovereignty” withOttoman “lordly power” (Anderson 1974:397).With the nineteenth century expansion ofEuropean colonialism, this contrast eventuallymutated into the contrast between Europeannation-states and Asian empires, to such anextent that today it is difficult to recognize thatthe “despotism” or “absolutism” we associatewith Asia in fact derives from Europeangeneralizations about the Ottoman Empire(1974:493). In this perspective, early moderncapitalism is the product of Western Europe’sunique social structure, and there is anecessary or natural relation between capitalistdevelopment and the system of nation-states,with feudal states as their historicalprecondition. Under the influence of thisconception of history, imperial systems (vast,multi-ethnic empires such as the Ottoman,Chinese, Mughal, and Russian systems) areviewed as the political form of Orientaldespotism incapable of producing the politicalstructure necessary for the development ofcapitalism (1974:400, 412). It was this notion ofdespotism derived from descriptions of empirethat made it possible for later generations tocontrast Europe with Asia in terms of politicalca tegor ies (democrat i c Europe vs .authoritarian Asia), and that made it possiblefor Fukuzawa and his successors to contrastJapan with Confucian China through the theoryof “shedding Asia.”

The idea of Asia in early modern Europeanthought was always closely connected with thevast territory and the complex ethnicity of anempire, as contrasted with the republicansystem of Greece and European monarchy—inthe wave of nationalist movements in thenineteenth century, republican system orfeudal monarchy existed both as predecessorsof the nation-state and as political formsdistinct from that of any other region. In otherwords, despotism became closely associatedwith the idea of vast empire in the transitionfrom feudal state to nation-state. The categoryof “state”, opposed to empire, thereforeacquired its superiority in value and in history.European thinkers such Montesquieu firmlynegated some relatively positive description ofpolitics, law, customs, and culture in China bysome priests (such description had been thebase of the European Enlightenment views ofChina, particularly those by Voltaire andLeibniz). They proceeded to summarize thepolitical culture of China as “despotism” and“empire”. According to the classic descriptionsince Montesquieu, the major characteristics ofan empire are: the sovereign monopolizes thedistribution of property with his military power,thereby eliminates aristocracy that couldbalance the sovereign’s power and blocks thegrowth of the nation-state. [Montesquieu, TheSpirit of the Laws: 126-9]. If we analyze thisEuropean notion of despotic empire of mixedethnicity and vast territory by contextualizing itin the self-understanding of early modernJapan, we discern the foundation of twoideas—the contrast between a Japan with asingle ethnicity, mutating from feudalism to amodern state, and a multi-ethnic China,trapped in Confucian empire systems; and theproposition of so-called “turning down thefriends of Asia”. 　

The early modern Japanese idea of “Asia” wasalso founded on this sort of European-styleculturalism. In Maruyama Masao’s words, “itre f l ec ted Japan ’ s rap id p rocess o fwesternization following the Meiji period, for

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the cultural and political path formed throughthe confluence of statism and post-Meijiwesternization was so obviously different fromthose of all the other Asian countries”(Maruyama 1998:8). In explaining theformation of early modern Japanese “staterationality” Maruyama points out that thesovereign states of early modern Europe wereborn through the disintegration of the Christianworld-community symbolized by the [Holy]Roman Empire, and their international societywas an agglomeration of all independent states,whereas “Japan was the opposite; it began todevelop a nation-state only after it had beenforced into this international society”(Maruyama 1997:146). This is why the earlymodern Japanese notion of “equality amongstates” developed through a struggle againstthe hierarchical Confucian notions of“differentiating between barbarian andcivilized” (yi xia zhi ban) and “expellingbarbarians” (rangxia lun). According to thiscontrast between the principle of formalequality in European international law and theConfucian idea of “expelling barbarians,” earlymodern Japanese expansionism can beexplained as a result of lacking European-style“state rational ity” or as a product ofConfucianist “expelling barbarians”. Maruyamaargues that in Fukuzawa:

Internal liberation and externalindependence were understood as asingle problem. According to this logic,individualism and statism, statism andinternationalism achieved a splendidbalance – this was indeed a fortunatemoment. However, the harsh realities ofthe international context soon shatteredthis balance [Maruyama 1997:157].

The notion of “expelling barbarians” paved theway for the modern state’s expansion andexclusion, but if that is all, then the tragedy ofearly modern Japan is a tragedy of “incompletewesternization” or “incomplete modernization”rather than a tragedy of Japanese modernity

itself.

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

“State rationality” goes beyond thestage of absolute sovereignty to an ageof coexistence among all modernsovereign states. According to theprinciples of international law, thesemodern sovereign states establishdiplomatic relations and pursue theirstate interests through means such astreaties, alliances, and war. This sort of“international community” seems toh a v e a l r e a d y t a k e n s h a p e i nseventeenth century Europe, where itwas called the Western State System.“State rationality” developed under thetwin pillars of the principle of equalityamong sovereign states and the balanceof powers [1997:160].

Japan’s 1874 invasion of Taiwan, however, andits 1894 invasion of Korea both appealed toEuropean international law and its notion offormal equality among sovereign states. Shouldwe interpret these actions within a frameworkof “the decadence of state rationality,” orshould we interpret them within a process ofseeking or forming this European “staterationality”? There is no real contradictionbetween such imperialist actions and theembrace of the notion of sovereign equality inorder to cast off the imperial Chinese tributesystem or hierarchical relations. Rather thanexplaining this problem through a binaryopposition between tradition and modernity orxenophobia [“barbarian-expulsionism”] andinternational equality, we would do better toconsider the derivativeness of Japan’s earlymodern nationalism, colonialism, and Asianism.That is, we should examine early modernJapanese expansionism within its “Europeancontext.”

According to the classic model of nationalismforged in the French Revolution, the nation-

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state is the basic precondition for the individualas unit of power (i.e. the citizen). Without thispolitical community, without the preconditionof national uniformity, it would be impossible toestablish the individual as a juridical subject.As European writers have asked over andagain:

Will a free Europe take the place ofmonarchical Europe? The wars againstother monarchies undertaken to defendthe fruits of the [French] Revolutionquickly became a liberatory missioninvolving annexation of other countries’territories. […] The revolution and theempire tried to incite other nations tooverthrow their monarchs in the nameof liberty, but this expansionismeventually drove these peoples to unitewith their traditional monarchies inopposition to France [Gerbet 1989:12].

Here the key issue is that, on the one hand, thebourgeois nation-state and its individualistnotion of citizenship were political paths toabandon the hierarchy of aristocratic systemsand ancient empires, but, on the other hand,they were the best political forms for theexpansion of capitalism (especially theformation of national markets, the expansion ofoverseas markets, and the system of privateproperty), and this expansion was never limitedto borders of nation-states. So even if theycould have actualized the system of “rights”awaited by Fukuzawa, there was notnecessarily any guarantee that this “system”would not possess expansive or invasivefeatures. In this sense, there is no realcontradiction between his theory of “sheddingAsia” and the reality of “invading Asia” – bothcan find grounds in the “European context”from which they derive. Pointing this out doesnot mean denying the historical connectionbetween early modern Japanese imperialistexpansion and the political tradition of“respecting the emperor and expelling thebarbarians”; my aim is to highlight how the use

of this political tradition was produced undernew historical conditions and relations, and toshow that reflections on this political traditionshould therefore become an organic part ofreconsidering such new historical conditionsand relations.

II Populism and the Dual Meaning of“Asia”

Twenty-six years after Fukuzawa published “OnShedding Asia,” the Chinese Revolution of 1911broke out. Shortly after the ProvisionalGovernment of the Republic of China wasfounded, Lenin published a series of articlesapplauding the fact that “[today] China is aland of seething political activity, the scene of avirile social movement and of a democraticupsurge,” and condemning the civilized andadvanced Europe, which, “with its highlydeveloped machine industry, its rich multiformculture and its constitutions,” had neverthelessremained “in support of everything backward,moribund, and medieval” under the commandof the bourgeoisie (Lenin 1977, 1977a). Theseobservations constitute part of Lenin’s theoryof imperialism and proletarian revolution,where he argued that, as capitalism enteredthe imperialist phase, the various socialstruggles of oppressed peoples around theworld would be integrated into the category ofworld proletarian revolution. This method ofconnecting European and Asian revolutions canbe traced back to Marx’s article “Revolution inChina and in Europe,” written for the New YorkDaily Tribune in 1853 (Marx 1853). Lenin andFukuzawa’s opposing views are based on acommon basic understanding, that is, thatAsian modernity was the outcome of Europeanmodernity, and regardless of Asia’s status andfate, the significance of its modernitymanifested itself only in its relationship withthe more advanced Europe. Lenin regardsRussia as an Asian country, but this orientationis defined not from the perspective ofgeography but from the degree of capitalistdevelopment and the process of Russian

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history. In “Democracy and Narodism inChina,” he wrote that “Russia is undoubtedlyan Asian country and, what is more, one of themost benighted, medieval, and shamefullybackward of Asian countries” (Lenin 1975).Although he was warmly sympathetic to theChinese revolution, Lenin’s position was“Western European” when the issue switchedfrom Asian revolution to the changes withinRussian society. In the nineteenth andtwentieth centuries, Russian intellectualsregarded the spirit of Russia as the struggleand collision of two forces: the Eastern and theWestern, the Asian and the European. In thequotation above, Asia is a category connectedwith notions such as barbarity, medievalnessand backwardness. It is for this reason that theRussian revolution had a prominently Asiancharacter – that is, because it was directedagainst Russia’s benighted, medieval, andshamefully backward social relations—and atthe same time, had a global significance. [3]

The special position of Asia in the rhetoric ofworld history determined how the socialistsunderstood the task and direction of modernrevolution in Asia. After read Sun Yat-sen’s“The Significance of Chinese Revolution”, Lenincriticized the democratic and socialistprograms proposed by th is Chineserevolutionary that transcended capitalism. Henoted that they were utopian and populist.Lenin observed, “The chief representative, orthe chief social bulwark, of this Asianbourgeoisie that is still capable of supporting ahistorically progressive cause, is the peasant”(Lenin 1975). Before the Asian bourgeoisieaccomplished the revolutionary task that theEuropean bourgeoisie had accomplished,therefore, socialism was out of the question. Headroitly used historical dialectics to assert thatSun Yat-sen’s “Land Reform Outline” was“reactionary” because it went against orbeyond the present historical stage. He alsopointed out that because of the “Asian”character of Chinese society, it was exactly this“reactionary outline” that could accomplish the

task of capitalism in China: “[populism], underthe disguise of ‘combating capitalism’ inagriculture, champions an agrarian programthat, if fully carried out, would mean the mostrap id deve lopment o f cap i ta l i sm inagriculture.”

