Embracing "Asia" in China and Japan: Asianism Discourse and the Contest for Hegemony, 1912–1933 by Torsten Weber (review)

"Asianism," according to one of its most astute observers, historian Takeuchi Yoshimi, "is multifaceted. No matter how many definitions one assembles and classifies, it cannot be grasped as thought that has the shape of functioning in reality." While sharing this reflection at the outset (p. 31), Torsten Weber boldly proceeds with a 400-plus page analysis of the same.

Weber's enthusiasm for Asianism derives from what he considers three major failings in the extant scholarship on the subject: its focus on a single nation (particularly, Japan), its use of stark dichotomies (East versus West), and its overriding concern with wartime rhetoric (particularly, the Manchurian Incident through the end of the Pacific War). Embracing "Asia," by contrast, accentuates Asianism as a mutual dialogue between Japan and China: one that, more than a mere negation of the West, contributed to a positive self-definition of Asia; and one that blossomed from the first year of the Chinese Revolution (1912) through the founding of the Greater Asia Association in Tokyo (1933).

Weber examines not Asianism, per se, but what he describes as an "Asianism discourse," a discussion principally among Japanese and Chinese thinkers, activists, and statesmen over what contemporaries called Ajiashugi in Japanese and Yazhou zhuyi in Chinese. Ajiashugi was coined in Japan as early as 1891 and entered Chinese political discourse soon after the first Sino-Japanese War (1894–95). But, according to Weber, it rose to the level of transnational discourse only in 1912, when an essay titled "On Greater Asianism," originally published in the Chinese pro-Republican newspaper, Minli Bao, spurred widespread discussion in both China and Japan.

Weber identifies 1912 through the outbreak of World War I (1914) as the first phase of a Sino-Japanese discourse on Asianism (chapter 3). In this period, Asianism was conceived less as an expression of racial or cultural solidarity than as a simple counter to Western geopolitical hegemony. And the strength of the sentiment was initially more powerful in China than in Japan, where official Japanese accommodation of Western policies and practices precluded a more robust embrace of Asia. In both countries, Asianism was, for the first time, identified as a distinct principle.

A powerful glimpse of decline in the West, World War I invited widespread global discussion over possible alternative world orders (chapter 4). Although Asianism remained a minority impulse in wartime Japan, a growing number of commentators on both left and right addressed the relative wisdom of associating with Asia or the West. Increasingly, observers such as Gotō Shinpei and Tokutomi Sohō advocated Asianism as an excuse for a proactive continental policy. In China, on the other hand, the potent earlier impulse to associate with Japan naturally subsided with the growing momentum of Japanese expansionism. Chinese audiences continued, nonetheless, to closely follow Japanese debates on Asianism through the popular journal Dongfang Zazhi (Eastern miscellany).

Weber identifies the years 1919 through 1924 as a third era of Asianist discourse, when increasingly "racialist" concepts of Asia emerged (chapter 5). Distinctions between "White" and "Asian" permeated public discussion as such distinctions became institutionalized on the international stage—through rejection at the Paris Peace Conference of Japan's proposed "racial equality" clause and through the 1924 Immigration Act, which halted all immigration to the United States from Asia. By October 1924, a special issue of the Japanese journal Nihon oyobi Nihonjin featured prominent pundits from around Asia discussing Greater Asianism (Dai Ajiashugi), including liberal Japanese politician Ōishi Masami, Indian revolutionary Rash Behari Bose, and Chinese politician Yin Rugeng. In the same year, Indian Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore and the father of Republican China, Sun Yatsen, both decried the history of Western oppression on separate visits to Japan. Although Japanese and non-Japanese activists rarely saw eye to eye, this era laid the foundation for what Weber applauds...