Modernity and National Identity in the United States and East Asia

2: Modernity and Empire

44 ideas and the making of identity 2 Modernity and Empire Intellectual ferment in the 1890s had a profound impact on national identity in the United States, China, and Japan. Rapid social and economic changes caused Americans to wonder where their country was going and what the future of the nation would be in the new century and prompted a number of writers to offer competing visions of modernity and America’s destiny. One of the most popular books of the times was Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1889), a utopian fantasy that envisioned a solution to the social and economic consequences of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism. In Bellamy’s vision of America in the year 2000, labor strikes, poverty, and urban misery had all vanished in a benign but all-powerful socialist system. Work, production, and consumption were all rationally distributed by the “nation” to the benefit and satisfaction of all. Bellamy ’s dream of modernity erased all the ugliness of modernization, creating a utopia of harmonious and fulfilling lives.1 Another book that exemplified the temper of the times was Josiah Strong’s Our Country, first published in 1885 and revised in 1891. The subtitle, Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis, captured the peculiar blend of optimism and anxiety about America’s prospects. Many Americans were uneasy about the flood of immigrants that threatened to dilute or overwhelm the purity of the Anglo-Saxon, Protestant “race.” Strong suggested that, far from being at risk, the Anglo-Saxon race and American civilization were destined to prevail. Invoking a teleological view of development, he wrote, “It seems to me that God, with infinite wisdom and skill, is training the Anglo-Saxon race for an hour sure to come in the world’s future . . . the final competition of races.”2 A third book that exercised enormous influence was Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The Influence of Seapower upon History (1890). Through a detailed account of the crucial role of naval battles in European history, Mahan argued that the greatness of a nation depended on its naval power. Though hardly as stirring a read as either Looking Backward or Our Country, Mahan’s treatise captured the imagination of 44 modernity and empire 45 policymakers like Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, who saw in it the strategic impetus for the “large policy” that would make the United States a great power. All three of these books dealt with epochal change as the nineteenth century drew to a close, and each proposed an optimistic vision of America’s future. In China, too, there was a palpable sense that the old order was fast changing , though there was less cause for optimism than in the United States. Modernity was making inroads in the treaty ports via Western intellectual, cultural, and economic influences, though not yet in the hinterland. Missionaries, too, were entrenched in key cities and were constantly pressing for expanded rights to settle and proselytize in the interior. China’s self-strengthening movement of the 1870s and 1880s had spawned armories, shipyards, and translation schools, but conservative officials tried to staunch the erosion of Chinese cultural identity through the slogan, “Chinese culture for the essence (ti), Western culture for practical utility (yong).” The impracticality of such a defensive formula was already becoming evident; for instance, the young men sent to the United States for practical education on the Yung Wing mission had come back alarmingly Americanized. The 1870s and 1880s had also seen a series of setbacks in Chinese foreign relations that resulted in a chipping away at the borders of the empire: the 1879 loss of Ryukyu to Japanese control; the defeat in Vietnam in 1883–85 in which the French sank a number of China’s new “self-strengthening” ships; and the British move in 1885 to make Burma, formerly a tributary state, into a British protectorate. Already many Chinese intellectuals were wondering whether a new formula was needed to strengthen and thus preserve the empire. The ideas that Chinese and Americans held of their respective country’s place in the world can also be understood in the context of their interactions with Japan and Japanese modernity. Combining firsthand observations of the chaos and “backwardness” of China with careful attention to Western history, a number of Japanese intellectuals had begun to question Japan’s identity as a nation and its place in the world. How should the ambitious young nation account for its cultural and ethnic ties to the rest of...