Lenin’s impressions of the Chinese revolutionwere based on his reflection on the Russianreforms of 1861, and especially the failure ofthe 1905 revolution. In 1861, after the failureof the Crimean War with Great Britain andFrance over control of the Balkans and theBlack Sea, Alexander II initiated reforms toabolish serfdom. Two points about thesereforms should be highlighted. First, theyoriginated from pressures external to Russiansociety. Second, the “Decree of Emancipation”announced on 19 February 1861 was carriedout under the premise of full protection oflandlord interests, and the Russian peasantspaid a heavy cost for Russia’s top-down processof industrialization. This is why Lenin arguedthat 1861 led to 1905 (Lenin 1973). From thereforms of 1861 to the revolution of 1905, theconcentration of land did not give rise tocapitalist agriculture; instead it led peasantmembers of agrarian communes to demandvehement l y the appropr ia t i on andredistribution of landlord lands (Lü 2004). [3] Itwas against this background that Lenin linkedhis thoughts on the 1905 revolution to Russia’sland question. In “The Agrarian Program ofSocial-Democracy in the First RussianRevolution, 1905-1907,” focusing on theRussian land question, Lenin described twomodels of agricultural capitalism as “thePrussian path” and “the American path”: in theformer case state and feudal landlords allied todeprive the peasants of communes and theirland ownerships with violence, turning feudaleconomy into Junker bourgeois economy; thelatter might be preferable for the peasants to asmall number of landlords. It took all land intostate ownership in order to abolish the serfsystem in countryside. It was exactly sucheconomic necessity that led the Russian

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peasants to support the nationalization of land.In considering the relation between the Russianland reform and the failure of the 1905revolution, Lenin concludes that under Russia’ssocial conditions, “Nationalization of land is notonly the only way to thoroughly abolish themedieval agricultural system, it is also the bestland system possible under capitalism” (Lenin,1972).

Poster, Russian Revolution of 1905

Lenin believed that the Russian Populist(Narodnik) agrarian program was bound tolead Russia to return to a small peasanteconomy in which village land was divided upinto small plots, and this kind of economicsystem could not provide the impetus forcapitalist development. He endorsed the“American path” first because only abolition ofmedieval agrarian relat ions throughnationalization of land could provide thepossibility to develop agricultural capitalism,and second because Russia had large areas ofvirgin land and other conditions for theAmerican path as opposed to the paths ofEuropean countries. The development ofcapitalist agriculture must involve the coercivereshaping of earlier social relations, but thiscould happen in various ways:

In England this reshaping proceeded ina revolutionary, violent way; but theviolence was practised for the benefit of

the landlords, it was practised on themasses of the peasants, who were taxedto exhaustion, driven from the villages,ev i c ted , and who d ied ou t , o remigrated. In America this reshapingwent on in a violent way as regards theslave farms in the Southern States.There violence was applied against theslaveowning landlords. Their estateswere broken up, and the large feudalestates were transformed into smallbourgeois farms. As regards the mass of“unappropriated” American lands, thisrole of creating the new agrarianrelationships to suit the new mode ofproduction (i.e., capitalism) was playedb y t h e “ A m e r i c a n G e n e r a lRedistribution”, by the Anti-Rentmovement […] of the forties, theHomestead Act, etc. [Lenin 1972].

It was from this perspective that Lenin saw thetruly revolutionary potential of Sun Yat-sen’sprogram. He marveled at this “advancedChinese democrat” who knew nothing of Russiabut still argued like a Russian and posed“purely Russian questions”:

Land nationalisation makes it possibleto abolish absolute rent, leaving onlydifferential rent. According to Marx’stheory, land nationalisation means amaximum elimination of medievalmonopolies and medieval relations inagriculture, maximum freedom inbuying and selling land, and maximumfacilities for agriculture to adapt itselfto the market [Lenin 1975].

In contrast, “Our vulgar Marxists, however, incriticising ‘equalised redistribution,’‘socialisation of the land,’ and ‘equal right tothe land,’ confine themselves to repudiating thedoctrine, and thus reveal their own obtusedoctrinairism, which prevents them fromseeing the vital life of the peasant revolutionbeneath the lifeless doctrine of Narodnik

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theory.” Through examining Sun Yat-sen’srevolutionary program against Russia’sparticular historical background, Leninconcluded that “The Russian revolution cansucceed only as a peasants’ agrarianrevolution, and the agrarian revolution cannotcomplete its historical mission without carryingout nationalization.” If the main characteristicdefining the “American path” in contrast to thePruss ian and Engl i sh paths was thenationalization of land, the “Chinese path”represented a bottom-up “peasants’ agrarianrevolution.”

The Russian reforms took place against thebackground of the Crimean War, the 1905Russo-Japanese War, and the First World War,so Lenin’s reflections on the path of Russia’sreforms could not avoid addressing theinternational relations created by Europeanimperialism. If Russia’s land question must besolved through “nationalization” [i.e.transferring ownership to the state], what kindof “state” could bear this responsibility? Leninwrote that:

[T[he national state is the rule and the“norm” of capitalism; the multi-nationalstate represents backwardness, or is anexception. […] This does not mean, ofcourse, that such a state, which is basedon bourgeois relations, can eliminatethe exploitation and oppression ofnations. It only means that Marxistscannot lose sight of the powerfuleconomic factors that give rise to theurge to create national states. It meansthat “self-determination of nations” inthe Marxists’ Programme cannot, froma historico-economic point of view, haveany other meaning than political self-determination, state independence, andthe formation of a national state [Lenin1972a].

So when Lenin discussed “the awakening ofAsia,” his concern was not with socialism but

with how to create the political conditions forthe development of capitalism, that is, thequestion of national self-determination. Twopoints are worth noting here. First, the“national state” and the “multi-national state”(i.e. “empire”) are opposed, the former beingthe “norm” of capitalist development, the latterforming its antithesis. Secondly, national self-determination is “political self-determination,”and under the conditions of Russia and China,the necessary form of “polit ical self -determination” was to use socialist methods toform the political conditions for capitalistdevelopment, i.e. the political structures of thenation-state: “[C]apitalism, having awakenedAsia, has called forth national movementseverywhere in that continent, too; […] thetendency of these movements is towards thecreation of national states in Asia; […] it is suchstates that ensure the best conditions for thedevelopment of capitalism.” Under theparticular conditions of “Asia,” only peasant-ledagrarian revolution and socialist state-buildingcould create the preconditions for capitalistdevelopment, so all reform programs opposedto peasant liberation and redistribution of landmust be rejected.

There is no need to exaggerate the influence ofthe 1911 Revolution in China on Lenin or onthe Russian Revolution. In contrast, theOctober Revolution in 1917 arose against thebackground of European wars and influencedthe Chinese Revolution profoundly. Lenin paidspecial attention to the 1911 Revolution in thecontext of his prolonged reflection on theproblems of state, socialist movement, andpeople’s democratic dictatorship. Yet two factsare seldom remembered. First, the OctoberRevolution took place after China’s RepublicanRevolution of 1911. The method of socialistconstruction after the October Revolution canto a great extend be regarded as a response tothe revolutionary situation in Asia. Lenin’stheory of national self-determination and hisinterpretation of the significance of revolutionin backward countries in the era of imperialism

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were both introduced after the ChineseRevolution and were theoretically connectedwith his analysis of this revolution. Second, theRussian Revolution greatly shocked andprofoundly influenced Europe, and can beregarded as the historical event that separatedRussia from Europe. There is no fundamentaldifference between Lenin’s revolutionaryassessment and the notions of Asia in thewritings of Smith or Hegel. All perceived thehistory of capitalism as an evolutionary processbeginning in the ancient Orient and floweringin modern Europe, and moving through thestages of hunting and agriculture to modernindustry and commerce. For Lenin, however,this world-historical framework had twomeanings from the start. First, the globalexpansion of capitalism and the Russianuprising of 1905 that it stimulated were themain forces that would awaken Asia—a landthat had been “standing still for centuries” andhad no history (Lenin 1977). Second, since theChinese Revolution represented the mostadvanced power in world history, it clearlyindicated the point at which the imperialistworld system would be broken through. In theprotracted debate between Slavophiles andWesternizers among Russian intellectuals andrevolutionaries, Lenin developed a new sort oflogic that could be called “shed Europe and joinAsia” (datsu-ou nyu a or tuo ou ru ya). It waswithin this logic that the Chinese revolutionprovided a unique path combining nationalliberation with socialism. This unique pathprovided the precondition for a new kind ofrevolutionary subject: the alliance betweenworkers and peasants with the Chinese peasantas the principal component.

III “Great Asianism” in the Perspective ofSocial Revolution

L e n i n ’ s t h e o r y g i v e s u s a c l u e f o runderstanding the relation between earlymodern Chinese nationalism and the questionof Asia. It is worth noting that early modernJapanese Asianism was first directed at

“reviving” or “stimulating” Asia, but soon itbecame intertwined with expansionist“continental policy” and the imperialist visionof “Greater East Asia.” Beneath this shadow,the intellectuals and revolutionaries of China,Korea, and other Asian countries could notexpress interest in any variations of such an“Asianism.”

A few limited writings on this topic by Chineserevolutionaries such as Zhang Taiyan, LiDazhao, and Sun Yat-sen were produced in acontext associated with Japan. For them, thequestion of Asia was directly related to theChinese revolution, social movement, andnational self-determination. At the end of 1901,Sun Yat-sen published “On the Theories ofPreserving and Partitioning China” in the TohoSociety Journal. Addressing two theories thenprevalent in Japan—that of preserving Chinaand that of partitioning China, Sun pointed outthat “From the perspective of state power(guoshi), there is no reason to preserve [China];from the perspective of national sentiment(minqing), there is no need to partition[China].” There was no reason to “preserve”China because, from the perspective ofrevolutionary politics, the Qing state and thepeople stood opposed to one another, and therewas no need to “partition” China because oneof the aims of the revolution was precisely toimplement national self-determination (Wang2004:65-7).

In 1924, during his last visit to Kobe, Sun againarticulated his views on the Asia question in aspeech, which was his famous “Great Asianism”(da yazhou zhuyi) (Sun 1986). He delineatedtwo visions of Asia with ambiguity: One was the“birthplace of the most ancient culture,” butwhich lacked “a completely independent state”;the other was the Asia about to be rejuvenated.The former had inherent connections with the“multi-national states” in Lenin’s account, butwhat was the starting point of this Asianrejuvenation or rejuvenated Asia? Sun said thatthe starting point was Japan, since Japan had

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abolished a number of unequal treaties andbecome the first independent state in Asia. Inother words, we could say this starting point isthe nation-state rather than Japan in particular.He also applauded the Japanese victory in theRusso-Japanese war of 1904:

The Japanese triumph over Russia wasthe first triumph of an Asian over aEuropean nation in the past severalcenturies. […] All Asian nations areexhilarated and start to hold a greathope. […] They therefore hope to defeatEurope and start movements forindependence. […] The great hope ofnational independence in Asia is born[Sun 1986:402].

