Author: 嵩山

The Worldist Tongue: Esperanto as Anti-Imperial Ideology in Early Twentieth-Century East Asia

In the early twentieth century, Esperanto, the “planned” language created by Ludovic Zamenhof in 1887, found a surprising stronghold. Beyond its European origins, it was in Japan, and later China, where the language flourished, forming the largest Esperanto community outside Europe by the 1930s.1 Conventional history often dismisses Esperanto as a noble but failed utopian project, especially when compared to the global ascent of English.2 However, this view misses its more profound significance. In East Asia, Esperanto was not a failure but a powerful ideological force. This was a manifestation of a homegrown philosophy known as “worldism” (sekai shugi), which is the belief in a political order that transcended the nation-state and centred on a global community of common people. This philosophy directly challenged the foundations of the Western world order.3

Esperanto’s rise coincided with an era of burgeoning nationalism and a simultaneous search for internationalist ideals. East Asian intellectuals developed a profound critique of the prevailing system, arguing that true peace could never be achieved through the competitive framework of nation-states.4  Thinkers like Japan’s Kōtoku Shūsui and China’s Kang Youwei envisioned a political order built around heimin (“the common people”) as a global, transnational community. For them, Esperanto was not an “international language” (kokusaigo) for state diplomacy, but a “world language” (sekaigo) for the people.5 This distinction was crucial. By embracing Esperanto, Japanese activists, for instance, were engaging in a form of anti-imperial resistance, rejecting their country’s participation in a Western-dominated system.

A key to Esperanto’s appeal was its perceived cultural neutrality. It was viewed as a blank slate, functioning as a transnational medium without the baggage of a specific national history or civilisation.6  This allowed it to become a powerful symbol that could amplify the diversity and equality of all local cultures.7 So more than just a tool for communication, Esperanto represented an ideology of world unification. This vision resonated perfectly with existing East Asian utopian projects. Kang Youwei’s The One-World Philosophy (Ta T’ung Shu), for example, had already called for a universal language.8 Meanwhile, Chinese anarchists in Tokyo saw Esperanto not as a replacement for their “unmodern” language, but as a framework to promote Chinese culture on a global stage.9 The language was successful because it could be seamlessly integrated into local visions of a unified world.

The movement was inherently grassroots, spreading through informal networks rather than state sponsorship. A diverse mix of intellectuals, artists, and ordinary citizens studied it in coffee shops and rural homes, often in evening classes.10 This created a unique space for transnational connection. A notable example is the Russian writer Vasily Eroshenko, a blind Esperantist who gained celebrity status in Japan. His blindness was symbolically interpreted as also being an inability to see racial hierarchies, allowing him to transcend national boundaries and live integrated within Japanese society.11 His influence extended to China, where he later lectured, inspiring figures like the playwright Akita Ujaku, who found that only Esperanto could convey the true meaning of universal brotherhood.12

Despite its non-state origins, authorities viewed Esperanto as “subversive”, and it was indeed used for political struggle, such as in Chinese anti-Japanese propaganda.13 The movement’s enduring coherence came from a continuous, deeply felt desire among its participants to make “concrete connection[s] with the wider world”.14

Therefore, the true importance of Esperanto in early 20th-century East Asia lies not in its linguistic reach, but in its ideological power. It gave tangible form to a comprehensive “worldist” vision. Esperanto was a vehicle for peace and global unity based on individual agency and cultural equality. It stood as a powerful, indigenous alternative to the Western geopolitical paradigm, rejecting a system defined by state sovereignty and a linguistic hierarchy that mirrored imperial power imbalances.

 

 

  1. Rapley, Ian, ‘A Language for Asia? Transnational Encounters in the Japanese Esperanto Movement, 1906-28’, in Iacobelli, P, et al., (eds.), Transnational Japan as History, (2016), p.167 [↩]
  2. Kim, Young S., ‘Constructing a Global Identity: The Role of Esperanto’ in Boli, John and Thomas, George M., Constructing World Culture: International Non-Governmental Organisations since 1875, (1999), p.148 [↩]
  3. Konishi, Sho, ‘Translingual World Order: Language Without Culture in Post-Russo-Japanese War Japan’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 72: 1 (2013), p.92 [↩]
  4. Ibid, p.99 [↩]
  5. Ibid, p.94 [↩]
  6. Ibid, p.100 [↩]
  7. Ibid, p.93 [↩]
  8. Ibid, p.96 [↩]
  9. Ibid, p.103 [↩]
  10. Ibid, p.91-92 [↩]
  11. Ibid, p.108 [↩]
  12. Ibid, p.106 [↩]
  13. Ibid, p.107 [↩]
  14. Rapley, Ian ‘A Language for Asia?’, p.182 [↩]

