Authors:
- Explores the emergence of a new, affirmative discourse on Asia in the early twentieth century in the context of shifting power relations between the two countries and the rest of the world
- Contributes to the transnational history of geopolitical thought in East Asia, transcending national borders and moving beyond national historiographies
- Analyses and compares different affirmations of Asianism, as well as criticisms and rejections of the concept, to offer a more complex understanding of Asianism than previous studies have been able to provide
Part of the book series: Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series (PMSTH)
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Table of contents (8 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
About this book
This book examines how Asianism became a key concept in mainstream political discourse between China and Japan and how it was used both domestically and internationally in the contest for political hegemony. It argues that, from the early 1910s to the early 1930s, this contest changed Chinese and Japanese perceptions of ‘Asia’, from a concept that was foreign-referential, foreign-imposed, peripheral, and mostly negative and denied (in Japan) or largely ignored (in China) to one that was self-referential, self-defined, central, and widely affirmed and embraced. As an ism, Asianism elevated ‘Asia’ as a geographical concept with culturalist-racialist implications to the status of a full-blown political principle and encouraged its proposal and discussion vis-à-vis other political doctrines of the time, such as nationalism, internationalism, and imperialism. By the mid-1920s, a great variety of conceptions of Asianism had emerged in the transnational discourse between Japan and China. Terminologically and conceptually, they not only paved the way for the appropriation of ‘Asia’ discourse by Japanese imperialism from the early 1930s onwards but also facilitated the embrace of Sino-centric conceptions of Asianism by Chinese politicians and collaborators.
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Authors and Affiliations
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DIJ German Institute for Japanese Studies, Tokyo, Japan
Torsten Weber
About the author
Torsten Weber is Senior Research Fellow and Head of the Humanities Section at the German Institute for Japanese Studies (DIJ) in Tokyo, Japan.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Embracing 'Asia' in China and Japan
Book Subtitle: Asianism Discourse and the Contest for Hegemony, 1912-1933
Authors: Torsten Weber
Series Title: Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65154-5
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: History, History (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-65153-8Published: 25 January 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-87960-4Published: 04 June 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-65154-5Published: 13 December 2017
Series ISSN: 2634-6273
Series E-ISSN: 2634-6281
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XXI, 407
Number of Illustrations: 6 b/w illustrations, 2 illustrations in colour
Topics: Asian History, World History, Global and Transnational History, Modern History, Political History