Sun called attention to a subtle notion—“allAsian nations.” This notion is not only Asia asthe origin of the most ancient civilization, butalso an Asia that contains independent nation-states; it is not only East Asia within theConfucian cultural sphere, but also amulticultural Asia. The unity of Asia was basedon the independence of sovereign states. “AllAsian nations” is the outcome of nationalindependence movements and not an awkwardimitation of European nation-states. Suninsisted that Asia had its own culture andprinciples—what he called “the culture of thekingly way (wang dao)” as opposed to “theculture of the hegemonic way (ba dao)” ofEuropean nation-states. He titled his speech“Great Asianism” partly because he connectedthe idea of Asia with the notion of “the kinglyway.” If we compare his speech with theimperialist idea of Asia, it becomes clear thatalthough it preserves its association withConfucian ideas such “the kingly way” or“virtue and morality” (renyi daode), Sun’snotion of Asia is not an Asia with a core ofcultural homogeneity. It is instead an Asiaconsisting of equal nation-states. According tothis notion of Asia, the inherent unity of Asia isnot Confucianism or any other homogeneouscul ture , but a pol i t ica l cu l ture that

accommodates different religions, beliefs,nations, and societies. Within this category ofpolitical culture, Sun discussed China, Japan,India, Persia, Afghanistan, Arabia, Turkey,Bhutan, and Nepal, and the tributary system ofthe Chinese empire. Cultural heterogeneity wasone of the main characteristics of this idea ofAsia, and the category of nation provides thevehicle for the heterogeneity inherent in theidea of Asia. In Sun Yat-sen’s usage, culturalheterogeneity was the historical basis for anation-state’s internal unity and resistanceagainst external interference. [4]

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

Although Sun’s speech mentioned the tributarysystem of China, he did not intend to affirm thehegemonic or central status of China in relationto surrounding areas. It was used to prove thenecessity of the kingly way. In the context of“Great Asianism”, Sun’s idea of the “kinglyway” was opposed to the “hegemonic” logic ofcolonialism. He believed that the tributarymodel contained mutual recognition of themultiplicity of culture, ethnicity and religion, inwhich modern states would be able to discoverthe cultural resource for surpassing imperialist

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politics. When he referred to the tribute paid byNepal to China, he did not intent to relive thedream of great China. It was because he firmlybelieved the tributary relation containedequality based on mutual recognition andmutual respect. Sun supported the nationalliberation and independence movements inSoutheast Asia. His ideas of Asia and nationalindependence deeply influenced this region. [5]He hoped that the pluralism of empire culturecould be united with new relations amongnation-states so as to obviate imperialistcolonization and the tendency toward highcultural homogenization. His vision of Asiaconsisted of Japan in the East, Turkey in theWest, and nation-states founded on Hinduism,Buddhism, Islam, Confucianism, and othercultures in the inner areas. He said, “We mustinsist on Great Asianism and recover the statusof Asian nations. If we use only virtue andmorality (renyi daode) as the basis to unite allnations, all nations of Asia, [when united,] willbecome powerful” (Sun 1986:408-9). Accordingto Sun, the culture of the kingly way defendsthe oppressed nations, rebels against thehegemonic way, and pursues the equality andliberation of all peoples. Sun discerned therelationship between nationalism and theconcept of race, and recognized thatnationalism’s logic of resistance also containeda logic that could lead to its opposite, that is,the logic of oppression and hegemony. When heappealed to the notion of race to legitimizenational independence, therefore, he proposed“Great Asianism.” Great Asianism, or “Pan-Asianism” (fanyazhou zhuyi), is antithetical tothe Japanese proposal of “Greater EastAsianism” (da dongya zhuyi). As a form ofmulticulturalism, it criticizes the Japanesenotion of “East Asia” (toyo) which is highlyhomogenized. This notion is therefore not onlya vision to transcend imperialism through self-determination, but also a multi-nationalism thatsurpasses the homogeneity of ethnicity,culture, religion and belief.

This self-deconstructive logic is the very basis

of the close connection between “GreatAsianism” and internationalism. Sun on the onehand defined Asia from an ethnic perspective,but on the other hand defined the Russianliberation movement as allied with GreatAsianism and providing a means to surpass thedemarcations of ethnicity. He said:

There is a new state in Europe which isdiscriminated against by all whiteEuropeans. The European regards it asa venomous snake or a violent beast anddares not approach it. Some people inAsia hold the same view. Which state isthis? Russia. Russia is parting ways withthe white Europeans. Why does it doso? Because Russia advocates the kinglyway and not the hegemonic way; itinsists on virtue and morality ratherthan talking about right and might. Itupholds justice to the utmost, andobjects to the oppression of the majorityby the few. Hence the new culture ofRussia is entirely compatible with theold culture of the East. Russia willtherefore come to join hands with theEast, and part ways with the West [Sun1986:409].

Here skin color is not the yardstick but ratherthe socialist “new culture” after the “OctoberRevolution,” with which “Great Asianism,” as a“mass liberation movement” of oppressednations, resonates. If we compare Sun’s wordswith Li Dazhao’s “Great Asianism and NewAsianism” and “New Asianism Revisited,” bothpublished in 1919, we notice that all of thesetexts describe a vision of Asia centered onn a t i o n a l s e l f - d e t e r m i n a t i o n a n dinternationalism, defined in reaction to Japan’s“Twenty-one Demands” on China, andcatalyzed by Russia’s October Revolution. Liregards Japan’s “Great Asianism” as a “GreatJapanism” understood as a form of “AsianMonroe Doctrine”. Its substance is “not peace,but invasion; not national self-determination,but imperialist annexation of weaker nations;

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not Asian democracy, but Japanese militarism;not organization befitting the world’sorganization, but organization deleterious tothe world’s organization” (Li 1919). His “NewAsianism” involved two points: “One is that,before Japan’s Great Asianism has [been]destroyed, we weaker Asian nations shouldunite to destroy this Great Asianism; the otheris that, after Japan’s Great Asianism has [been]destroyed, the Asian masses as a whole shouldunite and join the organization of the world –[only] then will it be possible to join theorganization of the world” (Li 1919a). What hevalued was not alliance among states butrather an alliance among “the masses as awhole” (quanti minzhong); regional or worldorganization must be a “great alliance of themasses” premised on social revolution andsocial movements.

The understandings of “Asia” by Lenin, SunYat-sen, and Li Dazhao were closely related totheir understandings of the task and directionof China’s revolution. As for Lenin’s Asia, wecan clearly see a synthesis between revolutionlogic and the special definition of Asia inHegel’s conception of world history (amedieval, barbarous, ahistorical Asia). ThisHegelian revolutionary conception of Asia notonly includes ancient (feudal), medieval(capitalist), and modern (socialist) modes ofhistorical development; it also stresses theunique position defined for “Asia” (especiallyRussia and China) in the age of worldcapitalism and imperialism, emphasizing theunique path of capitalist development within asociety with peasant economy as its maincomponent. The state question is addressed ina double sense: on the one hand, national self-determination is sought within an imperialistinternational order; on the other hand, thestate and its violence must be directed towardpeasant interests and capitalist development.These two aspects together comprise arevolutionary perspective on Asia’s socialcharacteristics. In this perspective, what makesAsia is not any cultural essence abstracted

from Confucianism or any other type ofcivilization, but rather the special position ofAsian countries in the capitalist world-system.This special position is not produced by astructural narrative of world capitalism, but bya dynamic analysis of the class composition andhistorical traditions internal to Asian society.

It is for this reason that there are extremedifferences between the “Asia” defined bysocial revolutionary perspectives, on the onehand, and by the various culturalisms, statisms,and theories of civilization that emerged fromearly modern history. The former focuses oninvestigating social forces and their relations.The question pursued by social revolutionariesis: taking agrarian relations as the center, whatkinds of relations exist among the peasantry,the gentry, the emerging bourgeoisie, warlords,and urban workers? As Mao Zedongdemons t ra ted in h i s “Repor t on anInvestigation of the Peasant Movement inHunan” and “Analysis of the Classes in ChineseSociety,” these analyses of class compositionare not structural, but rather political analysesmade from the perspective of social revolutionand social movements. These participants inrevolutionary movements are not seeking todocument the usual ownership ratios ofdeterminate social groups, but rather to graspthe attitudes and potentials of various groupsfor social revolution and social movements. Sothis sort of “class analysis” is really more of adynamic political analysis within the frameworkof class analysis. Political analysis ischaracterized by attention to the agency ofsubjects. Ignoring this, it is impossible tounderstand why, in the class transformations ofearly modern China, members from the middleand upper social strata could become the mainforces of revolutionary movements, or whyintellectuals from imperialist countries couldbecome steadfast friends and comrades of theoppressed nations. If we analyze “Asia” fromthis kind of social revolutionary perspective,those generalized and static descriptions of“Asia” or “toyo” lose their validity, because the

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perspective of “political analysis” requires adynamic grasp of international relations andrelations internal to different societies. Fromthe perspective of social revolution it asks: inthis historical movement, who are our enemies,and who are our friends? And this question offriendship or enmity pertains to relations bothamong and internal to nations.

According to Machiavelli’s ancient explanation,“politics” is related to an active subjectivity ora subjective agency. A political perspectiverequires both the placement of conscioussubjects within this perspective and thediscernment of various active subjects –discernment of friends and enemies, andassessment of the direction of socialmovements. A “political perspective” is alwaysan “internal” perspective, a perspective thatplaces oneself in dynamic relations of friendand enemy, a perspective that puts the politicalactions of thinkers or revolutionaries intointimate relations with the recognition of Asia,China, Japan, and Russia. The strongest part ofthis perspective is that it can overcome theframework of statism and internationalrelations among nation-states by discerningdifferent political forces within and amongsocieties. In this perspective, questions ofopposition or alliance are founded not on stableframeworks of relations among states ornations, but on forces internal to each societyand their possible dynamic relations. In orderto illustrate the characteristics of this kind ofpolitical perspective or analysis, we maycontrast it with the notion of “state rationality”(perhaps including its opposite, “stateirrationality”) that Maruyama Masao used todiscuss Fukuzawa Yukichi. According toMaruyama, one of Fukuzawa’s contributions tothe history of thought was that he articulated a“state rationality” appropriate to the needs ofhis day. From the perspective of thisrationality, modern Japan’s exclusionism andexpansionism can be seen as results of lackingor betraying this state rationality. In otherwords, for Fukuzawa no politics is more

important than the establishment of “staterationality.”

Carl Schmitt opened his now widely quoted TheConcept of the Political with the words “Theconcept of the state presupposes the concept ofthe political.” “‘[P]olitical’ is usually juxtaposedto ‘state,’ or at least brought in relation to it,”but “equating the state with the political”cannot represent the true form of the political:“The equation state = political becomeserroneous and deceptive at exactly the momentwhen the state and society penetrate eachother” (Schmitt 1996:19, 20, 22). His purposewas to illustrate that this situation “mustnecessarily occur in a democratically organizedunit.” My purpose here in differentiating thepolitical and the state is not to delineate thecharacteristics of a “democratically organizedunit,” but to understand political practiceduring the era of the Russian and Chineserevolutions. In the context of social revolution,“the political” exists among various activesubjects and in the self-conscious will ofclasses, class fractions, and political parties.These forces attempt to influence, dominate,transform, or control state power, but the statedoes not have an absolute capacity toencapsulate “the polit ical” within its“structural-functional” operations. From thisperspective, the equation state = political (i.e.active subjects having already become“structural-functional” factors of state power)describes not the normal situation but ratherthe result of a process of depoliticization.

