Asianism, pan-Asianism, Great Asianism—by whichever name it is called, it was a set of ideas and political projects that, in most treatments of the subject, lost all viability in the wake of Japan's defeat in the Pacific War. This set of ideas lost credibility because they were adopted and manipulated by the militarist regime to create a region free of white imperialists, yet under Japanese control. The varied articulations of Asianism that evolved from the late nineteenth century onwards have primarily been studied through the Japanese intellectuals, activists, and political leaders who advanced its principles and projects. In contrast, Craig Smith joins Prasenjit Duara, Torsten Weber, and other scholars, in shedding welcome light on the Chinese intellectuals who engaged with their Japanese counterparts and produced their own evolving Asianist discourses. That re-centering alone makes this a book worthy of attention, because it allows Smith to effectively argue that Asianism emerged through multiple sites of creation and that it had sincere, as well as opportunistic, advocates across a large swath of Asia, including many Chinese, Koreans, and Taiwanese who ardently opposed the Japanese imperialist variety of pan-Asianism.
Several tensions run through the book, reflecting both the history Smith recounts and his analysis. The chief historical tension was between an ardent dedication to the nation and support for regionalist or internationalist programs and institutions. Similarly, the application of a fluid, fluctuating definition of “Asia” and its constituent countries or groups, by both Smith and his historical actors, contrasts with a monolithic, unchanging West. Very much related to this second dichotomy were the civilizational and racial discourses that divided East and West. On the analytical side, Smith argues that the history of Asianism in China should be examined through a “categorization by specifics” rather than by chronology, in part because all varieties were present throughout the period under examination, yet, in tension with that claim, the chapters divide easily into a tripartite periodization that correlates well with the major military conflicts. On the whole, these tensions are more productive than problematic, for they drive the most significant parts of Smith's argument. His primary intervention into the historiographical debate, which he presents throughout, is his contention that the relationship between Asianism and nationalism was not paradoxical, but rather one of the imbrication of the former into the latter. By “imbrication” he means that, during the first half of the twentieth century—and more recently—Asianism and Chinese nationalism fused with and mutually supported each other, even though they had different stated objectives. In addition, he asserts that the changing conceptualizations of race and civilization that informed Chinese Asianism allowed certain varieties to come to the forefront and then recede, depending upon the circumstances of different parts of these five decades and the needs of various authors and political leaders. Smith demonstrates this imbrication and categorization scheme through nine lively chapters that are packed with details on the Asianist ideations of figures both well-known and more obscure, the organizations that they established, and the venues in which they published their writings.
In the first three chapters, Smith narrates the origins of Chinese Asianism as a modern discourse with some classical inflections. Faced with the weakening of the Qing Dynasty, both reformers like Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, and revolutionaries like Sun Yat-sen, Zou Rong, and Zhang Taiyan, looked to Japan and its radical Meiji-era transformation as a possible model. These explorations drew them to the ideas of Japanese pan-Asianist pioneers like Tarui Tōkichi, Yamamoto Ken, and the members of the Tōa Dōbunkai. Those ideas became fixtures of Chinese debates over how to change China through a wave of translations, especially those provided by the Japanese Sinologist Kōjō Teikichi in the pages of an influential new journal, the Chinese Progress (Shiwu bao). The revolutionaries’ and reformers’ interests also led them to Japan as a haven when they had to escape the reach of the Qing state, where they deepened their ties to Japanese Asianists and met with Indian revolutionaries. Although the Chinese intellectuals had different nationalist projects, their regionalist Asianism depended upon a close partnership between Japan and China; Smith highlights the ubiquity of the classical “lips and teeth” metaphor in their writings. Confucianism provided one source for that bond, as seen in the Yokohama Datong School headed by Kang's student Xu Qin, but it was a new Confucianism that was heavily influenced by modern ideas of race and civilization, inverted the Orientalist East–West dichotomy, and promoted Asian civilization as moral and superior. The Chinese Asianists saw all of these as very fluid concepts. For example, Smith shows in Chapter 3 that Zhang Taiyan mapped these new ideas onto the much older division between Yi (barbarian) and Xia (civilized), whereas Zou Rong similarly defined the civilized yellow race as both united in its conflict with the white race and divided into racial subcategories that informed his anti-Manchu Han nationalism. The concept of “same race” (tongzhong) and the possibility of race war fueled visions of an alliance or federation between China and Japan, but those visions had to contend with the racial nationalism of Chen Tianhua and others, who based their Asianism in a sense of shared anti-imperialist victimhood.