Navigating the Grey Zone: Buddhist Adaptation and Critique in Modern East Asia

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, East Asia was reshaped by the forces of modernity. The rise of the nation-state and Social Darwinism, which framed international relations as a brutal struggle for survival, challenged traditional societies.1 Within this environment, East Asian Buddhist traditions confronted an existential crisis, widely dismissed by modernisers as “superstitious and useless for national survival”.2  In response, Buddhist thinkers adopted a pragmatic strategy of navigating a “grey zone” between outright collaboration and futile resistance.3 This was not a passive position but an active space of negotiation and critical engagement. Through this approach, they sought to ensure the survival of their tradition while safeguarding its ethical core, strategically appropriating modern ideologies and repurposing their own transcendent ideals to critique state power.

This is exemplified by the Korean monk Han Yong’un (1879–1944). Recognising that Buddhism had to prove its relevance against rivals like Protestant Christianity, Han borrowed from the Chinese reformer Liang Qichao. He used Liang’s argument that Western evolutionary theories were inherent in the Buddhist principle of cause and effect.4 However, his critical innovation was his refusal to fully surrender to Social Darwinism’s harsh logic. While acknowledging its descriptive power in the material world, he subordinated it as a provisional, lesser truth, ultimately subordinate to the higher, universal ethics of Buddhism. For Han, the “survival of the fittest” was a phase in a larger spiritual evolution whose ultimate end was a world of transcendental equality and peace.5 This philosophical framework provided a moral foundation to withstand the coercive pressures of Japanese imperialism.6

A parallel, yet distinct, strategy emerged in Japan, where secular intellectuals wielded Buddhist concepts as instruments of political critique. Here, the strategy was not to subordinate a modern ideology but to weaponise a traditional Buddhist ideal itself. The modern distinction between inner belief and outer practice allowed these thinkers to approach Buddhism as a philosophy, rather than a faith. They utilised the resources in the tradition’s transcendent visions, particularly  Pure Land. This is a transcendent realm defined not by what it possesses, but by the absence of suffering. Thinkers like Ienaga Saburō recognised in this ideal a form of “negative thinking”.7  By envisioning a perfect world defined only by what it was not (i.e., not full of suffering), the Pure Land concept provided a moral standard from which to judge and “negate” the existing political order.8  The use of Buddhist concepts by Japanese leftists thus contained a profound irony. While the institutional Buddhist establishment often aligned with the state, secular intellectuals adopted the same tradition to uncover a radical, critical philosophy. This highlights a key division in modern Buddhism where the ‘grey zone’ could be a space for state collaboration for some, and a source of state negation for others, all within the same national and religious context. Thus, a traditional Buddhist image was transformed into a philosophical foundation for challenging the Japanese state’s rising totalitarianism.9

In conclusion, East Asian Buddhism navigated the challenges of modernity by operating within a strategic “grey zone.” Whether by domesticating Social Darwinism within a Buddhist framework in Korea or by radicalising utopian ideals from within the tradition in Japan, thinkers discovered a path to ensure their tradition’s continuity. Their collective legacy is one of intellectual agility, demonstrating that strategic engagement, not isolation, was key to preserving an ancient tradition’s critical relevance in a modernising world.

  1. Tikhonov, V, Social Darwinism and Nationalism in Korea: The Beginnings (1880s-1910s), (Leiden, 2010), p.134 [↩]
  2. Ibid, p.117 [↩]
  3. Schickentanz, Erik, ‘Forum Introduction. The Chrysanthemum, the sword, and the dharmakcakra: Buddhist Entanglements in Japan’s wartime empire (1931-1945’, Modern Asian Studies, 58: 6 (2024), pp.1460-1464 [↩]
  4. Tikhonov, V, Social Darwinism and Nationalism in Korea, p.123 [↩]
  5. Ibid, p.114 [↩]
  6. Ibid, p.135 [↩]
  7. Curley, Mellissa A.M, Pure Land, Real World: Modern Buddhism, Japanese Leftists, and the Utopian Imagination, (Honolulu, 2017), p.16 [↩]
  8. Ibid. [↩]
  9. Ibid, p.6 [↩]

How Neo-Confucian Ideology Clashed with Women’s Rights in Song China

At the heart of the Neo-Confucian, or ‘Learning of the Way’, movement in Song China (960-1279) lay a profound contradiction. This is its vision of a perfectly ordered society, which required the dismantling of economic rights that women already possessed. Through the attempts to construct an ideal female subject devoid of economic agency, it inadvertently exposed its own fundamental instabilities. This movement sought to re-establish rigid patrilineal structures centred on the “descent-line system” (tsung-fa).  But what this shows, unintentionally, is the resilient legal and customary rights exercised by Song women.