In contrast to the analytical perspective of“state rationality,” “political recognition”during a period of social revolution is not themode of action of political subjects (e.g. states)in a normative sense, but rather the reality anddirection of carrying out a historical movementfrom the perspective of “active politicalsubjects and their mutual movement.” Thisrequires those with consciousness to transformthemselves into “active subjects,” that is, toplace themselves or the interests they

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represent within a field of political analysis,giving rise to a political summons. Leninperceived in Sun Yat-sen’s program a linkbetween the Chinese revolution and “purelyRussian questions,” so he proposed a programof national self-determination, launching aninquiry into on whom revolutionary forces mustrely, whom they must oppose, and which kindof state must be established in order forcapitalism to develop in “Asia.” The politicaldecision to combine socialism with the statewas the product of this political analysis.Similarly, Japanese intellectuals such asMiyazaki Toten and Kita Ikki, based on theirrecognition that China’s independence andliberation was a necessary step in the liberationof Asia, and even in the l iberat ion ofhumankind, either took part in the practice ofChina’s revolution or undertook directinvestigation into the movements of Chinesesociety, and in this way they producedprofound political analyses and energies. Afterthe 1911 Revolution, “What Kita Ikki saw wasthe wretched obeisance to Great Britain inJapan’s foreign policy.” His analysis of the“theory of preserving China” (Shina hozen ron)was truly political: If Japan entered the groupof six lending countries, “learning from theEuropean countries’ [methods] of economicpartitioning,” would that not be “to play therunning dog, [helping to] partition [China] inthe name of preserving [China]”? If one reallywanted to “preserve” China, one must worktowards China’s independence and nationalawakening, and that required drawing clearlines between traitorous warlords and the“emerging revolutionary classes.” The lendingof money to war lords in the name of“preserving China” in fact demonstrated therelationship between state politics and theexpansive aspirations of Japanese plutocrats(Nomura 1999:32-7). Kita supported andparticipated in Sun Yat-sen’s revolution, but hesharply criticized Sun’s acceptance of loansfrom Japanese plutocrats and his excessivereliance on foreign aid, saying that Sun failedto discriminate between “war and revolution”

(Wang 2004:174-5). Here the ideal of“liberating Asia” (Sun’s “Great Asianism”) andthe problems of “Chinese revolution” and“remaking Japan” generated intimate ties, andin this political perspective, not only did theabstractness of the idea of “Asia” disappear,but China and Japan were no longer monolithic,unanalyzable concepts.

Another example is Yoshino’s June 1919 articlepublished in Chuo Koron, “Do Not Vituperatethe Activities of Beijing Student Groups,”where he cut through the superficialappearance of the “pro-Japan faction” (CaoRulin, Zhang Zongxiang, et al.) and the “anti-Japanese voices” of the student movement,proposing that: “If we want to get rid of the jinxof anti-Japanese [sentiment], the way is not tofund unrest among the people by supportingmessieurs Cao and Zhang, but to [address] ourown government’s policy of supporting[Chinese] warlords and plutocrats” (Nomura1999:68-9). As I see it, this is a “politicalperspective.” During the second year of theWar of Resistance against Japan, when theNanjing government was forced to move toChongqing, Ozaki Hotsumi perceived thedeepening of the Communist Party’s influenceand the weakening of the influence of theZhejiang plutocrats, and he concluded that:“This has accelerated the desire for nationalliberation, and the national liberationmovement has already become a force that isdifficult for the Republican Government tocontrol”; “China’s ‘reddening’ is determined byChina’s particular complexities and its complexcontent; I think it should be understood assomething quite different from the situation inRussia” (Nomura 1999:176, 184; Ozaki a:197;b:323). As I see it , this is a “polit icalinterpretation”. After the Marco Polo BridgeIncident, Tachibana Shiraki questioned his ownrecognition of China, saying: “My vision hasbeen fixed on China’s objective aspects in aneffort scientifically to grasp its variousconditions, but my consideration of the crucialsubjective conditions has been too shallow.

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How could this relation be established underthese conditions? I must begin anew” (Nomura1999:206). As I see it, this way of recognizingChina through going back to “subjectiveconditions” is also a “political mode ofrecognition.

In terms of the history of thought, theserecognitions of China or conceptions of Asiaeventually strayed from their initial course invarious ways and to various degrees. This wasmainly because, in the face of powerful statepolitics, they could not fully implement thesemodes of analysis. That is, in the face of “thestate,” the “active subject,” the heart of thepolitical perspective, disappeared. This recallsa thesis proposed by a European historian: Ifwe want to determine a central theme of worldhistory since the nineteenth century, thattheme would have to be the nation-state. Whilereading Professor Nomura on the thought andactivities of Miyazaki Toten, I noticed that hisanalysis began with “Miyazaki’s two majorregrets”: “First, why did he take part in thisrevolution as a Japanese person and not as aChinese person?” And “Second, before devotinghis life to the Chinese revolution, why did henot commit himself to bettering Japan?”Nomura then insightfully observes: “We cansay that these two questions of Miyazaki’sregret were deeply influenced by the politicalsituation during the Meiji and Taisho periods.[…] [T]he basic source of this regret was thetragic sense of being ‘torn in two’ by therelations between the countries” (Nomura1999:117). After quoting Miyazaki’s words inhonor of the Japanese emperor and state,Nomura comments: “As a man of the Meiji era,Miyazaki never managed to break free from theshackles of this curse: the state’s emperorsystem (tennosei kokka)” (1999:165).

Kita Ikki went much further than Miyazaki: Onthe one hand he regarded Japan’s internalrevolutionary transformation as a preconditionto the liberation of Asia, but, on the other hand,he also claimed that “Our seven hundred

million compatriots in China and India couldnot stand up on their own without our support.[…] While the authorities of Euro-Americanrevolutionary theory all take this superficialphilosophical position and cannot grasp the‘gospel of the sword,’ the farseeing Greece ofAsian civilization had already constructed itsown spirit. […] People who eschew armedstates have the views of children” (Kita 292).Here, rather than carrying his political ideasabout “remaking Japan” over into Sino-Japanese relations during the imperialistperiod, Kita instead uncritically imagined Japanas the armed liberator of Asia. As in his 1903description of the Russo-Japanese War as a“decisive battle between the Yellow and Whiteraces” (Kita 78-96), notions such as “state” and“race” prevent him from making a politicalanalysis of his own society, so that today it iseasy to notice “an immense inconsistencybetween his ideal image of Japan as a‘proletarian,’ ‘revolutionary’ state and itscolonialist reality” (Wang 2004:171).

When Ozaki Hotsumi trumpeted an “East AsianCooperative Community” in the late 1930sagainst the background of Japanese invasionsthroughout Asia, or when Tachibana Shirakiapplied his analysis of Chinese society to hisconstruction of Manchukuo as a “decentralizedautonomous state,” what we see in their modeof analysis is precisely the equation “state =political,” and the deviation from the politicalmode of analysis that they had long insisted on.Political analysis halted at the gate of theJapanese Empire for different reasons. From aperspective of social revolution, this is “thestatification (kokka ka) of politics,” a momentiin which the shadows of thinkers overlap withthat of the very object—the “Japanese Empire”that they had earlier sought to transform.

In the visions of Lenin and Sun Yat-sen,national self-determination is a synthesis ofnationalism and socialism. On the one hand, itrequires the establishment of nation-states asthe predetermined condition for capitalist

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development. On the other hand, it emphasizesthat this process of state-building at the sametime transforms traditional imperial relationsthrough social revolution. Socialists believethat weaker nations’ demands for self-determination always include demands for acertain degree of democracy, and, moreover,their support for national independencemovements is always linked to support fordemocratic forces. In this synthesis ofinternat ional i sm and nat ional se l f -determination, not much room is left for acategory l ike “As ia” – As ia i s on ly amarginalized part of the capitalist system, ageographical region that can enter the worldcapitalist system and the struggle against theworld capitalist system only through nationalrevolution. If we want to discuss how socialistthought relates to Great Asianism, then [weshould recognize that], in the early moderncontext, they both have historical ties to certainforms of nationalism. The socialist idea ofnational self-determination is founded on theearly modern European binary between“empire” and “state.” Those efforts to found“colonialist autonomous governments” such asManchukuo under the banner of “GreatAsianism” similarly employ the ideas ofsovereignty, independence, and autonomy inorder to incorporate Japan’s imperialist policiesinto a narrative of progress. The Japaneseintellectuals mentioned above expressedsincere sympathy for China’s revolution andprofound insight into China’s socialmovements, so why did even someone asinsightful as Kita Ikki eventually convert to thevery state system he had once criticized, evento the point of supporting policies of imperialistinvasion? I cannot discuss these issues ingreater detail, but two factors may providecertain explanatory possibilities: First, earlymodern Japan lacked the conditions for socialrevolution, so these keen intellectuals could notbring to fruition within Japanese society thepolitical perspective they had developedthrough their observation of China’s revolution.Second, lacking these social conditions,

socialist thought could not constitute the forcesnecessary to overcome nationalism and statism.

With the ebb of Asia’s national liberationmovements and the Chinese revolution, thatpolitical perspective of social revolution andmovement, that political mode of analysiscapable of linking the social movements ofRussia, China, Japan, and other Asiancountr ies , eventual ly receded fromconsciousness as well. Since the late 1970s,following the decline of the 1960s socialmovements and the end of the nationalliberation movements, we entered an era of“depoliticization,” a process in which statemechanisms have gradually appropriated activesubjectivity or subjective agency into “staterationality” and the tracks of the global market.As the question of “Asia” again becomes aconcern of many intellectuals, we seemincapable of finding the political mode ofanalysis through linking different societies thatlast century’s revolutionaries adeptly developedthrough p lac ing themse lves wi th inrevolutionary history. In the present era,discussions of the question of Asia center onregional markets and alliances againstterrorism, and are linked by financial security,and such factors.

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

Today intellectual discussions of “Asia” takeplace under condit ions of neol iberalglobalization. Above I mentioned twodiscourses of “empire.” One is the discourse ofglobal empire with the US as its center andglobal organizations such as the World Bank,the WTO, and the IMF as its mechanism.According to Sebastian Mallaby, the formationof this global empire “would not amount to animperial revival. But it would fill the securityvoid that empires left – much as the system ofmandates did after World War I ended theOttoman Empire” (Mallaby 2002). The other isthe discourse of regional empires, with the

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European Union as model, aimed at resistingthe monopolized domination of the globalempire. UK Prime Minister Blair’s foreignpolicy advisor Robert Cooper calls this“cooperative empire.” In his classification, thetwo types of “postmodern states” are the EU asa “cooperative empire,” and the InternationalMonetary Fund and World Bank as [agents of]“voluntary global economic imperialism.” Bothtypes operate according to laws andregulations, as opposed to traditional empires’reliance on centralized power. Cooper’s visionof “cooperative empire” and “the imperialism ofneighbors” were proposed in the shadow of theBalkan and Afghanistan wars. He associated“humanitarian intervention” with this new kindof imperialism, making “humanitarianism” thetheoretical premise for “empire” (Cooper 2002,2002a).