These ideological and political foundations continued into the interwar period covered in the next three chapters of the book. Here Smith argues that different, and in some cases new, aspects predominated. Although race war, Confucianism, and pan-Asian unity remained parts of the changing discourse, it became more strongly defined by visions of conflict between civilizations—rather than between civilized and barbarian—socialist internationalism, and debates over who would lead in a united Asia. Japan and Japanese Asianist thinking retained their importance for Chinese Asianists, but increasingly as a negative example, as seen in Smith's examination of Du Yaquan and his leadership of the Eastern Miscellany (Dongfang zazhi), and his discussion of Li Dazhao's New Asianism as a counter to the Greater Asianism espoused by Japanese such as Kodera Kinkichi (Chapters 4 and 5). The turning point for Du and many others was the Great War, which Du interpreted as the result of militarism, capitalism, and state nationalism, key features of what now appeared to be a bankrupt Western civilization. Eastern civilization, with its fundamentally different basis in morality and simplicity, offered a preferable alternative, especially with Chinese leadership of Asia. Li Dazhao, a former student of the Japanese Asianist and liberal imperialist Ukita Kazutami, shared Du's sense of how East and West opposed each other, and he developed his New Asianism through his engagement with nationalist, Marxist, and internationalist ideas. Those threads appeared in his 1919 formulation of a vision of both Chinese nationalism and Asian regionalism as necessary steps on a path to world unity. For Li, China had to lead the oppressed Asian nations in opposing imperialism, including Japan's imperialism. Sun Yat-sen, whose Asianism Smith explores at length in Chapter 6, offered an alternative view. Focusing on Sun's writings in the 1910s and his famous 1924 “Great Asianism” speech, Smith demonstrates most clearly the imbrication of nationalism with Asianism and the political strategy of Sun's (and the Guomindang's) conditional acceptance of Japanese leadership. Sun's discussion of Asia's Kingly Way contained the themes of civilizational conflict and Eastern morality rooted in Confucian ideas, but his primary motivation was ensuring China's national survival.
In the last three chapters of the book, the emphasis on shared victimhood as the basis of Asian unity that appeared in Chen Tianhua's, Li Dazhao's, and Sun Yat-sen's work emerges as the dominant strain among Chinese Asianists, who increasingly focused on China's role as the leader of the “weak and small nations.” Motivated now by their perception that the League of Nations had failed to fulfill its internationalist promise, intellectuals formed organizations like the Asian Nations’ Alliance in Beijing and the Asiatic Society in Shanghai (Chapter 7). They continued to engage with Japanese Asianists, such as in the Asian Nations Conferences in Nagasaki (1926) and Shanghai (1927), but Smith argues that these interactions failed because the Japanese could not support the anti-imperialist nationalism of their Chinese counterparts. As a result, and with the establishment of the Guomindang government in Nanjing, Wang Jingwei and others positioned China as the “elder brother” of Asia, who would lead all oppressed and colonized peoples through Sun Yat-sen's Three People's Principles to their national liberation (Chapter 8). Especially following the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, they defined Asianism as a counterweight to Japanese Monroism, that is, as a set of ideas that would create a unified Asia out of the liberated nations and a shared sense of morality. In the final chapter, Smith looks at the wartime propaganda of the only avowedly Asianist regime in China, that of the Wang Jingwei government. Wang and his associates faced a dilemma: would they ally with the United States and oppose Japanese imperialist expansion, or follow Sun's earlier acceptance of Japan's leadership in Asia to achieve other goals? Through a nuanced reading of the New Citizens Movement and its associated propaganda, Smith shows that their choice of the latter route reflected continuity with earlier Asianist trends.
The book is at its strongest when it explicates the complex, multi-vocal streams that shaped Chinese Asianism, and the variety of ways in which it was expressed. In this regard, one of Smith's greatest achievements is in bringing to light the many lesser-known figures who created and developed the discourse, only a few of whom are mentioned in this review. In doing so, he also provides an important corrective to the Japan-centric approach to Asianism by displaying the fundamentally dialogic quality of Asianist discourse as something that evolved through the interactions between Japanese and Chinese intellectuals and their respective grappling with modern ideas of race, nation, and civilization. However, the richness of the first few chapters is not matched in the latter portions of the book, in which the cast of characters shrinks and we learn somewhat less about, for example, the Asian Nations Conferences than we had about the Datong Schools. Throughout the book, and especially in the Conclusion, Smith connects more recent expressions of Asianism by Chinese intellectuals and government leaders to the history that he has detailed, but without expressing the similarities between current China-centric and past Japan-centric regionalisms. As a result, readers may be left wondering whether it was the fusion of Asianism and nationalism that Smith presents so fully, rather than Japan's wartime façade of Asianism, that explains its post-war diminution. But that is a question for a separate study. Scholars of twentieth-century Asia, and regionalism more broadly, will find much of interest in this one.