The philosophical drive behind the Neo-Confucian movement, spearheaded by figures like Chu Hsi (1130–1200), was the promotion of a radical form of patrilineality.1  The core tenet was that “ancestral property must not be divided but must be put in charge of one person”, that being the male lineage head.2 Within this framework, a woman’s possession of personal assets was perceived as a direct threat. It was seen to “undermine the authority of the household head” and, crucially, “siphon assets away from the patriline.”2  The ideal woman was thus conceptualised as an “economic void,” whose economic self-interests must be overlooked.

However, this idealised construction was immediately destabilised by the established legal and social practices. Contrary to the Neo-Confucian ideal, T’ang and Sung law maintained that a wife’s property was “conceptually distinct from that of her husband,” and she retained the right to remove these assets from the marriage in cases of divorce or widowhood.3 Another key practice was the right of a daughter with no brothers to inherit her parents’ estate, a direct transfer of property that Neo-Confucians like Chu Hsi explicitly condemned as “inappropriate”. 4  This reveals that the Neo-Confucian movement had to actively reshape the reality of women’s activity before replacing it with a passive, patrilineal focus.

But lacking the immediate power to alter statute law, the movement turned to moral and social pressure. A primary tool was the strategic use of funerary inscriptions to disseminate models of exemplary behaviour. Chu Hsi and his contemporaries consistently lauded women who performed acts of economic self-sacrifice, such as selling their dowry jewellery to support their husbands’ families or to fund a funeral.5 This pervasive praise, however, proved to be a double-edged sword. By celebrating dowry donation as an “a rare virtue worthy of attention,” the movement tacitly admitted that it was not the normative practice.6  The ideal woman could only be validated through the conspicuous, public surrender of the autonomy she already legally possessed. This created a paradox where the ideology’s need for constant performance of sacrifice served only to highlight the persistence of the autonomy it sought to negate.

The movement’s most aggressive efforts are evident in the judicial rulings of figures such as Huang Kan (1152–1221), a staunch disciple of Chu Hsi. Huang explicitly set out to overturn precedent, asserting in his judgments that a wife’s dowry land automatically “became land of the husband’s family” and reducing women to mere “conduits for inheritance”.7   Yet, even this militant approach encountered the hard limits of established law. In his own verdicts, Huang Kan was forced to concede that a childless widow could legally reclaim her property, acknowledging that the principle of women’s separate ownership was still “plainly in forcea”.8 The gap between ideological ambition and legal reality remained, even in its most ardent enforcers.

Lastly, while the ideology stressed female submission, its vision of the scholarly male, freed from worldly burdens, necessitated the delegation of domestic management to women. Thinkers like Chen Te-hsiu thus instructed women to use “obedience and submission to establish the foundation”, but to apply “strength and intelligence (kang and ming)” in daily action.9  This created an untenable female subject who was subordinate in theory yet dominant in household governance.

In conclusion, the Neo-Confucian endeavour to construct the “economic void” woman was an inherently unstable project. Its reliance on performative sacrifice, its struggles against resilient legal frameworks, and its own internally contradictory demands reveal an ideology constantly at war with its social context. The historical record of this struggle, preserved in the very inscriptions and legal texts meant to enforce the ideal, ultimately serves as a powerful testament to the economic autonomy it could never fully erase.

  1. Birge, Bettine, Women, Property, and Confucian Reaction in Sung and Yüan China (960-1368), (New York, 2002), p.143. [↩]
  2. Ibid [↩] [↩]
  3. Ibid, p.41 and p.52 [↩]
  4. Ibid, p.146 [↩]
  5. Ibid, p.149-150 [↩]
  6. Ibid, p.197 [↩]
  7. Ibid, p.188. and p.191. [↩]
  8. Ibid, p.190 [↩]
  9. Ibid, p.184 [↩]

How Male Reformers Reframed the “Woman Question” in China

The rise of feminist discourse in early twentieth-century China is typically framed as a battle between tradition and modernity. However, this is a simplified view overlooking the constraints of modernity. The modern Chinese legal and political system proved incapable of legislating genuine gender liberation. This is because the hierarchical logic of patriarchy was philologically embedded within the very textual and institutional fabric of the state.