Against the background of colonialism andimperialist wars, Asian intellectuals havegenerally taken the East/ West binary forgranted in their conceptions of history. Earlymodern ideas of Asia, moreover, often hadstrong culturalist overtones, inevitably tendingtoward essent ia l i s t perspect ives inunderstanding and constructing “Asian”identity. Not only are ideas of Asia formed inthis way unconvincing in practice; even ifsuccessful, do we really want to establish thekind of “cooperative empire” or “imperialism ofneighbors” that can carry out violentintervention in the name of humanitarianism?How can such a politically, economically, andculturally complex Asian society form a “linkingmechanism” to provide a form of regionalorganization different from both the earlymodern nationalist state model and the two“imperial” models described above? Havingexperienced both the cruel history ofcolonialism and powerful movements fornational liberation, can we find a flexiblemechanism that can avoid the traps of both“imperial” and statist models?

Let us begin our search with the various

historical narratives of an “East Asian world.”The construction of such a world as a relativelyself-sufficient “cultural sphere” is the inventionof early modern Japanese thought, but thereare different ways in which this world has beensketched. Nishijima Sadao described “the EastAsian world” as a self-contained culturalsphere: geographically, China formed a centersurrounded by Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and thearea between the Mongolian and the Tibetanplateaus. Culturally, it was characterized by theChinese writing system, Confucianism,Buddhism, and a system of laws and decrees(Nishijima 1983:89). The effort to establish aconnection between geographic region andculture aimed to construct East Asia as anorganic whole, but how did this idea of “AsianOrganism” come into being? According toMaeda Naonori, Japanese scholars previouslydid not include Japan in their conception of theEast Asian world:

It is generally believed that beforemodern times, before the history ofdifferent regions in the world attainedcommonality, China was a world, andIndia was yet another world. From theperspective of cultural history, theworld of China can be regarded as thewor ld o f Eas t As ia , i nc lud ingManchuria, Korea, Annam, etc. This iswhat people used to believe. Althoughwe considered the possibility, we werehesitant to include Japan in this world.But this is only a question of culturalhistory. We know almost nothing aboutwhether the inner development ofKorean or Manchurian societies, not tomention Japan, were connected orparallel to China. We know that in theEuropean world, for instance, thedevelopments of British society wereparallel to and interrelated with thoseof the European continent. But whethera similar phenomenon existed in EastAsia, especially between Japan andChina, was still not clear until modern

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times. Moreover, the question itself hasnot yet been taken seriously. Thereceived idea has been that thedevelopment of Japan’s social structure,from ancient times to the medieval andmodern periods, has been completelyunrelated to those on the continent[Maeda 1993:135].

The view that set Japan apart from Asia wasclosely associated with the unique historicalcircumstances before Japan opened its portsand with the notion of Japan’s particularity thatarose after the ports were opened. Connectionand distinction, shedding Asia and joining Asia:these antitheses formed the opposing andcoordinated characteristics of the early modernJapanese nationalist narrative of Asia.

The impetus for constructing the organicwholeness or self-containment of the East Asianworld has always been the challenge of anationalistic, industrial, and capitalistic “West”.The notion of a “sphere of East Asiancivilization” was an organic constituent of earlymodern Asian nationalist knowledge, andpeople sought behind it not only culturalparticularity but also an “inherent” and“universal” dynamic of nat ional ism,industrialism, and capitalism appropriate tothis cultural particularity. Hence the effort tosearch for modernity in Asia deconstructed theHegelian framework of world history, but theinherent standards of the Hegelian world orderwere not questioned but reproduced:nationalism, capitalism (industry and tradeetc.), and theories of state organized a meta-historical narrative about East Asian history.

Miyazaki Ichisada, a representative historian ofthe Kyoto school, proposed a new definition of“East Asia” (toyo) (Miyazaki 1993). On the onehand, this account no longer regarded the“East Asian world” as part of the “Chineseworld,” instead locating China and its historywithin a category of “East Asian history (toyoshi). On the other hand, through analyzing

changes in transportation and commerceduring the Sui, Tang, and Five Dynasties period[581-960 CE], Miyazaki concluded that “onecould perceive in Song society obviouslycapitalistic tendencies and phenomena thatdiffered drastically from those of medievalsociety.” From this basis he developed a set ofnarratives about an East Asian modernitycomparable to Western modernity (Miyazaki1993:168). Miyazaki wove together the historyof various regions through the analysis ofcommunication, transportation, and trade, andfrom this perspective he elaborated on “SongDynasty capitalism,” “East Asian earlymodernity” and “nationalism”. In a chapter on“nationalism in early modern East Asia,” heanalyzed ethnic relations from the Qinunification all the way to the Qing Dynasty. Heargued that during the Song Dynasty,“nationalist upsurges” appeared, nationalcontacts went beyond tributary relations, andthe Dayue and Dali kingdoms, althoughnominally tributaries to the Song court,actually were “independent and unrestrainednation-states” (1993:195-211). Although the[Mongolian] Yuan Dynasty interrupted thisprocess, it later stimulated “Han-Chinese-centered nationalism.” In this sense, thedevelopment of nationalism in Asia is treated asparallel to that in the West. Miyazaki boldlyemploys various European concepts. Hisunderstanding of the Tang-Song transition andespecially of the Song Dynasty is based onnotions of capitalism and the nation-state. Sucha search for history in East Asia is inevitablycharacterized by teleology. We can perceivethe European binary of “state” vs. “empire” inthe link of “East Asian modernity” and thenation-state.

In this regard, Hamashita Takeshi’s discussionof the Asian tributary system is a criticism ofboth “shedding Asia” and particularism. In thefield of economic history, he reconstructs anEast Asian world order centered in China andwoven together through a tributary system, andin this way he affirms a set of historical ties

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within Asia (including those between Japan andChina). Although he similarly emphasizes themodern forces internal to Asia, unlike Miyazaki,whose notion of “East Asian early modernity” isbased on European-style nationalism,Hamashita locates the inner organicity of Asiain this distinctive tributary-trade network(Hamashita 1999). At the center of his theoryare three hypotheses: First, Asia forms anorganic whole, not only culturally but alsoeconomically and politically. Second, thisorganism is centered in Chinese civilization andorganized according to the trans-statetributary-trade network. Third, coupled withthis tributary network is a set of “center/periphery” relations constituted throughpractices of tribute and imperial bestowal, tobe distinguished from European-style relationsamong “states.” If Miyazaki’s account isgrounded in Eurocentric assumptions, thenHamashita deconstructs the link between thenation-state and modernity, constructing analternative narrative of regional and worldhistory. In his view, moreover, the Asiantributary network was not completelydestroyed by Western capitalist expansion;“Asia as world-system” continues to exist in theearly modern age.

Hamashita’s account is inspiring. He discoversan inner theme to connect Asian states anduses it as a starting point for envisioning thecontemporary wor ld . He a lso uses a“peripheral” perspective to expose continent-centrism and the principles of dynasticorthodoxy in official Chinese historiography.This is a forceful criticism of advocates ofparticularism who refuse to recognize thehistorical relations between Japan and the restof Asia. For Chinese scholars who areaccustomed to considering China from within,this theory provides a perspective for viewingChina from its periphery. This effort to searchfor East Asian modernity based on a tributaryimperial system also challenges the Eurocentricbinaries of empire vs. state and tribute vs.commerce.

The so-called “unity of East Asia” is a constructpremised on the category of Asia, whileHamashita’s approach to the “unity of Asia”stresses commercial aspects of the tributarysystem, especially maritime commercialrelations. Here I attempt to supplement, modifyand develop Hamashita’s work. First, thepractice of tribute was a historical result of theinteraction among agents participating in thissystem and not a self-contained or completestructure. In this sense, the tributary systemwas a constantly shifting process linking anddefining the relations among multiple centersof power. Whenever a new power took shape orentered the picture, the internal powerrelations changed. Hamashita defined six typesof tributary relations: 1) tribute from localchiefs and local officials; 2) tribute underrelations of vassalage; 3) tribute involvingstates with the closest ties to the imperialcourt; 4) tributary states with two-wayrelationships with the imperial court; 5)tributary states on the outer edge of theperiphery; 6) states in primarily commercialrelations with the court (Hamashita 1999:35-6).But this narrative relies excessively on thestatic “center/ periphery” framework, so itcannot account for the constant changes inhistorical tributary practices.

From a strictly economic perspective, Miyazakihad already divided Chinese history intoperiods based on major routes of transportationand communication: from ancient to medievaltimes was the inland-centered period; from theSong to the Qing Dynasty was the Grand-Canal-centered period; and with the late Qing beganthe coast-centered period—a new circumstancethat took place under European influence(Miyazaki 1993:168, 170). If center/ peripheryrelations within China were constantly shifting,so was the tributary system. For example, thetributary relations that the Song courtestablished under conditions of war withnorthern peoples could not at all be describedby Hamashita’s framework of “center/periphery” relations, nor could the Qing court’s

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relations with Russia since the seventeenthcentury.

The instability of center/ periphery relations isone of the most important characteristics thatdistinguish the modern capitalist world. Thetheory of center/ periphery relations with Chinaas the center, therefore, cannot entirely explainthe changes in power relations within Asiasince the nineteenth century. As Hamashitapointed out in an essay written early in hiscareer, the intensification of the Westerncapitalist powers’ financial penetration intoAsia and especially China was closely related tothe international financial market’s expansionfollowing the discovery of gold in the USA andAustralia (Hamashita 1995). Financiallyspeaking, the history of modern Chineseeconomy can be regarded as the processthrough which Chinese economy was woveninto the fabric of a unified internationalaccounting structure centered in London. Inthis sense, the modern age in Asia is theprocess of gradual economic incorporation intomodern world history, one characterized byrelations of financial subordination-domination.If we apply the framework of center/ peripheryto nineteenth and twentieth century powerrelations within Asia, it will inevitably concealthe actually central status in the new world-system of traditionally peripheral categories.For example, if Japan’s shedding Asia and itsmodernization (including the first invasion ofTaiwan and the first Sino-Japanese war of1894-5) is explained within the framework of“shaking off the status of a tributary state” (i. e.the center-periphery framework), greatchanges in the center/periphery relations thathave been taking place since the Opium Warswill be obscured. The binaries of “center-periphery” and the empire of China vs. thetributary state actually reproduces the binaryof empire-state in modern European thought.As Maruyama says, European state rationalitycame into being in the struggle against trans-state authorities such as the Sacred RomanEmpire and the Roman pope, and in the

struggle against the request for autonomy byMedieval social powers such as feudal lords,autonomous cities, local churches (Maruyama1997: 160). This framework cannot explain therole of Japan in early modern Asia, or exactlywhy the periphery (Japan, Korea, Hong Kong,Taiwan, Singapore, etc.) became the center orsub-center of nineteenth and twentieth centuryAsian capitalism, while continental areas suchas mainland China, India, and Inner Asiadeclined and became “peripheral” or colonized.

