Rethinking the World in East Asia 1850s-1990s

Scholarly reaction to Jiang Qing has been mixed, which is to be expected considering his work appears to transcend an academic analysis of the role of ancient Confucian thought in modern-day China. Instead he makes sweeping proposals for the creation of new political structures that would revolutionise Chinese governance after decades under Mao. This article approaches the reception of his work and finds that his proposed political structures have incited an interesting reaction from those who seemingly stand against the homogenisation of governance along western liberal democratic lines.[1]

What Jiang Qing proposed was a wholesale reanalysis of the nature of governmental power in China and cited a Confucian idea of The Way of Humane Authority as a foundation for these changes. Under this new order, power would be divided equally between three parliamentary houses. The house of Confucian tradition, dealing with the matter of sacred legitimacy; the house of the people, dealing with the matter of popular legitimacy; and the house of the nation, dealing with the matter of cultural and historical legitimacy. At the core of this system was the rejection of the western political principle of the sovereignty of the people – in favour of a system in which the balance between the three aforementioned forms of legitimacy is strictly maintained.[2]

Reception to these ideas has been mixed, and those who see it in a positive light cite the uniqueness of the Chinese context and the care that must be given to avoid the wrongful application of western democracy to a strictly eastern context. Daniel A. Bell has taken this view and expounds the importance of incorporating cultural resources into the governance of China.[3] Both Daniel Bell and Ruiping Fan go as far as to suggest that such a movement toward a trilateral parliament has the potential to gain support in the future, should the right provisions and adaptations take place. It would seem that support for Jiang Qing rests on the assertion that the alternative, a western style liberal democracy founded on the sovereignty of the people, would not respect the cultural and religious heritage of the state of China. To follow in the footsteps of Japan and Korea in adopting a westernised system of separated powers would be to support the supremacy of a political philosophy that neither originated, nor holds sway, in China.

Opposition to Jiang Qing appears to be ideological in nature, and surrounds debates about Jiang’s interpretation of Confucianism. An example of such opposition is that of Li Minghui, who strikes down Jiang’s ideas as utopian. Li claims that in creating a dichotomy between mainland and Taiwanese Confucianism, Jiang is ignorant to the political aspects of the latter.[4] Far less lofty than those who support him, Jiang’s opposition seems to be less concerned with the practicality of his conception, and rather with how he has interpreted China’s ancient frameworks of politics and spirituality. Li goes on to claim that Jiang puts far too much emphasis on the political aspects of Confucianism and is ignorant to matters of morality and the mind.

As stated, the scholarly reaction to the work of Jiang Qing has been mixed, but I would argue that they largely miss the mark in terms of the impact and significance of what Jiang was at least attempting to achieve. Following decades of Maoist rule, China looked to the future and sought new mechanisms of government to redefine their position in the modern world. Jiang’s vision of a trilateral parliament that looked to China’s ancient heritage for legitimacy and foundation was one that presented an interesting and ironically forward-thinking solution to the problem of governance. Opposition centred around Jiang’s individual interpretation of Confucianism failed to grasp the significance of Jiang’s stand against ideas of western democracy that were creeping in. Standing against the homogeneity of political ideology along western lines was, at the very least, a fresh vision for China’s future.

[1] Jiang Qing, “From mind Confucianism to political Confucianism”, The Renaissance of Confucianism in Contemporary China, (Dordrecht, 2011), p.17.

[2] Jiang Qing, A Constitutional World Order, ed. Daniel A. Bell and Ruiping Fan (Princeton, 2015), p.29.

[3] Daniel A. Bell, “Jiang Qing’s Political Confucianism”, in Ruiping Fan (ed.), The Renaissance of Confucianism in Contemporary China, (Dordrecht, 2011), p.139.

[4] Li Minghui, “I disagree with the phrase “mainland new Confucianism””, Contemporary Chinese Thought 49:2, (2018), pp.100-112.

The phrase ‘Overcoming Modernity (kindai no chōkoku 近代の超克)’ refers, in a narrow sense, to a symposium organised by a journal Bungakukai, and circulates in a broader sense as a general term describing ideological attempts to transcend modernity brought about by capitalist modernisation in Japan since the Meiji Restoration. However, contrary to their intentions, the intellectual struggle by Japanese intellectuals in the interwar period to  overcome modernity was indeed one of the products of abstraction and specialisation resulting from capitalist modernisation.

