Intellectuals in Japan and China reawakened principles of Confucianism in response to Western domination of a certain conception of modernity, though their methods and goals would prove quite different. Confucianism had been heavily suppressed in Meiji Japan, with the rise of modern nationalism leading to the irreversible appropriation of spaces that had been hitherto intertwined with Confucian networks of knowledge, values and science.1 Meanwhile in China, Confucianism was stifled by pushes towards western-inspired systems of education and modernisation, during the end of the nineteenth and start of the twentieth centuries, particularly as imperial powers sought to assert their economic and political dominance over the weakening Qing government.
Intellectual circles in Japan and China were both distinctly affected by the repercussion of the First World War. The War presented a challenge to liberals, undermining Enlightenment universalist principles of rationality and progress that presented the West as an exemplar of civilisation. Chinese intellectuals such as Liang Qichao and Zhang Junmai, who had toured Europe in 1918-19 as part of a delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, posited that the West had become too materialistic, and had plenty to learn from spiritual Eastern civilization.2 This led, for instance, to Zhang Hunmai collaborating with German idealist Rudolph Eucken to try and produce a book that brought together the ethical and metaphysical ideas of China and the West. Others in China sought a constructive dialogue with Western thought out of a belief in the affinities between the two. The conservative journal Critical Review, founded in Nanjing, sought to synthesise native Chinese culture with new Western knowledge, while thinkers like Liang used ‘Easternisation’ to assert the East’s complimentary role in modern culture; the West would benefit from understanding Confucianism just as much as China had to learn from the West.3
However in Japan in the aftermath of the First World War, rather than working in synthesis with Western ideas, Confucian discourse was used by state structures to frame Japanese notions of superiority. Paramore argues that the War brought significant economic expansion to Japan through trade revenue in war provisions and imperialist expansion in China, which was justified by Japan’s self-representation as the steward of Asian tradition defending East Asian values against the corruption of western ideologies compared to the Chinese republicans and communists.4 This meant that fears over an imminent breakdown in the social order through labour conflict seen as inherent to high Western modernity led to a desire to return to non-Western and pre-industrial value systems to thus circumvent the contemporary problem of capitalist inequality. This conservative movement led to the establishment of Shibunkai, an activist Confucian organisation that oversaw the integration of Confucianism into Japanese society. Confucianism became intertwined with the state alongside Shinto and adopted into the structures of the state imperial cult through ceremonies associated with national morality, state organs and the military.5 This would later lead to Confucianism being associated with authoritarian and fascist governments, as nationalistic cultural homogenisation policies utilised Confucian statecraft and values.
While this was undermined by a fundamental contradiction between the idea of Japanese exceptionalism and attempts to universalise Japanese perceptions of Confucianism, such associations with fascism meant ultimately Confucianism became a taboo topic in Japan.6 In China, the rise of the New Confucians in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution brought elements of Confucianism back into the mainstream discussion. Arguments such as those of Zhang Junmai’s Manifesto that the obsession of modern Western civilisation with progress and expansion stems from an emptiness and discontentment that can learn from the East’s deep wisdom demonstrate that unlike Japan’s new culturalism of the 1930s, such understandings of Confucianism were based around mutually beneficial interactions between East and West.
- Paramore, Kiri. Japanese Confucianism: A Cultural History. of New Approaches to Asian History. (Cambridge, 2016), p.142 [↩]
- Fung, Edmund S. K. The Intellectual Foundations of Chinese Modernity: Cultural and Political Thought in the Republican Era. (Cambridge, 2010), p.66 [↩]
- ibid. p.75 [↩]
- Paramore, 2016, p.166 [↩]
- ibid. p.156 [↩]
- ibid. p.168 [↩]