Hamashita’s innovative research also makes itpossible for a regional study that is notcentered on states but on networks, but it isexactly in the widened perspective of networksthat the excessively static structure of tributarytrade or center/periphery relations ischallenged. As Hamashita himself has noticed,at the beginning of the nineteenth century, theoverseas Chinese private trade networksuccessfully transformed the official tributesystem into a private trade system, and thiswas the result of long-term processes. XuBaoqing argues:

When the Europeans arrived in EastAsia at the beginning of the sixteenthcentury, they tried to connect with theofficial tribute system so as to promotethe development of trade. But theyrealized that they increasingly relied onthe extensive overseas Chinese tradenetworks. Especial ly s ince thebeginning of the nineteenth century, theofficial tribute system centered in Chinawas merely a fantasy of the governmentconcerning control that had never beenactual ized because China wasconfronted with the growing hegemonyand invasion of imperialist powers. To alarge degree, therefore, it was not theofficial tribute system but privateoverseas Chinese trade networks thatintegrated the East Asian regions into asingle system. [6]

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According to Xu, it was not tribute but ratherprivate overseas trade, including smuggling,which constructed a more importantconnection between the East and SoutheastAsian trade networks. Under the conditions ofEuropean imperialism in the nineteenthcentury, the development of the SoutheastAsian market was less a result of tributarycommerce than a result of breaking out of thatsystem. The important characteristics of thecommercial form in Southeast Asia from theeighteenth to the nineteenth century weresmuggling, arms trafficking, and Europeanmonopol ies . [7] Here, the histor icaldevelopment of networks is precisely the resultof shifts in the existing relations betweencenter and periphery.

Second, in the vision of “maritime East Asia”woven together by the tributary network,historical routes of communication andtransportation within the Asian continent andtheir changes over time were reduced to asubordinate and marginal status. If we compareNishi j ima’s “East Asian world” withHamashita’s, the latter centered on the eastcoast, peninsulas and islands of the Eurasiacontinent, including Northeast Asia andSoutheast Asia, is approximately the same asthe category of the “maritime world” in whichthe contemporary Japanese academy isinterested. Hamashita developed his idea ofAsia in opposition to Eurocentrism. Hisdescription focused on aspects such ascommerce and the circulation of silver andstressed the historical communicationsbetween China and East and Southeast Asia –i.e. exchanges enabled mainly through marinetransportation. This narrative, therefore,responded to the economistic logic andframework of maritime theory in the Europeannarrative of capitalism. In his account,maritime theory, as a theory of modernity,became central to grasping the question ofAsia, because it dealt with politico-economicrelations that corresponded with the moderntreaty system. While using the tribute system

as his narrative framework, he specificallypointed out that the basic rules of this worldsystem need to be modified. The modificationshould aim to establish a new East Asia systemthat is centered on the sea and different fromthe western commercial system. For the samereason, this “historical world with its own innerunity” is centered on East and Southeast Asia.Hamashita stresses the importance of culture,political structure, and the sea in the formationof regional relations, especially regional traderelations. But this idea of Asia that emphasizesunity lacks a thorough analysis of continentaltransportation and communication—betweenChina and Inner, West, and South Asia, andRussia—that dominated the tribute system formany centuries, and it seldom address therelation between the formation of maritimetrade spheres and continental dynamics. Nordoes it sufficiently examine the role of the Westin these processes. The so-called maritime agecame into being under conditions of Europeanindustrialization, development in maritimemilitary technology, and the formation of thenation-state system in Europe. It underminedthe historical connections and social relationswithin the Asian continent and subordinatedcontinental Asia to maritime hegemonies andeconomic relations connected by maritimepassages.

Throughout Chinese history, the relationsamong the Northwest, the Northeast, and theCentral Plains has been fundamental in drivingchanges in China’s social system, population,and mode of production. Even in the so-calledmaritime age, inland transportation routes andrelations played a vital role. Chen Yinke hastraced the origins of Sui and Tang policies andregulations to, first, the Northern Wei Dynasty,and, second, the Northern Qi, Liang, and Chendynasties, and third, the Western Wei andNorthern Zhou dynasties. He points out: “Suiand Tang artifacts and systems spread widelyto the desert in the North, Hanoi in the South,Japan in the East, and Inner Asia in the West,but monographs on their origins and

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transformations are rare; it is a regrettablelacuna in Chinese historiography” (Chen1992:515). His studies on Tang political andmilitary history show that Chinese policies,population, and culture since the Sui and Tangdynasties were already the product of multipleEurasian cultures, policies, and regulations.

Owen Lattimore similarly describes an “Asiancontinent” with the Great Wall as its center,which transcended political and ethnic borders.This idea of a “center” meant that on both sidesof the Great Wall were two parallel socialformations, agricultural and pastoral. Thesetwo social formations maintained long-lastingcontacts along the Great Wall, and theirinteraction deeply affected both societies.Lattimore’s alternative account of a “center”counterbalances the previous insistence on thecentral status of agriculture in the South anddraws our attention to how China’s frontiersand frontier peoples took shape. The CentralPlains pastoral society and the southernagricultural society developed at the sametime, and the area in between developed a“frontier condition” (Lattimore 1962:55). TheGreat Wall-centered, Yellow River-centered,and Grand Canal-centered narratives ofChinese history contrast sharply with oneanother. The shifting of the center of historicalnarratives was related to the shifting of the“heartland” from dynasty to dynasty. Moreover,it was also related to how one observeshistorical change, and especially the forcesdriving historical change. According toLattimore, the internal route of expansion inChinese history was originally from North toSouth. The pressures of European colonialismand industrialization forced the center ofexpansion to move from southern to northernChina. He therefore uses the terms pre- andpost-West to describe the transformation ofinternal relations on the Asian continent.

The differentiation between pre- and post-West,however, also becomes too simplistic when westudy inland movements. Once the Manchus

controlled the central plain, large scalemigration of population, economy, commerceand other cultural relations from the centralplain to the north became important. In theseventeenth and eighteenth centuries, thisSouth-to-North movement originated mainly inthe internal dynamics of the Qing Empire, andhad little to do with the Western powers. In1857, when Marx considered Chinese attitudestoward maritime hegemonies, he noticed thatwhile Western states used military force toexpand their trade with China, Russia spentless but gained more than any of thebelligerent states (Marx 1857). Although Russiahad no maritime trade with China, it enjoyed anoverland trade centered in Kiakhta. The valueof goods bought and sold in 1852 amounted to150 million American dollars, and, since thegoods were relatively inexpensive, the quantityof goods involved was striking. Because of thisincrease in trade, Kiakhta grew from a fortressand marketplace into a major city, and directand regular postal communication wasestablished between it and Beijing, which isabout nine hundred miles away. Marx andEngels both pointed out how the Sino-Britishand Sino-French coastal conflicts created thepossibility for Russia to obtain vast territoryand great profit in the inland Amur River basin(Marx 1980, 1980a; Engels 1980). Engelspredicted that Russia was “fast coming to bethe first Asiatic Power, and putting Englandinto the shade very rapidly on that continent,”and he criticized British media and the BritishMinistry for suppressing information on howRussia gained greater profit in China,Afghanistan, and other Inner Asian regionswhen they publicized the Anglo-Chinese treaty.If we understand the 1905 Russo-JapaneseWar’s impact on the course of Japanesemodernization, or China’s later alliance andsubsequent split with the Soviet Union within adialectic of continental and maritime relations,then it becomes clear that continental relationsbetween Asia and Europe have indeed played alarge role in shaping East Asian modernity.

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Theories of Asia centered on the tributarysystem tend to emphasize economic relations(especially maritime commercial networks) atthe expense of events such as wars andrevolutions. Sun Yat-sen’s description ofoverseas Chinese as “mothers of the Chineserevolution” illustrates the influence of overseasnetworks (especially in Japan and SoutheastAsia) on China’s modern revolutionary history,networks which overlapped with tributaryroutes. After the failure of the Hundred Days’Reform in 1898, Japan became not only arefuge for exiled reformers and the firstgeneration of Chinese revolutionaries, but alsothe cradle of the Chinese Enlightenment. It wasat this time that a number of Japaneseintellectuals became direct participants inChina’s revolutionary and reform movements.Chinese communities in Southeast Asiancountries such as Vietnam, Malaya, thePhilippines, and Myanmar not only providedmaterial resources for China’s reform andrevolution; they also injected a special vitalityinto the wave of nationalism that eventuallyswept the en t i re reg ion , f o rming atransnational network of social movements.Fol lowing the 1911 Revolut ion, th isrevolutionary movement based in overseascoastal areas took root on the Chinesemainland and provided the initial impetus forthe political revolution, the agrarian revolution,and the military struggles that soon developed.The interaction between coastal networks andinland areas thus manifested itself during therevolution era.

Similarly, the ties and differences between landand sea also influenced the characteristics ofAsian wars to a certain extent. In an appendixto The Concept of the Political titled “Theory ofthe Partisan,” Carl Schmitt puts the guerrilla or“partisan” of “irregular warfare” at the centerof political thought, regarding the partisan asan “irregular force” in contrast with “thisregularity of the state and the military”:

There is no place in the classical martial

l aw o f t he ex i s t i ng Europeaninternational law for the partisan, in themodern sense of the word. He is either[…] a sort of light, especially mobile,but regular troop; or he represents anespecially abhorrent criminal, whostands outside the law [….] The partisanis […] different not only from the pirate,but also from the corsair in the way thatland and sea are distinguished as (twodifferent) elemental spaces of humanactivity and martial engagementbetween peoples. Land and sea havedeveloped not only different vehicles ofwarfare, and not only distinctivetheaters of war, but they have alsodeveloped separate concepts of war,peace, and spoils. The partisan willpresent a specifically terrestrial type ofactive fighter for at least as long asanticolonial wars are possible on ourplanet [Schmitt 2005:3, 6, 13-14].

“Through comparison with typical figures ofmaritime law and a discussion of the aspect ofspace”, Schmitt further elaborated on the“tellurian character of the partisan”. Beginningwith the Opium Wars, the external pressuresfacing China switched from inland to coastalareas, and the traditional forms of warfarelikewise changed. During the First Sino-Japanese War (1894), the Japanese navythoroughly destroyed the Qing’s Northern Navyand took control of the East Asian waters. Butfrom the invasion of northeastern China in1931 to the full-scale outbreak of the War ofResistance in 1937, Japan’s mighty armynevertheless failed to subjugate poor andmilitarily-backward China. Of course the war’soutcome was determined by many complexpolitical, economic, and military factors, butthe failure of Japan to victory in the war isclearly related to the interweaving of regularand partisan warfare, and of inter-state and“people’s war.” Acting in concert with theregular army were the flexible, irregularpartisan forces dependent upon the character

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of the land and the general population’ssupport, political consciousness, and clearrecognition of friend and enemy.

In this ethnically complex, geographically vastinland region mainly populated by peasants,China’s revolutionaries synthesized militaryand revolutionary mobilization, using uniquemilitary forms to break through the concepts ofregular warfare (war among states) as definedby European international law, and laying afoundation for postwar political and militaryforms completely different from those prior tothe war. China’s revolution unfoldedthroughout China’s inland mountain ranges,waterways, jungles, and prairies, and throughthe intensification of agrarian revolution,modern China’s political forces, especially therevolutionary party, turned several generationsof peasants and their descendants intorevolutionary and military subjects. Throughmilitary experience and revolutionarymobilization, that agrarian society which, froma European perspective, was the symbol ofbackwardness and conservativism, couldbecome an active political force. The forging ofrevolutionary state-building, industrialplanning, urban development, and new urban-rural relations was intimately linked to theemergence of this new political subject.Reviewing from this perspective Mao Zedong’sconcept of guerrilla strategy, his theory ofprotracted war and the question of the role ofpeasants and villages in warfare, and hisconcept of New Democracy, we can perhapsdevelop a new understanding of China’srevolution.