Progressive male reformers appropriated the radical language of female “slavery” and “property” to articulate their own economic and psychological anxieties. In doing so, they minimised women’s constitutive historical oppression, recasting it as a mere symptom of male frustration. Part of the  “enlightenment and national self-strengthening, coded either “male” or “patriarchal”.1 This is a continuity that anarcho-feminist theorist He-Yin Zhen rejected as a “metaphysical-political principle” woven into the fabric of history.2 She demonstrated that this oppression was intrinsically economic, arguing that the “beginning of the system of women as private property is also the beginning of the system of slavery.”3

He-Yin Zhen grounded this theory in philological and historical evidence:

      • The character for “slave” incorporates the radical for “woman”
      • The character for “treasure” or “stored wealth”  had an alternative form meaning “women and children”, explicitly equating them with property.4

He-Yin Zhen concluded that the figure of “woman” embodied the “combined humiliation of being both prisoner and slave.”5 This was a continuous  feature of the Chinese social order and thus the the state was the defender of this property system, making its abolition a prerequisite for women’s liberation.6  Female slavery was a concrete, historical condition from which all subsequent social ills flowed.

Similarly, when male intellectuals addressed the “woman question,” they used the same vocabulary of subjugation but fundamentally reframed its meaning. For them, it was not a problem of systemic female enslavement, but one of national productivity and male identity. The liberal thinker Liang Qichao argued that because women could not support themselves, men were forced to “raise women as livestock or slaves.”7 This framed subjugation as a consequence of women’s economic uselessness, not its cause. Women were recast as consumers who impeded national self-strengthening.

This focus on male economic anxiety intensified during the New Culture Movement. Male reformers like Yi Jiayue and Luo Dunwei articulated their frustrations in journals like Family Research, placing immense faith in the state and its ability to legislate a new, rational xiao jiating (conjugal family).8  They linked the oppressive patriarch to forces of “power” and “class” that stifled China. Their fight for family reform was driven by a “search for a new identity” and the goal of “economic self-mastery.”9 They argued that patriarchal control over finances was not just shameful, but that it “restricted productivity and stunted the potential of China’s youth.”10. As this was deeply woven into the fabric of authority, law, and language, this validated He-Yin Zhen’s uncompromising view that the only solution was to “abolish all governments” and overturn the category of distinction itself.11 

For example, as Yi Jiayue noted, the patriarch could evade his duty to support children for education by simply claiming insufficient resources, a claim the “court’s investigations are unreliable”.12  Furthermore, one man lamented that divorce was “extremely difficult” and remarriage “against the law”.13 They even required state intervention to “prohibit parents from deciding their sons’ marriages”. demonstrating the practical limits of their individualistic approach. 14 

The central contradiction emerges when these male anxieties merged with the rhetoric of female dehumanization. Their ideal of modern manhood, built on “moral autonomy” and “economic self-mastery,” required educated wives who could provide “enlightened companionship.”15  Confronted with the reality of uneducated, parent-chosen brides, the reformers inverted He-Yin Zhen’s logic. In extreme fictional accounts, the traditional woman was depicted not as a victim, but as a parasitic “ghostly fire” or a “corpse that gets smellier day by day.”16

Thus, the concept of woman-as-property was co-opted and flipped. The male reformers, despite their progressive aims, ultimately recentered their own plight. In reframing female oppression as a barrier to male self-realization and national progress, young men remodelled and “joined” the patriarchy.17 The profound, systemic critique articulated by He-Yin Zhen was thus contained, demonstrating how the language of emancipation can be harnessed not to abolish hierarchy, but to renegotiate the terms of power within it.

  1. Dorothy Ko, Lydia He Liu, Rebecca E. Karl [ed.], The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory (New York, 2013), p.7 [↩]
  2. Ibid, p.21 [↩]
  3. Ibid, p.22 [↩]
  4. Ibid.114-115 [↩]
  5. Ibid, p.118 [↩]
  6. Ibid, p.70 [↩]
  7. Ibid, 24 [↩]
  8. Susan Glosser, Chinese Visions of Family and State, 1915-1953, (Berkeley, 2003), p.44 [↩]
  9. Ibid, p.36 [↩]
  10. Ibid, p.34 [↩]
  11. Ko, Liu and Karl, The Birth of Chinese Feminism, p.107 [↩]
  12. Glosser, Chinese Visions of Family and State, p.43 [↩]
  13. Ibid, p.51 [↩]
  14. Ibid, p.79 [↩]
  15. Ibid, p.52 [↩]
  16. Ibid, p.55 [↩]
  17. Ko, Liu and Karl, The Birth of Chinese Feminism, p.159 [↩]

Anarchist Roots vs Authoritarian Reality of Maoism

Of all the ideological contradictions within Maoism, none is more profoundly ironic than its relationship with Anarchism. The core conflict between the two can be defined as a centralised vanguardism vs decentralised spontaneity.1 But the true irony lies not just in their methodological divergence, but in the complete reversal of Mao’s own stance. A central paradox is revealed, as Mao’s quest to destroy one form of authority became a reproduction of the very power it sought to overthrow.

Mao’s early thought was saturated with an anarchist spirit. As seen in his declaration that “the value of the individual is greater than that of the universe” and his condemnation of the “four evils,” which are the church, capitalism, monarchy, and the state. This reveals a pure, radical individualism.2 His seminal essay published in 1919 titled “The Great Union of the Popular Masses”, was less a blueprint for a party-state and more a vision of a collectivist anarchist society, deeply resonant with the Confucian ideal of Datong, or Great Unity. 3  This is influenced by the early Chinese reception of Marxist texts, including the Communist Manifesto, as seen by the intellectual Li Dazhao (1888–1927). He was influenced by the popular Western anarchist writings he encountered at the Beijing library, and  interpreted Marxism not as a call for a vanguard party, but as a theoretical reinforcement for anarchist ideals.4 He perceived a similarity between Marx’s egalitarian society and Confucian utopianism, and was particularly drawn to Marxism’s critique of Western imperialism, which resonated with the anti-Qing movement. This made  anarcho-communist ideals seem inevitable in China. Similarly, intellectual Chen Duxiu returned to China in 1908 after studying for seven years in Japan. His exposure to the growing anarchist movement abroad led to him and Li joining forces and developing poltical theories and philosophies, applying Marxist theory to their current Anarchist movement.5 At this stage, Mao was not drawn to anarchism for its destructiveness, but for its ultimate, utopian goal in a social order where government itself would wither into obsolescence.6  But, the irony becomes clear as the future architect of one of the most centralised states in history began by dreaming of its abolition. 

This initial collusion made the subsequent departure more significant, as the early anarchist movement was absorbed by the more successful Communist movement. The Communist Party, for Mao, became the indispensable instrument of liberation. Functioning as a necessary, temporary concentration of power to guide the masses. In June of 1949 he states that “our present task is to strengthen the people’s state apparatus of the people’s army, the people’s police and the people’s courts”.7 This pragmatic approach departs from the strong anarchist spirit. For anarchists, this increasing form of centralised power was not a means to an end, but the creation of a new elite, a new enemy in the very form of the liberating party itself.8 The revolution was an ironic contradiction as it had to build a powerful, hierarchical institution in order to achieve its stated goal of a stateless, classless society.9 As historian Dirlik argues, anarchism nourished the radical culture that made the communist revolution possible, only to be systematically purged once that revolution succeeded.10 

 The anarchist slogan to “doubt everything and overthrow everything” which was once the rallying cry of his own May Fourth generation was no longer a form of revolutionary fervor.11 The ultimate irony is that Maoism, in its ruthless suppression of anarchism, proved the anarchists’ core argument that power, once centralized, inherently corrupts and seeks to perpetuate itself. 

  1. Arif Dirlik, Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution, (Berkeley, 1991), p.176 [↩]
  2. Robert Elliot Allinson, ‘Mao in the Margins: Mao’s Commentary on Freiedrich Paulsen’s, A System of Ethics’ in Jean-Claude Pastor, One Thousand Years of Chinese Thought: Song Dynasty to 1949 (2015), pp.14-16 [↩]
  3. ‘The Great Union of the Popular Masses’, Selected Works of Mao Zedong, Transcription by the Maoist Documentation Project. <https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-6/mswv6_04.htm> [Accessed 5 October 2025]. Ibid, p.57 [↩]
  4. Dirlik, Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution, p.72 [↩]
  5. Ibid, p.15 [↩]
  6. Ibid, pp.56-57 [↩]
  7. Mao Zedong, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, ed. Stuart R Schram (New York: Frederick A. Praeger), p.20 [↩]
  8. Dirlik, Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution, p.101 [↩]
  9. Ibid, p.77 [↩]
  10. Ibid, p.25 [↩]
  11. Ibid, p.114 [↩]