As Takeuchi Yoshimi described it as ‘one of the catchwords that took hold of the Japanese intellectuals during the war’ and ‘one of the magic words’,[1] ‘Overcoming Modernity’ was an ambiguous and comprehensive slogan with vague ideas of what modernity was and what was intended to be accomplished after modernity would have been transcended. In fact, the 13 intellectuals who participated in the symposium ‘Overcoming Modernity’ were not only philosophers, but also music, literary, and film critics, physicists, and other intellectuals from a variety of academic fields. This symposium, which brought together specialised intellectuals on the abstracted theme of ‘modernity’, is arguably the epitome of capitalist modernisation.

In Overcome by Modernity, Harry Harootunian states that the interwar Japanese history was the process of being overcome by the dynamics of modernity instead of the intellectuals overcoming modernity.[2] The intellectuals of the time sought to restrain the uneven development brought about by capitalism, which commodified everything in everyday life, and searched for something unchanging to transcend modernity. As a result, they proposed the concepts of ‘culture’ and ‘community’, but this was a form of commodification as well, labelling abstractions that had not been named before.[3] That is, what the intellectuals initially aimed to do was to overcome capitalist modernity through the pursuit of concepts with temporal invariance, but the result was a situation in which modernity was being overcome by modernity.

More precisely, however, they had been swallowed up by modernity, rather than overcome by it. They may have seriously sought to overcome modernity, but ‘modernity’, which was steadily constructed after the establishment of the new Meiji government in 1868, was already too abstract a concept at the time, and it would have been practically impossible to determine how much of the change in their circumstances resulted from modernisation and the capitalist economy.Furthermore, their perspectives on the arbitrary conception of ‘modernity’ were so varied and specialised that they ended up with different possible approaches to ‘overcoming’ it. Therefore, their intellectual endeavours were solely within the framework of capitalist modernity, and as such, no matter how much the thinkers searched for a way to overcome modernity, their methods and consequently the vision to ‘overcome modernity’ devised as a result were also products of capitalism and modernisation.

As such, the failure to formulate a systematic solution to overcome modernity lay in the fact that intellectuals in the interwar period struggled to confront the ‘modernity’ that surrounded them even though they themselves existed within the capitalised modern Japanese society. The discourse on ‘Overcoming Modernity’ demonstrates the difficulty for intellectuals to objectify the subject of their studies and propose new theses that would transcend its framework as long as they constitute the subject.

[1] Yoshimi Takeuchi, What Is Modernity?: Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi (New York, 2005), p. 103.

[2] Harry D. Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton, 2001), p. 94

[3] Ibid., p. xxiii

Tanabe Hajime, and the Kyoto School more widely, hit their apogee at a time when Japan sought to drastically expand its overseas territorial possessions, and in their work we can see an attempt at justifying the existence of imperial governments in a time when Europe’s empires began to wane. In his work, The Logic of Species, Tanabe extrapolates the Linnaean categorisation of species and genus and applies it to the organisation and self-identification of humanity, the bottom line being that, for a nation-state (Genus) to exist, it must be multi-ethnic (multi-specific).[1] This assertion underlines the Japanese idea of an empire encompassing multiple ethnicities gaining their national identity by contributing to the state. Tanabe Hajime joined a long list of intellectuals whose work was used by imperial governments to justify their incursion into foreign, often indigenous land. Where he differs however is in the use of logical thought processes and metaphysical analysis, where similar European examples used religious or legal arguments.

Expansion of Japan’s empire was swift and ruthless. Within the decade preceding the outbreak of the second world war in the pacific, Japan brought Manchuria, areas of Northern China, and numerous islands in the pacific under their control. During the war, European colonies in south-East Asia and American colonies in the Pacific Ocean faced a similar fate. It was then the case that the Japanese empire not only covered vast swathes of mainland and Oceanic Asia, but incorporated countless ethnicities ranging from Han Chinese to indigenous pacific islanders. When Tanabe writes, it is important to note that it is against a backdrop of a growing need to establish an intellectual foundation of Japan’s expanding and increasingly multi-ethnic empire.