From these perspectives, how to relate Asia’scontinental and maritime eras and how torelate Asia’s organic unity with its internalcultural and historical complexity are questionsthat await further research. Simple maritimetheory cannot explain the profound polarizationcurrently underway between China’s coastaland interior (especially northwestern) areas,and the coastal economy’s domination over the

inland economy. Nor can it explain the forcesdriving China’s (and Russia’s) modernrevolution centered on agrarian revolution, orthe special characteristics of the Second Sino-Japanese War. More importantly, the tributarysystem is not simply a matter of economicrelations; it encompasses ritual and politicalrelations among various social groups withdiffering cultures and beliefs. In the course oflong historical processes, networks formedthrough tribute, commerce, and migration stillprovide the means for revolutions, wars, andother social interactions. In this sense, thecomplex meanings and uses of tributaryrelations, and especially their points of overlapor conflict with modern capitalist relations,merit further exploration.

The theory of the tributary system is defined inopposition to European nation-states and theirtreaty system. It overcame the earlier idea thatthe nation-state was the only force capable ofpropelling modernization, but the dichotomybetween tributary and treaty systems is alsoderived from that between empire and state. Asearly as the seventeenth century, the Qingstate was already using the treaty form todefine borders in certain frontier regions (suchas the Sino-Russian border), to create regularfrontier patrols, to determine custom-duty ratesand trade mechanisms, to exert sovereignrights over residents within its administrativesphere, and to establish tributary and treatyrelations with European countries. Hence theQing was not only an empire of mixed nationaland ethnic composition, but also a politicalentity with advanced state systems as well. Itswell developed tributary network includedtreaty relations. If we interpret Qing societythrough the simple opposition between stateand empire, treaty and tribute, we will not beable to see how empire construction and stateconstruction were overlapping processes, andwe will not be able to understand the basiccharacteristics of modern Chinese nationalism.The complex relations between the tributaryand state systems prevent us from describing

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the tributary system simply as a hierarchicalrelation between center and periphery. [8]Here the question of whether East Asia orChina is state-centered or tributary is notsignificant. The pivotal question is to clarifyvarious notions and types of political bodies,and various notions of state, so as not toobscure the notion of state with the history ofmodern capitalism and nation-state. Researchon the tribute system and network emphasizeseconomy and commerce, which is analternative type of study of the forms ofcapitalism. But it should not be ignored that thetribute system is linked with ritual, politics,culture, internal and external relations andeconomics, embodying a peculiar politicalculture.

If the tributary system is a product of adifferent type of state than modern Europeansovereign states, then we need to reinterpretthe relationships between tribute and states bycomparing different types of both categories. InChinese history, tributary and treaty relationsare not completely opposite categories. Forexample, when the Qing government began todevelop commercial, political, and militaryrelations with European countries, tributaryrelations were a form of inter-state relations.The Qing court’s relations with countries suchas Russia, Portugal, Spain, Holland, and GreatBritain were called tributary relations, but theywere also in fact diplomatic and treatyrelations. Hamashita, in classifying types oftribute, points out that one he calls “mutualmarket” relations is very similar to what wouldlater be called “diplomatic” or “foreign trade”relations. Within the tributary sphere, therealso existed a relation involving tribute andexchange of gifts. Sometimes the two giftswere of equal value, and sometime the returngift was worth more than the tribute. Tributaryrelations, therefore, involved both economicand ritual forms of interaction. The ritualinequality and actual reciprocity, the ritualcharacter of the tributary relation and theactual substance of tributary trade, overlapped.

If it is an inherent characteristic of tributarypractice that state and tributary relationsoverlapped, why not consider European states’domestic and international relations fromanother perspective, that is, why not regard thetreaty system not as a structural form but as aproduct of historical interactions amongvarious forms and forces? For example, we canask: Was Great Britain’s nineteenth centurycommercial relationship with India and NorthAmerica defined by treaty or tributaryrelations? Was the US’s (or the USSR’s)twentieth century relationship with its“strategic partners” in the Cold War a relationamong sovereign states or between center andperiphery, or lord and vassal? During theOpium Wars, the Qing scholar and official WeiYuan already recognized that the maindifference between China and Britain incommercial affairs was not a differencebetween a system based on tribute and asystem based on treaties, but rather anotherkind of difference: Tribute was not themainstay of China’s economy, so there was nointernal impetus for linking the imperialgovernment and military directly to foreigntrade, whereas Britain’s domestic economyrelied on tributary and commercial relationswith its colonies. This forced the British state totake an active role in supporting overseascommercial activities, including with militaryforce.

If, as Wang Gungwu argues, China’s overseascommerce was a “commerce without empire,”then British commerce was the opposite: anorganized alliance of military and businessunder state auspices (Wang 1990). It was onlyin order to force China to sign unequal treatiesthat the Western powers recognized the Qingstate as a formally equal legal subject, thusapplying to a non-European entity the notion ofsovereignty previously reserved forinternational law among Christian or “civilized”states. If one explains the Qing conflicts withJapan over the Korean peninsula and the FirstSino-Japanese War according to a normative

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framework of either “tributary” or “treaty”relations (i.e. sovereignty based on formalequality), then the major changes in Asianpower relations during the nineteenth centuryare obscured. It will thereby lead to thejustification of the expansionism of Europeaninternational law with a universal ist“rationality”. If one bases one’s argument on abinary of tribute vs. treaty, or empire vs. state,and then attacks such Eurocentric ideas byinverting the relations between the two terms,the complexity of historical relations withinAsia will probably be oversimplified. We needto consider carefully how to define therelationship between Asia’s “center/ periphery”mechanisms and Europe’s “state” mechanisms,which have both overlapping and oppositionalaspects.

The question of Asia’s modernity musteventually deal with the relationship betweenAsia, on the one hand, and Europeancolonialism and modern capitalism, on theother. As early as the 1940s, Miyazaki began toexplore the “beginning of Song capitalism” bystudying the history of wide-rangingcommunication and transportation amongvarious regions. He argued that those “whoregard history since the Song as the growth ofmodernity have arrived at the time to reflect onWestern modern history in light of thedevelopments in early modern East Asianhistory” (Miyazaki 1993:240). That his theory of“East Asian early modernity” overlapped withthe Japanese idea of a “Greater East AsianSphere” does not obscure Miyazaki’s insightfulobservations. He observed that in a kind ofworld-historical framework, the digging of theGrand Canal, migration to metropolises, andthe circulation of commodities such as spicesand tea connected the European and Asiantrade networks, and the expansion of theMongolian Empire promoted artistic andcultural exchange between Europe and Asia,not only changing the internal relations inChinese and Asian societies, but alsoconnecting Europe and Asia by land and sea. If

the political, economic, and cultural features of“Asian modernity” appeared as early as thetenth to eleventh century, was the historicaldevelopment of these two worlds parallel orassociated? Andre Gunder Frank responded tothis question by demonstrating that Asia andEurope had already established important tiesby the thirteenth or fourteenth century, andmoreover that any discussion of the birth ofmodernity must begin with an appreciation of aworld-system composed of such long-standingrelations (Frank 1998). [9] The significance ofcommunication and transportation is not thestiff bundling together of two worlds; it is morelike two gears connected with a belt: when oneturns, the other must turn as well. So a logicalconclusion is that:

The European Industrial Revolution wasdefinitely not an independent Europeanhistorical sequence, because it was notonly a problem of machinery but also anissue of the whole social structure. Forthe Industrial Revolution to take place,the prosperity of the bourgeoisie wasnecessary, and moreover, the capitalaccumulation from trading with EastAsia was indispensable. To make themachines work required not only powerbut also cotton as raw material. EastAsia provided the necessary rawmaterials and markets. If there had notbeen interaction with East Asia, theIndustrial Revolution might not havetaken place [Miyazaki 1993:236-8].

Miyazaki’s research mainly focuses on China’sinternal history; his writings on the interactionsbetween Asia and Europe are thin. Frank’sresearch, on the other hand, is economistic andcommerce-centered; he seems to have little tosay about historical forces internal to Europeansociety and their relation to the birth ofcapitalism. In their structuralist narratives,war, contingent events, and other historicalfactors are pushed into the background. Butthese narratives, from different perspectives,

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provide important tools to help us re-narrate“world history.”

Hence in such an interactive narrative ofhistory, the validity of the idea of Asiadiminishes, since it is neither a self-containedentity nor a set of self-contained relations. It isneither the beginning of a linear world historynor its end. This idea of Asia, which is neitherstarting point nor end, neither self-sufficientsubject nor subordinate object, provides anopportunity to reconstruct “world history.” Ifwe need to rectify mistakes in the theories ofAsia, we must reexamine the notion of Europetoo. As we correct the errors in the idea of Asia,we must also reexamine the idea of Europe. InLenin’s style, we should ask: Where does thisadvanced Europe come from, after all? Whatsort of historical relations have resulted inAsia’s backwardness? Historical relationsinternal to societies are also important, but inthe long run, how should we appraise theeffects of continually extending inter-regionalrelations on a society’s internal situation? Iftheories of Asia continue to be based on taken-for-granted notions of Europe, and the forcesthat gave rise to the concept of Europe are notthoroughly reexamined in the context ofEuropean historical development, thesetheories will not be able to overcome theirambiguity.

Conclusion: A Problem of “WorldHistory”—Asia, Empire, and Nation-state

The accounts of Asia that we have discussedabove reveal not so much Asia’s autonomy asthe ambiguity and contradictions in the idea ofAsia. This idea is at the same time colonialistand anti-colonialist, conservative andrevolutionary, nationalist and internationalist,originating in Europe and shaping Europe’simage of itself, closely related to visions of bothnation-state and empire, a notion of non-European civilization, and a geographiccategory established through geopoliticalrelations. We must take seriously the

derivativeness, ambiguity, and inconsistency ofhow the idea of Asia emerged as we explore thepolitical, economic, and cultural independenceof Asia. The keys to transcend or overcomesuch derivat iveness, ambiguity, andinconsistency can be discovered only in thespecific historical relations that gave rise tothem.

First, the idea of Asia was created in closerelation to the issues of modernity andcapitalism, and the core of the modernity issuewas the development of the relationshipbetween nation-state and market. The tensionbetween nationalism and supra-nationalism isclosely related to the dual reliance of capitalistmarkets on state and inter-state relations. Suchdiscussions often focus on issues such asnation-state and capitalism, the diversehistorical relations, policies and governance,customs, and cultural structure of Asiansocieties nested in the narrative of modernity.Values, policies, and rituals independent of thisnarrative of modernity have been suppressedor marginalized. One important step inreflecting on the role of Europea in “worldhistory” is to challenge Eurocentric historicalnarratives and to redefine such suppressedhistorical legacies as values, policies, rituals,and economic relations.

Second, at this point, the nation-state is still themain force behind regional relations withinAsia. Its main manifestations are that: 1)Regional relations are the extension of staterelations: whether we are talking about theAsian Forum promoted by Malaysia, or the EastAsian Network advocated by South Korea, orregional organizations such as ASEAN or theShanghai Six, all are predicated on inter-staterelationships formed to develop economicrelations or state security collaboration. 2) Theconstruction of Asian sovereignty has neverbeen complete: the standoffs on the Koreanpeninsula and the Taiwan Strait and theincomplete sovereignty of postwar Japan allillustrate that nationalist processes took shape

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in the nineteenth century still play a major rolein shaping relations in East Asia. 3) Since thenew discourse on Asia is directed at formingprotective and constructive regional networksagainst the domination and turbulence causedby globalization, the question of the state stilloccupies a central place in the question of Asia.The imagining of Asia often appeals to a sort ofambiguous Asian identity, but if we pursue thepreconditions for this idea’s system andprinciples, then the nation-state will emerge asthe political structure trying to be overcome.So, however we deal with the legacy of nationalliberation movements (respect for sovereignty,equality and mutual trust etc.) and historicalregional relations under present conditions,this is still an important question.

Third, the dominance of the nation-state inAsian imaginaries arose from the binary ofempire/ nation-state created in modern Europe.The historical implication of this binary is thatthe nation-state has become the single modernpolitical form and the principal precondition forthe development of capitalism. This binary,however, underestimates the diversity ofpolitical and economic relations that weresummarized as belonging to the category ofempire, and underestimated the diversity ofinternal relations within nation-states. ModernAsian imaginaries are based mainly on inter-state relations, seldom dealing with Asia’scomplex ethnicity, regions and modes ofinteraction that are overshadowed by thecategory of empire—e.g. trans-state tributesystem, migration network etc. The question is:As the nation-state has become the dominantpolitical structure, will historical patterns ofcommunication, coexistence, and policies andregulations in Asia suggest ways andopportunities to overcome the internal andexternal dilemmas brought about by the nation-state system?

Fourth, the unity of Asia as a category wasestablished in opposition to Europe. Itencompasses heterogeneous cultures, religions,

and other social elements. Whether we baseour judgment on historical traditions or currentpolicies, one does not see the possibility orconditions in Asia for creating a EuropeanUnion-style super-state. Buddhism, Judaism,Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism,Zoroastrianism, Daoism, and Confucianism alloriginated in this continent we call Asia, onwhich three-fifths of the world’s landmass liesand over half of the world’s population live. Anyattempt to summarize the characteristics ofAsia with one unitary culture will fail. The ideaof Confucian Asia cannot fully represent thecharacteristics of even China alone. Even if theidea of Asia is reduced to the idea East Asia, itsown internal cultural heterogeneity cannot beescaped. New imaginings of Asia must combinecultural and political plurality with regionalpolitical and economic structures. A highdegree of cultural heterogeneity does not meanthat Asia cannot form certain regionalstructures; it merely reminds us that this kindof structure must have a high degree offlexibility and plurality. So two possibledirections for imagining Asia are: 1) glean fromthe institutional experiences common to Asiancultures to develop new models allowingdifferent cultures, religions, and peoples tointeract on equal terms within and amongstates; and 2) form multilayered, open socialorganizations and networks linked throughregional connections to coordinate economicdevelopment, mitigate conflicts of interest, andalleviate the dangers posed by the nation-statesystem.

Fifth, Asia has a multiplicity of longstandingreligious, commercial, cultural, military, andpolitical ties to Europe, Africa, and theAmericas, so it is inappropriate to describe Asiaas something like an enlarged nation-state. Theidea of Asia has never been purely self-defined;it is the product of relations among thesevarious regions. The critique of Eurocentrism isnot an affirmation of Asiacentrism, but rather arejection of that sort of egocentric, exclusivist,and expansionist logic of domination. In this

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sense, revealing the disorder and pluralitywithin the “new empire,” breaking open thetaken-for-granted notion of Europe, is not onlyone of the preconditions for reconstructing theideas of Asia and Europe, but also thenecessary path for breaking out of the “newimperial logic.”

Sixth, if the excavation of Asia’s culturalpotential is also the critique of West-centrism,then the reconstruction of the idea of Asia isalso resistance against the colonial andhegemonic forces dividing Asia. Thecommonality of Asian imaginaries partlyderives from the imaginers’ commonsubordinate status under Euro-Americancolonialism, the Cold War, and the presentglobal order, and the trends of national self-determination, socialist, and democratizationmovements. We will not be able to understandthe modern significance of Asia or the origin ofdisunion and war in Asia if we forget thesehistorical conditions and movements. Manyregard the fall of the Berlin Wall and thedissolution of the Soviet Union and the EasternEuropean socialist bloc as the end of the ColdWar, but in Asia, the Cold War has to a largeextent continued, as illustrated by a dividedChina and a divided Korea, indeed the ColdWar in Asia has developed new forms undernew historical conditions. Today’s discussionsof the question of Asia, however, are carriedout either by intellectual elites, or by states,and the various social movements in Asia –workers movements, student movements,farmers movements, women’s movements, etc.– are indifferent to this question. Thisphenomenon contrasts sharply with thepowerful wave of Asian national liberation inthe twentieth century. If the national liberationand socialist movements of the twentiethcentury have ended, at least their remains arestill an important source for the stimulation ofnew ways of imagining Asia.

By way of conclusion, let me emphasize againwhat I have conveyed: the issue of Asia is not

simply an issue in Asia, but an issue of “worldhistory.” To reconsider “Asian history” is toattempt to reconstruct nineteenth centuryEuropean “world history,” and to attempt tobreak out of the twenty-first century “newimperial” order and its logic.

1998, Beijing

First revision 1999, Seattle

Second revision,spring 2006, Tokyo

Third revision, spring 2007, Beijing

This is an edited version of an article thatappeared at Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 8,1,2007, pp. 1-34. Published at Japan Focus onApril 13, 2007.

Notes:

[1] Here a note on Marx’s theory should beadded. In the preface to A Contribution to theCritique of Political Economy, he describedthe “Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modernbourgeois modes of production” as “epochsmarking progress in the economicdevelopment of society” (Marx 1977). After1859, however, this preface was neverreprinted during Marx’s lifetime. In 1877,Russian scholar Nicolai K. Mikhailovski usedMarxism to argue that Russia shouldestablish capitalism in order to abolishfeudalism. Marx commented that his workmerely attempted to describe the path thatWestern capitalism developed from withinfeudal ism, and that one should not“transform his historical sketch of thedevelopment of Western European capitalisminto historical-philosophical theory ofuniversal development predetermined by fatefor all nations, whatever their historiccircumstances in which they find themselvesmay be. [… that view] does me at the same

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time too much honor and too much insult”(Pandover 1979:321).

[2] Russian intellectuals’ ideas of Europe andAsia were obviously influenced by politicaldevelopments in Western Europe and theEnlightenment conception of history. On thed e b a t e b e t w e e n S l a v o p h i l e s a n dWesternizers, see Berdyaev 1995:1-70.

[3] I am grateful to Professor Lü Xinyu forintroducing me to the Russian debate onagrarian reform and Lenin’s theory of“Prussian” and “American” paths. Mydiscussion here is largely based on herresearch (Lü 2004).

[4] Sun said in his conversation withjournalists in Kobe: “Unification is the hopeof all Chinese citizens. If China is unified,people all over the country can live in easeand comfort, and if not, they will suffer. If theJapanese people cannot do business in China,they will also suffer indirectly. We Chinesebelieve that the Japanese people sincerelyhope China be united. But the possibility ofChina’s unification is not determined byChina’s domestic affairs. Since the outbreakof the Chinese revolution, violent upheavalshave continued to arise for years. Chinacannot be unified not because of Chineseforces but completely because of foreignforces. Why can’t China unify? The foreignersare the sole cause. The reason is that Chinaand foreign countries have signed unequaltreaties, and every foreigner uses thosetreaties to enjoy special privileges in China.Recent people from the West are not onlyusing unequal treaties to enjoy specialprivileges but also to abuse those treaties inoutrageous ways” (Sun 1986a:373-4).Because Asia had not undergone a completetransition to the nation-state form, “GreatAsianism” could not design a completeapparatus for such regional groups. Sun’s

idea of Asia is closely related to his respectfor the sovereignty of nation-states. His“Great Asianism” is somewhat analogous towhat Coudenhove-Kalergi proposed in Pan-Europe (the thesis of a Pan-Europe based onthe sovereignty of nation-states), and to thePan-American organizations that came intoexistence earlier. This type of regionalconstruction can be regarded as a regionalorganization within the League of Nations,whose function was to adjudicate overconflicts between regional groups such as“Pan-Europe,” “Pan-America,” NorthAmerica, South America, the UK, the USSR,and the Far East (Gerbet 1983:34;Coudenhove-Kalergi 1926).

[5] For instance, Sun participated in thePhilippines Revolution from 1908 to 1900,sending two batches of weapons toPhilippines revolutionaries. He believed thatthe Philippines revolution would help theChinese revolution to succeed. Therevolutions of Indonesia and a number ofother Southeast Asian countries wereinfluenced by Sun’s nationalism and by theChinese revolution, but tended to emphasizethe nationalist quality of Sun and the Chineserevolution, while eliding their socialistcharacteristics.

[6] The quotation is from Xu Baoqiang’sPh.D. dissertation. I appreciate Mr. Xu’skindness in letting me read and cite hismanuscript.

[7] Such unofficial connections betweenChina and Southeast Asia, particularly theSoutheast Asian Chinese communities,formed through smuggling, trading andmigration, provided an overseas base for lateQing Chinese revolutions. The connectionslinking contemporary China and overseasChinese economies are based on earlierconnections. In other words, unofficial

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connections between China and SoutheastAsia provided modern Chinese revolutionswith a particular Asian dynamic.

[8] For example, the Russian and Qing courtsestablished tributary relations, but, to acertain extent, neither ever placed itselflower than the other to define a hierarchicalrelation. Each regarded the other as its owntributary state. Tributary ritual practice itselfis the product of interaction among complexforces, and hierarchical ritual includesprinciples of equality and possibilities forvarious interpretations from differentperspectives. Fletcher (1995) addresses thisin his research on the history of Chineseimperial relations with Central Asian polities.

[9] Frank points out that that Europeancapitalism has steadily grown in theworldwide economy and population since1400, and that this process is consistent withthe East’s decline since around 1800.European countries used the silver theyacquired from their colonies in the Americasto buy their way into Asian markets that justhappened to be expanding at that time. ForEurope, the commercial and politicalmechanisms for this Asian market wereunique and effective for the worldwideeconomy. Just as Asia entered decline, theWestern countries became industrialeconomies through the mechanisms ofimportant and export. In this sense, modernEuropean capitalism is the result both ofchanges in productive relations withinEuropean societies, and of relations with Asia(Frank 1998).

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