Tanabe Hajime’s Logic of Species, as discussed, is a philosophical response to the question of identity in human society. Utilising zoological theory, it unites ideas of species and genus with those of ethnic and national identity. To summarise briefly, as this format lacks neither the time nor space to fully analyse this complex work, Tanabe argues that for an ethnic identity to exist and be recognisable, it must be negated. In that it only exists in contrast to other ethnic identities. The role of the state in this context is to be the forum in which multiple ethnicities exist under the same national identity.[2] Taking the nation-state’s existence as fact, the only way for it to exist is to incorporate multiple ethnic identities. The species, (ethnicity) is a personal trait that connects one to a network of cultural markers of identity. However, the genus (the nation-state) is a necessary construction that plays a direct role in the operation of society.

Understanding how and why this work was vital to the intellectual foundation of Japan’s empire allows us to analyse more widely the justifications for imperialism worldwide. We have already discussed the need for intellectual justification for their imperial ambitions, and this isn’t an issue experienced only by Japan. Early forays into empire by European powers required justification, although what was produced was of a different genre and form. Spanish incursions into South America was justified by a series of papal bulls expounding the belief that it was the role of Christians to spread Christianity. Similar justifications on religious grounds were common between the European powers in the early days of their colonial expansion into the Americas. The British empire, as it began to rapidly expand in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, sought legal grounds on which to found their colonial possessions. They settled on the principle of res nullius, a pillar of Roman law in which an ‘unowned’ piece of property can be claimed by those who put it to economic use.[3]

The point of analysing these different approaches to the difficult question of imperial hegemony is not to justify the ends they helped to incur, but to establish a common thread that appears across temporal and geographical contexts. Conquest is rarely given as justification for rule, and it is clear that throughout numerous examples of empire in the modern age, it is rarely enough to cite one’s comparative economic or military power as a reason for their subjugation. Tanabe Hajime, in his work of metaphysical philosophy, contributes to this history of justification, and joins such intellectuals as John Locke and Jules Ferry in their attempts to give reason for the expansion of the English and French empires respectively.

[1] Viren Murthy; Fabian Schafer; Max Ward, Confronting Capital and Empire: Rethinking Kyoto School Philosophy, (Leiden, 2017), p.172.

[2] Naoki Sakai, “Subject and Substrata: On Japanese Imperial Nationalism”, in Cultural Studies, 14:3, (09/11/2010), p.462.

[3] Anthony Pagden, Lords of all the world: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and France, c.1500 – c.1800, (Newhaven, 1995), p.45.

In reading Susan Glosser’s “Chinese Visions of Family and State”, we are able to register the heavy importance of the personal in spawning the New Culture Movement. The call for industrialisation by mid 20^thcentury young urban males in China simultaneously aimed to dismantle and reconfigure the family unit. Spearheading the project to disentangle themselves from their overbearing fathers, fiscal co-dependency and minimise the inventory of filial obligations, Yi Jiayue and Lou Dunwei cite superficially Marxist theory to figure themselves in the wider national context to achieve those ends. When we read Glosser against Ko, Liu and Karl’s The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory, we can further see that the New Youth’s purported understanding of women’s liberation, industrialisation and the patriarchy is very limited by the male experience it largely drew on. Having intellectual tunnel-vision and clutching at theoretical straws, the proponents’ hang-ups about the family system only made visible young male and elite female urban struggles.

Yi Jiayue’s criticism of patriarchal authority was that it stood in the way of personal freedoms of men such as himself, obstructed progress for the wider Chinese world[1] and that the family institution which it that world was hinged on also inserted itself into “every aspect of [young men’s’ lives”.[2] Since Confucian ideology pervaded all matter of state – making the personal and political synonymous – the New Youth perceived the family unit as symptomatic of national failures and illnesses. Taking remedial action, the New Youth’s advocacy for industrialisation was because of their belief that it was a process capable of destroying the family system that was causing them so much distress.[3]

Interestingly, however, the New Cultural Movement’s belief that it was servicing progress and helping women realise their personhood was largely erroneous or at least exclusive.[4] The main form of progress it was affecting was not just that of young urban males’ everyday-life experiences, but the achievement of placing young Chinese men in some sort of historical moment. The New Culture radicals’ eagerness to participate in history and locate the movement in an international intellectual conversation. Although modernization and industrial mobilization may have distanced men from their family, prevented the creation of “extended families”, their antiquated ideals and led them to deferring the start-up of a new generation because of their renewed focus on factory work or intellectual engagement, as Glosser notes, the New Youth’s understanding of the past was a cursory one which was to the end of reenacting “revolution in the present”.[5] Importantly, the movement neglected the experiences of women in rural society who were adversely affected by the very industrialisation the men urged for. As Ko et al note, “laboring women and [their] rural economic hardship remained largely invisible” and male dominated discussions about the oppressed female position were largely glossed over.[6] Thus, although one may look positively on the Movement’s prohibition of “taking concubines, collecting slaves etc…”, the reality of the situation was that China’s insertion into the capitalist system was detrimental, primarily to women, in numerous ways. The Youth’s desperation for the destruction of the family unit through industrialisation and espousing Marxist ideology to justify that particular route, would thus go on to destroying some families economically. “Women, whose family livelihoods were being ruined” at the hands of “competition in silk and cotton from Japan, British-colonised India, and the revival of the American South” were not considered when rethinking the family and the nation. [7]

Ultimately, we are able to see that the superficial applications of Marxist ideology, a theory which itself focussed on class-based struggle at the expense of treating the women’s plight, in its attempt to ease the burden young urban males were subjected to by their families as well as well as in marking itself as a moment on the Chinese historical timeline. As a result of such exclusivity, the New Culture Movement failed to address the working class struggles of China, the problem of women’s rights and intersection at which those issues compound.

[1] Glosser, Susan L. Chinese Visions of Family and State, 1915-1953. University of California Press, 2003, p.9

[2] Ibid, p.7

[3] Ibid, p.6

[4] Ibid, p.17

[5] Ibid, p.5G

[6] Liu, Lydia He, Rebecca E. Karl, and Dorothy Ko. The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory. Columbia University Press, 2013 p.32

[7] Ibid, p.31-32

With Arishima Takeo’s dissolution of the tenant farm in Niseko (1922), the consequent emergence of a cooperatist farm saw an experimental phase of anarchist living in Hokkaido. Sho Konishi understands that cooperatist activity and the alternative modes of living on the farm as a rejective response to Western notions of progress and modernity.[1] The land which the farmers inhabited was to uniquely serve as fecund ground for many different and coexistent values. The cooperatist ideology encouraged political participation of all farm members, was loose in its outline of viable economic schemes and, chiefly, espoused egalitarian ideals. Popular understandings of anarchism catalogue the ideology as traditionalist, irrational and disordered.[2] However, when we look at the development and embodiment of cooperatist farms, we see that this particular brand of anarchism was a largely equalised ground on which the inhabitants enacted the process of political, governmental and social trial and error. With that expression of trial and error in mind, a conclusive ‘right answer’ was not sought out so much as the process was to be calibrated.

The “Hokkaido cooperative” resisted subscription to Western ideas of modernity which the wider Japanese state adopted.[1] On the smaller and larger scale, the anarchists sought to enshrine “sōgo fujo” (mutual aid) as a central tenet to an ideal lifestyle. Both interpersonal relations and the organisation of labour were to be characterised as interdependent and harmonious, rather than Darwinist, competitive and tension inducing.[2]However, to the end of that cooperation, conflict was not eschewed. Indeed, discursive conflict was encouraged where it could service democratic decision making and secure future relations. With the “elimination of hierarchy”, society’s reorganisation along horizontal lines naturally saw a greater range of opinions and perspectives on the affairs of the farm as well as its relation to other political actors.[3] The “day-long discussions” which required the result of “every members’ approval” before ratifying decisions demonstrates that the cooperatist farm did not stubbornly and naively aim to develop a utopian and fully agreeable society. Instead, cooperativism decided its idea of a progressive society included compromise, and was even necessary for, consensus. In this way, we can see that the cooperative farm, a society in which many values were cultivated, was without a strict hierarchical order but not disordered.

Economically, while the Hokkaido anarchists sought to distance themselves from the liberal capitalist system projected by the West, the farmers located themselves as “part of and a response to the modern condition”.[4]Therefore, at the time they were disowning personal property, communalising resources and pooling their labour efforts, they were not violently and universally overthrowing the “existing system”.[5] Furthermore, cooperatist modernity was not only subsistent, but, in entrepreneurial and profit seeking spirit, it also allowed for the marketing its agricultural produce.[6] In 1926 when rice prices in Japan fell, there was a sober reality that their trajectory was affected by the international and so the farmers experimented with dairy farming after learning from Utsunomiya farm.[7] This small case illustrates the way in which the anarchists located themselves not as an isolated society far removed from the wider globe, but rather a community, working with the help of others, which could carve out its own path to a modernity they defined on their own terms. Their embracement of agricultural technology was also a nod to the constant trial and error they practiced in developing an ideal, but not insular, society.[8]

Ultimately, the cooperatist farm did not abide by a strict ideological doctrine which prevented it from participating in a particular system or espousing certain ideals. Instead, with its basic aim to operate as an egalitarian society in which interdependent individuals lifted each other up, the definition of modernity was constantly updated in line with the processes which most well lent to that foundation. Understanding the cooperatist farm in this way is important to reconceptualising as forward thinking not only in terms of its ideals, but also as a process which continually revise itself.

[1] Konishi,Sho“OrdinaryFarmersLivingAnarchistTime:ArishimaCooperativeFarminHokkaido.”Modern Asian Studies 47, no. 6 (November 2013), p.1847

[2] Ibid, p.1846

[3] Ibid, p.1845

[4] Ibid, p.1848

[5] Ibid, p.1852

[6] Ibid, p.1863

[7] Ibid, p.1864

[8] Ibid, p.1860

In early 20^th century Chinese intellectual discourse, the thread of utopianism and revolution were weaved into the concepts and movements of both nationalism and anarchism, it was just done in very different patterns. While imperial China and emergent Chinese interests within that political bloc were reorienting themselves to external influences and also internally reorganising society, they were discursively reshaping time and space in revolutionary ways. Indeed, the meaning of revolution and its political legitimacy here are the contested concepts which characteristically define that competition of ideas. In the abstract sense, Arif Dirlik’s analysis of nationalism, utopianism and anarchism helps us treat revolutionary politics in China as a topic which is centred on the discomfort of the individual, political authority, and their divergent visions of the China as a social space in the future

Focusing on external forces, a Darwinian take on the new national consciousness China was to realise explains that building the state was crucial to China’s survival on the wider global stage.[1] In protection of China, a streamlined and dynamic political system would “ward off the threat to the country’s existence in a new world”.[2] While the idea that an encounter with the West directly caused a national conscience is a one-dimensional one, an appreciation of the global helps us treat the problematique of revolutionary discourse as hinged upon China’s place and mode of operation in a reconfigured world. On this note, Dirlik points to the state’s “ability to represent” the “society over which it rules” as a barometer of its success.[3] Ironically, as a result, subjects became conscious citizens of the state and occupied space in a way that led them to more closely criticise social relationships themselves and vis-à-vis political authority.[4]

Dirlik cites “discomfort” as a key precondition to anarchist revolutionary intellectual discourse in China.[5] The utopian aim to insert itself as a transformer of humanity on the global scale was developed in order to form a nationalist ideology that went beyond creating the state as an end in itself.[6] By locating itself on the globe this way, China set a project to spatially revolutionise the scope of its political legitimacy. However, internally, this understanding of scope did other things. Tan Sitong’s belief that there should exist “one world” where no one “belongs to any state” and where there are “no boundaries” is an anarchist sentiment expressed in response to the incipient nationalist sentiment in China. The belief is based on an almost utopian desire to eliminate power struggles, inequality between the sexes, as well as the rich and the poor, and culture of war which the nation was said to foster.[7] This anarchist resolution of “mutual harmony” provides an alternative vision and treatment of time and space. It was a vision that, in terms of ideals, departed greatly from the nationalist one.

In this way, Chinese political revolution in the early 20^th century was defined differently within nationalist and anarchist discourses. While nationalism sought to bring society closer to the state through political reorganisation, anarchists sought to dismantle the very idea of a politically organised community. These intellectual concepts do diverge in their views of political authority and the end image of the future, but both ideologies have a key interest in re/disorganising society through reflecting on social interests. Through this process, they have also revolutionised the way time and space were thought of in China.

[1] Dirlik, Arif. Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution. University of California Press, 1991, p.48

[2] Ibid,p.47

[3] Ibid, p.50

[4] Ibid, p.49

[5] ibid

[6] ibid

[7] Ibid, p.56

Bibliography: