Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

Constructing Nationhood

in Modern East Asia

Kai-wing

Edited by

Chow, Kevin M. Doak,

Poshek Fu

Ann Arbor

THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS

Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2001

All rights reserved

Published in the United States of America by

The University of Michigan Press

Manufactured in the United States of America

Q Printed on acid-free paper

2004 2003 2002 2001

4321

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,

or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or

otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Constructing nationhood in modern East Asia / edited by Kai-wing Chow,

Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2001 All rights reserved Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America @)Printed on acid-free paper 2004 2003

2002 2001

4 3 2

1

Kevin M. Doak, Poshek Fu.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-472-09735-0 (cloth : alk. paper) - ISBN 0-472-06735-4

(pbk.: alk. paper)

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

1. Nationalism - East Asia - History - 20th century. 2. East Asia -

Civilization -20th century. I. Chow, Kai-wing, 1951- II. Doak, Kevin

A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Michael. III. Fu, Poshek, 1955-

DS518 .C66 2001

951.05 - dc21

00-51176

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Constructing nationhood in modern East Asia I edited by Kai-wing Chow, Kevin M. Doak, Poshek Fu. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-472-09735-0 (cloth : alk. paper)- ISBN 0-472-06735-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Nationalism-East Asia-History-20th century. 2. East AsiaCivilization- 20th century. I. Chow, Kai-wing, 1951- II. Doak, Kevin Michael. III. Fu, Poshek, 1955DS518 .C66 2001 951.05- dc21

00-51176

I(HIG

P ESS

Acknowledgments

This collection of essays originated in the conference Imagining National

Identity in Modern East Asia in Narratives, Art, and Ritual organized

by the three editors at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in

1997. We received conference grants from the Center for East Asian and

Pacific Studies and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, State-of-

the-Art Conference. For their generous support, we are grateful. Other

units to which we are indebted for financial support include the Depart-

ment of East Asian Languages and Cultures and the Department of

History of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Many colleagues and graduate students helped to make this confer-

ence successful. In particular, we would like to thank Jin-hee Lee, Susan

Hellman, and Garvin Davenport for their help during the conference.

Jin-hee Lee and Soon Keong Ong have been very helpful in converting

files and copyediting the manuscript. We also want to thank Ingrid

Erickson and Christina Milton of the University of Michigan Press for

their professionalism and uncompromising support of this book.

Contents

Introduction1

Part 1: Narrative Schemes, Language, and Printed Texts

1. Three Realms/Myriad Countries: An

"Ethnography" of Other and the Re-bounding

of Japan, 1550-1750

15

Ronald P Toby

2. Narrating Nation, Race, and National Culture:

Imagining the Hanzu Identity in Modern China

47

Kai-wing Chow

3. Narrating China, Ordering East Asia:

The Discourse on Nation and Ethnicity in

Imperial Japan

85

Kevin M. Doak

Part 2: Nostalgia and Loss in the Formation of Modern

National Identity

4. Discoveries of the Horyiji

117

Stefan Tanaka

5. Political Ritual in the Early Republic of China

149

Peter Zarrow

6. In Search of HISTORY in Democratic Korea:

The Discourse of Modernity in Contemporary

Historical Fiction

189

JaHyun Kim Haboush

7. Cosmopolitanism and the Ideal Image of Nation in

Communist Revolutionary Culture

Hung-yok Ip

215

viii Contents

Part 3: Diaspora, Gender, and Ambiguity of Identity

8. Between Nationalism and Colonialism: Mainland

Emigr6s, Marginal Culture, Hong Kong Cinema,

1937-1941

247

Poshek Fu

9. Trials of the Taiwanese as Hanjian or War

Criminals and the Postwar Search for

Taiwanese Identity

279

Jiu-jung Lo

10. The Sing-Song Girl and the Nation: Music and

Media Culture in Republican Shanghai

317

Andrew F Jones

11. Narratives of Exile and the Search for Homeland

in Contemporary Korean Japanese Writings

343

John Lie

12. The Regime of Authenticity: Timelessness,

Gender, and National History in Modern China

359

Prasenjit Duara

Contributors

Index

389

387

Introduction

Kai-wing Chow, Kevin M. Doak, Poshek Fu

Recent scholarship on nationalism has shifted focus from the traditional

state-centered perspective to a more cultural understanding of the na-

tion and national identity. This tendency is especially helpful for work on

nationalism in East Asia, where the emphasis on the state and state

building has tended to dominate the literature on nationalism in the

past, especially since the rise of modernization theory during the 1950s

and 1960s. Moving away from this concern with state building should

allow scholars of East Asia to liberate themselves from the Japan para-

digm, which has focused on the establishment of a modern state in Japan

only to conclude with the lack or relative weakness of the state in the

rest of East Asia. While the issue of state building in East Asia is

perhaps an overworked topic, the similarities and differences among

cultural constructions of national identities and nationalisms in modern

East Asia remain underdeveloped topics. It is well established that the

state mobilizes culture to shore up its own legitimacy. Yet less attention

has been given to attempts by domestic social groups to establish cul-

tural and national identities that may remain in opposition, or at least in

an ambiguous relationship, to the state. To understand the politics in the

cultural production of a nation, we need to understand the values and

ideals that various groups hold up as representing what is most impor-

tant to them. While states may be analyzed in terms of the economic

structures, institutions, and governing apparatuses that inform them,

nations are far more chimeric and rest more on those ideas and values

that convince many people that they are one. A shift from the state-

building perspective to a more sustained reflection on the multiple di-

mensions of cultural identity in the region will uncover the complexity

and heterogeneity of nationalism and nationhood in East Asia.

The appeal to cultural ties in inventing national identity often in-

volves privileging the culture of a specific ethnic group either as the

2

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

dominant group of the political arena or the oppressed subgroup of the

nation. While power can enhance the appeal of ethnicity among dominant

groups, conversely, the shared experience of being oppressed or sub-

sumed under the dominant culture can also lend luster to claims of ethnic-

ity among members of subgroups. The contesting voices of domestic

ethnic groups in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries frequently

were overwhelmed by powerful waves of state-engineered nationalisms

that often sought to assimilate, integrate, or outright oppress domestic

contesting identities. The presence and the role of these divergent cul-

tural forces in the nationalist movements in East Asia during the nine-

teenth and early-twentieth centuries need to be reconsidered if we are to

understand the complexity of modern East Asian nationalisms.

Notoriously elastic, the concept of nationalism has generated more

definitions than consensus. But many analyses point to the importance

of sustained communication and the means of communication in shaping

a sense of common identity and in the dissemination of that identity.

Printed materials, radio, films, literary and historical narratives, ritual,

and the performing arts - through which national identities are imag-

ined, contested, and publicized - significantly determined how effective

nationalist movements would be in mobilizing popular support. As pub-

lic means of communication, media easily shape the manners in which

national identities are presented, transmitted, and contested. The battle

among domestic social groups over how national identities should be

imagined and constructed inevitably involves the control and use of

media. In part, it is this particular attention given to the role of media

and the suppressed voices of sub- and counternationalisms that distin-

guish this volume from other attempts to come to terms with nationalism

in East Asia.

In recent years, we have all come to appreciate how every form of

identity presupposes Other(s). Constructing and imagining an identity in-

volves the projection of a sense of Other or Otherness, whether implicit

or explicit, domestic or foreign. What constitutes identity and alterity is

imagined in terms of differences, traits, and bonds presumed to be "natu-

ral" or cultural. It is important not to forget that differences and identities

are established conceptually through processes of metonymic reduction

and reconfiguration, which "cut up" and reassemble traits to be appro-

priated as one's own while jettisoning undesirable ones onto the Other.

Of course, as desires, fears, and the nature of conflict change in a given

society the significance of the Other(s) changes as well.

Introduction 3

With the arrival of the state and state-building projects in modern

East Asia, the state was often seen as an emblem of the Otherness of the

West and an intrusion on local and native cultural forms. Consequently,

in this volume we have found it necessary to reconsider cultural national-

ism not only as the ways in which the state mobilized culture but also as

how cultural identities could be mobilized independent of and against

the modern state. Paradoxically, this cultural or ethnic sense of national

identity was deployed widely in China, Korea, and Japan (as minzu,

minjok, and minzoku, respectively) and worked at times to support

modern states and at other times to undermine them. Surely, the cul-

tural production of national identity in modern East Asia cannot be

understood without some consideration of the complicated dynamics of

this cultural, ethnic sense of national identity.

Narrative Schemes, Language, and Printed Texts

This volume approaches national identity as something that must be

understood beyond the machinations of political institutions; we explore

and interpret various narrated sites of identity and Otherness in East Asia

as forms of struggle over cultural identity. We are particularly con-

cerned with how Others in East Asia were represented in new narrative

schemes: how constructing essential differences involves imagining new

boundaries to be deployed in a new configuration of space and time in all

sorts of texts, both literary and iconic. One of the new ways in which

identities were constructed is the conflict of metanarrative schemes that

provided the fundamental frame of reference in time and space. Tradi-

tional identities were rendered unintelligible when aporia occurred as a

result of redeployment in radically disparate narrative schemes. An im-

portant change in the production, dissemination, and consumption of

narratives of collective identities (whether ethnic, national, cultural, reli-

gious, class, or gendered) in the modern period is the speed with which

texts could be duplicated, distributed, and appropriated within the same

scriptural society and, especially in modern East Asia, across different

national societies using similar writing systems. Narratives and iconog-

raphies of both the self and the Other were disseminated and translated

into different languages. A translingual discursive space was opened up

in print wherein disparate conceptualizations of group identity articu-

lated through different languages competed for "universal validity" in the

expanding horizon of what was understood of the world. Producers of

4 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

literary culture were forced to deal with discourses originating in other

languages made available through translated texts. This translingual

dimension of the modern discourse on identities in East Asia is an espe-

cially compelling issue since for most of the premodern era people

throughout East Asia (who today are considered to belong to indepen-

dent nations or cultural groups) shared a common literary and intellec-

tual structure.

One finds several key moments beginning with the sixteenth century

when territorial and cultural markers were reimagined to rechart the

spatial boundaries of East Asia, especially between Japan and China.

The chapters by Ronald P. Toby, Kai-wing Chow, and Kevin M. Doak

address the question of the construction of identities in new and conflict-

ing narrative schemata of time and space. Each focuses on some of these

early moments when the boundaries of China, Japan, and Asia were

being reimagined in narrative and iconic representations.

Toby's chapter marks the origins of a break from the premodern,

transnational, epistemological order in East Asia. As he shows, Japan's

encounter with Europeans in the mid-sixteenth century contributed to a

change in imagining and representing Japan's Other(s) in a new spatial

and ethnic relationship with China. The shift Toby outlines, from a

"Three Realms" spatial structure to a "Myriad Countries" framework,

can be seen in the new ways Japanese and their Other(s) were portrayed

in both literary texts and in iconography. In this new spatiality, the rela-

tionship between China and Japan was changed, but it was not yet con-

structed within the framework of modern states. In his universal encyclo-

pedia, the Kinmo zui (1666), Nakamura Tekisai recognized that China's

self-appellation was "Central country," even though China was called in

Japanese texts by its dynastic titles, Han and Tang. Nakamura was aware

of the Europeans' choice of "China" (i.e., shina in kanji), but this term

would not become the label preferred by Japanese intellectuals until the

late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The wankoku framework

in which the boundaries of Japan and China were imagined in the mid-

sixteenth century was prenational, in the sense that it preceded the

construction of a modern state in Japan, but also protonational, in

the sense that it laid the epistemological foundations for a ready accep-

tance of the ethnic definitions of peoples that would proliferate in the

modern period. This representation of ethnic others also demonstrates

how publishing served as an important conduit for the reproduction of

images of Europe's Other(s).

Introduction 5

Toby's interrogation of the "anthropological" lens converges with

Kai-wing Chow's analysis of the anti-Manchu rhetoric of Zhang Binglin

and the revolutionaries in China. As Chow shows, an earlier discourse

on race was appropriated and refigured beyond biology into a political

ideology directed against the Manchu regime. To exclude the Manchus

from the Chinese nation, the vast ethnic, linguistic, and local cultural

differences were subsumed under and erased by a Han identity. In sharp

contrast to the ways in which modern Japanese mobilized narratives of

Chinese ethnicity, Zhang used historical narrative to endow the Han

lineage with a subjectivity that homogenized the various dynasties into

one Chinese Han lineage (Hanzu) that fought constantly and coura-

geously against barbarians, the equally homogeneous Other(s). As

Chow argues, this imagination of the Chinese nation as a mammoth Han

lineage descended from Huangdi drew upon the symbolic sources of

social Darwinism, Enlightenment discourse on the nation, and indige-

nous lineage discourse. The extensive deployment of lineage terminol-

ogy in the writings of the revolutionaries clearly shows the "domesticat-

ing" or "distorting" effect of translating foreign discourse into the native

language. Like Japanese sinologists, Zhang drew from Western sources

on Chinese history and national identity. But, whereas Japanese sinolo-

gists frequently argued that China was merely a territory that encom-

passed five distinct ethnic nations, Zhang Binglin and the revolutionaries

sought to efface ethnic minority identities by arguing that a single Chi-

nese nation based on the Hanzu should overthrow the Manchus in order

to establish a single Chinese Han nation-state. Here we find a striking

example of how ethnic national identity in China was deployed for dra-

matically different purposes by Chinese and Japanese.

Kevin M. Doak's chapter looks at how Japanese sinologists mobi-

lized the rhetoric of ethnic nationality to deny that China was a single

nation. Even as Japanese historians employed the language of ethnic

nationalism favored by anti-imperialists, their representations of Chinese

ethnic identities often reflected Japanese imperial interests. As Doak

reveals, this was true not only of elite historians in the academy but of

popular historians as well. In particular, a 1916 text aimed at the masses,

The Nations of the Far East, took advantage of a large reading public and

a modern efficient publishing industry in the Japanese empire to propa-

gate a common conceit among Japanese that China was not a state. China

was seen as neither a modern state nor the Central Country, but as a

transitional "multinational region" in which various ethnic peoples had

6 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

contested for centuries over political dominance and autonomy. Like

British missionaries, this text found the Chinese self-identity as zhongguo

(Central Country) unacceptable for its anachronistic, premodern sense

of hegemonic identity and its implied arrogance toward other nations.

Instead, it employed the transliteration of the English term China, render-

ing it in Japanese Kanji as shina. But the point was not that China was

now a modern national state. Rather, The Nations of the Far East shifted

its narrative of Chinese history from a narrative of a single national state

to independent narratives of the five major ethnic groups (minzoku) of

China, emphasizing the ethnic oppression of the minority Manchus dur-

ing the Qing dynasty as well as the shortcomings of contemporary Chi-

nese attempts to construct a unified, stable, political state around a single

Han ethnicity. In short, Doak raises troubling questions not only about

the ambiguities of ethnic identity in national formation but about the

transference of imperial desire in early-twentieth-century Japanese nar-

ratives of East Asian identities.

Read together, the chapters by Kai-wing Chow and Kevin M. Doak

reinforce how the sharing of the same linguistic symbols (Chinese charac-

ters or Japanese Kanji) made it extremely important to gain control over

linguistic representation. The choice of the characters for toyo by Japa-

nese scholars and yazhou by Chinese intellectuals is by no means merely

a trivial quarrel over accuracy in rendering the English word Asia. At

issue was a translingual contest over the imagining of a new geopolitical

space in which both China and Japan sought to position themselves at the

center. In fact, as Toby's chapter shows, a geopolitical space of bankoku

had been introduced in Japan in sixteenth-century maps and portraits of

non-Japanese. Even though China retained its central position on the

world map, it had been decentered in discourse by virtue of the shift

from the sankoku spatial structure to the "ten thousand countries," of

which China was only one. After the Meiji Restoration, Japanese schol-

ars increasingly refused to use zhongguo as the name for China, arguing

that such usage was not only anachronistic but an affront to the equality

of nations.

Nostalgia and Loss in the Formation of Modern

National Identity

One issue central to the cultural production of national identities is how

modernity engenders a sense of loss and nostalgia for a more certain past

Introduction

7

and how this longing can lead to cultural expressions of national identi-

ties. Nostalgia as a form of historical consciousness is common in the

construction of national and nationalist cultures across modern East

Asia. While nostalgic resistance to the defamiliarizing and alienating

aspects of modernity is hardly unique to East Asia, within and across

East Asian cultural and nationalist discourse a shared concern over the

hegemony of Western culture was often an underlying element in the

construction of this cultural nationalism. The particularities of East

Asian cultural nationalism, if any, can be found in the interstices be-

tween this broadly shared nostalgia for a moment prior to the invasion of

Western history and the different forms this nostalgic impulse took in

responding to and shaping social and political movements in the very

different national contexts of China, Japan, and Korea.

Stefan Tanaka's chapter explores how the Meiji Restoration, like

other modern disruptions, simultaneously constructed a new sense of

historical time and with it other strategies for contesting tradition in

multiple ways and for multiple purposes. Tanaka focuses on a single

Buddhist temple, the Horyuji, which in the early Meiji period was redis-

covered and reconceptualized as central to modern Japanese understand-

ings of themselves and their nation. The struggles over the meaning of

what had been a rather obscure temple reveal the profound depths of

the aesthetic and emotional responses to this modern disruption. At

issue was the perception that the past was receding but not entirely

inaccessible to modern Japanese. This sense of loss and longing was

exacerbated by a specific, modern, temporal consciousness that required

past traditions in order to project a particular national identity into the

future. What is striking about this debate over a Buddhist temple as an

icon of modern Japanese identity is that it was taking place against the

backdrop of a modern state that had decisively shifted away from Bud-

dhism toward its own version of nationalistic Shintoism. Clearly, na-

tional identity in modern Japan was a field much larger than the state

could imagine. Through the debates over H6ryuji, Tanaka skillfully un-

covers the multiple uses of and contestations over the national aesthetic

past, reminding us of the varieties of ways in which modernity engenders

its own peculiar forms of nostalgia and loss and of the varied possibilities

in reimagining the past.

When Tanaka's chapter is read in conjunction with Peter Zarrow's

chapter analyzing a roughly simultaneous moment in China, one catches

both the similarities of this modern nostalgia across East Asia and some

8

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

of its differences. Zarrow highlights how the Revolution of 1911 in

China led not to a complete discarding of the earlier reliance on ritual as

power and tradition but to its redefinition for modern Chinese social

needs in the hands of men like Yuan Shikai. Like Tanaka, Zarrow

undertakes his analysis with the modern rupture as his point of depar-

ture while reminding us that the past is not a complete loss in modern

societies but was reconfigured in the invention of new identities. Zarrow

locates the power of this nostalgic concern for the past and its rituals not

merely at the political level but at deeper cultural levels where individu-

als find their personal needs met through reconnection with an earlier

moment even while those needs are reconfigured within new political

and social contexts. Zarrow's reading of Yuan's attempt to find answers

to modern social and national questions in the Qing emphasis on ritual

reminds us again of this particular consciousness of loss and the hope

that responses to the disquieting effects of modern social ruptures can be

quelled by looking backward into the past.

Another perspective on how modern forms of nostalgia situate the

past and the nation is provided by JaHyun Kim Haboush's chapter on

Korean historical fiction. Kim-Haboush shows how the nation can be

approached as a text in the same way that literary texts prefigure na-

tional obsessions: in her analysis, the Korean nation becomes a "multidi-

mensional space in which are married and contested several writings,

none of which is original." For Korean intellectuals in the 1980s, moder-

nity was not a hegemonic ideology that called forth suppressed desires

but a possibility that could be read into their own tradition by looking

into their past and locating an autonomous modernity. Such a retrospec-

tive gaze, however, required a concept of "arrested time," a sense that

East Asia had multiple paths toward modernity, multiple ways of filling

the gap created by loss and longing, multiple national identities, and

multiple narratives of the West. Through her powerful and compelling

readings of contemporary Korean historical fiction, Kim Haboush not

only reminds us of the continuing importance of historical consciousness

in Korea but of the importance of interpreted culture and political fluid-

ity in democratic politics and societies.

Just as Kim Haboush's analysis of literary texts foregrounds the

broad menu of strategies available for coming to terms with loss and

longing for the past, Hung-yok Ip shows how a similar spectrum of

cosmopolitan concerns informed Chinese Communist intellectuals. Ip

explores how Chinese Communism was itself a response to the disorient-

ing array of new ideas and modern political values that flooded into East

Introduction 9

Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She provoca-

tively suggests how cosmopolitanism and Marxism were not simply an-

tagonistic systems of belief but often converged around a shared experi-

ence of loss of continuity and the radical conditions of modern society.

Modern utilitarian values, evident in Communist celebrations of the

nation as a legitimate tool in anti-imperialist movements (even as they

condemned bourgeois nationalism), were themselves a central part of

the modern reflection on the loss of original, pure essences and an

awareness of the contextual or contingent nature of modern social life.

As Ip demonstrates, this was especially true of Chinese Communists,

who had to deal not only with the economic effects of modern capitalism

but with the cultural connotations of Western social theories as tools for

the liberation of East Asia. This cultural dilemma often led Chinese

Communists to what Ip calls cosmopolitanism as a means of reimagining

Chinese national identity from a cultural perspective, rather than locat-

ing it wholly within the modern state or in some essential category of

tradition.

Diaspora, Gender, and Ambiguity of Identity

National and cultural identities need to be historicized and hetero-

genized. With different geopolitical focuses and analytical strategies, all

the chapters in this section underscore the ambiguity and cultural poli-

tics of identity formation in modern East Asia. Rather than a homoge-

neous discourse - whether emanating from the state, the nation, or eth-

nic groups-identity is actually the site of hegemony, contestation, and

various kinds of resistance. Gender, diaspora, and popular culture pro-

vide significant ways of understanding the complex politics of identity

making.

Poshek Fu focuses on the Hong Kong cinema between 1937 and 1941

to explore the ambiguity of local identity formation. In the 1930s, as

colonial subjects of Great Britain, Hong Kong people were doubly mar-

ginalized by the British colonizers and the diasporic intellectuals exiled

from Japanese-occupied Shanghai. While the British "Otherized" them

as apathetic and excluded them from war preparations, the people of

Hong Kong were castigated by the mainland Chinese 6migr6s as "feu-

dal" and unpatriotic. The local cinema became a site in which a China-

centered nationalist discourse that privileged modernization and Enlight-

enment values tried to impose its hegemonic control over local popular

culture. Through the lens of what Fu calls "Central China syndrome,"

10

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

the 6migr6 filmmakers and critics inscribed a primitive and slavish Other

onto the local cinema. The Mandarin films they made in Hong Kong - a

city of Cantonese speakers- projected this "centralizing nationalist ide-

ology" by valorizing a national language as the instrument of state build-

ing and sacrifice to collective interests. Against this statist intervention,

some local filmmakers strove to foreground the cultural difference of

Hong Kong from the geopolitical situation on the mainland. This differ-

ence, Fu argues, animated the production of an alternative vision of a

Hong Kong identity. But under the twin pressures of British colonialism

and centralizing nationalism, this incipient sense of local identity was

tentative. As is evidenced in one of the popular films discussed in his

chapter, this identity was both hybridized and ideologically ambivalent.

It was situated uncomfortably between an attachment to the Chinese

homeland and an assertion of local difference.

Like Fu, Jiu-jung Lo looks at diasporic Chinese identity. Her subject

is Taiwanese identity and its ambiguous position in the shifting contexts

of Chinese politics. Beginning in 1931, under the colonial policy of assimi-

lation, the majority of Taiwanese became Japanese nationals. But many

intellectuals chose to remain loyal to China because it provided them

with a psychological escape from colonial oppression. After the Marco

Polo Bridge Incident of 1937, some Taiwanese went to join the resistance

on the mainland only to meet with the suspicion of the Chinese govern-

ment, while the colonial authority enlisted those who remained in Taiwan

to serve in the imperial Japanese Army. The end of the war thus brought

the question of Taiwanese nationality to the forefront: were Taiwanese

Chinese nationals or Japanese nationals? It was a question with serious

implications. A heated debate broke out within the Chinese government

regarding whether Taiwanese should be brought to trial under the cate-

gory of traitor or war criminal, a question that hinged on their nationality.

In Lo's account, just after the war many Taiwanese readily identified

themselves as Chinese while pleading for legal clemency for their war-

time behavior. After 1946, however, under the abusive rule of the Chi-

nese, who ignored their complicated situation, Taiwanese began to imag-

ine a separate national identity by fashioning a distinctive ethnic-cultural

tradition out of their Japanese colonial past. This ambiguous history

marked the beginning of an increasingly fixed but contested boundary

between Taiwan and China, providing an excellent example of the inven-

tion of national identity in modern East Asia.

While Fu and Lo discuss the Chinese diaspora as an instrument of

Introduction

11

homogenizing nationalism, John Lie explores diasporan Koreans in Ja-

pan. Through the writings of three Korean writers in Japan, he demon-

strates the pluralities of responses to ethnicity and national identity

among Korean Japanese. While Kim Sok-pom yearned to return to a

homeland that existed only in his literary imagination, Yi Yang-ji found

herself, like many Korean Japanese, trapped in a predicament between

an idealized homeland and its alienating reality. One way to escape this

predicament is offered by Yi Hoe-song. Yi avoids the psychological

ambivalence by eschewing a return to a national homeland and champi-

oning a diasporic and "pan-ethnic vision" of Korean identity. This para-

digmatic shift "from exile to diaspora" tries to sever ethnicity from

national aspiration and relocate it as merely cultural membership in a

deterritorialized group. Lie takes us back to the equation that informed

the initial quest for national identity in modern East Asia: the attempt to

identify and then match ethnic identities with their own nation-states.

But Lie's is a postnational vision: diasporic identity - accepting the

condition of exile rather than seeking to alleviate it by returning to a

homeland - as the only realistic solution when the boundaries between

homeland, identity, and one's place of residence are constantly shifting

and fraught with ambiguity.

Focusing on popular songs in Republican Shanghai, Andrew F.

Jones explores the reconfiguration of nation in the 1930s surrounding the

figure of the sing-song girl. The mass appeal of popular songs had been

predicated on the fetishization and consumption of their female per-

formers - sing-song girls - whose glamorous but brutal lives were at the

same time exploited as sensational themes in these songs. As an all-out

Japanese invasion became imminent in the early 1930s, critics of differ-

ent backgrounds began to attack popular songs as weakening the spirit

of national salvation. This did not mean that they gave up the figure of

sing-song girls. Instead, they incorporated them, especially the pathos of

their oppression, into the nationalist discourse by transforming them

into a symbol of national humiliation. Popular music was thus turned

into an instrument for mobilizing resistance against the Japanese inva-

sion. But in both the commercial and nationalist discourses the "real

persons" of sing-song girls were erased.

Prasenjit Duara seeks to locate the gendered politics of identity

formation in modern China in a complex nexus between history and the

national state. He locates an enabling contradiction at the foundation of

national history in that it is at once linear and timeless. In his words,

12

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

"linear History embeds a notion of time in which all is in flux, but it also

locates an unchanging core at the heart of change." It is this unchanging

core that animated the production of national identity. In Republican

China, as in other (post)colonial nation-states, as Duara argues, this

identity was thoroughly gendered. Political elites represented women as

that unchanging core, that realm of authenticity that defined the nation.

This subsumption of women into the national discourse was in effect a

strategy of containment, subjecting women to patriarchal control. But

Duara does not see this as a totalized regime of control. Rather, some

women, like the Hong Kong filmmakers and Taiwanese, were able to

appropriate the nationalist idiom to enunciate their resistance. Herein

lies the ambiguity of identity politics. Gender, articulated by male elites

to define the core of national tradition, ironically may simply make

national identity more accessible to women within the terms of this

repressive schema. For all their discursive homogenizing power, dis-

courses on nationalism and national identity throughout modern East

Asia have not been able to displace social resistance, whether on the

basis of gender or other sources.

PART 1

Narrative Schemes, Language, and

Printed Texts



Chapter 1

Three Realms/Myriad Countries:

An "Ethnography" of Other and the

Re-bounding of Japan, 1550-1750

Ronald P. Toby

A nation can have its being only at the price of being forever in

search of itself, forever transforming itself in the direction of its

logical development, always measuring itself against others and

identifying itself with the best, the most essential part of its being;

a nation will recognize itself in certain stock images, in certain

passwords known to the initiated. . . . It will recognize itself in a

thousand touchstones, beliefs, ways of speech, excuses, in an

unbounded subconscious, in the flowing together of many obscure

currents, in a shared ideology, shared myths, shared fantasies.

- Fernand Braudel, The Identity of France

Identities, both individual and collective - that is to say, psychological,

social, cultural, and ethnic - are constituted psychologically and cultur-

ally through processes of distinction, the perception or invention, and the

demarcation of asserted difference of the self from an ever-increasing

array of others. Benedict Anderson's influential work on Indonesia articu-

lates a notion of the nation as a community imagined from within and

stresses the ideological generation of internal similarities, consistencies,

and continuities within a politically constituted, bounded geographic area

that historically had contained a dazzling array of cultural, linguistic, and

ethnic diversity.1 At the extreme, one might read Anderson as positing

the nation from within as a self without others, an internal similitude

without external difference. Eugen Weber, likewise, focuses on dis-

courses of similitude, the effacement of what Braudel later saw as the

nearly infinite variety of linguistic and cultural microclimates within

"France" that brought about a unified "French" nation, with but passing

15

16

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

reference to the discourses of difference, distinguishing what was homoge-

nized as "France" and "French" from what was excluded as different.2

Freud, by contrast, writes of a "narcissism of petty differences"

(narzismus der kleinen differenzen), a discourse of distinction of the

collective, community self from its proximate, yet excluded, "othered"

neighbors.3 He argues that the gross differences that distinguish the

collective self from the radical alterities of far-off, little-known strangers

are of far less import in the construction of identities than the articula-

tion of "petty differences" between the self and its best-known, most

familiar, proximate others. Thongchai Winichakul, in a critique of An-

derson, amplifies upon Freud's theme (though he does not refer to

Freud), arguing that nations cannot be "imagined" solely from within as

communities of similitude constructed without reference to the excluded

other. Rather, he argues, the nation is constructed precisely by "identify-

ing those characteristics which do not belong to us, rather than by consid-

ering positively any natural qualification of 'us.'"4 This process, Freud's

"narcissism of petty differences," privileges differentiation from the fa-

miliar, proximate Other over distinction from the less well-known, dis-

tant alien.

In this chapter, I examine some of the early modern roots of the

"imagined community" of the Japanese "nation," looking at discourses

of difference in an age of political and ideological unification but also an

age of radical challenge to historically dominant cosmologies in Japan.

Politically, "Japan" might be said to have existed in the mid-sixteenth

century, if at all, only as an imagined ideal and goal, much like the Holy

Roman Empire: The archipelago had been torn by virtually ceaseless

civil war since 1467 and had barely reconstituted itself into a series of

territorial "kingdoms," principalities engaged in constantly shifting stra-

tegic alliances to defend themselves against the depredations of invari-

ably hostile neighbors. It was as "kingdoms" that the first Europeans

referred to the many principalities they found upon arriving in late-

sangoku Japan in the 1540s and 1550s.5

I take a position closer to that of Freud and Winichakul than to

Anderson, and read the "nation" as constructed at least as much in a

dialogic engagement with "imagined communities" of excluded others -

aliens distinguished by imagined differences, both petty and great, from

the included, imagined "nation," its land and people, customs, lan-

guage, and lifeways - as in any process of imagining the internal commu-

nity in an intracultural soliloquy. For, despite the seemingly self-evident

Three Realms/Myriad Countries

17

ocean borders of the island-country of "Japan," neither those borders

nor the "country" it delineated was self-evident in 1550-nor even to-

day, when the borders of Japan are in dispute with Russia, both Koreas,

and both Chinas.6 I shall examine the processes of imagining an increas-

ing variety of excluded Others, peoples and creatures defined as "not

Japan," and "non-Japanese," even before there was full internal agree-

ment upon where Japan was, and who was Japanese.

The two centuries encompassed by this study are the years of final

transition from a "medieval" to an "early-modern" order - both politi-

cal and ideological or cosmological in Japan; they also coincide with

Japan's first encounters with peoples from beyond China. This Euro-

pean - initially Iberian - encounter from the mid-sixteenth century cata-

lyzed a transformation of Japanese consciousness and cosmology; the

emergence of distinct new structures and discursive practices, especially

with regard to the modes of representation; and the strategies for consti-

tuting and deploying "knowledge" of the foreign and distinguishing it in

a rhetoric of "petty differences" that one might characterize as the pre-

condition for imagining the nation that would be Japan.7

I shall limit the present inquiry to a set of questions centered on

conceptions/representations of Japan's Other(s), those "not-Japanese"

creatures - human or otherwise - and places "not-Japan," against whom

(or which) "Japan"8 constituted itself. I shall be more concerned with

establishing the emergence of a new array of significant structural and

discursive forms that mark the shift into the early modern era - the begin-

nings of a kinsei discourse - than with their ending, their transformation

into a "modern," or fully "national," discourse of self and Other.9 In

doing so, that is, I am interrogating the notion of "Japan" itself as a

historically-constituted artifact produced at a particular moment and re-

produced or re-constituted periodically in an ongoing dialectic of identity.

There was, I shall argue, a distinct shift, not merely in the "objec-

tive" relationship of "Japan" to its Others - "not-Japans" - but in the

cognition of both Japan and not-Japan in the Japanese consciousness,

that may be located in the mid-sixteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries.

This shift, moreover, accompanied a shift in representation itself that

allows us, for the first time, I believe, to speak of a Japan that has a

discursive, representational consistency unifying all "Japan" and all

"Japanese" - although the margins of both Japan and Japanese re-

mained themselves raggedly unclear and contested.10 The shift in repre-

sentation reflects a shift in cosmologies, from a universe of Three Lands

18

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

(sangoku) to a world comprised of Myriad Lands (bankoku), and in

epistemologies and strategies of representation that suggest an "anthro-

pology" (jinrui-gaku) of alterities evocative of the panoptic posture of

the National Geographic."

An equally compelling line of inquiry, of course, prompts us to ask

when - or whether - the discursive structures of identity that coalesced

as an "early-modern" discourse on identity(ies) ceased to have the

power to explain and convince, to ask when the "early-modern" ends.

That inquiry I leave to a separate study. I shall suggest, however, that

new modes of both constituting and organizing "knowledge" as it ap-

plied to the Other (and to the Self, though that is another inquiry) were

formed in the late sixteenth century and that these modes signaled the

loss of heuristic power in the sangoku model and its gradual displace-

ment by a bankoku model.

Sangoku: The "Three Realms"

Although one cannot locate a unitary cosmology comparable to the

monotheistic, theogonic cosmology of the Judeo-Christian "tradition"

that held unquestioned, hegemonic sway in either elite or - to the extent

we can "read" it - popular Japanese consciousness prior to the mid-

sixteenth century, there is little question that most Japanese shared a

vision of a division of the world into three parts: the sangoku (Three

Realms) of Wagacho (our country); Shintan or Kara (the continent),

which included both "China" and "Korea"; and Tenjiku (India).12 Japa-

nese merchants, adventurers, and religious traveled to and from various

parts of kara, while a variety of comparable karabito (men of Kara)

likewise visited Japan at irregular intervals, but travelers to and visitors

from Tenjiku were all but unknown.13

The relative merit and priority of the "Three Realms" was contested

in Japanese Buddhist and Shinto cosmological theory, with Buddhist

cosmologies generally positing a Tenjiku-centered cosmos, as visualized

in world maps that radiated outward from Mount Sumeru, and placed

Japan at the far margins, a hendo shOkoku or "small land at the mar-

gins."14 This cosmology represented the buddhas and bodhisattvas as

prior, original essences, honji, and the deities of Shinto as localized

manifestations, suijaku, contingent manifestations in Japan of universals

originating in Tenjiku. Medieval Shinto theology, spurred by the suc-

cesses of Japan's myriad deities in fending off the Mongol invasion,

Three Realms/Myriad Countries

19

reversed the sequence of priority, positing the Japanese deities as the

original forms, or roots, which then grew, like tree trunks, through

Shintan, to leaf and flower in Tenjiku as the buddhas and bodhisattvas,

manifestations of originally Japanese universalities in Buddhistic form.'5

Yet, in sangoku cartography, the centrality of Tenjiku was unshakable.

In the late-fourteenth-century Go-tenjiku-zu, for example, the world

consisted of one vast continent comprising Tenjiku and Shintan sur-

rounded by stormy oceans with a mountainous "Shikoku" and "Kyl-

koku" floating precariously above the waves at the eastern edge of the

sea; Honshu, home to the centers of Japanese power and culture, has

literally fallen off the edge of the world.16

The attempt to reformulate a Japanese-centered sangoku was itself

intimately bound up with notions of shinkoku, of Japan as the "Land of

the Gods" or "Divine Land." Shinkoku thought, as first expressed in the

archaic histories compiled in the eighth century, was premised on the

notion that the Japanese land and people were uniquely descended from

Japanese progenitor deities and "confirmed" by foreign recognition: "I

hear that in the east there is a shinkoku, called Japan," averred a Silla

prince, according to the Nihon shoki.17 In later years, Japan's divinity

became the predicate of both historiography and diplomacy. For Kita-

batake Chikafusa, it was the underlying premise of all Japanese history:

His Jinno shotO ki begins from the declaration that "Japan is the shin-

koku." Likewise, Toyotomi Hideyoshi's edict of 1587 ordering the Catho-

lic missionaries expelled is premised on Japan's divinity: "Because Japan

is the shinkoku, it is an outrage that [men from ] strange lands [come

and] propagate false doctrines to mislead the people ..."18

There was, as has recently been shown, substantial fluidity and

variation in notions of shinkoku.19 Nor was there a unitary sangoku

cosmology, we discover. Rather, there was a multiplicity of noncon-

gruent sangoku cosmologies, contesting the relationships among the

"three realms." Yet within that intellectual and ideological tension the

sangoku comprised the entire plane of known and imagined ("seen and

unseen"?) realms until hitherto unimagined creatures ruptured the cos-

mology from beyond its limits.

When those unimagined creatures from beyond the limits of the

cosmology actually appeared, rupturing Japanese cognitive spaces and

toppling the sangoku cosmology, it would require new epistemologies -

new "techniques of knowledge"20 - to comprehend and organize an un-

derstanding of both the lands and the peoples of the "brave new world"

20

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

Japan discovered. These techniques, I would argue, are as much a part

of the rupture in the discourse as the objects of knowledge they were

mobilized to comprehend.

The Iberian Irruption and the End of the Triad

The tripartite cosmology that had held sway in Japanese consciousness for

a millennium since the introduction of Buddhism in the sixth century was

irreparably shaken by what I have called the Iberian irruption of the mid-

sixteenth century. 21 Portuguese, followed by Spanish and other European

traders, raiders, and missionaries, first found their way to Japan in the

1540s. The initial Iberian arrival in Japan, in 1543, was more remarkable,

or at least more remarked, for its technological impact - the first known

appearance of modern firearms in Japan - than for the strangeness of the

humans who brought these early arquebuses to the island of Tanegashima

off the southwest coast. Indeed, the Teppo ki, an early "account of the

arrival of firearms," while interesting in every detail of the new weapons,

offers no description whatever of the people who brought them. But a

scant six years later, when Francisco Xavier, one of the founders of the

Society of Jesus, landed in Satsuma in 1549 to begin preaching the gospels

to the "heathen" Japanese, it was the strangeness of the person, as well as

his doctrine, that attracted attention.22

Xavier remained in Japan for only a few months on his first visit, but

in his wake came dozens of others, both Catholic missionaries and a host

of secular sorts: Portuguese aristocrat-soldiers, merchants, common sea-

men, and slaves and crew members from India and (perhaps) Africa. In

what seemed only a moment, the universe had opened and Japan was no

longer "one in three," but "one among myriad" countries and peoples in

the wide, wide world. To be sure, Japanese merchants had already en-

countered a wider world in their peregrinations, for long before the

mid-sixteenth-century "Xavierian moment" Japanese traders and free-

booters had been sailing the waters of Southeast Asia. Portuguese ships

had taken Malacca in 1511 and were active in the South China Sea by the

second decade of the century, and it strains credibility to think that

Japanese and Portuguese had somehow avoided each other for more

than three decades while crisscrossing the sea lanes of Southeast Asia.

In the years after Xavier's visits, dozens of missionaries and hun-

dreds of Iberian merchants, soldiers, and seamen came to Japan. As

warring Kyushu daimyos competed to attract the foreigners, their trade,

Three Realms/Myriad Countries

21

and their firearms to their domains, the outlanders became a fixed pres-

ence in western Japan and a regular sight on the streets of the capital,

Kyoto, and the trading city of Sakai (just south of modern-day Osaka).

Their fixity in the landscape was enhanced when in 1571 Omura Sumi-

tada, daimyo of Arima, granted the port - then but a fishing village - of

Nagasaki to the Society of Jesus, making of the town a center of Portu-

guese residence, trade, and evangelism. By 1587, when Toyotomi Hide-

yoshi confiscated Nagasaki, the town boasted a foreign population -

Portuguese, Chinese, and others-of hundreds, a church, and a school

for catechists. Similarly, the Jesuits had established a collegio in the

province of Bungo on the eastern coast of Kyushu and - of perhaps

greater cultural significance - had built a church in the capital on land

granted by the emperor.

My purpose in cataloguing these landmarks of the Iberian presence

is not simply to list key moments in the narrative of European encroach-

ment into Japan's physical environment, nor to rehearse the tragic - or

triumphant, if one's viewpoint is that of the invaded - "Christian cen-

tury" narrative of initial evangelical successes snuffed out by Japanese

intransigence (or Jesuit arrogance).23 Rather, it is to suggest that the

Iberian irruption into Japanese consciousness and discursive space consti-

tuted a fundamental rupture in the discursive structure. The appearance

of real people from the third-realm world of trans-Kara subverted and

destabilized the sangoku cosmology, rendering it ultimately irreparable,

and forced the construction of a "brave new world" of myriad realms

(bankoku) populated by a formerly unimaginable variety of peoples.24

How the mutually perceived "radical alterity"25 of Japanese and Iberians

affected Iberian cognitive space-if it had any lasting impact at all-is

not my concern here; its effect on Japanese cognition, however, is criti-

cal to my argument.

Kibi Daijin and Sumiyoshi Daimyijin

Prior to the Iberian irruption, as I argue elsewhere,26 Japanese iconogra-

phy barely admitted the possibility of non-Japanese on Japanese soil.

Visual representations of Chinese in China, or of "Indians" (beings from

the land of the Buddha) in a quite imaginary India, which no Japanese

had even seen, were a common, even essential element in Japanese ico-

nography and cosmology. Similarly, tales of both China and Japanese

travelers in China were common.

22

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

The reverse, however, cannot be said: representations of foreigners

in identifiably Japanese settings are extremely rare in the extant inventory

of Japanese painting prior to about 1565. It is impossible, of course, to be

certain that some accident of preservation has discriminated against the

survival of such works, but barring that remote possibility I have been

able to identify only a very few works among thousands of pre-1565

Japanese paintings in which foreigners are depicted in Japanese set-

tings.27 The oldest of these is the eleventh-century Shotoku Taishi eden, a

pictorial biography of Prince Shotoku (574-622), in which two scenes -

out of dozens - show the prince receiving obeisance from "barbarian"

emissaries. Next is the TOsei eden, which depicts the coming of Ganjin

from Tang China to Japan. But, as noted earlier, Ganjin's monastic

status places him outside ethnicity: he cannot be distinguished visually/

iconographically from Japanese monks depicted in the same scroll. In

any case, in terms of the Kibi Daijin and Sumiyoshi Daimyojin para-

digms proposed earlier, Ganjin was himself a form of booty brought back

by the enterprising Japanese monks Eiei and Fusho.28 The last work is

the MOko shirai ekotoba, which narrates the exploits of Suenaga against

the invading Mongol horde in the late thirteenth century.29

How are we to account for this "visual silence," the absence of repre-

sentation of foreigners in Japan, when representation of foreigners - and

Japanese - abroad was quite common? I suggest that an analogy with

Japanese legend types may be helpful and propose a bipartite schema,

which I call the Kibi-Sumiyoshi paradigm, drawing on the legend of the

Nara period envoy to Tang, Kibi no Makibi, as embodied in the Kibi

Daijin nittO ekotoba, and the tale of the encounter between the god

Sumiyoshi Daimyojin and the Chinese poet Bo Zhuyi, as told in the No

play, Hakurakuten.30 Kibi and Sumiyoshi each encountered the Other,

the former in China and the latter in the waters off the southwest Japanese

coast. The contrasting venues and manner of their encounters consti-

tute, I suggest, two cultural paradigms of the Japanese encounter with

the Other that endured until the middle of the sixteenth century.

Kibi, the scion of a clan of provincial magnates on the shores of the

Inland Sea, made his way to the capital in Nara in the 710s, attended the

state-sponsored university, and gained an appointment in the state bu-

reaucracy. Immensely talented, he rose to ministerial level-the last

man from the provinces to do so for four hundred years; he studied in

Tang China from 717 to 735 and was selected as ambassador to the

Tang. According to the Ekotoba, at least, the Tang court feared that

Three Realms/Myriad Countries

23

Kibi might undermine the emperor's authority and imprisoned him in

the turret of a gate, planning to prove him with tests and schemes and

ultimately either to execute him or to drive him away. Kibi, though, was

far too clever and resourceful to be bested so easily. Taming, indeed

civilizing, a demon who inhabited the environs of the gate, Kibi learned

the secrets of invisibility and flight and thus was able secretly to enter

the imperial palace and discover the tests that were to be put to him. He

eavesdropped as the learned doctors of Chinese lore composed ques-

tions about the Thousand Character Classic, an elementary but basic

primer of Confucian theory. Likewise, primed to expect a challenge at

the game of go- not yet known in Japan- Kibi took an all-night lesson

from the demon, visualizing the black and white stones laid out on the

grid of the ceiling in his turret-prison. Because he had been able to steal

the exam questions, as it were, Kibi easily bested his Chinese examin-

ers, answering correctly their every challenge about the arcana of the

Thousand Character Classic and defeating the imperial go master at his

own game.

Kibi went out there to Otherland (TO, after all, is Kara). There,

overcoming all the challenges and passing all the tests (even though he

"cheated"; the Tang doctors were playing a rigged game, too), Kibi was

able to wrest from the Chinese their precious secret lore and bring back

to Japan all manner of material treasure and esoteric new knowledge.

He is credited with introducing a number of Chinese texts to Japan on

return from his first, student sojourn in Tang. Kibi went out there, stole

treasure and wisdom from Other, and brought it back here, without once

enduring the risk of having Other come here.

Yet what happened when Other did seek to come here? In Hakura-

kuten - the play is named for Bo Zhuyi, the most popular Chinese poet

in Japan in the Heian and medieval eras, using a sobriquet by which he

was commonly known in Japan - Other tried to accomplish just that. In

an inversion of Kibi's tale, the Tang emperor, fearful of Japan or merely

perverse, has dispatched Bo as a reconnaissance party of one to spy out

Japan in preparation for a Chinese invasion. A fisherman in Hakozaki-

today part of Fukuoka - who is later revealed to be the god Sumiyoshi,

gets word via the divine ether(eal) net of the nefarious Tang plot and

rows out to meet and thwart Bo. Hailing the Chinese voyager as he

approaches Japan's shores, the fisherman/god announces that he knows

Bo's evil purpose and will do all in his power to foil his designs. Un-

daunted by the innocuous mien of this mere fisherman, Bo announces

24 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

his determination to go on, so the fisherman challenges Bo to his own

game: a poetry contest! If Bo wins the match, he may do his will in

Japan; should the "fisherman" prevail, Bo must promise to turn tail and

go back to China without ever setting foot on dry land in Japan.

Bo accepts the challenge, of course, and the contest is joined. Verses

fly back and forth across the waves separating the two craft(smen),

rhyme thrusting and stanza parrying in a tense and bitter exchange.

Finally, Bo admits defeat, and Sumiyoshi reveals himself for the god that

he is. Bo turns back across the waves to Tang, and Japan is (once again)

saved by divine force. Other - in this instance an explicitly hostile Other

with nefarious designs - is prevented from landing in Japan.

In pre-1550 Japanese expressive culture-literature, art, and per-

formance - as I read it, most representations of the Japanese encounter

with Other either engage Other out there in Otherland or repel Other's

unwanted attempts to come in here, to enter Japan (there are excep-

tions, of course).31 After circa 1550-75, however, in the wake of the

Iberians, as it were, the Others who had been kept comfortably at bay,

either offshore or out there in Otherland in the realm of Japanese

representation, appeared increasingly in here, in Japanese settings.

While no foreigners are depicted in the Uesugi Rakuchu rakugai-zu

byobu (ca. 1565), Nanban-style foreigners - or Japanese costumed in

Nanban garb - walk freely on the streets of the capital in the Funaki

Rakucha rakugai-zu byobu (ca. 1618-20) and Koreans tour the Dai-

butsu-den at HOkoji in the Okayama Rakucha rakugai-zu byobu (after

1617).32 Similarly, two Chinese stand and chat on the street near Nihon-

bashi in the Edo meisho-zu byObu (ca. 1635), while Nanban-garbed

Japanese masquerade in a festival at the Asakusa Kannon Temple and

in the Edo-zu byobu a parade of Koreans marches right through the

main gate of Edo Castle.33 Indeed, Sumiyoshi had failed, and the for-

eigners had landed!

Moreover, the Iberian irruption, like Miranda after the fortuitous

arrival of Prospero's brother's ship off his magical isle, brought Japanese

into contact with a "brave new world" of unimaginably varied Others

and Otherlands beyond the ken of sangoku cosmologies and forced a

reordering of cosmologies to bring them into conformity with the range

of newfound "radical alterities." Among the strategies for ordering

knowledge of the brave new world, I suggest, were radically new episte-

mologies, some of which might, in a pinch, be termed protomodern or

even quasi-anthropological. Some of these strategies were imported,

Three Realms/Myriad Countries

25

borrowed, or adapted from either Chinese or European models; others,

perhaps, were "original" Japanese ideas. Each was an attempt to bring

order to the brave new world and the peoples now discovered to exist

beyond Kara, beyond Tenjiku, and indeed, beyond the ken of a sangoku

cosmology in a universe of bankoku, a world of a myriad realms and

peoples.

Brave New World: The Panopticon of Peoples in the

Myriad Realms

The Europeans brought with them "round earth" knowledge of the myr-

iad realms of trans-Kara as well as strategies for mapping that world and

representing its myriad peoples. I leave the question of mapping strate-

gies per se to a separate project, concentrating here on Japanese attempts

over the succeeding century to impose a seeming order on the remarkable

proliferation of "peoples" in the myriad realms now revealed to them.

While the emergence of an "anthropology"--as jinruigaku, a "science of

humanity" - remained but an unimagined possibility for future fulfill-

ment (in the "West" as well as in Japan), one can imagine in these move-

ments toward an ordering of knowledge of Other in sixteenth- to

eighteenth-century discourse a groping toward an anthropology of sorts.

Indeed, as will be seen, I am led to the notion of an anthropology of

representation by the self-description of a series of one-sheet charts of all

the peoples in the myriad realms as a display of jinrui, composed to aid

the reader in determining the relative qualities of each of these peoples -

an ambition not unlike the pleasure nineteenth-century physical anthro-

pologists took in measuring and classifying peoples in order to place them

in a Darwinian evolutionary hierarchy.

Tabulations of the peoples of the myriad lands first appeared as

marginalia on world maps composed in the late-sixteenth and early-

seventeenth centuries as one expression of the so-called Nanban art

of the Azuchi-Momoyama age. Initial representational schemata were

adapted directly from European models, sometimes representing only

Catholic Europe and its "New World" conquests.34 As in the forty-two

cartouches depicting "couples" from all around the world, even the appar-

ently "Japanese," "Chinese," and "Korean"(?) couples are painted

through the gaze of a European iconographic vision.35 Even the carto-

graphic vision of these early maps was European, derived from Willem

Blau's Amsterdam world map of 1607.36 They placed the Atlantic Ocean

26 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

and Europe (Repanto sentO-zu -Sekai chizu byobu) or Jerusalem (Nija-

hachi toshi-zu -Bankoku-zu byObu) at the center of the map. It was only

with the introduction of Matteo Ricci's China-centered adaptation of the

European world map that the "center" of the world shifted cartographi-

cally to East Asia, and Japanese, too, were quick to note the shift.37

A Ricci-style world map was issued by a Nagasaki publisher in 1647

(ShOho 4), under the title Bankoku sOzu (A complete map of the myriad

countries), in tandem with an accompanying table of forty different

peoples of the world arrayed in a grid, five cells across and eight cells

high. Although it is untitled, the table bears a legend at the top, which

reads, in part, as follows:

The world is broad; the variety of its peoples (jinrui) is without end.

Just as its countries differ, the peoples are likewise different. In

appearance, some are tall and some short; they appear in paired

opposites: black and white; male and female. If we represent their

body types as specimens, this is what they are generally like. One

can distinguish at a glance their systems of clothing and headgear;

the manufacture of their bows, swords, and weapons. [Using this

chart, one can] instantly discriminate the quality of each people

(jinpin shabetsu) in the regions of the world. Thus, we have pre-

pared this [chart] solely that it may serve as an aid to the investiga-

tion of things and the accomplishment of knowledge (kakubutsu

shichi).38

The Shoho Bankoku jinbutsu-zu, that is, makes claims to an authori-

tative and didactic gaze that offers to assist in the attainment of a system-

atic "knowledge" of the peoples of the world. It proposes an anthropol-

ogy of the world, allowing the reader to "discriminate" among peoples

and arrange them in a meaningful, systematic order, a hierarchy of

quality. The chart accomplishes this, in the first instance, by simple -

though not entirely consistent - tabular arrangement of peoples, in a

geographic order, from the "nearer" peoples of eastern and northeast-

ern Asia at the top to peoples from "faraway places with such strange-

sounding names" as Ingeresu, Amerika, and Perusha at the bottom and

in an implicitly descending order from Japanese at the upper right to the

barbarous, savage, and grotesque at the lower left. It signifies "civiliza-

tion" and "savagery" through the deployment of signs such as clothing

and nakedness, whiteness or blackness of skin, decoration of the body

Three Realms/Myriad Countries

27

with tattoos (by savages - dojin) or recognizable animal products (furs,

feathers, or unprocessed leaves), hair texture, hairiness, and so on.39

The lower corners of this National Geographic display of comfort-

ably lesser Others is anchored with quite antipodal depictions of sav-

agery and alterity: At the lower right, a nearly naked Amerika(n) couple

wears tobacco-leaf headdresses and (the man) a skirt; below them a

cannibal couple from Barajiru (Brazil) stands over a remarkably well-

crafted grate where a human hand and foot roast over an open fire. They

"live in holes and like to eat human flesh. They eat men but don't eat

women. In childbirth, the men have labor pains; the women do not have

pain."40 At the lower left are two men from the Land of the Giants

(Chojin), "people" (hito) who are "one jO and two shaku [about fifteen

feet] tall; because they don't have letters, they use ropes to govern." The

"giants" leave just enough space to show four men, "people" from the

Dwarf (Shajin, Kobito) Land, strolling arm in arm. They are "one shaku

and two sun (about eighteen inches) tall; because they are likely to be

captured if they walk alone, they walk in large, linked groups." With

the exception of these last two antipodalities, all of these varieties of

people emerge either from Japanese experience in East and Northeast

Asia or from the "implicit ethnography" of the earlier Nanban screens.

The giants and dwarves are creatures from another cosmology, the paral-

lel world of the Shanhaijing.41 Curiously invisible are the "peoples" of

both Ezo and Ryukyu, Japan's nearest outer boundaries, both of which

were being increasingly closely bound to "Japan" at this moment while

being maintained as boundary "Others."42

Yet, the Shoho Bankoku jinbutsu-zu's "system of organization" re-

mains curiously unsystematic, though it seemingly follows a principle of

geographical distance from Japan as its underlying organizational prin-

ciple rather than the "discrimination of qualities" proclaimed in its cap-

tion. Japan serves as the starting point for these peoples/countries, and

the remainder of the top row is devoted to more or less familiar Others

in Northeast Asia, China, Korea (archaized as Da-Ming/Dai-min and

Korai/Kory6 rather than the truly contemporary Da-Qing/Dai-Shin and

Chosen/Choson), Tatary (Tattan), and Manchuria (Orankai). All are

clothed in garments firmly grounded in the iconographic and ethno-

graphic intersection of Japanese "sight" and "representation" that Gom-

brich suggests we should expect from Japanese artists. So far so good.

But, interestingly, Iberians - now taboo, of sorts, in Japan - are identi-

fied and located nearby, in Luzon and Macao, rather than in "Spain"

28 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

and "Portugal" in Europe, while Hollanders, whose bases in Taiwan and

Java were of great concern and interest to Japanese, were located in

Europe, nestled between "Zerumaniya" and "Furansa." Represented in

this way, however, the Iberians appeared more "outland(ish)," their

clothing marking them off more radically from their neighbors (on the

chart) for their location in East Asia. Each "country" was also located

precisely on the accompanying world map (Bankoku siOzu), including

the giants and dwarves, who were located at precisely opposite "poles"

in Patagonia (giants) and far northwestern Europe (dwarves), as if they

were truly mutual antipodes.

This organizational scheme relies on iconographic cues as well as

location in the tabular arrangement of information. Peoples perceived as

savage or uncivilized, for example, are some combination of partially or

wholly naked (shod/barefoot, etc.), darker skinned, or curly haired;

they tattoo themselves or eat animal-even human-flesh. They wear

unprocessed "natural" things such as tobacco-leaf skirts and hold rough-

hewn weapons or knives. Some peoples mix signs: black skinned but

fully clothed Javanese and Takasago-ites (Taiwanese?), white-skinned

but barefoot Sumatrans. The Hollander couple is white-skinned and

fully clothed, in the manner of "civilized" peoples in this schema, but in

Otherly fashion the man and woman are ignorant of proper morals and

public conduct, as evidenced by their arm in arm public intimacy.

Publishers in Nagasaki and Kyoto produced and re-produced these

tabular representations of the "Peoples of the Myriad Realms" (Bankoku

jinbutsu-zu) frequently throughout the second half of the seventeenth

century, with but minor variations. The "myriad realms" differed signifi-

cantly from the anthropologies of the cartouches and tabulations in the

earlier Nanban-genre maps in some important respects:

1. First, the specific peoples represented in the early Nanban-

genre system were themselves an "anthropology" constituted by an

Iberian gaze into which Japanese artists were co-opted - especially

the "peoples" of Catholic Europe and those realms in Africa, the

"Indies," and the "New World" that had been focused in the coloniz-

ing gaze of Portugal and Spain. That is to say, the gaze sees Brazil-

ians but not the peoples of North America. It recalls the "Tar-

tarians" of the Mongol invasions and Marco Polo's Travels, yet the

eye is blind to the Manchus, Mongols, and other peoples of continen-

Three Realms/Myriad Countries

29

tal Northeast Asia still hidden "beyond Cathay" as well as to two of

Japan's nearest neighbors, Ezo and Ryuikyu.43

The "peoples" portrayed by the Bankoku jinbutsu-zu of 1647, by

contrast, are caught in the focus of a new gaze, one that combines

Iberian, Japanese, and Chinese cosmological and "anthropological"

lenses, through which it "sees" the peoples of Korea, Manchuria,

and Mongolia, "invisible" to sixteenth-century Portuguese, who

never strayed far enough from the sea lanes of eastern Asia to "see"

peoples beyond China and Japan. It also "sees" peoples the Iberians

would likely never have encountered, giants (chOjin) and dwarves

(shOjin), who lived only in the cosmology of the Shanhaijing, an

archaic Chinese text, and its rehearsals in late-Ming encyclopedism,

yet it remains blind to Ryukyu and Ezo..

2. The vision underlying the Shoho Bankoku jinbutsu-zu is a gaze

that - however much it finds objects for its vision in Iberian im-

ports- is constituted in a Sino-Japanese iconographic tradition quite

separate from the purely Iberian vision of the imperial Bankoku-zu

byobu. If, as Gombrich suggests, "an existing representation will

always exert its spell over the artist even while he strives to record

the truth," training the artist "to see what he paints rather than to

paint what he sees" - if, that is, iconographies are "a selective

screen which admits only the features for which schemata exist,"44-

then the imperial Bankoku-zu byobu represents nearly total co-

optation of Japanese artists to adopt an "alien" gaze, even when

"seeing themselves." The gaze at China, Korea, and Northeast

Asia, and reflexively at Japan, derives its "view" from Japanese and

Chinese iconographic models, while the Europeans and others from

the brave new world have been assimilated - at least halfway, as

Ezo and Ryukyu remain hidden - to a Sino-Japanese iconography

and gaze not visible in the earlier Nanban-genre vision.

One or two examples will suffice to clarify some of these differences

of gaze. The "Chinese," "Tatar" (?), and "Japanese" couples45 of the

imperial Sekai chizu byobu are -like all the "peoples" illustrated -

constituted in a sixteenth-century Italianesque painterly style, as repli-

cated by the anonymous Japanese artist, rather than in a "Japanese"

painterly vision. The "Japanese" woman, apparently intended to be an

aristocrat, is dressed in robes more prescient of nineteenth-century

30

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

Japonisme than reflective of a Japanese vision - indeed, one might won-

der whether the artist had actually seen an aristocratic Japanese woman,

so alien are her garments in both "design" and illustration - and sports

long, flowing, curly locks down to her waist.46 Her "spouse," likewise, is

displayed in a pose not common in Japanese portraiture, a standing full

figure, and is stylistically more evocative of the representations of Japa-

nese visitors to Europe in the illustrated press of the nineteenth century

than of any Japanese model I can identify.47 Further, he is depicted as

clean shaven, which would have been regarded as unmanly in Japan at

the turn of the seventeenth century, and is likewise outside the parame-

ters of Japanese portraiture.48

In the Shoho Bankoku jinbutsu-zu, by contrast, the Japanese couple

is the product of a Japanese vision, both iconographic and observa-

tional. The man is represented as a seated warrior in full battle regalia,

grasping a halberd in his left hand. He sports a full beard and moustache

and reminds the viewer of the memorial portrait of Honda Tadakatsu,

a general of fierce repute in the armies of Tokugawa Ieyasu.49 His

"spouse," too has been iconographically repatriated from the alien vi-

sion of the imperial Sekai chizu byObu, her hair, now freed of Ital-

ianesque curls, is straight, and it flows "properly" down the shoulders of

her juni hitoe kimono, itself a sign of a woman of high status. In the

hand-colored Kyoto University example, the sartorial signs of her status

are replicated by the chalk-white skin of her face and hand - a left hand

that dutifully holds a long sword (tachi) as if her husband is about to go

off to battle.50 Both are represented in "correct" garments, ones that

would be recognized by contemporary "native" observers as "authen-

tic," on the one hand, and in a painterly idiom that would be convinc-

ingly "real," on the other.

The Shoho Bankoku jinbutsu-zu and Bankoku sOzu, with its "an-

thropological" panopticon of forty "peoples," reappeared in several vari-

ant editions published in Nagasaki, Kyoto, Edo, and elsewhere, at least

until the late seventeenth century. Even as late as the first decade of the

eighteenth century, Nendaiki shin-e shO replicated the geography and

"anthropology" of the Bankoku sOzu and jinbutsu-zu at the same time

that Inagaki Korb attempted to combine an abbreviated, somewhat re-

vised anthropology - one that "saw" people in Ryukyu, if not Ezo, but

also bodhisattvas in Tenjiku - with a dual-polar-projection world map

(polar projections had been known for about a century in Japan).51

Inagaki "saw" the people of Ryukyu, for example, who had been

Three Realms/Myriad Countries 31

invisible in earlier iterations of the myriad peoples of the world, even

though the country of Ryukyu appeared unmistakably - and color-

coded, like Ezo, as a "foreign" country - in accompanying Bankoku

sOzu. As a cartographer, Inagaki recognized Ezo as a foreign country,

while excluding its people from his gaze. Inagaki likewise declined to

portray the people of Korea, even while representing ChOsen on his

map.52 Brazil, whose people were cannibals in earlier iterations, became

denizens of Canniballand (Shokujin-koku), fiercer and hairier than their

iconographic forebears and far more obviously eager to sate their crav-

ing for the human limbs roasting on an open fire. These were joined by

new "peoples" from "Blackpeople-land" (Kokujin-koku), and a re-

discovered Tenjiku, the latter looking for all the world like the bodhi-

sattvas that inspired them. Ishikawa Toshiyuki's Bankoku sOkai zu of

1688, published after the Kangxi Emperor's final defeat of the last Ming

resisters, maps Dai-shin (Great Qing) rather than the Dai-min (Great

Ming) of earlier maps, while Inagaki drops Dai-min for unspecificity.

Yet in his anthropology Inagaki insists on picturing a couple from Dai-

min, and none from Dai-shin; his concession, perhaps, to the Qing

triumph is to distinguish Tatars and Jurchens in his anthropology -

though this may be a renaming of Orankai. Nendaiki shin-e shO, like-

wise, refused to concede the Qing conquest, picturing only Dai-min in

its anthropology, and further dissociated lands and peoples by picturing

a couple from the anachronistic Korai while noting the nautical distance

to contemporary ChOsen.

At the same time, the encyclopedist Nishikawa Joken began to reor-

ganize anthropological knowledge from a myriad countries that num-

bered forty to a specified number of countries - he returned to the forty-

two of the imperial Bankoku screen - that would become canonical in

later iterations, well into the nineteenth century.53 Divorcing his anthro-

pology from cartography, Joken adopted a format that was replicated in

later iterations, accompanying each illustration of a people with a brief

explanatory text. He "saw" the people of Ryukyu - but not Ezo - and

clearly distinguished Ming (by which he meant "real" Chinese who had

not adopted Manchu customs) and Qing, who: "Because the emperor

(tenshi) is originally from Tatary, have amended the customs of Ming;

for this reason, I have divided the countries into two [separate] illustra-

tions, in order to show the reader the customs of the past and present"

(kokon no frzoku o shirashimu). Within this frame, Nishikawa intro-

duced such new "knowledge" as the distinction between Ming and Qing

32

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

and the existence of a people in Ryukyu who were distinct from both

Japanese and Chinese; and he divided the world into five "continents"

(go daisha, one of them comprising both the northern and southern

continents of Amerikiya). Interestingly, he located Africa (Rimiya) and

Europe by reference to direction from Tenjiku - by which he meant

India. The giants and dwarves of his anthropology were the ultimate

antipodalities, the last of his forty-two peoples, just as they were the last

of the Bankoku charts' peoples, at the corner diametrically opposite the

warrior-general and elegant woman of Japan.

Nishikawa's vision, however, contrasted sharply with the earlier

Bankoku vision in two crucial respects. First, his forty-two countries

were all foreign, that is, they excluded Japan. This was exclusively an

anthropology of Other, designed to catalog and order the foreign as

categorically distinct from-rather than inclusive of-a Japanese self.

And, whereas the Bankoku representations sought only to depict, not to

describe, their objects of knowledge, and did not attribute to them the

least social and cultural subjecthood, Nishikawa, in adding prose descrip-

tions, gave each people a history, if only momentary, and an identity,

however erroneous or fanciful. Nishikawa moved toward an encyclo-

pedism - another "technique of knowledge" - reflective of a parallel

universe of reflection.

The Encyclopedic Vision: Articulate Selves and

Typed Others

Nishikawa Joken traveled, as it were, in two epistemological universes,

the finite universe of the Nanban/Bankoku vision and the limitless,

panoptical universe of encyclopedism, a "technique of knowledge" that

had begun with a late Ming "big bang" in China and expanded with

growing force in Japan after the middle of the seventeenth century.

Encyclopedism exploded in China in the middle of the Wanli era (1573-

1620), with publication of Wanjin buqiuren and Jushu bolan (both 1604)

and Sancai tuhui and Xuefu chuanbian (both 1607).54

The encyclopedist urge to organize all knowledge intersected with

a reflexive ethnography of Japan itself, the Shokunin uta awase and

Shokunin ezukushi, by means of which, beginning in the late Heian era,

Japanese who had mastered "techniques of knowledge" classified them-

selves (initially aristocrats) and their internal Others (craftspeople) in

song and picture.55 In the earlier Japanese encyclopedias, the sinocentric

Three Realms/Myriad Countries

33

ethnographies of Sancai tuhue and Xuefu chuanbian are turned back on

themselves. Chinese encyclopedists represented a fully articulated range

of occupational and status types in China, beginning with the legendary

Yellow Emperor, and proceeding through actual emperors, and then to

a wide range of types representing a wide variety of occupational and

social roles. By contrast, the Japanese, like every foreign people, was

represented by a single type, usually male, indicating none of the social

complexity of that people. On the other hand, in Nakamura Tekisai's

universal encyclopedia, KinmO zui (1666), Japanese "humanity" (jin-

butsu) was represented as an articulated - though somewhat limited -

set of nearly sixty statuses, genders (though constructed as status posi-

tions rather than genders), and occupations derived from the shokunin

utaawase tradition.56

Nakamura's "humanity" is divided into two groups, a main group

and an "appendix," and each contains some foreign peoples as well as

Japanese. The Japanese run from the highest nobility (kO-kyo-shi-jo)

through the almost familiar "four classes" of warriors, peasants, artisans,

and merchants (here, though, hei-no-kO-shO) and life stages (infancy,

[male] youth, and old age, both male okina and female Oba) to a wide

variety of occupations, including such "despised" occupations as actors,

beggars, and prostitutes. Each of the two sets of statuses/occupations

seems to be arranged hierarchically. After each group of Japanese comes

an assortment of foreign peoples: a fur-covered Ezo archer, Nanban,

Chinese (here Chigoku), Korean, Mongol, and Jurchen in the main

section; a Ryukyuan, Luzonese (Spaniard, here distinct from Nanban),

Annamese, and so on, grading into the giants, dwarves, and the like from

the Shanhaijing (as the second half of the appendix).

Nakamura's foreigners have a variety of iconographic and anthropo-

logical forebears. His denizens of Nanban and Luzon, for example,

peoples not noted, in any case, in the late Ming encyclopedias, are

heavily indebted to images in the ShOho Bankoku jinbutsu-zu. But his

Korean - here Chosen - owes everything to Sancai tuhui, as do his

Jurchen and Mongol (Xiongnu in the Sancai tuhui) as well as his man

from Tenjiku. Even his Buddha (Demon, Taoist Immortal, Buddha,

and Bodhisattva are "Japanese" in Nakamura's scheme if I understand

him correctly), for whom there were nearly infinite models available, is

clearly copied from the Sancai tuhui. Nakamura's scheme of repre-

sentation is a straightforward combination of the visual and the nomi-

nal: a picture of each "thing," accompanied by a name-tag label, which

34

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

includes all the names by which the thing was known. Thus, for ex-

ample, China is "named" as follows:

Central country; Kara. Morokoshi. Same as Central civilization.

Here, we call the Central country Han or Tang. Central Asians call

it Shintan or Shina.57

His scheme is the same for phenomena like wind and rain (vol. 1);

features of the natural or built landscape like valleys, rivers, and bridges

(vol. 2); buildings and architectural features (vol. 3); clothing (vol. 6);

insects (vol. 15), and so on.58

A half century after Kinmo zui, in 1713, Terashima Ryoan pub-

lished his monumental encyclopedia, Wakan sansai zue, a domestication

of the Sancai tuhui in which, like much contemporary discourse, Japan

and Japanese toppled China from centrality and took over center

stage.59 Unlike the Sancai tuhui, however, and Kinmo zui, which saw

even demons, buddhas, giants, and dwarves as "people" (jinbutsu),

Terashima's anthropology is more exclusive. He begins his examination

of the species with Japanese, apparently the only people with a knowl-

edge of proper human relations (jinrin), looking at "categories of

human relations" (jinrin-rui), "kinship in human relations" (jinrin-

shinzoku), "offices and ranks" (kan'i), and "the utilities of human rela-

tions" (jinrin no yo). All are Japanese, from the emperor to thieves

(nusuhito) and from prostitutes (keisei) and wet nurses (menoto) to

beggars (kotsujiki) and boy lovers (nanshoku); even angels (tennin) are

Japanese.

Terashima proceeds to foreign peoples - who are also "people"

(jinbutsu). But, as if they were as distant biologically as geographically

or culturally, he interposes two volumes on the human body (keiraku)

between jinrin and foreign peoples. He further divides the foreign world

into two subcategories: "peoples of different/strange countries" (ikoku

jinbutsu), in what is among the briefest of all of his 105 chapters; and

"outer barbarian peoples" (gaii jinbutsu). It is not entirely clear to me

what his criteria are for distinguishing between "countries" and "barbari-

ans," although most of the eleven "countries" are familiar - China and

Korea, for example, as well as Ryukyu and Ezo. Each has a history (of

sorts), a language, and customs - including, for example, the Tatar

queue. Not all have relations with Japan; but all are in what we would

call Northeast Asia - they are familiar Others.

Three Realms/Myriad Countries 35

The "outer barbarians," however, are a complex lot. There are

more than 160 of them, beginning with Champa, including Cambodia,

Siam, Spain, and Portugal (in the guise of Luzon and Macao), and

ending (exclusive of the appendix) with Holland. Many of these barbari-

ans are clearly "real." But many more of the "countries" of the Bankoku

jinbutsu-zu have fallen through the cracks, replaced by "people" from

the Sancai tuhui who owe their existence to the Shanhaijing: the "long-

armed" and "long-legged" people (tenaga, ashinaga) and my favorite,

the "hole in the chest" people (senkyO), whose aristocrats ride on poles

running through the holes in their chests, borne by porters.

Encyclopedias and an Anthropology of Myriad Lands

Some of this knowledge of the myriad countries of the world is quite

fanciful, clearly, and hardly "modern" or "scientific" in any sense that

we would accept, though it is perhaps rationalist in its urge to classifica-

tion and order. The framework is one of rationalizing and organization,

yet the approach to the acquisition or constitution of knowledge to be

ordered in the frame is neither entirely empirical nor skeptical, not to

say "scientific" (if that is modern). Yet, I would argue, the attempts at

an ordering of knowledge, particularly of reinscribing boundaries of

Other around a circumference of Japanese identities, that is represented

in the Bankoku sozu, Jinbutsu-zu, KinmO zui, and Wakan sansai zue

marks a radical change in cosmologies and epistemologies from anything

visible prior to circa 1550.

Certainly, however, the knowledge of Other and Self inscribed in

these texts is a knowledge that could not conform to the sangoku frame-

work. The proliferation of peoples and continents, and especially the

irruption of Other into Japanese spaces, required the invention of new

practices, new forms of constituting both Self and Other, that marked an

irreparable discursive break with the nature of that knowledge and its

modes of representation.

As I said, this may not look modern, or even early modern. I do not

propose to look to "the West" to introduce the possibility of modernity

into Japan any more in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, than in

the nineteenth and twentieth. However, to paraphrase Matsuda Osamu,

it seems fair to suggest that the Iberian and Protestant irruptions into

Japanese cognition in the decades after 1550 "obliterated the constella-

tion of possibilities" contained in the sangoku discourse of Self and

36 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

Other, bringing to a close the viability of one set of structures and

practices. Yet they did so without determining the shape of the new

practices that were to form.

NOTES

I would like to thank E. Taylor Atkins, Kevin M. Doak, Jeffrey E.

Hanes, Paisley Livingston, Brian Platt, David Prochaska, and the participants in

the conferences on "What's 'Early-modern,' and What's 'Japanese' about 'Early-

modern' Japan" (Princeton University, December 1995) and "Narratives, Arts,

and Ritual: Imagining and Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia" (Uni-

versity of Illinois, November 1996) for their valuable comments on earlier drafts

of this paper. All translations are my own, unless otherwise noted.

This paper was written while I was a visiting professor at the Institute for

Research in the Humanities, Kyoto University; much of the research was con-

ducted while I was a visiting scholar at the Historiographical Institute, University

of Tokyo. Both institutes provided stimulating, intellectually generous environ-

ments in which to work. Research for this paper was supported by a William and

Flora Hewlett Summer Research Grant from the Office of International Pro-

grams and Studies, University of Illinois; a National Endowment for the Humani-

ties Senior Research Fellowship; and a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science

fellowship. These supported my work in the summers of 1992 and 1994 and during

the spring term of 1993. Grants from the Toyota Foundation and the University of

Illinois Research Board provided research assistants and other research funds. I

am deeply grateful to these organizations for their generosity.

1. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin

and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991).

2. Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural

France, 1870-1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976). Cf. Fernand

Braudel, The Identity of France, trans. Sian Reynolds (New York: Harper and

Row, 1989). For Braudel, the internal sameness was an illusion that deceived

French and foreigner alike.

3. See Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James

Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 72: "I once discussed the phenomenon that

it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related closely to each

other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and in ridiculing

each other-like the Spaniards and Portuguese, for instance, the North Ger-

mans and South Germans, the English and Scotch, and so on. I gave this phe-

nomenon the name of 'narcissism of minor differences,' a name which does not

do much to explain it." See also James Strachey and Alan Tyson, eds., The

Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24

vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1962), 18:101 11:199. I hope I will be forgiven my

"minor difference" in rendering kleinen differenzen; in the Standard Edition,

Three Realms/Myriad Countries

37

Strachey, cotranslating in collaboration with Anna Freud, renders the same

phrase as "narcissism of small differences."

4. Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A4 History of the Geobody of the

Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994), 16.

5. The first Europeans in Japan spoke of a proliferation of territorial

"regnos" (sengoku daimyo domains). Even Frangois Caron, who doubtless

worked from the analogy of the Holy Roman Empire, spoke in the 1640s of the

daimyos' territories as "kingdomes" vaguely subject to an "emperour," rather

than of a single undivided country. We must nriot, however, forget Braudel's

caveat that even "absolutist" Bourbon France, on the eve of the Revolution, was

fragmented into a bewildering array of pays, even within individual provinces.

Even in his own youth, he remarks, his cycling peregrinations with friends took

him across countless microcosmic pays in a single outing. See Braudel, Identity

of France.

6. I refer, of course, to the disputed northern territories, Takeshima and

the Senkaku Islands, each claimed by another country and the former two

occupied by Russia and the Republic of Korea, respectively. One could likewise

note the ongoing separatist movements in Okinawa Prefecture, annexed and

incorporated into the Japanese home islands in 1879 and occupied by the United

States from 1945 to 1972.

7. Lest the inference be drawn that this imputes sole agency to the Iberi-

ans, who "expanded" into East Asia in an "age of discovery," it is worth noting

that the initial Japanese encounters with Europeans occurred at the front of a

vigorous Japanese "expansion" (for which prewar Japanese historians crafted a

triumphant narrative) in the waters of the Indian Ocean, in Goa, and in South-

east Asia. It was in Goa, for example, that Francisco Xavier found the Japanese

convert Paolo (Yajiro), who served as interpreter during Xavier's 1549 evangeli-

cal visit to Japan.

8. This is not to say that there is an essential "Japan"; Japan remained

(and remains) in the process of self-invention, largely through a contest between

the Center, which attempts to impose a hegemonic uniformity and a wide range

of variation- say, Ezo and Ryukyu - which has historically resisted uniformity.

See Amino Yoshihiko's suggestive "Rekishigaku e no sasoi," in Aera mook 10

(1995): 4-8, which summarizes a line of argument Amino has pursued for sev-

eral years about the historically constructed nature of Japanese "homogeneity."

9. See M. William Steele, "Goemon's New World View: Popular Repre-

sentations of the Opening of Japan," in Asian Cultural Studies 17 (1989): 69-83.

Steele argues for the "creation of a new world view," mediated by the publica-

tion of popular broadsides (kawaraban) in the years surrounding the arrival of

the second round of Black Ships, 1853-54. If one--tentatively - accepts Steele's

argument, then one can posit an "early-modern" encompassing almost exactly

three centuries, from the arrival of Xavier (1549) to the arrival of Perry (1853).

Steele's argument, based heavily on the same general sort of visual evidence I

employ, is generally persuasive; yet I note in his evidence strong cosmological

and iconographic continuities with the kinsei.

38 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

10. See Ronald P. Toby, "Kinsei-ko no Nihon-zu to Nihon no kyokai,"

forthcoming from Tokyo University Press in an as-yet-untitled volume edited by

Sugimoto Fumiko.

11. Although there are numerous late-Momoyama period maps and screens

now called "world maps," the first such world map I have seen that calls itself a

printed map is the Bankoku sozu, from 1647, which is accompanied by a chart of

the peoples of the world, described as Bankoku jinbutsu-zu. There are several

extant exemplars of this map and chart. For a conveniently available reproduc-

tion, see Kazutaka Unno, "Cartography in Japan," in J. B. Harley and David

Woodward, eds., The History of Cartography, vol. 2, bk. 2, Cartography in the

Traditional East Asian Southeast Asian Societies (Chicago: The University of

Chicago Press, 1994): 406, fig. 11.39. Unno dates the map to 1645.

12. All three terms were more or less imprecise. Wagacho quite clearly

indicated "Japan," but the boundaries of "Japan" were less than clear. Kara and

Tenjiku together comprised ikoku, which might be parsed as either "foreign

lands" or "strange lands." Kara, if spoken or written phonetically, specified only

"the continent" and could be written with the Chinese characters for either

"Han" or "Tang" China, "Han" denoting the three kingdoms of archaic southern

Korea. Tenjiku, originally a Buddhist term, connoted the land of the historical

Buddha. Yet unlike "our land" and "the continent," it was not someplace from

which visitors came; nor did people from "our land" ever go there and return to

tell of it. My reading of Tenjiku is that it denoted "trans-Kara," which comprised

all the earth beyond China/Korea, merging almost imperceptibly from ikoku

into ikai, the "other/strange world(s)" of gods and spirits, buddhas, bodhi-

sattvas, and so on. Cf. Asao Naohiro, "Higashi Ajia ni okeru bakuhan taisei," in

Asao, ed., Nihon no kinsei l sekai shi no naka no kinsei (Chug Koronsha, 1991),

60-62. Asao sees a transition from a "three realms (sangoku) world view" to a

"global (chikyiigi) world view."

13. As I have shown, however, Tenjiku cannot be summarily equated with

"India" but must be understood as "trans-Kara," everywhere beyond China.

Bodhisenna, an Indian priest (from Tenjiku) is among those listed in a roster

recently discovered in the Shosoin storehouse as participating in the ceremonies

installing the Great Buddha in Nara in 752 (Asahi shinbun, April 13, 1996), and a

Tenjiku merchant named Kusuha Sainin - most likely a Muslim from Malacca -

settled in the Osaka area in the fifteenth century. But no Japanese traveler

was known to have visited Tenjiku and returned to tell the tale. On Sainin, see

Tanaka Takeo, "Kenmin-sen boeki-ka Kusuha Sainin to sono ichizoku," in Sato

Shin'ichi, ed., Nihon jinbutsu-shi taikei 2: chasei (Asakura Shoten, 1959),

193-225.

14. See Narusawa Akira, "Hendo shokoku Nihon," in Gekkan hyakka

194, 195 (1978). Japanese world maps rooted in a sangoku cosmology date

from at least the fourteenth century. See Jikai, Go-tenjiku-zu MS, 177 x 166.5

cm, 1364, in the collection of the Horyuji, Nara. Reproduced in Muroga and

Nobuo Unno Kazutaka, eds., Nihon kochizu taisei, sekai-zu hen (Kodansha,

1975), pl. 1.

Three Realms/Myriad Countries

39

15. See Jacqueline Stone, "In the Aftermath of the Divine Winds: The

Mongol Threat and Changing Images of Japan" (paper presented at the annual

meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, 1992). I am grateful to Professor

Stone for providing me with a copy of her manuscript.

16. Jtkai, Go-tenjiku-zu, 11.

17. Nihon koten bungaku taikei, Takagi Ichinosuke, Nishio Minouru,

Hisamatsu Sen'ichi, Aso Isoji, and Tokeido Motoki, eds., vols. 67-68, Nihon

Shoki, Sakamoto Taro, lenaga Saburo, Inoue Mitsusada, and Ono Susumu, eds.

(Iwanami Shoten, 1965, 1967), 67:339. See also Ito Yoshio, "Odo omin:

shinkoku shiso," in Ishigami Eiichi, Takanashi Toshihiko, Nagahara Keiji,

Mizubayashi Takeshi, Murai Shosuke, Yoshie Akio, and Yoshimura Takehiko,

eds., KOza zen-kindai no tennO 4 tOchi-teki kin to tennO-kan (Aoki Shoten,

1995), 257-294. Ito reminds us that the mere appearance of the phrase "there is

a shinkoku" does not constitute shinkoku as a thought system in the early eighth

century: "It is doubtful that this 'idea' (shiso [of Japan as a shinkoku]) had

established itself as an ideology (shiso) in ancient Japan. It is more accurate to

call it a 'notion' (ishiki) of Japan as shinkoku." Ibid., 282.

18. Nihon koten bungaku taikei, vol. 87, JinnO shotO ki; Masukagami,

Iwasa Tadashi, Tokeido Motoki, and Kidb Saizo, eds. (Iwanami Shoten, 1965).

The "Edict Expelling the Padres," or "Bateren tsuiho rei," appears in ShiryO ni

yoru Nihon no ayumi kinsei-hen, Okubo Toshikane, ed. (Yoshikawa Kobunkan,

1955), 51. Ito sees the transformation of shinkoku from a idea to an ideology of

control (shinkoku shiso ga shihai shiso to shite seiritsu suru) as emerging from

the imperial crisis of the Jokyo War (1221). For him, that is, shinkoku is the

central pillar upholding an ideology of nationhood by the time of the Jinno shOtO

ki. Ito, Odo omin, 284-291. On the place of shinkoku ideologies in Hideyoshi's

worldview, see Takagi Shosaku, "Hideyoshi, Ieyasu no shinkoku-kan to sono

keifu," in Shigaku zasshi 101, no. 10 (1992).

19. See Ito, Odo omin, and Sato Hiroo, "Shinkoku shiso," in Nihon shi

kenkyii 309 (February 1995), for valuable discussions of the variability and con-

testedness of shinkoku in ancient and medieval Japan. See also Takagi, "Hide-

yoshi, Ieyasu." Takagi examines the varying understandings of shinkoku visible

in Hideyoshi's and Ieyasu's worldviews and policies.

20. I think here of the unexpected best-seller, Chi no gihO, Kobayashi

Yasuo and Funabiki Takeo, eds. Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1993), which has

sold over 340,000 copies, ten times more than any other title the press has ever

published. It should not be imagined that sangoku cosmologies went softly into

that good night of the "early modern," however. As late as the middle of the

nineteenth century, Japanese Buddhists were continuing to attempt the subsum-

ing of "modern," "scientific" geographic knowledge into Tenjiku-centered Bud-

dhist cartography. See Egon, Nansenbushut saiken zusetsu, woodblock printed

map, 71.5 X 39.5 cm, 1845, in Muroga and Unno, Nihon kochizu, 27.

21. See Ronald P. Toby, "The 'Indianness' of Iberia and changing Japanese

Iconographies of Other," in Stuart Schwartz, ed., Implicit Understandings: Ob-

serving, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters between Europeans and

40 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era (London: Cambridge University Press,

1994), 324-351.

22. For a description of Xavier, see my translation of the Kirishitan

monogatari's account of his arrival. Toby, "'Indianness'" 326.

23. See C. R. Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan, 1549-1650 (Berke-

ley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1951). Boxer's book,

written in the aftermath of the Pacific War and the author's incarceration in a

Japanese POW camp, is redolent of a sense that the ultimate Japanese rejec-

tion of Christianity derived from a combination of Japanese intransigence and

cruelty. Cf. George Elison, Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in

Early-Modern Japan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974). Elison de-

picts the Jesuit mission as doomed to failure by the Jesuits' own intransigence

and - although Elison does not use the term - racism. Neither author seriously

considers the fundamental contradiction between the permeable Japanese reli-

gious culture, quite comfortable with a multiplicity of religions, and the dichoto-

mous approach of (especially Counter-Reformation) Christianity, which de-

manded Christian adherence to the exclusion of all other practices and beliefs.

24. See Ichimura Yiji, Sakoku: yuruyakana jOhO kaikaku (Kodansha,

1995), 99-103. Ichimura seems to date this phenomenon to the appearance of

Terashima Ryoan's Wakan sansai zue (1713) and to a Kohara Keizan painting of

foreigners in Nagasaki, Ikoku jinbutsu zukan (1718), which "includes some copy-

ing [of earlier works]" but essentially "depicts people who voyaged to Nagasaki,"

thus enabling "Japanese to begin to see [these foreigners] with their own eyes and

draw them from life." Ichimura overlooks the century of so-called Nanban art

depicting not only Europeans but Africans, Indians, people from various parts of

Southeast Asia, Chinese, Koreans, and Tatars.

25. The term is from Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America (New

York: Harper Collins, 1985). Todorov argues that for both Europeans and

Caribs the perceived differences between them were so much greater than those

among Europeans or Caribs as to constitute what might be called a "different

sort of difference," which he terms "radical alterity."

26. Toby, "'Indianness'." See also Toby, "The Mountain that Needs no

Interpreter," unpublished MS 1998.

27. I exclude works of portrait sculpture depicting Chinese Buddhist prel-

ates who immigrated to Japan, such as the statue of Ganjin in Tshadaiji, simply

because they do not specify a setting. It might also be argued - as in the case of

the Tosei eden, an illustrated scroll narrating the discovery of Ganjin and his

arrival in Japan - that Buddhist prelates constitute a class of supra-ethnic beings,

whose monastic status unifies them outside ethnicity. Thus, Ganjin, born in Tang

China, and the Japanese monk Enchin, who visited Tang, are equally uncon-

strained by representation of "ethnic" or "national" content.

28. The Tosei eden, completed in 1298, is reproduced in most standard

collections of emaki, including Shinsha Nihon emakimono zensha, 30 vols.

(Kadokawa Shoten, 1975-1980), vol. 21, TOseiden emaki, Kameda Tsutoma,

ed., and Nihon emaki taisei, 29 vols. (Chug Koronsha, 1977-1983), vol. 16,

TOseieden, Kikutake Jun'ichi and Ono Katsutoshi, eds. (1978). The MOko sharai

Three Realms/Myriad Countries 41

ekotoba, dated 1292, is in Nihon emaki taisei, vol. 14, MOko shtrai ekotoba,

Minamoto Toyomune and Ogino Minahiko, eds. (1978).

29. See Izumi Mari, "TOsenzu no keishb: Z aishokan-zu byobu o megutte,"

in Firokaria 5 (March 1988), 102-129. Izumi makes a strong argument for the

existence of a fifteenth-century screen painting - no longer extant - depicting

the arrival of a Chinese ship in a Japanese port.

30. For the Kibi Daijin nittO ekotoba, which is in the collection of the

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, see the reproductions in Nihon emaki taisei, vol.

3 Kibi Daijin nittO emaki, Komatsu Shigeni, ed. (1977). Hakurakuten is included

in all standard collections of NO texts, including Nonomura KaizO and Otani

Tokuzb, ed., Yokyoku 250-ban sha (Akao ShObundo, 1978), 35-37. More conve-

niently, see Nihon koten bungaku taikei, vols. 40-41, Yokyokusht, Yokomichi

Mario and Omote Akira, eds., 41:308-10.

31. These include, for example, the NO play Fujisan, in which a Chinese

comes to Japan seeking the elixir of immortality (fushi, which can be read as

fuji) and - most prominently - the tamatori or Taishokan cycle of tales, in which

the Chinese sends an ambassador to Japan to seek the hand of a Fujiwara

princess as consort to the Tang emperor. For an example of the latter, see the NO

play Ama, in Nonomura and Otani, Yokyoku, 608-11, Fujisan, ibid., 658-60.

32. The best reproductions of the Uesugi, Funaki, and Machida screens are

in Ishida Naotoyo, ed., Rakucha rakugai-zu taikan, 3 vols. (Shogakkan, 1987).

More readily available reproductions of the Uesugi, Funaki, and Okayama

screens are Hayashiya Tatsusaburo, Yamane YtzO, and Takeda Tsuneo, eds.,

Kinsei fazoku zufu, vols. 3-4, Rakucha rakugai (Shogakkan, Showa: 1983) and

Kyoto National Museum, Rakuchu rakugai-zu (Kadokawa Shoten, 1966). The

dating of most rakucht rakugai-zu byobu rests on internal evidence, and "dat-

ing" involves two separate questions: of the "time" depicted and of the date of

composition. The Uesugi screen is in dispute on both counts. Imatani Akira, at

the early end, argues in KyOto 1547-nen: egakareta chasei toshi (Heibonsha

Image Reading Series, 1988) for a brief window in 1547 for both "dates" and

rejects the traditional attribution to Kano Eitoku. Imatani's claim was immedi-

ately disputed by Takahashi Yasuo, in Rakucha rakugai: kanky6 bunka no

chtseishi (Heibonsha Image Reading Series, 1993), who left dating more open.

Kuroda Hideo has recently offered, in his Nazotoki: Rakucha rakagai-

zu (Iwanami Shoten, 1996), a strong argument that the Uesugi screen was

painted by Eitoku in 1564-65. Kuroda bases his argument on internal sources

but most especially on a number of documentary sources, including a notice of

1574 in the Uesugi family papers that, "In the third month of the same year Oda

Nobunaga of O[wari] Province sent Sassa Ichinosuke as an envoy to the Eppu

[the capital of Echigo Province] and presented a pair of folding screens. The

artist was Kano Genshiro Sadanobu, [also known as ] the lay monk Eitoku-sai.

He painted it on the third day of the ninth month of the eighth year of Eiroku

(1565). It [shows] everything in Kyoto. We sent a letter of acknowledgment."

33. The Edo meisho-zu byobu is in the collection of the Idemitsu Museum,

Tokyo; the Edo-zu byObu is in the collection of the National Historical Museum,

Sakura.

42 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

34. This is the case with the sixteen cartouches spread across the lower edge

of the world map that is paired with the screen depicting the Battle of Lepanto.

See Repanto sent6-zu-Sekai chizu byobu, pair of six-panel screens, color on

paper, 153.5 x 370 cm, in the collection of the Kosetsu Bijutsukan, Kobe.

Reproduced in Genshoku Nihon no bijutsu 20 Nanban bijutsu to yoga, Sakamoto

Mitsuru, Sugase Tadashi, and Naruse Fujio, eds., 2nd ed. (Shogakkan, 1990),

pl. 5. Cited below as Lepanto Sekai chizu by6bu.

35. Niji-hachi toshi-zu -Bankoku-zu byobu, pair of eight-panel screens,

color on paper, 179 x 490 cm, in the Imperial Household Collection. Repro-

duced in Genshoku Nihon, pl. 23.

36. Ibid., 40. Cited below as the imperial Bankoku-zu byobu.

37. Changes in cartography raise separate - though related and quite

complex-issues that are outside the scope of this essay. On the Ricci map, see

G. F. Baddeley, "Father Matteo Ricci's Chinese World-Maps, 1584-1608," in

The Geographical Journal (October 1917) and Ayusawa Shintaro, Mateo Ritchi

no sekaizu ni kan suru shiteki kenkyu: kinsei Nihon ni okeru sekai chiri chishiki

no shuryu (published as Yokohama Shiritsu Daigaku kiy&, Series A-4, no. 18

[1953]).

38. Bankoku jinbutsu-zu, map, 1647, in the collection of the Faculty of

Letters Museum, Kyoto University. Cited below as Shoho Bankoku jinbutsu-zu.

I follow the furigana phonetic gloss of this version. There are numerous versions

of this chart, published between 1647 and 1688; there are even variants within

the 1647 printings. See the example in the Mody Collection in N. H. N. Mody, A

Collection of Nagasaki Colour Prints and Paintings Showing the Influence of

Chinese and European Art on that of Japan (Kobe: J. L. Thompson and Co.

Ltd., 1939; reprint, Rutland, VT, and Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Company, Inc.,

1969), pl. 23. The Mody Collection example lacks the furigana of the Kyoto

University example. They vary slightly in internal detail, but they share the same

gaze, directed at the "variety of peoples" to "discriminate the quality of each

people." The Mody Collection was destroyed in the 1945 air raids on Kobe.

39. Perhaps because it is difficult to depict tattoos on a figure only a few

inches high, the people of Rataran - mapped as an island south of Japan and east

of Luzon and probably the "same" as the Island of Thieves (Ilha de Ladroes) in

early Nanban-style world maps - are also explained verbally: "These savages

figure their bodies with ink and like only to steal and raid" (Dojin sumi o motte

bunshin, moppara tOzoku o konomu). The tattooing is invisible in all examples

of the 1647 edition I have seen, but it is clearly marked in the 1652 version,

Bankoku sOzu, sekai ninkei zu, hand-colored wood-block print, 1652, 65.5 x

41.5 cm, in the collection of the Kobe City Museum. See Muroga and Unno,

Nihon kochizu, vol. 1, 148-49.

40. This image and its accompanying explanation are similar to those in an

undated Kano-school hanging scroll (which is likely from the early seventeenth

century) in the Mody Collection, depicting a black "Barajiru" couple standing

by a grate with three white human limbs roasting over a roaring fire: "The

people of this country do not make houses; they clear away earth, make a hole,

and use that for their residences. They eat human flesh; but they [only] eat men,

Three Realms/Myriad Countries

43

and do not eat women. They use birds and the seven beasts [?] to make their

clothing." See Mody, Collection, pl. 1. European models surely lie behind this

image, as they do behind most of the unfamiliar jinrui.

41. For a convenient introduction and a textual history of the Shanhaijing

in Japan, see Koma Miyoshi, SengaikyiO: Chiagoku kodai no shinwa sekai

(Heibonsha Library, 1994), 179-95. Shanhaijing was known in Japan from an-

cient times, but the earliest datable Japanese printed editions are a seven-

volume edition noted in a catalog of 1670 and a six-volume edition mentioned in

a 1675 annotated listing. Ibid., 189.

42. The ambiguity of Ezo and Ryukyu and their peoples in Japanese cogni-

tion is symbolized by the exclusion of both from the first "official" maps of

Japan, compiled by the bakufu in 1655, while only a decade earlier the bakufu

had commanded the mapping of Ryukyu as a Japanese province. See Toby, "The

Ragged Edge."

43. Nishimura Tei, Nanban bijutsu (KOdansha, 1958), 89. Nishimura identi-

fies the nationalities of the sixteen peoples represented as: Spaniards, Romans,

Muscovites, Abyssinians, Senegalese, Greenlandians(?), Turks, Sumatrans, Bra-

zilians, French, Irelandians, Tartarians, Canarians, Malabarians, People of Ilha

de Ladroes (Nusuhito-jima no hito or the Island of Thieves, an island in the

Marianas that appears in Magellan's log in March 1521), and Magalanicans

(what Nishimura identifies as an "Australoid" people). Each nation is identified

as the object of an anthropological, rather than a geographical, gaze- in other

words, as "the people of" such-and-such place rather than as the place itself. The

inclusion of the Muscovites, an Eastern Rite people, and the Catholic "Ire-

landians," while the Protestant "Englandians" are excluded, is indicative of the

Counter-Reformation Iberian gaze inherent in this work.

44. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Picto-

rial Representation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960; Bollingen Pa-

perback Edition, 1969), 82, 85, 86.

45. The Lepanto screen-map represents most "peoples" in bi-gendered

pairs, initially evocative of Noah's Ark, and it is likely that they are spousal

couples, as the Eskimo(?) - the man supports a kayak in his left hand and holds

a bow in his right - woman nuzzles an infant. There is one adult triad - one man

and two women-among the peoples coded, by (un)dress and skin color, as

barbarous. In addition, in the 1647 "anthropology," some "peoples" are repre-

sented by same-sex pairs and some, like Toroko (Turkey), by two men and one

woman. My identification of these "couples" as Chinese and Japanese is consti-

tuted in part by my own conditioned expectations, as none of them is identified.

46. Two hundred fifty years later, Etsuko Inagaki Sugimoto recalled from

her own childhood the pain of having wavy hair, a pain so strong that she must

separate herself from "the little girl who was myself, when I remember how

many bitter trials she had to endure because of her wavy hair . . . 'Etsuko,'

[Mother] said, 'do you not know that curly hair is like animal's hair? A samurai's

daughter should not be willing to resemble a beast ... '" A Daughter of the

Samurai (Rutland, VT, and Tokyo, Charles E. Tuttle Co., Inc., 1966), 15-16.

47. See Yokoyama Toshio, Japan in the Victorian Mind: A Study of Stereo-

44 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

typed Images of a Nation, 1850-80 (New York: The Macmillan Press, 1987) for a

study of the representation of Japan and Japanese in the British popular press.

48. See Ronald P. Toby, "Ketojin' no tOjo o megutte: kinsei ni hon no taigai

ninshiki/tasha-kan no ichi sokumen," in KyOkai no Nihonshi, Murai Shbsuke,

Sato Shin, and Yoshida Nobuyuki, eds. (Yamakawa Shuppan, 1977): 245-91.

See also Kuroda Hideo, "Hige no chisei to kinsei: kami kara naniga wakaruka,"

in Kaiga shiryO no yomikata, vol. 1, Shtkan Asahi hyakka Nihon no rekishi

bessatsu -rekishi no yomikata, (Asahi Shinbunsha, 1988), 26-31.

49. Reproduced in Yoshiaki Shimizu, ed., Japan: The Shaping of Daimyo

Culture (Washington, DC: The National Gallery, 1988).

50. See Hiroshi Wagatsuma, "The Social Perception of Skin Color in Ja-

pan," in Daedalus (Spring 1967) 407-43. The Japanese woman is not the only

whitened figure in the Shbho Bankoku jinbutsu zu, however. The woman of Da-

ming (China) is likewise whitened, as are two men (or a man and a woman; it is

hard to be sure) from the "Land of Giants" (ChOjin).

51. Inagaki Korb, Sekai bankoku chikyu zu, hand-colored woodblock

print, 127.5 x 42.5 cm, in the collection of the Kobe City Museum. Published,

Teradaya Shinshirb and Iseya Heizaemon, 1708. Reproduced in Muroga and

Unno, Nihon kochizu, 151. Anonymous Nendaiki shin-e shO (1708) reproduced

in Muroga and Unno, Nihon kochizu, 46.

52. The transformation of the deliberately anachronistic designation of Ko-

rea as KOrai, which had appeared in bankoku maps and "anthropologies," into

the politically "correct," contemporary Chosen began with Ishikawa Toshiyuki's

Bankoku sOkai-zu, hand-colored woodblock print, 127 x 57.5 cm, in the collec-

tion of the Kobe City Museum. Published, Sagamiya Tahei, 1688. Inagaki's map

marked the beginning of the change, as well.

53. Nishikawa Joken, Shijunikoku jinbutsu zusetsu, 2 vols. Enbaiken

Zohan, 1720), reprinted in Nishikawa Tadasuke, ed., Nishikawa Joken isho,

vol. 3 (Nishikawa Tadasuke, 1898). For a nineteenth-century descendant of

Nishikawa's anthropology, see, for example, Sugiya Yukinao, Kai jinbutsu zu,

MS, color on paper, dated Bunsei 10 (1827), in the Spencer Collection, New

York Public Library, which replicates illustrations from Shijanikoku jinbutsu

zusetsu and preserves the distinction of Ming - now nearly two centuries gone -

and Qing.

54. Wang Jin, Sancai tuhui, 106 juan (1607; 1609; facsimile, 6 vols., Cheng-

wen Chupan-she, 1970); Xuefu chuanbian, MS, 1607, in the collection of Ybmei

Bunko, Tokyo. The Xuefu chuanshu bears a publication date of 1607, but its

preface is dated 1609. I have not yet seen copies of Wanjin buqiuren, 18 juan in 5

ce, MS, 1604, or Jushu bolan, 6 juan in 5 ce, MS, 1604, in the collection of the

Naikaku Bunko, Tokyo. For a brief introduction to these encyclopedias, see

Tanaka Takeo, "Sogo ninshiki to joho," in Arano Yasunori, Ishii Masatoshi, and

Murai Shosuke, eds., Ajia no naka no Nihonshi V: ji'ishiki to sOgo rikai, 6 vols.

(Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1993), vol. 5, Ji'ishiki to sOgorikai, 205-42.

55. See especially Iwasaki Yoshie, Amino Yoshihiko, Takahashi Kiichi, and

Shiomura KO, eds., Nanajtichiban shokunin utaawase, Shinsen kyOka-sha,

Kokin ikyoku-shu, in Shin koten bungaku taikei, vol. 61 (Iwanami Shoten,

Three Realms/Myriad Countries

45

1993); Umeda Yukio and Hayashi Yoshikazu, eds., Kaiho Yisetsu: Shokunin

ezukushi (Kybwa Kikaku, 1983). Note particularly Amino's essay, "Shokunin

utaawase kenkyu o meguru 2, 3 no mondai" in Iwasaki, et. al., Nanajtichiban,

580-90, as well as Amino, Shokunin utaawase (Iwanami, 1992) and Amino, ed.,

Shokunin to geino (Yoshikawa KObunkan, 1994).

56. Nakamura Tekisai, Kinmo zui (Yamagataya, 1666; reprint, 1668). I

have used the 1668 edition and the facsimile edition, Kinsei bungaku shiryo ruija

Sanko bunken hen 4 Kinmo zui (Benseisha, 1976). A somewhat later encyclope-

dia, Anon. Jinrin kinmOzui (Osaka & Edo: Heirakuji, Murakami Seizaburb,

and Murakami Gorobei, 1690), excludes all aliens but covers 496 Japanese sta-

tuses, crafts, and occupations, illustrating an awareness of the rapid occupa-

tional specialization characteristic of the seventeenth century. Facsimile edition,

Tanaka Tachiko & Tanaka Hatsuo, eds. (Watanabe Shoten, 1969). The rapid

emergence of new crafts and occupations is underscored by comparison with

Nanajt-ichiban shokunin utaawase, circa 1500, which depicts 142 occupations (in

71 pairs), and KaihO Yusetsu's vision of "all the occupations" (Shokunin ezu-

kushi, circa 1650), which was limited to 120 occupations.

57. Tekisai, Kinmo zui, 4:10b. Chugoku; Kara; Morokoshi. Chuka wa

onaji. Kochira Chugoku o shoshite, Kan to ii, TO to iu. Saiiki-jin yonde Shintan

to nashi, Shina to nasu.

58. The only exception is "The Body" (vol. 5), which includes some bare-

bones explanations that might be useful to a physician.

59. Terashima Ryoan, Wakan sansai zue, 105 vols. (1713; facsimile ed., 2

vols., Tokyodo Shuppan, 1984). Cf. the modern-print editions, in Nihon shomin

seikatsu shiryO shisei, vols. 29-30 (San'ichi ShobO, 1980) and the eighteen-

volume ToyO Bunko edition, Terada Isao, Takeshima, and Higuchi Motomi,

eds., (Heibonsha, 1985-91), which reproduce all illustrations and transcribe the

entire text into modern print. There are numerous mistranscriptions in the

Heibonsha edition, and it should be used with care. It is not clear when the Sancai

tuhui was first imported into Japan, but as noted earlier, some of the illustrations

in Kinmo zui quote illustrations in the Ming encyclopedia, so it was in circulation

in Japan well before Terashima Japanized it. See Oba Osamu, "Nihon ni okeru

Chugoku jisho no yunyu," in Kansai Daigaku Tozai Gakujutsu Kenkyusho

kenkyu kiyO 27 (1994), 1-24. Oba lists Sancai tuhui as imported in 1757, but this is

clearly not the first time it was imported.



Chapter 2

Narrating Nation, Race, and National

Culture: Imagining the Hanzu

Identity in Modern China

Kai-wing Chow

Most Chinese would agree that the largest ethnic group in China is the

Hanzu, literally meaning the "Han lineage" or "Han nationality."' This

is not only the official view of the People's Republic of China, but it is

also taken for granted by those who consider themselves Chinese (Zhong-

guo ren) regardless of political allegiance.2 The term has been institution-

alized as a central category in a taxonomy of ethnic groups of China both

on the mainland and across the strait in Taiwan. Eric Hobsbawm lists

China, Korea, and Japan as a few of the extremely rare examples of

historic states composed of a population that is ethnically almost or

entirely homogeneous.3 His remark attests to the universal acceptance of

the concept as an ethnic category in China in our time. However, this

does not mean that the term or the identity has never been contested.

Recent studies have sought to problematize the ways in which the Han

identity is constructed in relation to other ethnic groups. This pertains

more to the specific ways the identity is being reproduced and reinforced

in narratives, visual arts, and other forms of cultural production. While

studies devoted to problematizing the term are not lacking, a study of the

politics of its invention in relation to cultural imperialism and domestic

politics has not been undertaken.4

This chapter seeks to recover the historicity of the ideological con-

struct Hanzu in two sets of historical forces in the late Qing. First, I

will situate the genesis of this concept in the discourses on "race" and

nation-state that were introduced to the Chinese as scientific knowledge

and as a progressive form of government in the late Qing. These scientific

and political discourses provided the frame of reference for the Chinese in

47

48 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

making sense of their new experience with imperialism - first European

and later Japanese - in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Postcolonial theories have recently shifted the focus of attention

from European origins of discourse on the Orient to discursive resis-

tance and appropriation by local cultures.5 In retracing the historical

conditions under which the identity of Hanzu was invented, this chapter

seeks to show how European discourses of race, nation, and history

were resisted and reconfigured as they were appropriated by the Chi-

nese in the production of knowledge of China itself. In this process, the

ideas of race, nation, and history as objects of discourse produced on

China were grafted onto indigenous discourses conducted in the Chinese

language.6

Translation across cultures and languages is never a neutral or objec-

tive transmission of ideas between the host and guest languages.7 Inter-

cultural translation always results in "semantic hybridity." It always

takes place in a context in which ideological and political forces inter-

sect. The political conditions under which ideas were translated signifi-

cantly shaped the choice of terms and hence the meaning of the loan

concepts that came to be embraced. The blending of different shades of

meaning from both foreign ideas and domestic concepts is contingent

upon the specific ways in which foreign ideas were appropriated. The

consequence is the creation of a new term with meanings that are not

entirely foreign to the user of the guest language while carrying some

shade of new meanings from the host language. The new identity Hanzu

was such a product of semantic hybridity. The second objective of this

chapter is therefore to show how the history of the creation and choice

of Chinese terms in rendering notions of race and nation-state was an

integral part of the ideological battle between the reformists and the

revolutionaries in the late Qing, on the one hand, and between Chi-

nese intellectuals and European and Japanese cultural imperialism on

the other.

British Imperialism and Decentering China in the "World"

The term Hanzu is a racialized concept of the vague ethnic rubric of

Hanren (people of Han), one of several identities loosely used to distin-

guish inhabitants of China from the "barbarians" beyond the frontier

before the nineteenth century.8 The racialization of the concept of

Hanren was a cultural corollary of the encroachment of European impe-

Narrating Nation, Race, and Culture 49

rialist regimes on China in the nineteenth century. It is not a coincidence

that it was Great Britain that defeated the Qing government in the

Opium War because it had taken the lead in colonialization in Asia by

the 1830s. Great Britain had defeated other European powers in various

Asian countries and had established itself as the most powerful and

rapidly expanding empire. It had also become the major producer of

discourse on China in Europe.

After the Opium War, the British began to disseminate in China

their own narratives of China, which had been developing in Britain

since at least the mid-eighteenth century. The Jesuits' admiration for

China during the Enlightenment was replaced by increasingly negative

and contemptuous representations in the late eighteenth century.9 These

images were provided by merchants, naval officers, and frustrated diplo-

matic personnel like Macartney, whose perception of their experience

was shaped primarily by their unpleasant encounter with Chinese mer-

chants and local officials.10 By the end of the eighteenth century,

whatever esteem the British held for China had dissipated amid contemp-

tuous and harsh portraits- its people poor, superstitious, and conserva-

tive, its government despotic and corrupt.11 These images and accounts

contributed to the making of a specific British orientalism on China that

sought to objectify it in space, time, and history in its knowledge of the

"World," a world driven by the forces of commerce and knowledge of

science and technology and dominated by superior "races."

In his study of the Spanish invention of America, Jose Rabasa un-

veils the hidden Eurocentrism in cartography symbolized by the atlas.

The atlas, or World map, defines "Europe as a privileged source of

meaning for the rest of the world."12 The spatialization of the globe in

the World map is a totalizing imaginary of territorial space.13 The atlas

"charted" the territory of the globe against the history of European

expansion.

In British literature produced in the nineteenth century, the early

name for China, Middle Kingdom, could not be literally understood in

the modern European episteme. The spatial centrality implied in the

term Middle Kingdom was at odds with European cartography that put

Greenwich at the center, that is, at the beginning and end of the lati-

tudes of the globe. The sinocentric scheme of the geopolitical tianxia

(the realm under heaven) was replaced by the Eurocentric scheme of the

"World." This world, World, is capitalized and italicized in this chapter

to highlight its Otherness to nonnative speakers of English, as if it has

50 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

been translated into Chinese. By bracketing its normalcy, its apparent

significance is problematized to restore the historicity of its meaning.

Narratives of the World authorized by the British began to be repro-

duced in China in the Chinese language. By the 1830s, among those who

went to China, Protestant missionaries from England became important

producers of "knowledge" for the Europeans.14 The "China" in these

materials was no longer zhongguo, the Middle Kingdom, a name that

literally put China at the center of its world tianxia (the realm under

heaven) both culturally and politically. It was but one of the many

countries that occupied the margin or even the threshold of the World.15

Although British missionaries in their books and magazines pub-

lished in Chinese used the Chinese' own name zhongguo, its meaning

indicated that China was now a country among many in the World,

which was rendered as wanguo, meaning "ten thousand countries."16 It

was one of the countries that needed to be taught the advances in Euro-

pean culture. This attitude was best illustrated in the objectives of the

Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, which were published in

1834 in a missionary journal. Members of the society published books to

"enlighten the mind of the Chinese, and to communicate to them the

arts and sciences of the West."17 The title of the magazine was China

Repository, not Middle Kingdom Repository.

China is relocated in the geocultural space called the World, in

which the British were unquestionably the most dominant nation in the

nineteenth century. It was in this new World that the Chinese had to find

a place, to invent a history and a new identity for China. The British

orientalist discourse on "China" was the primary source of information

from which early reformists such as Wei Yuan drew.18 It was in this new

spatio-temporal space, not the tianxia, that the Hanzu identity became a

figure of the modern Chinese nation.

China without History

Two metanarrative schemes were introduced to the Chinese as universal

pattern of the history of the World: the Hegelian philosophy of history

and the Social Darwinian theory of the "natural" history of the World.

The demise of the sinocentric geopolitical scheme - tianxia - brought

about in its wake an erasure of China's own history. There was no

history of the Middle Kingdom on the new World map or in the Hegelian

narrative of the history of the World. China did not have a history

Narrating Nation, Race, and Culture 51

because it was not a nation. It was yet to become a subject that could

make and write its own history. Only a nation could survive the competi-

tion and progress of the modern World. In Hegel's view, only European

nations had undergone "enlightenment" and moved beyond the stage

where mind and nature were in unity. Liberation of the mind from

nature enabled Europe to become the subject of its own history, gaining

freedom by overcoming nature. In contrast, China and the Orient re-

mained constrained by nature/primitiveness, a past that the European

had left behind.19 With scientific methods, the Europeans could study

their own past in oriental cultures and hence "discover" their history.

The Hegelian mode of historical narrative was disseminated by mis-

sionary organizations like the Guangxue hui. In 1894, the British mis-

sionary Timothy Richard published a translation of Robert Mackenzie's

The 19th Century, a History: The Times of Queen Victoria with a Chinese

title, Taixi xinshi lanyao, which Liang Qichao hailed as the best written

work on European history.20 The book numbered thirty thousand in its

first printing, an unprecedented volume at that time.21 In the words of

Collingwood, it presents the nineteenth century as "a time of progress

from a state of barbarism, ignorance, and bestiality which can hardly be

exaggerated, to a reign of science, enlightenment, and democracy."22

The central message of the book was that the history of Europe had

been one of progress and the great strides Europe had made could serve

as the model for China.23

Indeed, there was little trace of China in Mackenzie's book. It was

mentioned only twice: once in the context of the British colonialization

of Asia and again with regard to missionary work.24 Mackenzie said:

"China was later entered by the door which the English opened in their

determination to force the use of opium on that empire."25 Through

translated works like the Nineteenth Century and other missionary writ-

ings introducing European history and politics, the new intellectuals

read about the fundamental principles that constituted a nation-state.

Chinese intellectuals looked to language, custom, history, and religion

for the common bond of a nation. They found none. There was no

national language. The majority of China's four hundred million people

spoke dialects that were mutually incomprehensible. Only a fraction of

the population knew the official language and the writing system. When

they looked into the past, they found the rise and fall of dynasties. There

was no state that belonged to all members of the same political regime.

The belief in the Mandate of Heaven lost ground with the rejection of

52 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

the tianxia by Europeans. A political regime could no longer be justified

in terms of virtuous leadership but only in the sovereignty of the

people - the Chinese nation.

Liang Qichao explained the problem Chinese nationalists faced.

"The Twenty-four Histories are not histories; they are but family pedi-

grees of twenty-four surnames. . . Historians of our country think that

tianxia belong to the emperor. Therefore, their histories only record

how a given dynasty came to power, how it ruled, and how it lost its

regime. . . Histories of the past were all written for the rulers and their

officials; none was written for nationals (guomin). Their biggest flaw is

that they did not know the distinction between the imperial regime and

the state (guojia), knowing no state apart from the court .... There-

fore, there were debates over orthodox and illegitimate regimes. . . A

has the Mandate of Heaven, and B is a rebel. . . . Historians of the last

few thousand years were responsible for China's inability to develop

nationalism."26 Clearly, for Liang the Twenty-four Dynastic Histories

were no history because the subject of history is moral leaders who had

received the Mandate of Heaven. There were no national heroes, no

national martyrs, and no abstract objects with which the entire popula-

tion could identify. Liang knew very well that traditional Chinese histori-

cal works were written in the Confucian scheme of narration. From the

Confucian viewpoint, history was the story of the rise and fall of dynas-

ties. But dynastic continuity was not important. It was the belief in a

moral cosmos that granted and withdrew its mandate to and from human

leaders that really provided the continuity.

Liang Qichao's complaints about China's lack of history illustrate a

critical difference between traditional Chinese historical narratives and

the Hegelian historical scheme. The succession of dynasties did not take

place within a linear temporality as did European history. Continuity in

marking time therefore entailed identifying a succession of dynasties.

Because traditional histories were written for the emperors and their

dynastic regimes, they used the founding year or emperor's reign period

as time markers. Time was narrated in a linear temporality without a

teleology and was subsumed under a moral cosmos whose will was car-

ried out by human agents in cycles of dynastic change.

The belief that China under the Manchu regime was a guo (state)

was rendered problematic by the nationalists, whose rejection of Man-

chu rule was not so much based on the Mandate of Heaven as on the

modern notion of sovereignty. Sovereignty resided in the people, the

Narrating Nation, Race, and Culture 53

nation, not in rulers and their officials. Revolutionaries later argued that

China under the Qing regime was not a nation-state because it had lost

its sovereignty to foreigners (wairen).27

In the widely publicized and circulated text Geming jun (Revolution-

ary army), Zhou Rong deplored that "the Chinese do not have history.

The so-called Twenty-four Dynastic Histories in China are but a huge

history of slavery. As slaves, the Chinese could not have a history of

their own making. During the period of about 1,700 years from the end

of the Han dynasty up to the present, Chinese in its entire territory

became enslaved by different races (yizhong) for 358 years. Chinese

north of the Yellow River were enslaved by different races for 759 years.

Alas! How could the descendants of the Yellow Emperor have been so

heartless as to allow their kin of the main branch to be enslaved with

their homeland by outside races?"28 But did not the Chinese boast of

their long written history? The answer to this puzzling question can be

found in an unequivocal remark made by a Chinese student in Japan. He

lamented: "Our Zhongguo does not have a national history."29 This

student simply echoed what Liang Qichao and others had said about the

new and yet empty space of China in the history of the modern World.30

Social Darwinism and the Chinese Nation as a Han Race

Chinese reformers like Liang Qichao sought to build a nation-state ca-

pable of resisting the European imperialist powers. Despite their self-

criticism for the lack of a national history, Chinese reformers did not sing

in unison when it came to the question of what constituted the Chinese

nation. Chinese intellectuals seeking to understand and render the for-

eign idea of "nation" were in muddy water, for narration of the Chinese

nation crossed paths with the discourse on the evolution of human races.

Since 1898, the enterprise of nation building had been perceived as an

integral part of the broader struggle between races. The white race in

the Social Darwinian narrative scheme and European imperialism in the

Hegelian narrative of history constituted the primary Other before 1903.

When Yan Fu published his translation of Thomas Huxley's On

Evolution in 1898, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution became a house-

hold phrase.31 In Yan's translation, the dual meanings of race as lineage

and race as type were readily grafted onto the Chinese term zhong or

zhongzu. In Yan's writing, the nature of China's resistance against

European encroachment was understood in terms of a Social Darwinian

54

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

version of the World view. China's struggle for survival against the Euro-

pean powers was conceptualized as a war between the yellow and white

races. European imperialism was justified as the story of the white race's

success in creating modern nations that were able to subjugate inferior

races in the natural selection process. Darwin's ideas of survival of

the fittest and natural selection gained popularity as Western learning

spread from the city ports to inland cities through the rapid proliferation

of reformist journals after 1895.32

The intervention of Social Darwinism in the imagining of the Chi-

nese nation is evidenced in the change of neologisms for identifying the

Chinese as a racial group. Before 1900, many reformists justified their

demand for more extensive reforms in terms of a struggle for survival of

the yellow against the white race. This discourse on "race war" (zhong-

zhan) developed in the context of political reformism under the Manchu

regime. The broad racial identity of "yellow race" served the purpose

well for reformers like Kang Youwei and Yan Fu. For them, the threat

came primarily from the imperialist powers. The "yellow race," among

whose peoples the Chinese were the most civilized, was an identity

broad enough to include the Manchus. The reformists talked about

"preserving the [yellow] race" (baozhong), which included both the Han

and the Manchus.

To render, or rather imagine, the Western concept of "race" in the

Chinese language, a host of classifiers like zhong, zu, renzhong, and

even the most general term ren were used. In the reformist journal

Xinmin congbao, one author called the Chinese race Huangzu (yellow

lineage), another preferred zhongguo renzhong.33 Liang Qizhao called it

Huangren (yellow people) and Huazu (flower lineage). The term

Huaren (Flower people) taken as the synonym for Chinese was com-

monly adopted by missionaries. Like the missionaries, Tan Sitong in his

Renxue also referred to the Chinese as Huaren. But the new collective

identity of the Chinese (huaren, huazu, huangren) was unable to formu-

late a revolutionary language directed against the Manchus. In order to

articulate a distinction between the Manchus and themselves, the revolu-

tionaries began to search for new identities for the Chinese nation.

In 1901, Guomin bao published an anti-Manchu article entitled "An

Essay on the Destruction of the Country" (Wang guo bian). The author

used the term hanzong to differentiate the Manchus from the Han Chi-

nese.34 Zhang Binglin in his strident denunciation of the Manchu govern-

ment used hanren and hanzu and hanzhong interchangeably. 35 The essay

Narrating Nation, Race, and Culture 55

was written specifically to rebut Liang Qichao's argument against an

anti-Manchu revolution. Liang argued that both the Manchus and the

Han belonged to the same yellow race and that even the Japanese,

separated from China by an ocean, should be accepted because they

belonged to the same race and used the same writing system.36 Writing

in 1903, Wang Jingwei also used the terms hanren and han renzhong. He

said, "China (Zhongguo) is the Chinese' China; who are the Chinese? It

is the Han race (Han renzhong)."37 Even though some began to use

hanzu in 1903, most revolutionaries used hanzhong or han renzhong and

hanzu interchangeably as late as 1905 and 1906.38

In Zou Rong's Geming jun, terms such as hanzhong and huang han

minzu figured prominently. The term hanzu was not used as often, but it

was employed in a chart showing Hanzu as a branch of the "Chinese

races" (Zhongguo renzhong), which included Japanese, Koreans, and

Tibetans! This chart clearly shows that Chinese intellectuals felt uneasy

calling Han a race if Han was to be distinguished from other Asian

peoples like the Japanese and Koreans. By calling Han a zu, that is, a

branch or lineage of the yellow race, or in Zou's case the "Chinese

race," they could distinguish themselves from other Asian peoples.39

But this uneasiness surfaced only in the presence of the idea that Japa-

nese and Koreans belong to the yellow race.

There were other popular texts, songs, and dramas written to mobi-

lize the masses for the revolutionary cause. Chen Tianhua's Meng

huitou (Expeditious retreat) and Jingshi zhong (Awakening bell) were

among the most important. These texts were widely distributed and

performed.40 In them, hanzhong, hanren, and hanzu were interchange-

able.41 The term hanzu was increasingly used to distinguish Han Chi-

nese from the Manchus in revolutionary writings.42 An anti-Manchu

author in Minbao claimed that: "what is called zhongguo is the zhong-

guo of the Hanzu."43

The differential functions of zhong and zu in Chinese had not been

clearly established to correspond to species and subspecies. Some argued

that the "Han and the Manchus do not belong to the same zhong." This

differentiation could not have been valid if by zhong the author meant

the yellow race.44

Hanzu was only one of several names given to this imagined nation

in history. The vector of discursive movement from a variety of names to

Hanzu is the result of the momentary shifting of the discursive Other,

from European imperialism to its domestic enemy, the Manchus. The

56 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

term hanzhong is not intelligible within the Social Darwinian frame-

work, which most reformists and revolutionaries had embraced as a

gongli (universal principle). Major races popularized in Yan Fu's writ-

ings included only a few: the white, yellow, black, and red.45 The Man-

chus could only be a branch of the yellow race because it was hardly

possible to argue that the Manchus did not belong to the yellow race.

Therefore, when Zhang Binglin rebutted Liang Qichao's claim that the

Manchus belonged to the same race, he did not dispute Liang's point. It

was "logical" to downgrade the Han to the status of a branch, a lineage

of the yellow race.

To define the Chinese nation in terms of the Han race, as the revolu-

tionaries did, would require exclusion of other ethnic minority groups. If

the Manchus were not included in the Chinese nation, the Mongols,

Tibetans, Uighurs, and many other ethnic minority groups would also be

excluded. This problem provided the reformists with a powerful weapon

against the revolutionaries, who were advocating splitting the territorial

integrity of China.46 But before 1911 the problem was either ignored or

brushed aside by the revolutionaries. In response to Kang Youwei,

Wang Jingwei argued that overthrowing the Manchu government would

not lead to the carving up of China.

Imagining "Race" in the Chinese Language: The Chinese

Nation as a Han Lineage

The successful grafting of foreign concepts onto the indigenous language

depends to a large extent on whether the new concepts in their linguistic

rendering in the target language acquired intelligibility. The gradual

emergence of the term hanzu as the preferred rendering of the concept

"race" can be explained in part in terms of the growing popularity of

adopting lineage terminology in imagining the Chinese nation in the

early twentieth century. The figure of the Chinese nation as a lineage

was commonly deployed in revolutionary writings.47 Chen Tianhua, in

his widely disseminated text Jingshi zhong (Awakening bell), resorted to

a similar strategy. He said:

Only the Chinese do not know racial (zhongzu) distinctions. .

When the Mongols and the Manchus came, they provided them with

military service and paid taxes. When the Westerners (xiyang ren)

came, they served in their army and paid taxes. . . Even animals

Narrating Nation, Race, and Culture 57

know how to protect their own species; the Chinese are not even

animals! As the old saying goes: no one loves people of other sur-

names (waixing). In case of a feud between two lineages, one always

fights on the side of his kinsmen. But all the ordinary xing originated

in one xing. Hanzhong is a large xing; Huangdi is the grand first

ancestor (da shizu). All those who are not Hanzhong are not the

descendants of Huangdi. They belong to other surnames. One must

not help them. If you do, you abandon your ancestors (zuzhong)

and you are animals!48

As I argue elsewhere, from 1900 on the political writings of Zhang

Binglin shifted from "race war" to the struggle between the Han Chi-

nese and the Manchus. Zhang appropriated lineage terminology and

drew on his immense knowledge of classical scholarship in his imagining

of the Chinese as a lineage.49 In his anti-Manchu writings, he deployed

lineage terminology to arouse anti-Manchu sentiments. He argued that

the Han Chinese were descendants of Huangdi and analogized their

subjugation by the Manchus as the adoption of a descent-line heir

(zongzi) from a different surname into one's own lineage (yixing wei

hou).50 He accused the Han Chinese of having forgotten their "great

descent line" (dazong).51 In Zhang's rhetoric directed against the Man-

chu regime, there was a growing tendency to imagine the Han as a

lineage using terms familiar to most members of the Chinese educated

elite.

In 1900, Zhang coined the term zhongxing, apparently as an abbre-

viation of zhongzu and "surnames" (xingshi).52 As will be discussed,

the invention of this term might be a result of Zhang's attempt to resist

Japanese influence in cross-cultural translation. The term clearly was

designed to exclude the Manchus by means of surnames. Zhang fully

developed the idea later in 1904 in two chapters entitled "Xu zhong-

xing."53 In these chapters, he saw the central importance of keeping

accurate genealogical records as a way to prevent mixing with "barbari-

ans." He lamented that the lines of descent had been blurred, espe-

cially after Ming Taizu ordered the abandonment of barbarian sur-

names. He proposed that all surname groups be examined in order to

identify barbarian descent groups. Once these boundaries were clari-

fied, he argued, it would be much easier to mobilize the people against

the Manchus.54

Despite the use of the term zhongxing to render race, underscoring

58 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

the kinship bond, Zhang's notion of Hanzu also has historical and cul-

tural dimensions. For him, the formation of sociopolitical groups such as

a state or a race depends on "language, custom, and history."55 These

social groups could not exist if one of the three was lacking. "The Man-

chus destroyed China (Zhina) and destroyed its history." Zhang actually

referred to the Manchu government's attempts to destroy records of

resistance by Ming loyalists and the references to barbarians in Chinese

texts by means of literary inquisitions.56 Clearly, by zhongxing Zhang

meant a combination of race and lineage. He was aware of the mixing of

races. Through wars, migrations, adaptations to different ecological envi-

ronments, sexual reproduction, and social classes, races lost their origi-

nal distinctiveness. Therefore, existing "races that belong to the same

group may have been different in the past; different races existing today

may belong to the same group."57 These races were called "historical

nations" (lishi minzu). They were changed by different customs, lan-

guages, and crossbreeding. The criterion for distinguishing races was

therefore based on history.

No one exercised more caution in adopting Japanese neologisms

than Zhang Binglin, a point to which we will return shortly. 58 He coined

the term zhongxing not only as an attempt to deploy lineage terminology

in the discourse on nation to exclude the Manchus but also as a discur-

sive weapon with which to battle Japanese authority in translating West-

ern knowledge. This caution is evidenced most clearly in his creation of

terms like zhongxing for the English word race, which the Japanese

rendered as jinsiu in Kanji, that is, renzhong (human types). It comes as

no surprise that Zhang, as a leading scholar trained in philology and

classical studies in the Hanxue fashion under Yu Yue, sought to create

Chinese neologisms of his own. But these neologisms were not created

at will; their choices were shaped by social practice. No language could

be more powerful than lineage terms, which were laden with meaning

and references to social experiences to which many Chinese could re-

late. To be a Han Chinese was to be a member of the mammoth Han

lineage, a descendant of Huangdi, the Yellow Emperor of the Han race!

Huangdi as the First Ancestor of the Hanzu

The idea that Huangdi was the primogenitor of the "Chinese" was al-

ready being circulated in the writings of reformists such as Zhang Jian:

"Today, we Chinese, descendants of the glorious Yellow Emperor, of

Narrating Nation, Race, and Culture 59

Yao and Shun, have become backward and lethargic."59 It is worthy of

note that even though Huangdi was already being hailed as the first

ancestor of the Chinese in the late 1890s his discursive significance in

reformist writings did not lie in his status as the first ancestor of the Han

race; instead, it signified the coincidence of the meaning of yellow in the

name Huangdi and the yellow race.60

The growing popularity of the political symbolism of Huangdi is

owing, perhaps, to the popular appellation of the yellow race, Huang

zhong ren, a category in the Social Darwinian taxonomy. Second, Chi-

nese students studying in Japan were introduced to Terrien de La-

couperie's theory of the origins of the Chinese.61 Huangdi was a hero of

the yellow race but he was also a Chinese. The idea of Huangdi as an

ancestor in this context was subservient to his yellow race identity. But

as revolutionary polemics began to underscore the differentiation be-

tween Han and the Manchu branches within the yellow race, the signifi-

cance of Huangdi shifted to a narrower definition. His importance as the

ancestor of the yellow race was to be overshadowed by his status as the

first ancestor of the Han lineage in revolutionary writings. Huangdi as

the ancestor of the Hanzu became the dominant image in Hanzu dis-

course. Beginning on July 5, 1903, members of the Junguo min jiaoyu

hui, which was founded by Chinese students in Tokyo, began to wear a

pin with the image of Huangdi as a symbolic commitment to the over-

throw of the Manchu regime.62

In 1905, Zhang Binglin's friend Huang Jie called a new history he

wrote the Huang shi (History of the yellow).63 Echoing Liang Qichao's

view, Huang Jie dismissed traditional historical writings as the pedigrees

and genealogies of the ruling families. The History of the Yellow began

with Huangdi and organized peoples according to the descent-line sys-

tem (zhongfa), a term often associated with the discourse and practice

of lineage organization.M The first chapter, entitled "Records of Races"

(Zhongzu shu), traced the origin of the Chinese race to Huangdi, who

migrated from West Asia and settled in the Yellow River plain. Follow-

ing Zhang Binglin, he used a quasi-linguistic argument to substantiate

his claim.65 Huang Jie accepted de Lacouperie's idea that all human

races originated in West Asia. While Huangdi moved east and founded

the Chinese civilization, the branch that migrated west founded the

"Western civilization." Therefore, Huang Jie concluded, the first phase

of the development of "Western [European] history" had to have begun

with "Eastern countries" (Dongfang zhu guo) like Greece, Babylon,

60

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

Egypt, and Persia. What needs to be noted is that in Huang Jie's narra-

tion of the origin of the Chinese as a branch of the yellow race, while

accepting the orientalist division of the World into East and West, he

challenged Europe's claim to be the successor of the civilizations of

Mesopotamia and Egypt. To call these Eastern countries is: (1) to lay

claim to this "common" source of World civilization, and (2) to call into

question Europe's appropriation of Greek, Egyptian, Babylonian, and

Persian civilizations as its own. By applying the orientalist notion with

greater vigor, Huang Jie was not only able to challenge Europe's narra-

tion of the origins of modern Europe, but he made an even stronger

claim for China as the successor of these great civilizations because they

were all situated to the east of Western Europe in Asia. They were

therefore countries located in the East, of which China had been the

center of civilization for thousands of years. To be sure, Huang Jie's

view presented no challenge to European discourse because it was writ-

ten in Chinese.

Like Liang Qichao, Huang Jie could not comprehend why the Chi-

nese were classified as a Mongolian race (menggu zhong).66 In the

Chinese memory, the Mongols were "barbarians." This racial category

simply could not be made intelligible to the Chinese because the term in

Chinese signified a barbarian tribe that had been expelled by the Chinese

hero Ming Taizu. The new meaning of the Chinese term Mengu (derived

from the imported European discourse on race) clashed with the histori-

cal meaning of the Chinese term. Huang Jie not only rejected the label

Mongolian as the racial type of the Chinese, but he argued that the

Chinese race should be called yellow because Huangdi, the Yellow Em-

peror, had derived his title from the "virtue of the earth" (tude), which

was yellow in color.67 Clearly, Huang Jie was not bickering over the

rendering of a term. Translating presumably scientific knowledge of the

human races is challenged because the Chinese term itself had been an

object of discourse on China's relationship with peoples who had been

relegated to the category of barbarian.

The point I want to make is that discursive hierarchy could be sub-

verted when it was first translated into a remotely different language and

grafted onto indigenous discourses - the pervasive historical tradition of

China. It is highly questionable whether foreign concepts and discourse,

much less epistemes, could be transplanted in the soil of another culture

without losing some of their cognitive functions in the host languages.

Chinese readers with little or no knowledge of European languages

Narrating Nation, Race, and Culture 61

could not have understood the "literal" meanings, much less the com-

plex usage of terms like race, nation, and feudal. When Chinese terms

like zongfa, zongzu, and minzu were used, it was impossible to suspend

or erase their wide range of semantic references, which historical and

classical scholarship had generated since the early Qing.68 In fact,

the imagining of the Chinese nation was mediated largely through the

figure of lineage (zongzu). Like Zhang Binglin, Huang Jie applied the

lineage model as a metaphor in imagining the new Chinese nation.

Narrating the Chinese Nation in Modernist History

How can one establish the continuity of the Han lineage when tradi-

tional Chinese histories followed a narrative scheme based on the Confu-

cian view of history? As pointed out earlier, Liang Qichao was among

the few who attacked dynastic historical narratives. Loyalists who had

figured prominently in the Twenty-four Dynastic Histories were now

ridiculed as the slaves and bootlickers of the imperial family (zhongchen

wei yixing zhi zhougou jianu).69 This dramatic reversal of the value of

loyalty was made possible only by shifting away from the dynastic histori-

cal narrative that privileged the imperial regime. The succession of dy-

nasties no longer was regarded as a "historical necessity" explained and

legitimized by the notion of the Mandate of Heaven.

To narrate the Chinese nation as a subject in history, intellectuals

had to look to the Other, through which they could find continuity.

Only by narrating the struggle of various dynasties against a general-

ized enemy, the barbarians, could continuity be located in the new

historical narrative. Even though the various dynasties were founded

by different houses, and in many cases by barbarians, they were ho-

mogenized into one subject in a constant struggle against the faceless

barbarians, homogenized into an enemy of the Han lineage. The na-

tional identity of the Chinese was imagined in historical narratives of

barbarian invasion.

In the biographical section of the Xinmin congbao, one author

called King Wu-ling of Chao in the warring states period the "first great

man since Huangdi." The biography in fact was narrated as the national

history of the Chinese. It was "the history of the Chinese minzu in

competition with other races. For four thousand years, the inferior races

in the north never stopped threatening Zhongguo. . . . From the time of

Huangdi on, our lineage (wozu) began to multiply and scatter on the

62

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

Central Plain."70 The subject of history was no longer emperors and

loyal officials but heroic leaders of the entire Han lineage.

An editorial in the Guomin riri bao (National daily), following the

example of Japanese discourse on the nation, argued that the "national

spirit" (guohun) of the Chinese was none of those characteristic of Euro-

pean and American nations: not the spirit of trade, spirit of religion,

spirit of the knight, or spirit of the citizen but "nationalism" (minzu

zhuyi).71 The author then outlined Chinese history in a three-age

scheme: the ancient period (gudai), middle period (zhongshi), and mod-

ern period (jinshi). The ancient period was the time when "our lineage"

(wuzu) was victorious: "Huangdi expelled barbarians in the four direc-

tions and unified the various groups, resulting in the founding of a

"nation-state of the Han race" (Han zhong minzu di guojia). At that

time, the Han race was battling the Miao race in the south. "The Han

race was committed to nationalism, expansionism, and taking every bit

of land. With unrivaled bravery and intelligence, both Huangdi and his

officials conquered in all directions, overpowering all who were in their

way."72 When the "Hound barbarians" (rong) sacked the capital, it

marked the beginning of the defeat of the Han by an "external race"

(waizu).73 In traditional historical accounts, it was the Zhou court that

was sacked. In the new narrative, it was the Chinese as a race and a

mammoth lineage that was defeated.

Nowhere was the desire to narrate the ancient Hanzu as an aggres-

sive and expansionist people more notable than in Song Jiaoren's writ-

ings. In 1905, he wrote a preface to a history that he never completed. In

this preface, "Hanzu qinlue shi xu," Song argued that the foundation of

a nation rested on paiwai zhuyi (expulsion of foreigners) and progressive

government policies. The objective of his historical work was to trace

over the last five thousand years how the Han race had conquered other

races (waizu) since the times of Huangdi.74 The first ancestor of the

Hanzu, Huangdi, was portrayed as an aggressive conqueror. This was

not only disseminated as the history of the Chinese, but it was drama-

tized in popular plays and texts for the masses. Theatrical performances

aimed at arousing national sentiments propagated ideas like "Huangdi's

conquest of Qiyu."75

Huangdi was no longer portrayed as just a political leader in ancient

China. He was a common ancestor of the mammoth lineage, the Hanzu.

By representing the mythical figure Huangdi as a conquering leader, the

Chinese intelligentsia sought to create a history of the Chinese as an

Narrating Nation, Race, and Culture 63

aggressive, mobile, and outward-looking people, a race that had proven

successful in surviving the ruthless competition dictated by the evolution-

ary law of the Darwinian world. This history provides the ground for the

Hanzu to rebound from the conquest by the Manchus.

Historical Time Reinvented

Huangdi not only provided the genesis of the Han race but also served

conveniently as the beginning of a new temporality - a linear one - in

which a history of the Han race could be narrated. After abandoning the

dynastic narratives, Chinese intellectuals had to find a new temporality

to rechronologize China's past. As Paul Ricoeur has argued, there is a

"structural reciprocity" between temporality and narrativity.76 And "the

world unfolded by every narrative work is always a temporal world."77

The Christian calendar had been used by missionaries in their Chinese

magazines and publications. It was integral to the European episteme

and the geocultural scheme of spatial structure - the World. Any serious

attempt to resist or challenge this European episteme had to reject one

or both of these time- and space-structuring schemes.

To imagine a historical narrative of the Chinese nation differently

from the Hegelian narrative of history called for the creation of an alterna-

tive temporality. Chinese intellectuals had been experimenting with vari-

ous alternative time-marking schemes. As early as 1897, Liang Qichao

was interested in searching for an alternative time-marking scheme in

order to narrate the continuity of China's past. In the Qingyi bao, he

wrote an essay entitled "Jinian gongli" (universal principle of dating) to

explain why it was necessary to use a new time-marking scheme. He

recommended the birthday of Confucius as the beginning of the Chinese

chronology of history. 78 The choice of Confucius's birth date was a logical

one in view of the reformers' attempts to establish Confucianism as

China's religion in order to mobilize the masses to save China.79

Unlike the reformists, the revolutionaries began to advocate a new

chronological scheme based on the birthday of Huangdi. Zhang Binglin

and others chose Huangdi as the first person standing at the dawn of this

new temporality. As Huangdi rapidly emerged in the discourse on the

Hanzu as the undisputed "first ancestor" (shizu), no one was better

qualified to unveil the drama of the Chinese nation.80s In May and June,

Chinese student magazines began to date their issues by the alleged year

of the birth of Huangdi. In August 1903, Liu Shipei published an article

64 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

in Guomin riri bao urging the adoption of Huangdi's birthday as the

beginning of a new chronological scheme.81 Huangdi was hailed as the

first ancestor of the four hundred million Hanzhong and the creator of

"civilization" (wenming). The author explained why Confucius's birth-

day was not adopted. Since the reformists like Kang Youwei and Liang

Qichao sought to preserve the Confucian "religion," they had chosen

Confucius's birthday. But "our objective is to preserve the race (bao

zhong). Therefore, we choose Huangdi for keeping chronology." He

pointed out that "when the Hanzu is in danger of extinction, any attempt

to preserve it requires the exaltation of Huangdi. Because Huangdi is

Hanzu's Huangdi, to use his birthday to mark time has the effect of

arousing the national consciousness of the Hanzu."82 At the end of the

essay was a short chronological table, and Liu underscored three prin-

ciples on which the table was based: nation, polity, and culture.83

The chronological table listing twenty dates is clearly a narrative

emplotment of a Chinese collectivity in terms of its continual struggle

between the Hanzu and the barbarians. Of the twenty years under which

an event was recorded, nine involve either the expulsion of or invasion by

barbarians, including the sacking of Beijing by the allied forces during the

Boxer Uprising. Liu Shipei assembled a congeries of events in order to

reconfigure that past into a short history of the Chinese nation.84

By May 1903, when the third issue of the magazine Jiangsu was

published, it had abandoned the dating method based on the Qing

emperor's reign. Instead, it dated the publication in the 4,394th year

since the birthday of Huangdi. In October, Zhang Binglin dated his

memorial essay dedicated to Shen Yuwen, a martyr of the revolutionary

cause, as 4,394 years from Huangdi.85 The article was included in a

widely distributed revolutionary anthology entitled Huangdi hun (The

soul of Huangdi) published in 1904.86 The same year, when Guomin bao

(Chinese national magazine) reissued a selection of articles it had pub-

lished several years earlier in Tokyo, the birthday of Huangdi was also

used as the dating system.87

The different and competing schemes proposed and experimented

with by scholars shed light on the project of narrating a new history of

the Chinese nation as Hanzu. The various attempts to develop alterna-

tive time-marking schemes by both the reformists and the revolutionar-

ies attest to resistance to objectification in the temporality of the He-

gelian scheme of history. By using the birthday of either Confucius or

Huangdi, the Chinese intellectuals sought to avoid making European

Narrating Nation, Race, and Culture 65

history the standard reference in temporality and hence in historical

narrative schemes.

Japanese Orientalism and Narrating China as an

Asian Nation

Benedict Anderson has stressed the central role of modern print in the

dissemination of the ideology of the nation-state.88 Woodblock as well as

movable type printing methods had been widely used since the sixteenth

century in China. Printed texts served as a major avenue for the introduc-

tion and dissemination of discourses of the nation.89 Throughout most of

the second half of the nineteenth century, the discourse on the Chinese

nation was produced and disseminated through modern presses sup-

ported by private and public organizations in the treaty ports.9 Since the

1860s, European missionaries had been active in shaping the agenda of

reforming the Chinese government. Reformist leaders like Kang Youwei

and Liang Qichao learned about the West through Chinese printed

sources produced by missionary agencies such as the Guangxue hui (Soci-

ety for the Promotion of Learning).

The defeat of China by Japan in the Sino-Japanese War convinced

many Chinese reformers that the success of Japanese reforms could

provide a useful model for China. From 1896 on, Japan emerged as the

mediator in introducing knowledge of the West. The European orien-

talization of China was now filtered through a second layer of orien-

talizing in Japanese discourse on shina, the Japanese name of China in

Kanji. The dramatic success of Japan in the Sino-Japanese War firmly

established the belief that the Japanese had acquired the Western knowl-

edge necessary for building a modern nation. This body of knowledge

was available in Japanese translations. China would have similar success

if this body of knowledge in Japanese books were translated into Chi-

nese. The reformists Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao were among the

first to turn to Japanese books as a shortcut to Western knowledge.

At the Datong Translation Bureau, where Kang and Liang were

involved, the choice of books for translation was "primarily those in

Japanese, and books in European languages would be chosen as supple-

ments."91 When Liang Qichao published the Shiwu bao in 1896, he in-

cluded a section on the translation of foreign newspapers. Although

there already were translations of Japanese newspapers, these were

foreign-language newspapers published in Japan.92 But from the third

66

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

issue on there was a special section called "Dongwen baoyi" (Translation

of Japanese newspapers).93 Following the abortion of the Hundred Days

Reform in 1898, the number of students studying in Japan began to

increase sharply. By rendering into Chinese large numbers of Japanese

translations of Western works, Chinese students studying in Japan helped

to disseminate a wide range of Western learning to the Chinese literate

public. The drastic increase in the number of students studying in Japan

after 1905 eventually established Japan as the more influential source of

orientalist narratives of China.

Terms that had originated in missionary publications were gradually

replaced with Japanese neologisms. Words like wanguo and tianyan

were replaced with shijie and jinhua.94 Unlike European languages, the

Japanese written language used a large number of Chinese characters.

As early as 1647, the Japanese had used terms like wanguo and shijie.95

Calling China Zhongguo, the "Middle Kingdom," in Japanese Kanji is

to marginalize Japan itself. In the late nineteenth century, the Japanese

began to replace the word zhongguo with shina, a two-character translit-

eration of the English word China.

Beginning in the late 1870s, some Japanese scholars attempted to

study China in order to help liberate Asia from the yoke of European

imperialism.96 As Stephan Tanaka has argued, the transliteration of the

English term China into the Japanese Kanji shina had become an object

in Japan's narration of its Orient: "Japanese were using the West and

Asia as other(s) to construct their own sense of a Japanese nation as

modern and oriental."97 The term shina was the Other through which

Japanese toyoshi historians narrated the origins of modern Japan. Chi-

nese scholars like Liang Qichao in the last decade of the nineteenth

century had adopted the Japanese term shina as a synonym for zhong-

guo. The growing negative connotation of the term became so strong

that Chinese students in Japan protested its usage but to no avail.98

Hanzu in Yazhou

Aijaz Ahmad has criticized Edward Said's Orientalism for presenting

only "the history of Western textualities about the non-West quite in

isolation from how these textualities might have been received, ac-

cepted, modified, challenged, overthrown or reproduced by the intelli-

gentsias of the colonialized countries."99 Indeed, the West's discourse on

China's geopolitical space in its World was not easily passed as objective

Narrating Nation, Race, and Culture 67

knowledge in the nineteenth century. It was challenged in narratives

authorized by the Chinese themselves. To relocate China in the World

map without accepting the West's totalizing narrative of China's inferior-

ity did not begin with the late Qing reformers. Wei Yuan in his Illus-

trated Gazetteers of Maritime Countries (Haiguo tuzhi) had already

pointed out that Asia was the cradle of the major world religions: Confu-

cianism, Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity (Catholicism). Astronomy,

mathematics, and machines (qiqi) originated in Asia and were later

disseminated to Europe.100 It is important to note how Wei Yuan re-

garded Christianity as a product of Asia, not Europe.

The geographical space in which many Chinese intellectuals imag-

ined the history of the Chinese nation was not the World but Yazhou

(Asia). By using Asia as the geographical space, many Chinese intellec-

tuals sought to reestablish the leading role of China in Yazhou, not in the

World. Yazhou is China's world, just like the World is Europe's. Chinese

intellectuals sought to counter and appropriate orientalism in narrating

China in Asia or, as it was rendered in Chinese, Zhongguo in Yazhou.

This new geopolitical site of Yazhou was accepted by both the Chi-

nese and the Japanese. It provided them with a new concept with which a

new and yet contentious relationship was created. Though separated by

sea, both countries were now located in Yazhou. But China and Japan no

longer had the lord-vassal relationship of the China-centered Tianxia.

Furthermore, the Chinese and Japanese belonged to the same "yellow

race." The racial bond and new spatial link provided a fertile ground for

imagining a solidarity between China and Japan against the white race's

threat. Beginning even before the Hundred Days Reform, reformists

and future revolutionaries were attracted to the idea of an alliance be-

tween China and Japan in resisting Russian encroachment.101 Reformists

like Kang Youwei, Tang Caichang, and Liang Qichao and revolutionar-

ies like Sun Yat-sen in the 1890s entertained the idea of forming a

federation with Japan in order to resist European imperialism.102 In

1897, Zhang Binglin wrote an article urging cooperation between China

and Japan to protect Yazhou from the Russians and Europeans.103 Japa-

nese advocates of an alliance between China and Japan had been argu-

ing for such alliance in terms of the same race and writing system

(tongwen tongzhong). Both the Chinese and the Japanese belonged to

the "yellow race" or "yellow men" (huangren). On the Japanese side,

toyoshi scholars advocated solidarity among leaders of the yellow race in

Yazhou to resist European imperialism. In April 1898, a branch of the

68

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

Association for Elevating Yazhou was founded in Shanghai, with the

Japanese ambassador in Shanghai as president and Zheng Guanying as

vice president.104

The coincidence of the desire for cooperation in the early phase

resulted in the founding of the Association for Elevating Asia. But as

Chinese became more alarmed at Japanese ambitions in Yazhou trans-

lingual discourses on toyoshi and zhongguo in Yazhou clashed. In fact,

the theory of the Western origins of the Chinese took on a different

meaning in Japan's toyoshi narration of China. It served the purpose of

uprooting the Chinese from the new geopolitical sphere of Yazhou. If

the Chinese were not the original inhabitants of China but were immi-

grants from western Asia, the Chinese could not claim legitimate posses-

sion of territory. By bifurcating China's culture into antiquity and the

contemporary, the toyoshi historians asserted that they had inherited

the spirit of ancient Chinese culture, and in order to liberate the Chinese

from European imperialists the Japanese would have to assume leader-

ship by moving to the continent as immigrants themselves.

In the case of China, the "barbarians" in Yazhou were the Others

through which Chinese nationalists narrated the origins and history of

the Chinese nation. Even though Huangdi had come from the "West,"

meaning west of the Yellow River plain, he was not a Westerner or

European. He was from West Asia. In a way similar to Japanese histori-

ans' attempt to imagine Japan's toyo in order to create a new history for

modern Japan, Yazhou came to serve a similar narrative function in

imagining the history of the Han race/nation. The Hanzhong belonged

to the yellow race, but they were not the same as the Manchus, the

Mongols, or the Japanese. They comprised a race, or more precisely a

lineage, with a glorious past interrupted by occasional invasions by bar-

barians, of which the Manchus were only the most recent.

While the toyo the Japanese scholars narrated is located in Asia,

Chinese scholars sought to create discursive space in Asia for China. It is

important to note the difference in the preference for toyo, somewhat

equivalent to the English term Asia, and the Chinese preference for

Yazhou. Toyo in both Japanese and Chinese literally means "eastern

ocean"; yazhou in both languages means "continent." The choices of

ocean and continent clearly reflected a discursive privileging of the geo-

graphical space in which Japan and China found themselves. In his "A

General Discourse on the Geography of Asia," Liang Qichao praised

Yazhou as the home of the highest mountain, the largest population, the

Narrating Nation, Race, and Culture 69

deepest sea, the largest plateau, and the greatest plain. It was inhabited

by many races, including the yellow, the white, and the Malay. It was

also the place where the World's great religions originated: Confucian-

ism, Buddhism, Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Manichae-

anism. Viewed from the vantage point of history and geography, Europe

and Africa were but the vassals of Asia. After heaping praise on the

continent, Liang stepped back and reminded his readers that "What

makes Asia Asia lies in the future, not in the present!"105

Clearly, Liang's essay should not be read as an attempt to introduce

to Chinese readers the correct position of China in the geography of the

Asian continent. It is a narrative for the future, a narrative intended to

assert autonomy from domination by European discourse on the World.

This introduction of Western knowledge is in fact a discursive resistance

to or counternarrative of orientalist spatialization of the globe. The

"present Asia" in the early twentieth century was a geopolitical arena

dominated by European imperialist nations, and China was only an

objectified and voiceless entity. This is not the future any Chinese aspir-

ing to exercise sovereignty hoped to have, and it is not really an Asia

where China could participate as a subject. Liang continued, pointing

out various areas like India, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Thailand, and

Burma where Europeans had established colonies. Countries on the

Asian continent that had not been colonized were very few. The rising

power of Japan was too obvious to warrant mention. Even though China

was under threat from both Europeans and Japanese, Liang could not

resist raising the question: "As for our Zhonghua, is it not located at the

center of Asia?"106 As the remarks by Liang clearly show, the dislocation

of Zhonghua in the World created a profound identity crisis that sought

to relocate the Chinese nation in the center of Yazhou.

National Essence of the Hanzu

After the Subao case in the summer of 1903, with the arrest of Zhang

Binglin and Zhou Rong, the author of the revolutionary tract "Geming

jun" (the revolutionary army), the revolutionary movement gained

greater momentum. The abolition of the civil service examination in

1905 brought many Chinese students to Japan. In their quest for Western

and Japanese learning in Japan, many Chinese students and scholars

suffered from a profound anxiety about the loss of cultural identity.

While committed to forging a revolutionary rhetoric against the Manchu

70

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

government, Zhang Binglin was deeply concerned about the threat to

Chinese culture: language, scholarship, and history. Chang Hao argues

that the "national essence" (guocui) Zhang promoted was primarily a

"response to the growing impact of the West in China." By that he

means the cultural identity crisis created by Western culture and Zhang's

belief in fostering nationalism by promoting consciousness of the "value

of tradition." These were two powerful intertwined feelings.107 But by

1905 the Japanese impact was no doubt much more direct if not greater

than that of European orientalism on the discourse on the Chinese

nation. This was particularly the case with Japanese influence on educa-

tional reform.08

The Japanese toyoshi historians' narratives of an inferior and back-

ward China caused alarm among Chinese intellectuals who had experi-

enced the orientalization of shina in Japan. The founding of the National

Essence Journal (Guocui xuebao) was a very important event in the

history of Chinese resistance to Japanese orientalism. The small group

that founded the journal in 1905 was concerned that China's identity

embodied in language, scholarship, history, and literature would be lost

amid the strident call to adopt Western and Japanese cultures. One of

the founders, Huang Jie, clearly was aware of the need to narrate the

history of the Chinese nation with Chinese as the narrators. The produc-

tion of knowledge of the Chinese nation was now controlled by the

Japanese, who had taken over from the Europeans as a result of their

newly recognized national power, their proximity, and the large number

of Chinese students studying in Japan. He said: "What destroyed the

national learning of China was not Europe but Japan. Why? It is simply

because the Japanese used the same writing system and it is easily con-

fused . . . Japanese and the Chinese belong to the same race but differ-

ent subgroups (tongzhong yilei). Competition between subgroups within

the same race will be easily absorbed (tonghua). . . . Therefore, unless

we distinguish Japan from China, it will not be possible to distinguish

Europe from China."109 The more immediate threat to Chinese learning

was the assimilating power of Japanese, which employed large numbers

of Chinese characters with newly invested meanings. The Chinese lan-

guage would be reinvented in the hands of the Japanese if the Chinese

took the shortcut of adopting Japanese neologisms.110

There are two points worthy of note. First, the danger of consuming

discourse or knowledge through the same writing system far exceeded

the threat from discourse produced in an alien language. The Japanese

Narrating Nation, Race, and Culture 71

rhetoric of tongwen tongzhong (same writing, same race) was regarded

as deceiving and dangerous. A distinction had to be made to define the

Otherness of the Japanese and their culture, especially their language. It

is ironic that the term guocui is itself a Japanese neologism. For national-

ists like Zhang Binglin, the preservation of Chinese culture was crucial

to the project of nationalist revolution. Without identifying with a spe-

cific culture and a determination to protect it from extinction, the call

for the overthrow of the Manchu regime on the grounds of its inability to

resist European inroads would be meaningless. The preservation of the

Chinese race (baozhong) would be in vain if it were achieved at the

expense of losing their culture and identity. As Zhang saw it, the Chi-

nese writing system was the foundation of the culture of the Hanzu. The

Han race needed to have a writing system of its own, the Hanwen. While

the Japanese could borrow Chinese characters, they had to be differenti-

ated from the Hanzu within the yellow race.

Language of the Hanzu

The modern nation as the Chinese intellectuals imagined it was to be

constituted not only by kinsmen of the same lineage but by people

speaking and writing the same language. Early on, advocates of nation

building had included in their agenda efforts to reform the Chinese

writing system. To both reformist nationalists like Liang Qizhao and

revolutionary nationalists like Zhang Binglin, the modern Chinese na-

tion would require a common language, both spoken and written. But,

as one contemporary scholar has pointed out, the Chinese language "is

rather more like a language family than a single language made up of a

number of regional forms. The Chinese dialectal complex is in many

ways analogous to the Romance language family in Europe. . . To take

an extreme example, there is probably as much difference between the

dialects of Peking and Chaozhou as there is between Italian and French;

the Hainan and Min dialects are as different from the Xi'an dialect as

Spanish is from Rumanian. There are literally scores of mutually non-

intelligible varieties of Chinese."'11

European missionaries had been complaining about the difficulty of

learning the Chinese writing system. They used the romanization method

to facilitate the learning of various dialects. Indeed, the presence of vari-

ous dialects created great obstacles for those who believed in the need for

a "national language." As early as 1896, Liang Qizhao had publicized the

72

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

need to bridge the divide between spoken languages and the written

language of the Chinese. Drawing on the insights of Huang Zunxian, he

called for increasing literacy among the Chinese as an integral part of

educational reform, which in turn was crucial to the success of nation

building. He was delighted to introduce in Shiwu bao (Current affairs) a

system of phonetic transcription of Chinese written in English by Shen

Xue, a medical student from Shanghai. Since then, there had been several

attempts to create phonetic systems to facilitate the spread of literacy. 112

As many reformers saw it, creating a national language out of the

classical one would involve two tasks: to increase literacy by overcoming

the obstacle of having to learn large numbers of characters with the

creation of phonetic symbols, and, second, to unify pronunciation. The

first focuses on various methods for phoneticizing Chinese characters.

Since 1896, there had been two major approaches to the creation of

phonetic symbols. One group advocated the use of European alphabets,

while the other recommended creating new phonetic symbols out of

Chinese characters in a manner similar to the Japanese system.113

Increasing literacy also entails the spread of a standard spoken lan-

guage. Language reform advocates seeking to solve this problem natu-

rally took Mandarin, the official language (guanhua) of the imperial

government, as the logical standard. A newspaper published in Wuxi in

1898 carried the title Zhongguo guanyin baihua bao (Newspaper in the

plain language with official pronunciation). The editor explained, "To

exalt the baihua and abandon the wenyan is the only possible way to

assert the intelligence and talent of we yellow men."114 The "plain lan-

guage," baihua, was only plain to the Beijing dialect speakers, not to

speakers of other dialects. Nonetheless, the standardization of pronun-

ciation did not evoke much debate, and most either accepted it or pre-

sumed that guanhua was the national language.115

In addition to attempts to create systems of phonetic symbols to

promote the Beijing dialect, some saw the need to explain why the

presence of diverse dialects did not prevent the Chinese population from

being considered members of the same Chinese nation, the Hanzu.

Zhang Binglin was well aware of the presence of many different dialects,

but he believed that linguistic unity had existed in ancient China. It is

precisely in language that he found the essence of the Chinese nation

and the fountain of Chinese culture. For him, the Chinese language was

inseparable from the history of the Han Chinese, the Hanzu. Drawing

upon his formidable knowledge of the classics and philology, he argued

Narrating Nation, Race, and Culture 73

that a common spoken language had predated the writing system. By

means of careful study of local dialects, it was possible to show links

between new characters and words and earlier stages of the archaic

language by identifying phonetic family resemblances and ideographic

forms.116

But for some anarchists what China needed was a new language,

not reform of the existing Hanwen. Anarchists like Wu Zhihui called

for the abolition of the Chinese writing system and the adoption of

Esperanto (the universal language), which he rendered as wanguo

xinyu or shijie yu (new language of the World). In the anarchist journal

Xing Shiiji (New century), first published in 1907, Wu Zhihui explained

why Chinese characters should be abolished. First, Han writing (Han-

wen) should be abolished because it was "barbaric" and not suitable for

educating the people. Second, the Chinese writing system was used by

only a narrow circle of people. Wu said: "Han writing is family writing,

not that of a society. It is the writing of aristocrats, not that of the

common people."117 The Chinese writing system indeed was accessible

only to a small fraction of the population. Wu's statement reminds us

that a very small group produced the various discourses on nation and

modernity. What needs to be noted is Wu's reference to Chinese writing

as Hanwen, that is, "writing of the Han." Unequivocally, he was think-

ing of the writing of the Hanzu. Even Chinese writing now became the

writing of the Hanzu. It was natural and logical to call Chinese charac-

ters Hanzi or Hanwen and the Chinese language Hanyu.

For Zhang Binglin, to abolish the Chinese writing system would be

to surrender the authority to produce knowledge of Chinese culture and

history, without which the Hanzu could not survive. He refused to sub-

ject the Chinese writing system to the European discourse of languages

of the World because an alien language cannot "objectively" translate

cultural differences.118 To abandon one's own language, whether spoken

or written, is to forfeit one's subjectivity and throw oneself at the feet of

the users of an alien language. Without linguistic autonomy, there will

be no authorial power and one only exists as an object of discourse

imagined and prescribed as "knowledge" for consumption.

That reformers and revolutionaries alike did not quarrel over which

dialect would become the national tongue does not come as a surprise.119

The specific linguistic competence that the officials and gentry had

worked very hard to acquire during many years of studying and working

in the bureaucracy provided them with the most convenient means of

74

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

communication. Mastering guanhua had been essential to an official ca-

reer in the imperial system. Officials and gentry from outside the capital

and the Beijing area were mostly bilingual, speaking a local dialect,

which was their mother tongue, and Mandarin. But it was not the tongue

of the entire populace.

The vision of a modern Chinese nation was reserved to those who

had knowledge of and access to the official language. The creation of a

national language would entail the suppression and marginalization of

local dialects such as Cantonese, Fujianese, and Shanghainese in the

new national public arena. This voluntary suppression of local dialects in

the invention of a national language can be found in Liang Qichao's

narration of China's geography. Following his "A General Discourse on

the Geography of Asia" was a geography of Zhongguo. Liang said:

"Zhongguo is a natural unified country: racial homogeneity, linguistic

unity, dogmatic unity, uniform custom, all of which are rooted in its

geography. It is what makes China inferior in contrast to Europe, and it

is what makes China superior to the latter as well."120

The narration of the Chinese nation was undertaken by a small

group of literate people who were caught in the radical changes in the

political system that would affect their career trajectories. They came

from different provinces of the Manchu empire. They were mostly bilin-

gual, conversant in their own dialects and the official language of the

Manchu court. They were unified by a common classical education,

which explained to some degree why very few questioned the privileging

of the Beijing dialect and writing system. It also explains why the deploy-

ment of lineage terminology in imagining the Chinese nation was a

common strategy in their writings and why their familiarity with the

ancient history of China made it easy to accept Huangdi as the first

ancestor of the Hanzu. In narrating the modern Chinese nation by

means of the figure of the Han lineage, the revolutionaries homogenized

various ethnic groups into a nationality, the Hanzu; they privileged the

official spoken and written language as the national language, the

Hanwen, suppressing and marginalizing local dialects and cultures.

Conclusion

Narratives of the Chinese nation in the late Qing were produced by the

British, Chinese, and Japanese in at least three languages. A change in

Narrating Nation, Race, and Culture 75

the power relationship between China and Britain after the Opium War

had brought about an identity crisis for the Chinese. Confronted with

superior technology and military power, the Chinese were forced to

abandoned their own worldview - the tianxia - which centered China

among "barbarians." The uprooting of Zhongguo from its own world

was accompanied by the erasure of its history and identity. The Hegelian

narrative scheme located China at the beginning of World history where

the mind was still not liberated from nature, denying its subjectivity. In

their quest for a subject, the Chinese came across Darwin's theory of

races competing for survival. The Chinese in the social Darwinian

scheme belonged to the yellow race. This new identity served the reform-

ists' call for extensive reform under the Manchu government well. It also

provided a fictive tie for an alliance between China and Japan in a battle

against the white race.

This racialized identity of the Chinese was rendered impotent by

the revolutionary movement, which sought to overthrow the Manchu

regime. The notion of a war between the yellow and white races could

not articulate the power struggle between the Manchus and the Chi-

nese. Building on the institutionalized distinction between Han and

Manchus, Chinese intellectuals imagined the new identity as Hanzu, a

Han lineage, a branch of the yellow race to be distinguished from the

Manchus. In addition, the Hanzu identity was crucial to distinguishing

the Chinese from the Japanese after the Sino-Japanese War. Solidarity

among peoples of the yellow race, which included Japanese, Chinese,

and other groups, provided justification for Japan's assertion of leader-

ship among Asian countries in a battle against European imperialism. It

provided justification for the Japanese colonization of Asia. The narra-

tion of Chinese identity after the defeat of China in 1895 had to confront

a Japanese form of orientalism - the toyoshi - which sought to objectify

China as its Orient. The idea of war between the yellow and white races

had been appropriated by the Japanese imperialists, and the Chinese

nation could distinguish itself from the Japanese only as a branch of

the yellow race, that is, the Han lineage.

The Chinese nation imagined as a mammoth kin group came to be

narrated as a full-fledged lineage with its "first ancestor" Huangdi and

for many a history of migration from West Asia. The identification of

Chinese as descendants of Huangdi greatly facilitated the acceptance of

the fictive kinship bond of the Chinese nation. The Chinese and their

76

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

first ancestor were re-presented in historical narratives as aggressive and

expansionist. No longer positioned at the center of tianxia, this Chinese

nation as a Han lineage was expected to occupy the center of the Asian

continent - Yazhou. As an Asian nation, China had to authorize its own

knowledge against Japan's orientalist discourse on China. Before 1911,

the Chinese nation imagined as a Han lineage was able to exclude both

the Manchus internally and the Japanese externally.

I have argued that the discourse of nation could not be understood

primarily in terms of the internalization of oriental narratives by the

colonized. Discourses on the nation and modernity in the late Qing

period were not purely derivative because of systematic intervention at

three levels: language, discourse, and social practice. Narratives of the

nation were a result of appropriation, reconfiguration by indigenous

discourse, and resistance to European and Japanese orientalism.

But there were serious limitations to using the Hanzu identity to

bind the nation together. In the case of Zhang Binglin, the narratives of

the Chinese nation were couched in the difficult wenyan style, a style

even the newly educated found difficult to comprehend. In all cases, the

metaphor of lineage imposed serious constraints on the claim to moder-

nity because of the close identification of lineage with traditional and

outdated forms of organization. Finally, the Hanzu identity presented as

a racially and culturally homogenized lineage has contributed to sup-

pressing the enormous diversity of local cultures and dialects.

The identity of the Hanzu as the major nationality of the Chinese

population was accepted by both the Communist and Nationalist govern-

ments. Chinese writing is accordingly called Hanwen or Hanzi. The

Mandarin dialect became the Hanyu. The historicity of the term Hanzu

was erased when it acquired normalcy in the subsequent narration of

China's past in standard histories. It has become an essentialized iden-

tity that most Chinese take for granted. The Hanzu identity allows politi-

cal leaders to hide conflicts and tensions between ethnic groups within

the Hanzu, which include Shanghainese, Fujianese, Cantonese, and

other local dialect speakers. This myth also sustains a belief that there is

a majority ethnic group, the Hanzu, that is running the government,

therefore justifying domination over "minority ethnic groups" such as

the Tibetans and the Uighurs, who are "less civilized and advanced."

The hegemonic power derived from the sense of the Han majority in

part explains why those who identify themselves as Hanzu hardly ques-

tion the meaning of being Han Chinese.

Narrating Nation, Race, and Culture 77

NOTES

1. Whether the concept of "ethnicity" is a suitable analytical tool in the

study of Chinese history is open to debate. Pamela Crossley cautions against the

hasty adoption of the term ethnicity in studying Chinese social history ("Think-

ing about Ethnicity in Early Modern China," Late Imperial China 11, no. 1 [June

1990]): 1-35.

2. "China's population of one billion includes many nationalities. Over

90% of the population are Han." This statement appears in "An Outline of

Chinese History" by Zhu Jiazhen of the Institute of Economics, Chinese Acad-

emy of Social Sciences, in Xue Muqiao, ed., Almanac of China's Economy

(Hong Kong: Modern Cultural Company, [1981] 1982), 3.

3. Eric J. Hobsbawn, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1990), 66.

4. This belief in the existence of a huge population called the Hanzu or

"Chinese nation" (Zhonghua minzu) is beginning to come under scrutiny as

interest in the study of ethnic and national identities in anthropology and cultural

theories spills over into the China field. See Symposium on Ethnicity in Qing

China, Late Imperial China 2, no. 1 (June 1990); "Dimension of Ethnic and

Cultural Nationalism in Asia: A Symposium," Journal of Asian Studies 53, no. 1

(1994). Recent studies of national identities and ethnicity by scholars such as

Pamela Crossley, Emily Honig, Prasenjit Duara, and Dru Gladney do not focus

on the genesis of the Hanzu concept. See Pamela Crossley, Orphan Warriors:

Three Manchu Generations and the End of the Qing World (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1990); Emily Honig, Subei People in Shanghai, 1850-1980 (New

Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Dru C. Gladney, Muslim Chinese: Ethnic

Nationalism in the People's Republic (Cambridge: Harvard University, East

Asian Council, 1991); and Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narra-

tives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

5. For criticism of Edward Said's failure to consider the reception, resis-

tance, and appropriation of Western orientalism by the colonized, see Aijaz

Ahmad, "Orientalism and After," in In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures

(London: Verso, 1992), 159-220.

6. Recent studies of Chinese identities have come to focus on the coau-

thorship of China as an object of orientalist discourse. See Lydia Liu, Trans-

lingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity -China,

1900-1937 (Stanford University Press, 1995).

7. See Liu's introduction to Translingual Practice.

8. Other common identities include "people of Huaxia" (Huaxia zhi ren)

and "people of Zhongguo" (Zhongguo zhi ren).

9. For a discussion of the Jesuits' narratives of China, see David E.

Mungello, Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology

(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1985).

10. Leann Chen, "Cross-Cultural Dialogue: Eighteenth-Century British

Representations of China," Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, Champaign-

Urbana, 1996). For Macartney's mission, see James Hevia, Cherishing Men from

78

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793 (Durham: Duke

University Press, 1996).

11. Not all the negative portraits were new. Montesquieu was among the

few who thought China's government was despotic when most Enlightenment

thinkers held China in high regard for its excellent rule. But by the end of the

eighteenth century in Britain only the negative images of China found audience.

The different uses of China to serve polemical purposes in British domestic

politics played a significant role in the popularization of negative images. Unlike

French radical thinkers, who used China as a weapon to criticize religious intoler-

ance and aristocratic privileges at home, British conservatives tended to use

China as an example of stability and the preservation of tradition to resist

polemics for change and material progress. See P. J. Marshall and Glyndwr

Williams, The Great Map of Mankind: British Perceptions of the World in the

Age of Enlightenment (London: Dent, 1982), 132-33, 141-44, 169-76.

12. Jose Rabasa, Inventing A-M-E-R-I-C-A: Spanish Historiography and

the Formation of Eurocentrism (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993),

181. See especially chapter 5, "Allegories of Atlas."

13. As Rabasa points out, "Since the totality of the world can never be

apprehended as such in a cartographical objectivation, maps have significance

only within a subjective reconstitution of the fragments" (ibid., 186).

14. For discussion of change in the British representation of China in the

second half of the eighteenth century, see Hevia, Cherishing Men, 68-74. See

also Lianhong Chen, "A Cross-Cultural Dialogue: Eighteenth-Century British

Representation of China," Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, Champaign-

Urbana, 1996, chap. 2.

15. Although he described China as the oldest empire, Hegel nonetheless

remarked that "China and India lie, as it were, still outside the world's history"

(The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree [New York: Dover, 1956], 209).

16. There are of course exceptions. As late as 1892, a book on the geogra-

phy of the World by Timothy Richard used the term tianxia in its title. The book

was serialized in Wanguo gongbao in 1893 before its printing as a single volume.

But this book had a different title, which does not include the term tianxia. See

Xiong Yuezhi, Xixue tong jan yu wan Qing shehui (The coming of Western

learning and society in the late Qing) (Shanghai: Renmin chubanshe, 1994),

593-94.

17. Fred W. Drake, "Protestant Geography in China: E. C. Bridgman's

Portrayal of the West," in John K. Fairbank,, ed., Christianity in China: Early

Protestant Missionary Writings (Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies, Har-

vard University, 1985), 94-95.

18. For example, in the section on America in his Haiguo tuzhi (An illus-

trated treatise of the maritime kingdoms), Wei Yuan copied verbatim much of

Bridgman's Short Account of the USA. See ibid., 101.

19. Hegel, Philosophy, 120-21.

20. Robert Mackenzie, The 19th Century, a History: The Times of Queen

Victoria (London: Nelson and Sons, [1880] 1889).

21. Gu Changsheng, Chuanjiaoshi yu jindai Zhongguo (Missionaries and

Narrating Nation, Race, and Culture 79

modern China) (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1981), 168-69. The

book was in such great demand that there were at least twenty-five pirated

editions by 1898. See Xiong, Xixue tong, 601.

22. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1961), 145.

23. Xiong Yuezhi, Xixue tong, 597-601.

24. Mackenzie, Nineteenth Century, 177, 211.

25. Ibid., 211.

26. Liang Qichao, "Zhongguo zhi jiu shixue" (Old historical studies of

China) in Yinbing shi wenji (Collected Writings of the Studio of Sipping Ice)

(Taipei: Xinqing shuju, 1967), 3:97 (hereafter YBSWJ).

27. Xinhai keming qian shinian jian shilun xuanji (Selection of discourses

on current affairs in the decade before the 1911 Revolution) (Hong Kong:

Sanlien shudian, 1962), vol. 1, pt. 1, 63-64 (hereafter SLXJ).

28. Zou Rong, Geming jun, in Xinhai geming ziliao congkan (Beijing), vol.

1, p. 353 (hereafter XHGM).

29. Zhejiang chao (Current of Zhejiang), no. 2 (1903): 59 (hereafter ZJC).

30. See Hung-yok Ip's chapter on Hu Shih in this volume.

31. Although Yan Fu began writing about Darwin's theory of evolution in

1895, Darwinism was not widely known to Chinese intellectuals until 1898. See

James Reeve Pusey, China and Charles Darwin, (Cambridge: Harvard Univer-

sity Press, 1983), 45, 91.

32. Hao Chang, "Intellectual Change and the Reform Movement, 1890-

8," in The Cambridge History of China, (London: Cambridge University Press,

1980), 11:334-36.

33. Xinmin congbao, nos. 42-43, pp. 1-3 (hereafter XMCB).

34. Guomin bao,1901 (hereafter GMB) in SLXJ, 90-94.

35. The term Hanren had been used to distinguish the Manchus and Mon-

gols in the Qing government policy of appointment. It was in fact a full-fledged

discourse the Manchus had helped create, and it was sustained throughout most

of the Qing period. See Crossley, Orphaned Warriors.

36. GMB, 1901, in SLXJ, 94-99.

37. ZJC, 1903, in SLXJ, 504.

38. SLXJ, 527, 553, 561, 841, 893, 896, 900. Jiansu, 1904, in SLXJ, 837-49.

39. Zou Rong, Geming jun (The revolutionary army), in XHGM, 1:333-

64.

40. Li Xiaoti, Qingmo xiachen shehui qimeng yundong, 1901-11 (The En-

lightenment movement of the lower social strata in the late Qing, 1901-1911)

(Taipei: Academic Sinica, 1992), 201-10.

41. Chen Tianhua, Meng huitou (Expeditious Retreat), in XHGM, 2:129.

42. XHGM, 2:179, 190, 195, 197, 203, 349, 385.

43. Ibid., 190.

44. SLXJ, 391.

45. Frank Dikitter, Discourse of Race in Modern China (Stanford: Stan-

ford University Press, 1992), 67.

46. Indeed, this became a problem in the wake of the 1911 Revolution.

80

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

When the provinces declared their independence from the Manchu court in

1911, the Mongol king also declared independence in the name of being a nation

that had been under Manchu rule.

47. Dikotter, Discourse, 117-19.

48. XHGM, 2:130-31.

49. Kai-wing Chow, "Imagining Boundaries of Blood," in Frank Dikotter,

ed., The Construction of Racial Identities in China and Japan (London: Hurst,

1997).

50. For discussion of the different approaches to lineage organization and

ancestor worship, see Kai-wing Chow, The Rise of Confucian Ritualism: Ethics,

Classics, and Lineage Discourse (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994),

chaps. 3 and 4.

51. Zhang Binglin, Zhang taiyan quanji (complete works of Zhang Binglin)

(hereafter ZTYQJ).

52. Chow, "Imagining Boundaries," 17, n. 49.

53. ZTYQJ, 170-90.

54. Ibid., 110.

55. Ibid., 468.

56. Ibid., 467-69.

57. Ibid., 170.

58. As Charlotte Furth has observed, Zhang Binglin was "especially resis-

tant to classification." She means there are elements in Zhang's thought that

cannot be classified as conservative. Conservatism, as it has been used in China

studies, derives its intelligibility from Eurocentrism. Any resistance to or attack

on Western values is conservative. See Charlotte Furth, "The Sage as Rebel:

The Inner World of Chang Ping-lin," in Charlotte Furth, ed., The Limits of

Change: Essays on Conservative Alternatives in Republican China (Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 1976), 114.

59. Quoted in Marianne Bastid, Educational Reform in Early 20th-Century

China (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Center for Chinese Studies, 1988),

52.

60. Kang Youwei, for example, included the Manchus in the descendants of

Huangdi.

61. Martin Bernal, "Liu Shih-p'ei and National Essence," in The Limits of

Change, 89-99.

62. Dai Xueji, "Qing mo liu Rih rihchao yu Xinhai geming" (Studying in

Japan and the 1911 Revolution in the late Qing) in Jinian Xinhai geming qishi

zhounian xueshu taolunhui lunwenji (Symposium held in celebration of the sev-

entieth anniversary of the 1911 Revolution) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1983),

590 (hereafter JNXH).

63. Beginning in early 1905, Huang Jie published Huang shi, (Taipei:

Wenhai chubanshe) as a series on the "national history" of the yellow race in the

Guocai xuebao (Journal of national essence).

64. Ibid., 1:45. See also Chow, Rise of Ritualism, chaps. 3 and 4.

65. Huang Jie, Huang shi, 1:47-51.

66. Dikotter, Discourse, 86.

Narrating Nation, Race, and Culture 81

67. Huang Jie, Huang shi, 1:55-58.

68. For debates over approaches to lineage organization and ancestor wor-

ship in the early Qing, see Chow, Rise of Ritualism, chaps. 3 and 4.

69. YBSWJ, chap. 3, 121.

70. XMCB, nos. 40-41, 1.

71. Guomin riri bao huibian (Collection of the National Daily), in Zhonghua

minghuo shiliao congbian (Collection of historical sources of the Republic of

China) (Taibei: Dangshi shiliao bianznan weiyuanhui, 1968), vol. A15.1, 78-80

(hereafter ZHMGSLCB).

72. Ibid., 81.

73. Ibid., 82.

74. Song Jiaoren, 5-6 (hereafter SJRJ).

75. Li, Qingmo di xiac shehui Qimeng yundong (The Enlightenment in the

lower social strata in the late Qing) (Taibei: Academic Sinica, 1992), 202-9.

76. Paul Ricoeur, "Narrative Time," in W. J. T. Mitchell, ed., On Narrative

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 165.

77. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and

David Pellauer (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984), 1:3.

78. YBSWJ, chap. 3, 122.

79. Ibid., chap. 6. See also Wang Er-min, "Qingji zhishi fenzi di zijue"

(The self-consciousness of intellectuals in late Qing), in Zhongguo jindai sixiang-

shi lun (On the history of modern Chinese thought) (Taipei: Huashi chubanshe,

1977), 136.

80. Kai-wing Chow, "Imagining Boundaries."

81. Bernal, "Liu Shih-p'ei," 99; Dikbtter, Discourse, 116.

82. Guomin riri bao huibian, 275-76.

83. Ibid., 278-79.

84. Ibid.

85. Zhang Binglin, in SLXJ, 245.

86. Bernal, "Liu Shih-p'ei," 99.

87. Guomin riri bao huibian, in ZHMGSLCB, vol. A4, 2.

88. Anderson, Imagined Communities. For criticism of his stress of print

capitalism as the exclusive factor in imagining a national identity in China and

the presumed unity in the imagination of a nation, see Duara, Rescuing History,

52-56. Another problem with Anderson's argument with regard to China's

history is the dismissal of the role of woodblock printing in creating imagined

communities long before Europeans imagined themselves as belonging to

nation-states.

89. Of the various kinds of movable type used for Chinese characters dur-

ing the Qing, woodblock type was the inexpensive printing method most widely

used by commercial, government, and private publishers. With their woodblock

type, itinerant printers traveled from village to village to print genealogies in the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. See Zhang Xinhui, Zhongguo yinshua shi

(A history of printing in China) (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1989),

389, 678-832, 701-8.

90. Hao Chang, "Intellectual Change and the Reform Movement, 1890-8,"

82

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

in Dennis Twitchett and John K. Fairbank, eds., The Cambridge History of China,

vol. 11, Late Ch'ing 1800-1911, part 2 (London: Cambridge University Press,

1980), 274-338.

91. Tan Ruqian, Zhongguo yi Riben shu zonghe mulu (Union catalog of

Chinese translations of Japanese books) (Taipei, 1980), 58.

92. Shiwu bao, in Shen Yunlong, Jindai zhongguo shiliao congkan (Col-

lectanea of historical sources on modern China) (Taipei: Wenhai chubanshe,

1985), ser. 3, vol. 322, 26, 29, 43, 111.

93. Ibid., 1, 67, 133.

94. The replacement was gradual. For example, Sheng Jun still used

tianyan rather than jinhua for evolution in his essay on Zheng Chao's historical

scholarship. Xinmin congbao (New citizen journal) nos. 42-43 (reprint, Taibei:

Yiwen, 1966), 3.

95. Ronald P. Toby's chapter in this volume.

96. Shi Xiaojun, Zhong Ri liangguo xianghu renshi di bianqian (Develop-

ment of Sino-Japanese relations) (Taipei: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1992), 245-46.

97. Stefan Tanaka, Japan's Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (Berke-

ley: University of California Press, 1993), 18.

98. Shi, Zhong Ri, 232-34.

99. Aijaz Ahman, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London:

Verso, 1992), 172.

100. Wei, Haiguo tuzhi (Illustrated treatise on the maritime kingdoms),

74:1-2.

101. Wu Yannan, "Zhongguo shehui wenhua xingtai yu lian Ri sichao"

(Social and cultural consciousness in China and the idea of forming an alliance

with Japan), in Jin sanbai nian Zhong Ri guanxi yantouhui lunwenji (Symposium

on Sino-Japanese relations during the last three hundred years) (Taipei: Institute

of Modern History, Academic Sinica, 1996), 1:306-22.

102. Wu, "Zhongguo," 319-22.

103. Zhang Binglin, ZTYQJ, 5-6.

104. Wu, "Zhongguo," 311.

105. YBSWJ, chap. 3, 132.

106. It is worth noting that later in the same essay he used shina for China.

His essay was based on a Japanese text, and it is clear that the discursive negativ-

ity of the term shina was not recognized by him.

107. Chang Hao, Chinese Intellectuals in Crisis: Search for Order and Mean-

ing (1890-1911) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 118-19.

108. Bastid, Educational Reform, 44-58.

109. Huang Jie, preface to the first issue of the National Essence Journal

1(1905):15.

110. The threat was serious even though a quarter of the Japanese neolo-

gisms were invented by Chinese collaborators in missionary translation projects.

See Liu, Translingual Practice, 18; Federico Masani, "The Formation of Modern

Chinese Lexicon and Its Evolution toward a National Language," Journal of

Chinese Linguistics, monograph series no. 6, 1993, 157-223.

Narrating Nation, Race, and Culture 83

111. Jerry Norman, Chinese (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1988), 187.

112. Masani, "Formation," 109-11. It should be pointed out that Shen's

phonetic system was designed to transcribe the Fujian, not the Beijing, dialect.

113. Chen Wandao, "Ming yilai Zhongguo yuwen di xinchao" (New trends

in Chinese language since the Ming dynasty), in Zhongguo wenzi Ladinghua

wenxian (Sources of romanization of Chinese writing) (Ladinghua chubanshe,

n.p., [1940]), 3-5.

114. Masani, "Formation," 111-12.

115. Compare this to the use of the Japanese language as a distinguishing

criterion in the February 28 Incident discussed in Jiu-jung Lo's chapter in this

volume.

116. Furth, "Sage as Rebel," 125-28.

117. Zhan Wei, Wu Zhihui yu Guoyu yundong (Wu Zihui and the national

language movement) (Taipei: Wen shi zhe chubanshe, 1992), 44-49.

118. Liu, Translingual Practice, 245-46.

119. Even the Cantonese Li Jinhui promoted Mandarin. See Andrew E

Jones's chapter in this volume.

120. YBSWJ, chap. 3, 138.



Chapter 3

Narrating China, Ordering East Asia:

The Discourse on Nation and Ethnicity

in Imperial Japan

Kevin M. Doak

Geography, like the nation, is very much a state of mind. Concepts of

place and spatial relationships involve a web of imaginative acts and

projections of interests and desires by those who are empowered with

the representation of space. Cultural and geographical imaginations

draw from and act on both the hard limits imposed by the presence of

physical terrain and the past of earlier representations that we often

call "tradition." And yet the power of geographical mapping lies not

only in specific natural features but in the cultural and political re-

sources of strategic representations.1 As such, the imaginative construc-

tion and reconstruction of nations and regions are historical projects.

They draw from the events of their time, as well as the constantly

changing discursive frameworks that are available to them, in order to

present the image of a necessary relationship among contiguous politi-

cal bodies. What makes the process especially complicated and fascinat-

ing is that often regional mapping, such as the Japanese construction of

a modern East Asia in the twentieth century, is simultaneously imposed

on national mapping and changing concepts of the region are often

interwoven with, and interdependent on, changing definitions of the

nation.

Modern Japanese attempts to construct a new geography of East

Asia provide a good example of the intersection of national and regional

imaginations. As many historians have pointed out, the emergence of

the modern Japanese state required a new relationship to East Asia and

especially to China.2 The Tokugawa bakufu found in neo-Confucianism

a modus vivendi with the Qing policy that China was not merely a nation

85

86 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

among others but the Central Kingdom, the center of the cultured

world.3 The new modern Meiji state turned to the West for theories of

political legitimacy and found its strongest support in the theories of the

independent modern state. Consequently, almost from its inception the

modern Japanese state was hostile to any concept of the East Asian

region that was not premised on the principle of national autonomy. I do

not intend to rehash the well-worn issues of the Westernized Japanese

state and its aggression in "traditional" East Asia in the Sino-Japanese

and Russo-Japanese Wars. The fact that in both wars Japanese officials

publicly denounced their enemies for violating Korean national auton-

omy suggests the rise of a new independent factor in the politics of the

region: a new concept of nation and national autonomy that would have

to be taken seriously even as it could be used for various purposes by

different parties.

The problem of region and nation in modern East Asia cannot be

reduced to an ideological expression of political or economic motives

any more than the nation itself can be explained as merely a function of

economic or political forces. Leading theorists of nationalism have dem-

onstrated, quite convincingly I believe, that the nation requires indepen-

dent consideration, as it makes distinctive claims on people's allegiances

even while it can be used by the political state, class, gender, or other

interests.4 Issues of cultural and ethnic identity frequently cut across

class lines, and these kinds of identity questions are the very stuff of

nations, if not necessarily of states. Building on the important distinction

between "nation" and "state" that theorists of nationalism have opened

up, I want to draw attention to a less studied facet of Japanese interven-

tion in modern East Asia: the role that ethnic concepts of the nation, as

distinct from the political state, played in Japanese attempts to reorga-

nize East Asia as an arena of ethnic national cooperation under Japa-

nese state leadership, thus giving the region a new identity distinct from

those of modern (Western) independent states. This reimagination of

East Asia as an arena of ethnic national identities drew from new defini-

tions of the nation as an ethnic people (minzoku) that were enjoying

wide circulation during and after World War I. Yet, even as Chinese,

Koreans and others in East Asia sought to appropriate this discourse on

ethnic nationalism for their own needs, imperialists in Japan responded

and attempted to reshape ethnic nationalism as the basis of their own

New Order in East Asia.

Narrating China, Ordering East Asia 87

Constructing a Modern Vocabulary for National Identity in

East Asia

Definitions and descriptions serve not merely as reflections of realities

but as powerful tools in shaping perceptions of, and even contributing to

the construction of, social realities. One place to begin to appreciate how

concepts and narratives of national identity were changing in early-

twentieth-century Japanese discourse on East Asia is a 1916 volume en-

titled The Nations of the Far East. The Nations of the Far East is a valu-

able text for decoding changes in early-twentieth-century Japanese dis-

course on East Asia. A syncretic volume in an encyclopedic series, the

volume was a summary of "state of the field" work on East Asian history

and ethnology, but it also sought to make these professional findings

known to a broad audience. Apparently written by Nakamura Kyishire,5

a leading Japanese authority on Chinese history, the text employed pho-

netic furigana throughout so that it would be accessible even to readers

with a limited grasp of written Japanese. To a rare degree, The Nations of

the Far East sought to bridge the gap between the Japanese elite discourse

on East Asia and a more popular audience that included ordinary people,

both in the homeland and in the colonies, as well as government bureau-

crats and colonial officials who were increasingly in charge of day to day

affairs throughout much of the "Far East."

If Nakamura's text sought to reach a broad audience, it also had

ambitions of transforming how Japanese thought of themselves and their

neighbors in the region. Nakamura combined narrative and semiology to

suggest something more significant than a mere theoretical debate over

the meaning of terms. Writing about and responding to current events in

Europe and Asia that were transforming nations and nationalist dis-

course, Nakamura outlined a new vocabulary for understanding and talk-

ing about national identity. New events seemed to require a new language

for representing the nation, and Nakamura responded with both a narra-

tive on the origins of ethnic identity in East Asia and a summary of new

scientific nomenclature that established new relationships between the

critical components of nationalist discourse: the people, ethnicity, race,

and the state. Although Nakamura was an influential historian, the ques-

tion of his influence on specific individuals through this text is less impor-

tant than the question of how this vocabulary of the nation developed

in the context of growing Japanese imperialism in East Asia. Of course,

88

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

his text was a self-conscious attempt to explain key concepts like "the Far

East," "the (ethnic) nation" and "race" to a broad reading public in

Japan, and as such it was no mere description of an objective reality in the

Far East. It sought to codify and popularize key understandings of the

nation and national integrity, ethnicity, and the state, that would inform

subsequent articulations of the problem, even as those later articulations

would revise or revert to Nakamura's basic assumptions about national

and East Asian identities.

Nakamura stated at the outset that the Great War was demonstrat-

ing - even as he wrote - how the problem of ethnic nationality was not

fully contained within the contemporary international system, which was

based on "the authority of the geographical boundaries and historical

relations among existing states."6 This situation was both an opportunity

and a concern for Imperial Japan, Nakamura concluded, since Japan was

simultaneously alone as an independent state in the Orient and a mem-

ber of the Western powers. Imperial Japan's ambivalent position - in

but not of the Orient - seemed to Nakamura to call for a reconceptuali-

zation of the meaning and scope of the modern Far East. Nakamura

understood that specific conceptualizations of geopolitical space repre-

sented different ways of identifying the subject and therefore carried

with them differences in political analysis, and he reviewed various alter-

natives to the concept of the "Far East." He offered the example of the

Japanese term kyokuto, a neologism that could refer to either the "Far

East" or the "Extreme East" but in either case had sought to depict a

region that, in contrast to the eastern or southeastern European nations

(i.e., the Balkans) of the "Near East," lay at the extreme edge of the

East. Within this geopolitical imagination, Nakamura concluded that the

"Extreme East" was less appropriate as an alternative to "the Far East,"

since it would most accurately refer only to Japan.7

Nakamura's point was not to reify a Western global taxonomy but to

highlight certain unresolved tensions within it as a first step toward a

new imagination of the Far East. He was dissatisfied with the artificial

and inadequate Western view of the Orient, which neatly categorized

the region into the Near East, the Middle East, and the Far East:

[T]here is no consensus on the range of Eastern countries comprised

by the term "the Far East." Usually, when we speak generally of the

foreign relations of the Far East, we speak of the foreign relations

between Imperial Japan and China, but [Ernest John] Harrison's

Narrating China, Ordering East Asia 89

understanding of the Far East in his Peace or War East of Baikal

(1910) means the Far Eastern countries of Japan (which includes

Korea), China (which comprises four parts, the Manchu, Mongol,

Turk, and Tibetan), Eastern Siberia, and the Philippine Islands. Ac-

cording to the definition the English China hand Archibald Little

provides in The Far East (1905), Far East is a general term for Japan,

China (including also its various peripheries), Siam, Annam, Chosen

(his book was published the year before the Japanese annexation of

Korea), and most of the Malay Peninsula.8

Once he had uncovered these and other differences in how the term Far

East was actually used, and thus having undermined any natural connec-

tion between the term and its referent, Nakamura was free to provide his

own definition: "In this book, I will use the term Far East as a general

term to refer to those oriental countries in a region that is at the extreme

edge of the East; that is, the region that includes Imperial Japan and the

eastern part of the Asian continent."9

Significantly, Nakamura's geographical imagination included only

one concrete reference to an existing state in the Far East - Imperial

Japan. And his definition of Far East made possible a quite restrictive

and peculiar understanding of the region. As the organization of his text

made clear, his definition followed Harrison but excluded Eastern Sibe-

ria and the Philippines. The arbitrariness in the general usage of the

term allowed Nakamura to construct a Far East that focused on China as

a multinational region secured by the region's only modern state, Impe-

rial Japan.

Underlying Nakamura's recognition of the Japanese imperial state

as including Korea was a specific imagination of the Far East as a field of

competing ethnic nationalities in which ethnicity was a historical and

dynamic marker of non-Western identity in contrast to the Western

privileging of the political state as the fundamental unit of modern collec-

tive identity. Nakamura, who had studied in Germany in 1902, shared

with German nationalists a juxtaposition of "the legal and rational con-

cept of citizenship" and "the infinitely vaguer concept of 'folk."'10 Yet,

while nationalists in Germany, Central Europe, and elsewhere saw

volkish nationalism as a challenge to Western political nationalism,

Nakamura was more cautious. He agreed that the Great War had height-

ened a sense of difference between political boundaries drawn by em-

pires and ethnic national identities. For Nakamura, the lessons of the

90

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

war for "the problem of the Far East" were to highlight the nature of a

national identity that was not reducible to existing state structures.11 The

region would have to be reshaped in accordance with these new prin-

ciples of nationality.

Nakamura's approach to the Far East anticipated what Anthony D.

Smith has recently termed Western and non-Western models of national-

ism. In the Western model of the nation, political and legal criteria of

membership predominate, whereas "a rather different model of the na-

tion sprang up outside the West. . . . Its distinguishing feature is its

emphasis on a community of birth and native culture."12 Nakamura

employed this ethnic approach to national identity in his narration of

Chinese history, but he left the status of Japanese nationality unclear,

perhaps recognizing in Japan's case only Smith's point that "every nation-

alism contains civic and ethnic elements in varying degrees and different

forms."13 While Nakamura recognized ethnic differences in Japan, he

also felt such differences had not served as an obstacle to the construc-

tion of the modern state (Korean annexation was the exception to the

rule, but an exemption that caused little concern given Nakamura's low

regard for Korean ethnic viability). China, however, was a space where

five major competing ethnic nations (Han, Manchu, Mongol, Uighur,

and Tibetan) vied for dominance.14 Although Nakamura accepted the

existence of a Japanese nationality that approximates a civic model of

the nation (kokumin),15 he remained uninterested in the possibility of a

modern Chinese version of a civic nation (guomin) that might transcend

ancient ethnic divisions in China. Instead, he offered separate narratives

of these ethnic nations in China to demonstrate how ethnic nationality

had predated and problematized the movement toward a Chinese politi-

cal state, and he emphasized how political boundaries and a sense of a

common ethnic nation had rarely coincided in the long span of Chinese

history.

Given the central importance that this distinction between the ethnic

nation (minzoku) and the political nation (kokumin) or state (kokka)

would play in his narratives, Nakamura first offered definitions of the key

Japanese terms in discussing international relations in the Far East: the

ethnic nation (minzoku), the political nation (kokumin), and race

(jinshu). He began with a lengthy exegesis of tile term minzoku that

would provide the foundation for his and many subsequent Japanese

imaginations of national identity in twentieth-century East Asia. He ex-

Narrating China, Ordering East Asia 91

plained that the term minzoku was a neologism, like Far East, and that it

corresponded to certain aspects of the English word nation, the French

term peuple, and the German word Volk, all of which originally had

different emphases but had recently coalesced around the concept of a

distinct national people that shared certain attributes. Nakamura listed

these attributes as (1) a common ancestral blood lineage, (2) historical

and spiritual unity, (3) common culture, (4) common religion, (5) com-

mon language and customs, (6) a sense of community or shared economic

interest, (7) a common state structure that increases the sense of shared

economic interests, and (8) a sense of economic or industrial community.

Nakamura listed these ingredients in more or less chronological order,

arguing that nations were not entirely modern phenomena but were

rooted in ancient tribal histories and lineages that had gained a political

sense of community with the arrival of the West in the early modern era

and a common economic interest only with the emergence of recent

economic rivalries, by which he must have meant imperialism.16 These

constitutive elements, along with Nakamura's insistence that this sense of

nationality (minzoku) must be distinguished from the legal-political con-

cept of the nation (kokumin) and the state (kokka), mark out a concept

of ethnic nationality as a distinct form of national identity. 17

As the site where racial and political identities converged, the ethnic

nation best captured for Nakamura the tensions of similarity and differ-

ence that shaped social and political life in early-twentieth-century East

Asia. While he insisted on the distinction between a concept of the ethnic

nation and that of physical race, he found racial arguments useful in

providing explanations for the macroformation of a Far Eastern context

and for the microformation of individual ethnic nations. He drew from

the racial classifications of physical anthropologists like Bernier, Keane,

and Flower to argue that humanity was divided into five races (yellow,

white, black, dark [Malay] and red copper), of which the yellow and

white were "historical" races and the black, dark and red were passive

races that had yet to make any significant contribution to history.18 And,

while the white race had the upper hand in the modern era, in the premod-

ern and especially the medieval era the Asian race had contributed nearly

everything of significance to world history: paper, printing, gunpowder,

the magnetic needle, and even the Christian savior had all come from the

East.19 Nakamura used this world historical narrative to supplement West-

ern racial theories, including notions of progressivism, to counter beliefs

92

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

in Western/white superiority, and to suggest the racial and historical supe-

riority of the East.

Yet, Nakamura did not completely accept the racial collectivization of

modern Asia as a homogeneous entity opposed to the West. In place of

racial ties, he emphasized that the modern world required a more specifi-

cally national sense of identity, an identity that should be neither too

broad in a physical, racial sense nor too invested in the Western form of

the political state. Modern Asia, as Nakamura understood the region, was

a complex arena where racial similarities and national differences were

synthesized within a sense of ethnic nationality - the result of the histori-

cal and cultural mediation of race. Nakamura conceded that the subject

referred to as "the (ethnic) nations of the Far East" could be described in

other terms (the denizens of Asia, the yellow race, the Asian lineage), but

he concluded that they really referred to (1) the Japanese (including the

Koreans), (2) the Chinese (shina kokujin), and (3) the various Indian

peoples. No nation was simply a single tribe, and Nakamura recognized

the presence of thirteen different tribal groups within the Japanese em-

pire (including, of course, the Korean, Ainu, and Ryukyuan peoples).20

Such tribal diffusion was not unique to Imperial Japan but was characteris-

tic of all the nations of the Far East to varying degrees. Even China, which

Nakamura understood through the five major ethnic divisions of Han,

Manchu, Mongol, Uighur and Tibetan, was more complex than such

major ethnic national categories suggested.

And yet, what we call one Han people is not a single, independent

(ethnic) nation. An extremely complicated series of migrations and

miscegenation since the beginning of history has resulted in tribal

(shuzoku) differentiation within the Han people. The greatest divi-

sion is between the southern Han (the southern Chinese) and the

northern Han (northern Chinese), but in addition there are so many

tribal groups that it is almost impossible to count them all.21

The key point here is that, whereas the coherence and independence of

the core Japanese ethnic nation within the multitribal Japanese empire

was never called into question, the Han ethnic nation had been divided

and subdivided until it was no longer recognizable as "a single, indepen-

dent (ethnic) nation." The contrast with Japan could not be greater, and

in fact this conviction that Japan was different from China served as the

underlying assumption of Nakamura's entire text.

Narrating China, Ordering East Asia 93

Narrating Nations, Negating the State: China as an

Ethnic Arena

Having laid out the conceptual terms that would organize his imagina-

tive geography of the "Far East," Nakamura turned away from the

ethnic and tribal problems of Japan and Indian peoples to a narrativi-

zation of the five ethnic nations that constituted China. Chapter 2 dwelt

on the complexities of the "Han ethnic nation" for more than two hun-

dred pages, while chapter 3 dispensed with the intricacies of the Man-

chu, Mongolian, Uighur, and Tibetan ethnic nations by providing, in a

little more than a hundred pages, separative narratives of each. Al-

though Nakamura had noted the complex nature of such ethnic groups

in his introduction, once he turned to his five narratives internal differ-

ences gave way to a narrative of distinct ethnic nations, their rivalries,

and their subjugations.

Ethnic diversity and instability led Nakamura to open his account

with the question of what to call the Chinese. He noted that they had

called themselves Han in their foreign relations since the Han period

but in more recent times had called themselves the Central Kingdom

People (zhongguo ren) or related terms like the Central Flower ethnic

nation (zhonghua minzu). Nakamura rejected both of these terms, as

the former implied disrespect toward other nations and the abbreviated

version of Flower Tribe (huazu) was too easily confused with the

Japanese term for nobility (kazoku). And anyway, he concluded, "the

names China (shina) and Chinese (shinajin) have been used by foreign-

ers for a long time, and recently the Chinese have taken to using these

names themselves."22 The point was to displace any notion of China as

a unified country and to project instead a view of the Asian continent

as a field where ethnic national rivalries were played out. As Nakamura

put it in describing late Ming China, "the Chinese continent was a

Sumo ring for the Han and Manchu ethnic nations, just as it was in the

case of the [Han] Song and the [Mongol] Yuan."23 But the continent

was a unique ethnic arena or at least it was culturally an East Asian

arena (hence the metaphor of a Sumo ring). From the outset, Naka-

mura repossessed China for the Far East by rejecting the theories of

Lacouperie and others who argued for the 'Western origins of Chinese

civilization and accepting instead Friedrich Hirth's conclusions, which

drew on art to argue for the independent origins of Chinese civiliza-

tion.24 In doing so, Nakamura reminds us that art and aesthetics can be

94

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

mobilized to mark off the cultural nation as a particularistic field with

its own standards of legitimacy and argumentation - standards that can

be quite compatible at times with exceptionalist and homogenizing ap-

proaches to national identities.

Chinese history, as Nakamura told it, was a story of ethnic strife.

The underlying theme of his narrative was the struggle of the Han ethnic

nation to control affairs in its own country and its own destiny and the

continued frustration at being ruled by ethnic minorities. Like all great

tragedies, the history of Han China began with a golden age, the con-

quest of the Miao people by the Han under the leadership of their

founding hero, the Yellow Emperor, around 2700 B. c.25 During the Xia,

Shang, and Zhou periods, the Han ethnic nation pursued a policy of

national unification against the pressures of various other ethnic groups,

a policy that Nakamura explicitly called "revering the emperor and expel-

ling the barbarians" (joi), thus associating it with the late-nineteenth-

century Japanese nationalist campaign to throw out the West.26 Predict-

ably, the Jin and Han periods were reduced to the building of the Great

Wall to keep out non-Han ethnic groups and to Ban Chao (32-102 A.D.)

and his policy of "using barbarians to control barbarians" (iyi zhiyi).

Next Nakamura suggested that between the Han and the Sui periods

the Han ethnic nation had lost so much of its earlier strength against other

ethnic nations that the former "Great Han" (da Han) or "Strong Han"

(qiang Han) was now described in the historical records as the "Han

children" (Han zi).27 But the Tang period, not surprisingly, was repre-

sented as a restoration of Han power. As Nakamura wrote, "In short, the

Han period was a glorious period for the Han ethnic nation, but with the

period of invasions by the five barbarian groups (Xiongnu, Jie, Xianbei,

Di, Qiang) the Han ethnic nation entered a period of terror. And if one

can say that the Sui period was a return of the pendulum for the Han

ethnic nation, then the Tang period truly should be called a period of the

highest, crowning glory for the Han ethnic nation."28

The Song period was also an important pivotal moment in Naka-

mura's narrative of the Han ethnic nation. It drew upon the Han pe-

riod's foundational work in political institutions and the Tang period's

development of Han ethnic culture in cultivating a Han ethnic national

sense of identification with China. But this ethnic national identity was

cultivated in the context of increasing oppression of the Han ethnic

nation by other "ethnic nations" throughout the Song period: first, the

Khitan and the Xi Xia, then the Jurchen, and finally the "great oppres-

Narrating China, Ordering East Asia 95

sion" (dai appaku) of the Mongols, which culminated in the Yuan dy-

nasty.29 The overthrow of the Mongol Yuan dynasty was attributed

solely to the fact that "the Han ethnic nation could not long bear being

oppressed by the Mongols."30 Nakamura asserts, with citations from

Chinese historical documents, that Zhu Yuanzhang, the founder of the

Ming dynasty, acted self-consciously as a representative of Han ethnic

national resentments against the Mongols.31 Here Nakamura connects

his narrative on China with his own concerns in an unusually candid

manner. In a chapter subsection entitled "Late Song-Early Ming and

Our Japanese," Nakamura suggests that the Japanese learned loyalty

from the Song Han Chinese and, pausing to remind his readers that

Coxinga (Zheng Chenggong) was half Han Chinese and half Japanese,

noted that "the people of our country were filled with sympathy for the

Ming and did not welcome the Qing court's rule over China."32

Nakamura's narrative of Han China concludes where it began, with

arguments against Qing ethnic minority rule over the Han Chinese and

with doubts about the viability of a truly multiethnic Chinese polity.

Here narrative form served to reinforce analytic definitions. The Qing

policy toward ethnic nationality was not unique but merely one of a

limited set of possibilities in ethnic relations that Nakamura had outlined

in his preface:

The Manchu court's policy toward the Han ethnic nation was

extremely multidimensional, but it may be summarized as . . . (2)

an actual case in which the ethnic nation (minzoku) and the political

nation (kokumin) are not the same, that is, where members of the

same political nation are not of the same ethnic nation . . . [in this

case,] the conquering minority, possessed of extraordinary power,

tries to absorb the conquered majority and assimilate them.33

In short, the Manchus tried to avoid becoming assimilated into the Han

Chinese and rather sought to assimilate the Han into the Manchu. Sig-

nificantly, Nakamura drew from Wang Jingwei, a future collaborator

with the Japanese in China, who shared Nakamura's belief in the impor-

tance of maintaining even slight ethnic differences (between the Han

and Manchus) as a form of resistance against complete political and

cultural domination.34

But Nakamura realized that his narrative ended before the story was

over. What to do about the fact that some Chinese protested that in the

96

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

"New China" these ancient ethnic squabbles were subsumed in the new

modern national identity of "Republican" China?35 Nakamura's re-

sponse was two pronged. First, he pointed to the 1911 Wuchang Uprising

that had spawned the Chinese Revolution as proof of enduring ethnic

tensions between the Han and Manchu ethnic nations.36 And he drew for

good measure on the authority of a litany of Japanese sinologists, includ-

ing Inoue Tetsujiro, Ichimura Sanjiro, Hattori Unokichi, Shiratori Kura-

kichi, Kuwabara Jitsuzo, Naito Konan, Inaba Kunzan, and even Profes-

sor Edward Alsworth Ross of the University of Wisconsin, whose 1914

The Changing Chinese Nakamura considered an authoritative introduc-

tion to Han ethnic nationality.37 In fact, Nakamura concluded his narra-

tive of the Han ethnic nation with fifty-five pages of text devoted to

establishing the "ethnic nationality of the Han people" [Kanjin minzo-

kusei], more pages than any of the remaining four ethnic nations of

China received for their entire narratives.38 History and science joined in

confirming for Nakamura that Han ethnic national consciousness was

here to stay and that China should belong to the Han Chinese.

Perhaps conscious of the general audience his book was designed to

reach, Nakamura did not want his study to be considered "pure scholar-

ship" or for the implications of his work to remain understated. In his

conclusion, Nakamura made explicit his hopes that his book would redi-

rect Japanese attention back to the Orient before the West, currently

absorbed in war in Europe, could return.

How can we Japanese ignore East Asia at this point in time? We must

step forth, go to the continent, and do our utmost to manage affairs

there. Given the state of affairs, those who cannot leave Japan must

lend a hand. Those who cannot lend a hand must open their eyes

and pay attention. To fail to pay careful attention to the Far East

arena will have profound implications for the fate of our country.

How can we not study the situation of the ethnic nations in the Far

East?39

Yet the political implications of Nakamura's call in 1916 for engagement

in East Asia from an ethnic national perspective are not without ambiva-

lence. His book was promoted and read by liberals and populists in Japan,

and Yoshino Sakuzo and Tokutomo Soho, two of the most influential

liberals in Japan at the time, both wrote glowing introductions to it. It is

important to recall that during World War I and immediately afterward,

Narrating China, Ordering East Asia 97

many Japanese intellectuals joined liberals and other leftists around the

world in espousing ethnic nationalism as a critique of imperialism and

colonialism.40 Nonetheless, ultimately the historical significance of Naka-

mura's text was not in bringing down imperialism but ironically in en-

hancing a discursive framework that combined an ethnic national view of

East Asia with a sense of Japanese entitlement, a sense that the Japanese

must adopt an activist stance in reforming political structures in the new

East Asia to reflect modern ethnic national identities.

DissemiNation: Imagining Ethnicity/Enforcing Empire

I have spent considerable time discussing a single text, Nakamura's The

Nations of the Far East, in detail. This text deserves close analysis not

because it was original or compelling or the only text that influenced

Japanese thinking about the nation. Rather, The Nations of the Far East

deserves our attention precisely because it was both ordinary and ex-

ceptional: ordinary in that it summarized a widely shared understanding

of the conceptual underpinnings of national and regional identity around

the time of World War I, but exceptional in that Nakamura sought to

bring that conceptual apparatus to a more popular audience through a

text that was both readable and widely available. I am not interested in

trying to establish how wide the readership of this single text was or in

measuring its precise degree of influence over the thinking of specific

individuals. As a historical text, The Nations of the Far East claims our

attention not because of influence but because of its social nature: the

way in which it embodied and disseminated a historically specific under-

standing in Japanese society of national and ethnic identity in East Asia,

and particularly how such forms of collective identity were seen in rela-

tionship to the modern state. We now need to step back from Naka-

mura's text to see how this grammatology of the nation responded to

new events and places in the years after World War I, especially in the

context of growing Japanese imperialism in East Asia.

If World War I provided the framework for Nakamura's understand-

ing of the problem of ethnic national domination, regional events in-

creasingly played a role in shaping the development of the discourse

on ethnic nationalism and imperialism in East Asia. In 1918, Uchida

Ryohei, a leading activist in the Japanese nationalist movement, dis-

missed Chinese calls for national independence by reasserting his theory

that China was not a state. China, he asserted, "may have the name of

98

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

an independent country, but the reality [of an independent Chinese

state] is almost completely absent."41 China's political problems indi-

cated to Uchida deeper cultural and moral failings that ultimately had

left the Chinese people completely bereft of any belief in the state.42

Before China could be a state, it had to become a nation - and many

Japanese felt willing and able to teach the Chinese what a nation was and

how to become one.

Uchida's assumption that China was not a state was informed by a

widespread belief among Japanese political theorists in the years after

World War I that the nation, as an ethnological concept, was a moral and

cultural prerequisite to a secure, independent, political state.43 The

sinologist Hattori Unokichi argued that Confucianism was an ethnic na-

tional doctrine (minzoku-teki kyogi), but that in the modern era Japan

had succeeded better than the Chinese in adopting "the teachings of

Confucius," which, unlike "Confucianism," incorporated the progressive

spirit required by the modern age.44 By thus juggling Confucianism as an

East Asian culture with Japan's own particular national culture, Hattori

could suggest both a sense of pan-Asianism and a rationale for Japanese

leadership in a new East Asian regional order. As Stefan Tanaka points

out, "Hattori turned Confucianism into an alternative to Wilsonian inter-

nationalism."45 Yet, it is important to grasp that Hattori's Confucianism

only opposed Wilsonian internationalism to the degree that he believed

Wilson's principle of (ethnic) national self-determination would lead im-

mediately to ethnic nation-states in Asia that would be independent of

Japan's influence but dependent on the West. That is, Hattori followed

Nakamura in accepting Wilson's principle of "ethnic national self-

determination" (minzoku jiketsu) and in suggesting that an ethnic na-

tional approach to the East Asian region could serve as a replacement for

the Wilsonian concept of an international order composed of autonomous

states anchored in the European-dominated League of Nations.

Korea represented an early test case for these ideas about ethnic

national identity as distinct from the modern political state. After the

March 1, 1919, movement for independence, Saito Makoto was ap-

pointed governor-general of Korea and Japanese policy in Korea began to

emphasize "cultural containment."46 One of the targets of cultural con-

tainment was the Korean ethnic national historians (Minjok sahakka)

such as Sin Ch'aeho and Ch'oe Namson, who sought to write narratives

that "aimed at enhancing the inherent national ideas, elevating the Ko-

rean spirit, and emphasizing traditional ideas of cultural superiority to

Narrating China, Ordering East Asia 99

compensate for Korea's political defeat in the real world."47 The high

point in the Korean expropriation of the discourse on ethnic nationality

was reached when Yi Kwang-su explicitly proposed a "reconstruction of

the Korean ethnic nation" in the May 1922 issue of Kaebyok. Yi's em-

brace of ethnic Korean nationality, while stopping short of an outright call

for political independence, was written within and against the dominant

discourse on Korean ethnic nationality that came from the government-

general. Only one year earlier, in 1921, the education office of the

government-general had published a volume called ChOsenjin, which

listed strengths and weaknesses in the Korean ethnic character as part of

an overall argument that Korean ethnicity should be assimilated into the

Japanese ethnic nation.48 In Japan, Nakayama Kei reinforced this rejec-

tion of Korean ethnicity in his article "A Basic Policy for Assimilating the

Korean Ethnic Nation: We Must Convert All Korean Names to Japanese

Names," published in Nihon oyobi nihonjin. Nakayama was quite seri-

ous, and he did not stop at changing names: he proposed a series of

reforms that meant cultural genocide for Koreans.49

As a nation annexed to the Japanese imperial state, Korea was a

particularly advantageous space for exploring some of the complexities

and contradictions in the discourse on ethnic nationalism in East Asia. Yi

Kwang-su drew from this Japanese discourse on the separation of an

ethnic nation from the state to suggest that Korean nationalism was alive

and well even without the reality of an independent Korean state, but he

was criticized by fellow Koreans for this camouflaged "betrayal against

his nation."50 Even as they concluded that Koreans were not a viable

ethnic nation, Japanese colonial officers shared Yi's ethnic nationalist

assumptions, as did Japanese intellectuals like Nakayama, who suggested

cultural genocide (chosen minzoku naru mono ga naku naru yo ni suru

koto) as the only solution for ending discrimination against Koreans.51

Throughout all these arguments ran a consistent belief in the centrality of

ethnic national identity as a form of national identity that was distinct

from the political nationalism centered on the modern state. But the

argument for assimilating Korean ethnic identity into the Japanese eth-

nic nation - an argument that Nakamura Kytishiro had shared and had

explicitly tied to a sense of the historical rather than racial nature of the

ethnic nation - remained the exception to the dominant imagination of

an ethnically subdivided Far East. Because Korea had been annexed to

Japan since 1910 and because of what were perceived as unusually close

cultural similarities between Koreans and Japanese, undermining ethnic

100 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

national identity would apply only to Korea. As Nakayama concluded,

"With ethnic nations other than Korea, Japan must always interact

equally, within a greater Asian federation (dai-ajia renpO)."52 Nearly all

sides of the debate agreed that it was not healthy for a political state to

encompass multiple ethnic nations.

Korea may have been exceptional, but it was not isolated from events

that were shaping nationalist discourse in East Asia. The Korean

government-general was concerned about the potential of an anti-

imperialist ethnic nationalism stemming from the Soviet Union and work-

ing through China to disrupt the Japanese empire. A 1930 report of the

Korean Police Affairs Bureau entitled The International Communist

Party and the Chinese Revolution discussed topics like "Soviet Russian

policy for the East," "China's Red Revolution," and "the International

Communist Party and China's Guomindang." It provided a narrative of

the Chinese Revolution that detailed Sun Yat-sen's alleged turn to revolu-

tionary ethnic nationalism, noting that after China's defeat in the Sino-

Japanese War, Sun had "advocated ethnic nationalism (minzokushugi) as

a means of overthrowing the Qing dynasty and establishing a Han state

(Hanjin no kuni)."53 Sun's ethnic nationalism was said to have gradually

changed its meaning until 1921, when he had moved beyond a celebration

of Han ethnic identity located within a broader pan-Asianism. He now

agreed with Lenin that "the weak ethnic nations (jakushO minzoku) of

the Orient must work together with the proletariat of Europe and the

United States to strike back at world imperialism from both sides." Sun,

the report concluded, was now a thorough Bolshevik and the Chinese

national Revolution had been hijacked by the Soviet Union and its policy

that "all ethnic nationalist movements must first be linked to Soviet Rus-

sia."54 The Police Affairs Bureau report emphasized that ethnic national

formation did not take place in a vacuum and if Japan did not actively

engage in shaping the results of ethnic nationalism in East Asia the Soviet

Union would. From this vantage point, the threat posed by communism

was as much centered on propagating revolutionary ethnic nationalism

and anti-imperialism as on fomenting class consciousness and proletarian

strife in Japan's cities.

The New (Ethnic) Order in East Asia, 1938-45

The concerns expressed by Imperial Japan's civil servants over the use of

ethnic nationalism as an anti-imperialist tool were not merely theoreti-

Narrating China, Ordering East Asia 101

cal, nor were they misplaced. The full potential of ethnic nationalism as

a critique of imperialism was not revealed until after Prime Minister

Konoe Fumimaro announced a "New Order in East Asia" in November

1938. While no one seemed to know precisely what this New Order

meant, the proclamation was a discursive intervention that renewed

excitement over the ethnic nation as a substitute for the state as the basic

organizational unit for political arrangements in East Asia. The question

remained, however, whether ethnic nationalism could be controlled to

Imperial Japan's advantage. The sinologist and spy Ozaki Hotsumi sug-

gested otherwise, adopting a Marxist attack on the civic state and adjust-

ing Uchida's theory that China was not a state to argue that China's lack

of a civic state was a virtue Japan should follow. Ozaki placed the prob-

lem of ethnic nationalism, which he defined as a comprehensive repre-

sentation of all the Chinese people, at the center of the New Order in

East Asia, and he believed that the Soviet Union had a unique history in

encouraging Chinese ethnic nationalism.55 But Ozaki pushed his attack

on Western civic nationalism in the wrong direction for Imperial Japan;

he was arrested in 1941 for espionage and executed with his coconspira-

tor Richard Sorge in 1944. Although he was a spy against Imperial

Japan, Ozaki's actions were motivated by a patriotism that cannot be

understood without serious consideration of his support for ethnic na-

tionalism and how he connected it with a belief in a new East Asia

constructed around ethnic national cooperation.

As Ozaki's case revealed, the proclamation of a New Order in East

Asia in 1938, which followed the outbreak of war with China, unleashed a

wide variety of competing claims in Japan as to how East Asia ought to be

refashioned. Most of these claims promoted the ethnic nation as the new

organizing principle of the region. New organizations and reformed old

ones appeared, all devoted to the problem of how to solve the crisis in

East Asia. Lt. Gen. Ishiwara Kanji formed the East Asia League (TOa

remmei) in 1939 around the principle that all the ethnic nations of East

Asia should unite in a "Great Harmony" (daidO danketsu) with Japan at

the center. In the same year, the Institute for Common East Asian Cul-

ture (Tba debun shoin) was elevated to university status. Along with such

institutional efforts to reconceive East Asia, the years 1938-45 witnessed

a tremendous spate of books, pamphlets, and articles on ethnic nations

and East Asia.56 With such a wide range of ideas and opinions, there was

considerable disagreement over concepts and methods, but there was

almost unanimous agreement that the relationship between the ethnic

102 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

nation (minzoku) and the political state (kokka), rather than Japanese

imperialism per se, was the key to remedying the long-standing instability

in the East Asian region.

The debates raised during the late 1930s and early 1940s over a

separate ethnic national identity and a common East Asian tradition are

fascinating in themselves, but space does not permit much more than a

cursory examination of them here. Perhaps the most intriguing issue to

emerge was whether, given the historicist and socially determined char-

acter of the ethnic nation, the concept of ethnic nation could be ex-

panded beyond existing national cultures to form an entirely new ethnic-

ity that encompassed much of East Asia.57 This theoretical pan-Asian

ethnicity was a new approach to the problem of ethnic national identity,

and it was greatly encouraged by Foreign Minister Matsuoka Yosuke's

proclamation of a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in August

1940. Just a few months before Matsuoka's official proclamation, sinol-

ogist Tachibana Shiraki had argued that "there is no other way to satisfy

the demands of ethnic nationalism, the emancipation of the oriental

ethnic nations, than to settle the issue by forming all the ethnic nations

of the Orient into a single group."58 Tachibana's call for a pan-Asian

ethnic national identity was echoed by the editors of the journal East

Asia (TOa) in their September 1940 issue:

Seen in its entirety, East Asia is the victim of oppression by the non-

East Asian powers. . . In this sense, Japan, Manchuria, and China

possess a common fate. Consciousness of this common fate will re-

move the obstacles posed by a provincial ethnic nationalism to the

inauguration of an East Asian New Order. Above and beyond this

ethnic consciousness, which sees Japan, Manchuria, and China in

opposition, there is an ethnic national consciousness (minzoku ishiki)

that sees East Asia as one body and that springs from a philosophy of

East Asia as a community of fate. . . . We call this ethnic nationalism,

which has its basis in East Asia, East Asian ethnic nationalism (tOa

minzokushugi).59

The author(s) of this essay went on to say that since this monolithic East

Asian ethnic nationalism was founded in response to a common experi-

ence of oppression by Western colonization, it need not remain limited

to East Asia. Indeed, "East Asian ethnic nationalism possessed the

necessity of expanding into Asian ethnic nationalism" since "it is pre-

Narrating China, Ordering East Asia 103

cisely in the concept of East Asia as a community of fate and in the

promotion of East Asian ethnic nationalism that one finds the future of

East Asia, [which is] the future of Asia."6

The rhetoric employed in this article refers directly to one of the key

elements in prevailing definitions of the nation in interwar Japanese

political discourse. In suggesting that the concept of the ethnic nation

(minzoku) could be expanded from the boundaries of the modern state,

or even the nation-state, to a transnational region like Asia, the au-

thor(s) drew on a definition of the nation as a community of fate that

was associated with Otto Bauer, Joseph Stalin, and Ramsay Muir -

much the same leftist discourse on the nation that informed Nakamura's

text. And yet this strategy of rejecting previous understandings of the

ethnic nation as too narrow and offering instead an ethnic nationalism

that was regional returned to Nakamura's distinction between ethnic

nation and race, if only to rearrange the terms and scopes of definition.

Why not simply suggest a common Asian racial (jinshu-teki) identity,

instead of this cumbersome concept of an ethnic nation (minzoku) that

was not a state (kokka) and was broader in scope than traditional no-

tions of the ethnic nation? Others certainly did. But the leftist discourse

on the nation as a populist and historically constructed identity that was

not reducible to the state held out greater promise than the concept of a

biological race of absorbing nationalist aspirations throughout Asia

while at the same time avoiding the question of a variety of independent

nation-states in the region. This belief in the malleability of the ethnic

nation enhanced its prestige as a non-Western alternative to the bour-

geois Western state. For many Japanese working in this tradition, the

advantage of ethnic national identity over race reflected a confidence

that cultural and ethnic identities were separate from states but also a

concern that other ethnic nations eventually might insist on their own

independent states. The call for a single, pan-Asian, ethnic nationalism

was one, if rather extreme, response to the post-Versailles call for "one

nation, one state," and in this case, of course, the one state was Imperial

Japan.

Not all Japanese imperialists were willing to blend their identities

with those of Chinese, Mongolians, Tibetans, and others. In fact, most

Japanese advocates of ethnic nationalism upheld the distinction among

the ethnic nations of East Asia even when they called for some form of

East Asian "cooperation." Kamei Kan'ichiro, former intelligence ana-

lyst for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Social Masses' Party Diet

104

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

member, returned to Japan in April 1938 after eight months in the

United States and Nazi Germany where he had gathered information for

Prime Minister Konoe and the army. What Kamei found overseas

prompted him to propose a new direction for the nations of East Asia,

one in which ethnic differences would remain crucial. Kamei, who spent

the war years as the director of the Foundation for Technology in the

Holy War (Zaidan hojin seisen gijutsu kyokai), insisted that "without

liberating the oppressed ethnic nations of East Asia, there can be no

promotion of an East Asian ethnic national culture. . . . The reason is

that without the particularity of each ethnic nation there can be no

ethnic national culture, and without [individual] ethnic national cultures

there can be no cultural exchange."61 Of course, Kamei did not mean

liberation from Japanese imperialism but Japanese liberation of Asia

from the West. Practically on the eve of Pearl Harbor, Kamei wrote that

the coming war would be

a holy war for the liberation of the oppressed ethnic nations from

Anglo-Saxon economic internationalism. That is, the goal of the

Axis powers is the construction of a greater familistic world and the

repair and firming up of those states that float around like jellyfish.

In other words, the goal is to build a new world order, with ethnic

nations (not races [minshu]) -which are living communities -as the

structural unit, rather than modern states that are nothing more than

lifeless mechanisms.62

Kamei shared Nakamura's distinction between individual ethnic nations

and race and Nakamura's insistence that the ethnic nation is not purely

biological but also includes cultural and historical elements. Cultural

distinctiveness was important, for it would respond to the nationalist

aspirations of various peoples in East Asia, including a Japanese sense of

pride in achieving East Asia's only powerful empire.

To Kamei, what was at stake was not merely a new order for East Asia

but a seismic shift of global proportions. He believed two ethnic national

policies were competing for dominance in the world. The League of

Nations world order cynically promised ethnic self-determination as a

means of perpetuating English imperialism, while the Marxist answer, an

ethnic national policy of "liberating the oppressed ethnic nations" (hi-

appaku minzoku no kaihO), simply reflected the Soviet Union's desire for

world conquest. Japan, however, offered a third alternative, a "new eth-

Narrating China, Ordering East Asia 105

nic national policy," which, in cooperation with totalitarian Germany and

Italy, would usher in a new era of true national cooperation and

coprosperity.63 Not surprisingly, the details of Japan's "new ethnic na-

tional policy" were sketchy, but Kamei did offer three points at which

Japan's policy was different from the other two: a distinction between the

ethnic nation and race, ethnic national policy wedded to a concept of

regional-destined cooperative bodies, and new relations between the lead-

ing and the led states.64 Informing Kamei's expropriation of the liberal

discourse on the ethnic nation that Nakamura had outlined earlier were

two key characteristics that Roger Griffin has recently identified as cen-

tral to fascism everywhere: "a revolutionary, forward-looking thrust" and

"a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism."65 Griffin's analysis

helps clarify the relationship between ethnic nationalism and fascism at a

theoretical level, but for readers of Kamei's text, there could be no ques-

tion of Kamei's fascist sympathies.66 My point is not to portray wartime

Japan as a monolithic fascist polity, as the question of Japanese fascism

has been widely debated and the complexities of Japanese politics during

the war years are now well known.67

But it is important to recognize the role that ethnic definitions of the

nation, and especially a reimagination of East Asia as a realm of ethnic

nationalities, played in shaping the political consciousness of those in

wartime Japan who openly supported fascism. A crystallization of these

tendencies occurred late in 1942, when the Institute for Research on the

Ethnic Nation (Minzoku kenkyisho) was founded and Takata Yasuma

was named its director. In the institute's Bulletin, published in 1944,

Takata emphasized that the institute's work in clarifying the problem of

the ethnic nation was central to "the Japanese ethnic nation's unprece-

dented experiment. . . in liberating East Asia and promoting the con-

struction of a New Order in East Asia."68 Takata's essay in the Bulletin

employed Kamei's distinction between the English "liberal" ethnic na-

tional policy, which emphasized distance between ethnic nations (kyori

seisaku), and Japan's ethnic national policy, which encouraged closeness

(sekkin seisaku), in working toward the same goal, which was, of course,

"the liberation of East Asia." The problem was how to pursue a policy

of proximity without falling into complete assimilation and thereby "en-

dangering Japan's position in East Asia."69 The dilemma Takata identi-

fied was common to fascism everywhere. Takata's colleague Nakano

Seiichi suggested that a solution might be found in M. H. Boehm's

attempt to overcome the "modern Western European thesis . . . that

106 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

equated the ethnic nation (minzoku) and the state (kokka)."70 The dis-

tinction between the ethnic nation and the state, which Nakamura had

employed to suggest the legitimacy of national aspirations throughout

Asia, was reemployed now in asserting Japanese rights over other ethnic

nations in Asia.

Interwar discourse on East Asia in Japan was a complicated interweav-

ing of various elements, but at its core it focused on a sense that the

twentieth century required a new geocultural structure in the region that

was premised on national identities, in contrast to both the cultural

hegemony of traditional China as the Middle Kingdom and the cultural

hegemony of the West through the political form of the modern state.

With the emergence of a new sense of the nation as an ethnic people

separate from (and at times hostile to) the political state, Japanese impe-

rialists, ideologues, civil servants, and others were able to portray mod-

ern China as a nation in search of a state, while Korea's ethnic identity

could be negated in favor of an ethnically assimilated Japanese empire.

The same logic of ethnic nationality appealed to those Japanese inter-

ested in dividing China into different ethnic groups and thereby provid-

ing the grounds for legitimizing the new nation-state of Manchukuo. In

part, the power and durability of the concept of the ethnic nation as the

organizing principle for a New Order in East Asia rested on its ability to

respond to both longings for traditional cultural identities in a disorient-

ing new era and nationalist aspirations to resist modern forms of imperi-

alism and colonization.

As a political concept, the ethnic nation drew both from the reim-

agined cultural traditions of the newly conceived historical subjects of

the region and from a modern sense that the basic unit of political

membership in the world was the nation. This dual promise of the ethnic

nation as affording a more progressive political identity than dynastic

Confucianism as well as a more traditional identity than the modern

state lay at the very heart of Japanese imperialism in East Asia. We

should not forget that this discourse on East Asia as a geocultural arena

of ethnic identity projected Japanese concepts of self-identities and as-

sumptions onto others in East Asia with little concern for how well such

concepts fit actual lived experiences in the region. Such an awareness,

however, does not diminish the importance of this early-twentieth-

century Japanese representation of East Asia once we accept that all

geographical representations are in part imaginative constructions of

Narrating China, Ordering East Asia 107

spatial relationships. Yet, in both the specificity of its terms and the

power of its narratives, this discourse on East Asia in Imperial Japan

ironically helped establish the contours of subsequent attempts to imag-

ine East Asia as a coherent and meaningful geographical space.

NOTES

Research for this chapter was supported in part by an Asia Library

Travel Grant from the Center of Japanese Studies, the University of Michigan.

1. See Martin W. Lewis and Kiren E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A

Critique of Metageography (Berkeley and London: University of California

Press, 1997), for an exploration of the imaginative aspects of geography. For a

provocative application of the concept of "geographic imagination" to Japanese

history, see Karen Wigen, "The Geographic Imagination in Early Modern Japa-

nese History: Retrospect and Prospect," Journal of Asian Studies 51, no. 1

(1992): 3-29. Wigen adopts a microapproach to the problem of geography,

looking at a specific region in Japan rather than Japan's position in the East

Asian region, but her theoretical insights into the constructed nature of geogra-

phy apply to the approach I am suggesting here.

2. See, for example, Harry D. Harootunian, "The Functions of China in

Tokugawa Thought," and Bunso Hashikawa, "Japanese Perspectives on Asia:

From Dissociation to Coprosperity," both in Akira Iriye, ed., The Chinese and

the Japanese (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); Marius B. Jansen,

Japan and Its World: Two Centuries of Change (Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 1980); and Toyama Shigeki, Meiji ishin (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1951).

3. On the problem of China as a transnational cultural model (zhong-hua,

chunghwa, chuka) in the context of emerging nativism/nationalism in Japan, see

Harootunian, "Functions"; Stefan Tanaka, Japan's Orient: Rendering Pasts into

History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), esp. 203-5; and Ronald

P. Toby, "Contesting the Centre: International Sources of Japanese National

Identity," International History Review 7, no. 3 (1985): 347-518.

4. See especially Anthony D. Smith, "Capitalism and Nationalism," in

Nationalism and Modernism (London: Routledge, 1998), 47-69. See also Rogers

Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the

New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Walker Connor,

Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding (Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 1994); Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983);

and Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 1992). In Japanese, see Yamauchi Masayuki, Minzoku mondai

nyutmon (Tokyo: Chub Koronsha, 1996).

5. The only information about the author given in the text is that he was a

"Nakamura, Bachelor of Literature, who is conversant in history and currently

lectures on oriental history at the Tokyo Higher Normal School" (Preface to

Nakamura [Kytshiro?], KyokutO no minzoku [Tokyo: Minyisha, 1916], 3).

108 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

After an exhaustive search, and textual comparison with Nakayama Kyishiro's

(1874-1961) Toyoshi kOza dai-ni-ki zenpen (Tokyo: Ytizankaku, 1940), I have

concluded that the two men were one and the same. Nakayama, born Naka-

mura, was a renowned historian of China who graduated from Tokyo Imperial

University in 1899, studied in Germany, and was a lecturer at the Tokyo Higher

Normal School around 1910. He received his doctorate in 1925. On Nakamura/

Nakayama's name change, see Dai jimmei jiten: gendai hen (Tokyo: Heibonsha,

1955), 9:508.

6. Nakamura, 1.

7. Ibid., 4.

8. Ibid., 5.

9. Ibid., 6.

10. Han Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in Its Origins and Back-

ground (New York: Collier, 1944), 331.

11. Nakamura, 1-2.

12. Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (Reno: University of Nevada

Press, 1991), 11. This Western versus non-Western model of nationalism has

been criticized for extolling the West for possessing a superior model of national

identity. See Ronald Beiner, ed., Theorizing Nationalism (Albany: SUNY Press,

1999). My point, however, is that the same dichotomy between Western and

Eastern forms of national identity could be used to extol the virtues of the non-

Western ethnic nationalism as a pretext for reorganizing the region under Japa-

nese leadership.

13. Smith, National Identity, 13.

14. Nakamura, 35-37.

15. Eiko Ikegami argues for the Japanese concept of kokumin as an ap-

proximation of citizen and civic nation in her "Citizenship and National Identity

in Early Meiji Japan, 1868-1889: A Comparative Assessment," in Charles Tilly,

ed., Citizenship, Identity, and Social History (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1996). Yet, as she admits, the concept is closer to that of the political

nation than the citizen.

16. Nakamura, 6-9. Nakamura's list is not at all an idiosyncratic one. Most

early-twentieth-century commentators on the problem of the nation came up

with a similar list. In 1913, Stalin identified the elements of the nation as lan-

guage, territory, economic life, psychological makeup and a community of cul-

ture. See Joseph Stalin, "Marxism and the National-Colonial Question," re-

printed in Omar Dahbour and Micheline R. Ishay, eds., The Nationalism

Reader, 192-97 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press). In his 1917 Nation-

alism and Internationalism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917) - which had a con-

siderable influence on Japanese theorists of the nation - Ramsay Muir explored

the roles of geography, race, language, religion, common history, community of

economic interest, and the shared sentiment of being a nation as the key ele-

ments in the nation. While most theorists emphasized that no element or combi-

nation of elements was determinative for all cases, they were responding to

Ernest Renan, who as early as 1882 had explored race, language, religion,

Narrating China, Ordering East Asia 109

community of interest, and geography before concluding that the nation (which

he did not want to equate with the state) was merely a spiritual principle. See

Ernest Renan, "What Is a Nation?" in The Nationalism Reader, 143-55.

17. Nakamura argued that "the (ethnic) nation (minzoku) approaches

things from a blood and cultural perspective; the (political) nation (kokumin)

approaches things from a political and legal perspective: the two are not the

same" (10).

18. Ibid., 18-28.

19. Ibid., 28-30.

20. Ibid., 34-35.

21. Ibid., 35.

22. Ibid., 39.

23. Ibid., 121.

24. Ibid., 41-46.

25. Ibid., 47-48.

26. Ibid., 50. Later, Nakamura suggests that "one can understand how the

attitude toward Western countries [in late Tokugawa period Japan] grew so

deeply entrenched by recognizing that . . . the ethnic exclusive consciousness of

the Song and Ming people was directly transmitted to the late Edo period 'men

of high purpose' (bakumatsu no shishi)" (129).

27. Ibid., 57.

28. Ibid., 72-73.

29. Ibid., 89.

30. Ibid., 104-5.

31. Ibid., 106-7.

32. Ibid., 124-31.

33. Ibid., 133-34.

34. Ibid., 135-45.

35. The Japanese/Chinese term for a republic (dai kyOwa koku, da gong he

guo) more explicitly signifies (ethnic) harmony than the English republic.

36. Nakamura, 180-83.

37. Ibid., 186-207. Most of the Japanese sinologists Nakamura lists are

discussed in Tanaka, Japan's Orient, especially on pages 192 and 235-37.

Nakamura summarizes Ross's arguments on pages 207-40. Ross treats the Chi-

nese as a "race" in the most crudely racist manner (see Edward Alsworth Ross,

The Changing Chinese [New York: Century, 1914]). For example, in chapter 3,

"The Race Mind of the Chinese," Ross contrasts the "yellow men" of China

with the Anglo-Saxon "race" (51-69, at 52). His appeal for Nakamura appears

curious, given Nakamura's insistence on the distinction between [ethnic] nation

(minzoku) and race (jinshu) and his explicit rejection of race to describe the

Chinese as a group. In his summary of Ross, Nakamura does not translate Ross's

use of race as minzoku, nor does he miss the ethnic focus of Ross's analysis -

which in spite of the use of the term race does distinguish the Chinese from other

"yellow men" like the Japanese. Consequently, although Nakamura does trans-

late Ross's transethnic Anglo-Saxon race as anguro sakuson jinshu, he coins the

110 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

terms minshitsu and min'i to translate Ross's race fiber and race mind of the

Chinese, which Ross argues are distinct from those of the Japanese. See

Nakamura, 206-20.

38. One crude but suggestive measure of the historical significance Naka-

mura attaches to the various other ethnic nations in China is the length of

narrative history each receives: Manchus, 43 pages; Mongols, 47 pages; Uighurs

10 pages; Tibetans, 8 pages. The combined length of their narratives, presented

as chapter 3, "The Four Ethnic Nations of the Manchus, Mongols, Uighurs, and

Tibetans" ("Dai san-sho: Man Ma Ui ZO no yon minzoku") is, at 108 pages long,

only slightly more than half the 202 pages that narrate the Han ethnic nation in

chapter 2: "The Han Ethnic Nation" (Dai ni-sho: Kan minzoku"). The history of

China was mainly, one was supposed to conclude, the history of the Han ethnic

nation.

39. Nakamura, 351.

40. On the liberal discourse on ethnic nationalism in Japan around the time

of World War I, see my "Culture, Ethnicity, and the State in Early Twentieth

Century Japan," in Sharon Minichiello, ed., Japan's Competing Modernities:

Issues in Culture and Democracy, 1900-1930, 181-205 (Honolulu: University of

Hawaii Press, 1998).

41. Uchida Rybhei, "Shinajin no ganchu ni kokka nashi," Chiugai (January

1918); reprinted in Taisho dai-zasshi, 157-62 (Tokyo: Ryudo Shuppan, 1978).

42. Ibid., 160-61.

43. A succinct general history of the relationship between ethnic national-

ism and the events surrounding World War I may be found in Habu Nagaho and

Kawai Tsuneo, "Minzokushugi shisb," in Tamura Hideo and Tanaka Hiroshi,

eds., Shakai shisO jiten, 326-46 (Tokyo: Chio Daigaku Shuppanbu, 1982). There

are also many testimonies in interwar primary sources that assert ethnic national-

ism (minzokushugi) came into the public eye most forcefully after World War I,

and especially with President Woodrow Wilson's support for "ethnic nation self-

determination" (minzoku jiketsu). See for example, Kamei Kan'ichirb's state-

ment that "the word ethnic nation (minzoku) first appeared in print in actual

world politics after the Versailles Treaty" (Kamei Kan'ichiro, Dai tOa minzoku no

michi [Tokyo: Seiki Shobb, 1941], 301).

44. Tanaka, 149.

45. Ibid., 185.

46. Lee Joung-sik, "Nature and Characteristics of Nationalist Movement in

Korea," Korea Journal 6, no. 1 (1966): 9-10.

47. Lee Ki-Baek, "Historical View of Nationalism in Korea under Japanese

occupation," Bulletin of the Korean Research Center 27 (December 1967): 18.

48. Yun Kon-cha, "Minzoku genso no satetsu: 'Nihon minzoku' to iu jiko

teiji," ShisO 834 (December 1993): 25.

49. Nakayama Kei, "Chosenjin no na o zenbu nihon na ni henzubeshi-

chbzen minzoku doka no konpon saku," Nihon oyobi nihonjin (September

1924), reprinted in Taisho dai-zasshi, 156 (Tokyo: Ryado Shuppan, 1978). In

addition to providing examples of Japanese versions for some major Korean

surnames that played on linguistic similarities (Kim becomes Kaneda; Yi be-

Narrating China, Ordering East Asia 111

comes Inou), Nakayama offered a thirty-year plan for abolishing the Korean

language, intermarriage with Japanese, and allowing Koreans to serve as impe-

rial officials and be subject to the draft. He also foresaw little Korean resistance

to this plan since "when the Koreans see this, when they see that as Japanese

with a superior culture they are treated identically to native Japanese, their

former feelings of enmity will be swept away, and they will be happy to be

Japanese" (156).

50. Song Uk, "Han'guk Chisigin kwa Yoksa j k HyOnsil," Sasanggye,

April 1965, 215, cited in Lee, "Historical View," 8.

51. Nakayama, 154. Nakayama expressed the concept that I am calling

cultural genocide in a variety of ways. Along with the expression just quoted,

"chosen minzoku naru mono ga naku naru yo ni suru koto" make that which

defines the Koreans as an ethnic nation disappear), he expressed this same goal

as "karera ga chOsenjin de aru to iu koto no shOko zenbu inmetsu seshimuru

koto" (make them destroy all evidence that they are Koreans) (156).

52. Ibid., 156.

53. ChOsen sOtokufu keimukyoku, ed., Kokusai kyOsantO to shina kakumei

(Seoul: Chikazawa Insatsubu, 1930), 58.

54. Ibid., 114-116, 144. The phrase "weak ethnic nations" (jakushO min-

zoku) was often used interchangeably with "the oppressed ethnic nations" (hi-

appaku minzoku) in 1930s leftist affirmations of ethnic nationalism as an anti-

imperialist force. Both were also red flags, although ambivalent ones, to Japanese

imperialist officials, who knew their Soviet origins but could also adapt them to

mean the oppression of oriental nations by the West instead of the imperialist

oppression suggested in Marxist usage.

55. Ozaki Hotsumi, Gendai shinaron (Tokyo: KeisO ShobO, [1939] 1964,

141-42, 211-12. How central the problem of ethnic nationalism was for Ozaki

can best be discerned from his section on minzoku undo no tokushitsu (148-67).

See also the discussion of his concern with minzoku in Tanaka, 223.

56. The range of works that appeared during these years is too numerous

for a comprehensive listing, but the following sample provides a sense of the

magnitude of this discursive emphasis on ethnicity as the determinant unit of

East Asia: Komatsu Kentaro, Minzoku to bunka (Tokyo: RisOsha, 1939);

Izawa Hiroshi, Minzoku toso shikan (Tokyo: Sangabo, 1939); Takata Yasuma,

Toa minzoku ron (1939); Tanase JOji, Toa no minzoku to shakyO (Tokyo:

Kawade Shobo, 1939) (Tanase who worked for the Toa kenkyfsho actually

wrote three books on the problem of ethnic nationality in East Asia); Ma-

tsuoka Juhachi, Shina minzokusei no kenkyiu (Tokyo: Nihon Hyoronsha, 1940);

Kamei Kan'ichirO, Dai tOa minzoku no michi (Tokyo: Seiki Shobo, 1941);

Koyama EizO, Minzoku to jinkO no riron (Tokyo: Haneda Shoten, 1941)

and Minzoku to bunka no sho-mondai (Tokyo: Haneda Shoten 1942); Kaigo

Katsuo, TOa minzoku kyoiku ron (Tokyo: Asakura Shoten, 1942); the twelve-

volume Minzoku sOsho (Ethnic nation series) published by Rokumeikan in

1943, of which eight volumes dealt with Asian ethnic nations (the other three

were devoted to the Latin, Anglo-Saxon, and Slav ethnic nations); Ogawa

YatarO, ed., Nihon minzoku to shin sekaikan (Osaka: Kazuraki Shoten, 1943);

112 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

Hirano Yoshitaro, Minzoku seijigaku no riron (Tokyo: Nihon Hyironsha,

1943); and Minzoku kenkyajo kiyO (Tokyo: Minzoku Kenkyujo, 1944). Numer-

ous translations on Chinese ethnicity also appeared, including Suyama Taku's

translation of Henry Rudolph Davies's Yun-nan: The Link between India and

the Yangtze (with a preface by Okawa Shfmei) as Shina minzoku ron (Tokyo:

Keii Shobo, 1940). Oguchi Goro, an employee of the intelligence bureau

of the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, translated Song Wen-bing's Zhong-

guo minzu shi as Shina minzoku shi (Tokyo: Daitb Shuppan, 1940).

57. Perhaps the most consistent advocate of a common East Asian ethnic

identity was Prof. Komatsu KentarO of Kansai Gakuin University. In his Min-

zoku to bunka (Tokyo: RisOsha, 1939), Komatsu had made it clear that "the

ethnic nation (minzoku) is not limited simply to blood groups . . . [R]ather, the

ethnic nation . . . is a complex social group" (40-41). A few years later,

Komatsu offered this ethnic concept of the nation in which blood mattered but

was not the sole criterion, as the key to "forming a Greater East Asian ethnic

nation." As he put it, "Those called the yellow race (kiiro jinshu) who live in

Greater East Asia have intermarried due to regional proximity. . . . This situa-

tion has given rise to a distinctive race (tokushoku aru jinshu) and is the basic

premise for considering the Greater East Asia ethnic nations as a single ethnic

nation (dai tOa minzoku o hitotsu no minzoku to miru konpon-teki no joken)"

(Komatsu Kentaro, "Dai toa minzoku no keisei," in Ogawa, Nihon minzoku,

109-10).

58. Ozaki, Gendai shinaron, 240 (also cited in Tanaka, 224). Tachibana

made these comments in the midst of a roundtable discussion held on May 31,

1940, on "The Social Composition of the Orient and the Sino-Japanese Future"

with Ozaki, Hosokawa Karoku, and Hirano Yoshitaro. The proceedings were

published in the summer-fall 1940 issue of Chti kOron.

59. "TOa minzokushugi no kOyo," Toa 13, no. 9 (1940): 1-2.

60. Ibid., 2.

61. Kamei, Dai tOa minzoku, 225 (Tokyo: Seiki Shobo, 1941).

62. Ibid., 261-62. The emphasis is mine, although the interjection about

race in contrast to the ethnic nation is Kamei's.

63. Ibid., 174-78.

64. Ibid., 178-81.

65. Roger Griffin, Introduction to Fascism (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1995), 4.

66. Among his many books, Kamei also wrote Nachisu kokubO keizai ron

(The Nazi theory of national defense economics) (Tokyo: Toyo Keizai Shup-

panbu, 1939), in which his Nazi sympathies are also explicit. The fact that he was

arrested and convicted for criticizing Prime Minister Toj o in 1942 (his sentence

was suspended) is only further evidence of the extremist nature of his national-

ism and the complicated relationship between the modern Japanese state and

ethnic nationalism. Many extreme nationalists, like Kamei and Nakano Seigo,

were critical of Tajo. For a general outline of the relationship between the

wartime Japanese state and ethnic nationalists, see my "Nationalism as Dialec-

tics: Ethnicity, Moralism, and the State in Early Twentieth Century Japan," in

Narrating China, Ordering East Asia 113

James W. Heisig & John C. Maraldo, eds., Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto

School, & the Question of Nationalism, 174-96 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii

Press, 1994).

67. See, for example, George Macklin Wilson, "A New Look at the Prob-

lem of 'Japanese Fascism,'" Comparative Studies in Society and History 10, no. 4

(1968): 401-12; Peter Duus and Daniel I. Okimoto, "Fascism and the History of

Prewar Japan: The Failure of a Concept," Journal of Asian Studies 39, no. 1

(1979): 65-76; Miles Fletcher, "Intellectuals and Fascism in Early Showa Ja-

pan," Journal of Asian Studies 39, no. 1 (1979): 39-63; and Gregory Kasza,

"Fascism from Below? A Comparative Perspective on the Japanese Right, 1931-

1936," Journal of Comparative History 19, no. 4 (1984): 607-29.

68. Takata Yasuma, "SOkan no ji" in Minzoku kenkyitsho kiyi, 1.

69. Takata Yasuma, "Minzoku seisaku no kicho," in ibid., 17-18.

70. Nakano Seiichi, "TOa ni okeru minzoku genri no kaiken," in ibid., 45.



PART 2

Nostalgia and Loss in the Formation of

Modern National Identity



Chapter 4

Discoveries of the HOryuji

Stefan Tanaka

Today the Hotyuji is synonymous with beginnings, origins, antiquity,

and so on, temporal metaphors that establish its authenticity and impor-

tance as an archetypal Japanese temple. I have been struck by the num-

ber of times important figures in the Meiji period are said to have

"discovered" the Horyuji (or parts thereof). There is no doubt that

today the Horyuji is a central artifact in the history of Japan; that is the

issue in this essay, exploring the reasons why a lesser temple has gained

this preeminent stature.1

These discoveries of the Horyuji are indicative of a reconceptualiza-

tion of society and the world in which elements of the past, indeed, the

past itself, gain new meaning. The use of the word discovery in reference

to man-made objects signifies that such objects must be "forgotten,"

that is, displaced as unimportant, and then resignified according to a

different meaning system that revalues certain aspects of that object. In

modern societies, that meaning system is a new epistemology in which

time becomes the primary basis upon which society is organized. Discov-

ery makes claims for the originary moment of a continuous narrative, in

this case of the nation-state. It provides that moment from which devel-

opment can be described as well as the point from which distinctions

(hence unity) occur. In the case of the archipelago, Meiji intellectuals

discovered artifacts, such as the Horyuji, to give meaning to an idea of

Japan, a unitary place both connected to and apart from the continent.

An interesting aspect of modernity is the rather paradoxical contra-

distinctions that are sublated, for example, separation and totalization,

the universalizing epistemology that is based upon careful distinctions

from outsiders, and mobility and stability, claims to newness that require

an elevation of the old. Henri Lefebvre describes this obsession with

pasts:

117

118 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

This period which sees and calls itself entirely new is overcome by an

obsession with the past: memory, history. History begins hic et nunc,

with the here-and-now, with each passing minute. Historical becom-

ing is immediately upon us, and immediately it becomes history,

known and recognized historicity, historical consciousness, chained

to a vaguely distant past according to which the present vainly at-

tempts to situate itself.2

To articulate that past, a new conceptualization of time was also neces-

sary, that of progress, one that used the past but also separated the

present from it. This articulation of a different time, moreover, requires

the rearticulation of space, that is, how persons interact with their hu-

man and natural environments. Inside and outside were redefined but in

such a way that outside has been defined in national terms while other

forms of alterity have been occulted (through incorporation) by the new

space of the nation. Describing a passage by Walter Benjamin, Peter

Osborne comments on this reorientation through a shift in the meaning

of tradition:

Yet it contains some of Benjamin's sharpest insights, not only into

modernity as a destruction of tradition, but also into the production

of the idea of tradition within modernity as its inescapable dialecti-

cal other.3

Tradition in the first instance consists of those habitual and customary

codes that connect people to the natural (and supernatural) world. Tradi-

tion in the latter instance is an idea - of course grounded in the empiri-

cism of history - that gains significance within modernity but always as

its other.

The discoveries of the Horyuji - the destruction of Buddhist icons in

the initial years of the Meiji; the first survey of its contents in 1872,

ordered by the central government (Dajokan); the Nara exhibition held

on the grounds of the T6daiji, where artifacts from the Horyuji and

Shos6in were displayed; the discovery of the Kannon in the Hall of

Dreams (Yumedono) by Okakura Tenshin and Ernest Fenollosa; and

the explication of an architectural history of Japan by Ito Chuta - are

indicative of such a transformation of tradition. They indicate a search

for new temporal and spatial meanings to incorporate pasts into a uni-

fied nation-state, to what Lefebvre calls a representation of space. Each

Discoveries of the HOryaji 119

discovery served as an originary moment for a particular narrative about

the past as a symbol of power, as evidence of an imperial legacy, as a

repository of Asian art, and as a historical site and datum for the unfold-

ing of Japan.

Heteronomous Traditions

Around the time of the Meiji Restoration, people living in the vicinity of

the Horytiji called it a bimbOtera (poor temple).4 It was in dilapidated

condition: after the cadastral survey in 1585, Hideyoshi reduced the

Horyiji's annual stipend to twelve hundred koku, and two decades later

Tokugawa Ieyasu lowered it to a thousand.5 Such a reduction of financial

resources obviously reduced its power and influence and also forced

priests to become rather enterprising. On two or three occasions, they

took sacred objects - especially a statue of and relics related to Shotoku

Taishi- on degaicho to the Ekoin in Edo. (Dl)egaicho were the tempo-

rary unveilings of sacred objects outside temple grounds to tap support-

ers of and foster more support for temple icons, as in the case of the

Horyuji, the Taishi cult which worshiped Shotoku Taishi. They also sold

trinkets - hanging and stone lanterns - at the temple to worshipers of

the Taishi cult for placement before the ShoryOin (Chapel) and Saiendi

(West Round Hall).6

Discovery One: Pasts Prior to History

At the outset of the Meiji period, the new government cut the temple's

stipend to 250 koku and in 1874 reduced it again to 125. But more

troubling than poverty was the discontent directed toward Buddhist

temples at the beginning of the Meiji. One of the first laws of the new

government, separating bodhisattva and kami (shinbutsu kyari), set off

the widespread pillaging of Buddhist temples (haibutsu kishaku), many

of them former sites of political and economic power.7 Buddhist statues

were decapitated; sutras and other texts were destroyed; buildings were

burned, torn down, or sold; and priests and monks retired en masse.8

Destruction at the Kofukuji, the most powerful temple in Nara through

the Tokugawa period, was considerable. Books were either burned (the

bonfire reportedly lasted for more than three months) or their pages

were used as wrapping paper for lacquerware or as lining for tea boxes.

The three-roofed pagoda was sold for thirty yen, and local officials

120 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

proposed to burn down the five-roofed pagoda but demurred, fearing

the spread of fire.9 Fortunately this pagoda was not burned, but it

was saved not to preserve an invaluable artifact but out of the fear

that nearby houses and shops would also be destroyed. In contrast,

the Horyuji was largely spared, probably due to its lower status, rel-

ative isolation, and the popularity of the Taishi cult.10 Nevertheless, the

bimbodera was dilapidated: many monks had retired or left the temple,

local government officials proposed the demolition of the cloister walls

on both sides of the south gate (nandaimon), and cows and horses were

housed inside the cloister.n In other words, the years of relative obscu-

rity throughout the Muromachi and Edo periods facilitated forgetting

or indifference toward the temple that would be critical to its transfor-

mation into a Japanese archetype. It was not completely forgotten; it

was part of that social space of the everyday where farmers could keep

their livestock.

This first discovery of the Horyuji was far from a pivotal moment in

its elevation to archetype. Indeed it was not a discovery at all; instead, it

is indicative of a rejection of the past, the immediate past, and a disre-

gard for the significance of this site in the emergence of a "Japan." In

fact, it shows that time, the past, was not important to the present, that

the temple was indeed part of the present, but one connected to a

disgraced power structure that oversaw local matters. Second, there is

no Japan or East Asia here. The space that the Horyuji represented was

of the immediate environs (the village of Horyuji or Ikaruga) and the

believers who comprised the Taishi cult. It would be a leap to extrapo-

late the latter into evidence of a nation.

Discovery Two: Loss of Function

In May 1871, the Dajokan, concerned about the destruction of objects

from the ancient and recent past, issued an edict on the preservation of

old things. It states:

There are not a few benefits of some artifacts and old things in the

investigation of today's transformation from old to new and of the

history (enkaku) of systems and customs. It is natural to hate the old

and struggle for the new, but actually we should lament the gradual

loss and destruction of evil customs (ryahei).12

Discoveries of the HOryfiji 121

This is the first recognition of the importance of the Horyuji as past,

what can be called "discovery." It contained old things, especially those

tied to the emperor. One of the results of the edict was that the Minis-

try of Education sent out an investigatory team, headed by Machida

Hisanari. Machida was a key figure who first recognized the continuity

between modern society and its past while on a study tour in Europe.

The survey began in May 1872 and lasted four months, with the team

visiting Kyoto, Osaka, Kanagawa, Shizuoka, Aichi, Watarai, Sakai,

Ashigara, Shiga, Wakayama and Nara.13 Machida was accompanied by

Uchida Masao and Ninagawa Noritane, who was in the exhibition sec-

tion (hakubutsukyoku).14

Although it was not articulated in this way, Machida's observation is

a recognition that modern society has no fixed referent. Modernity,

itself, is the subject.15 One effect is the loss of previous congruence

between meaning and object or, in Benjamin's terms, the destruction of

tradition (as custom and habit). This issue, of course, is not new; intellec-

tuals and commoners in transforming societies have constantly searched

for the limits of change, the point where society will no longer be recog-

nizable to its anterior rather than as another homogenized place. We

must remember that the nation fills this vacuum; the idea of nation

becomes that referent, the particularities of the past, customs destroyed

by modern liberal-capitalist forces, are reemnplotted as "traditions" au-

thorizing the nation as an immanent form.

This survey designed to confirm the existence of and record artifacts

was the first step in preservation efforts, that is, to establish that referent

or the idea of tradition within modernity.16 One of the aspects that

stands out most clearly is that, historical rhetoric notwithstanding, from

this early date the new leadership shows concern for old things along

with an insistence on transformation to the new. To best facilitate that

transformation to the new, the administrative personnel in the DajOkan

saw value in retaining the past, that is, old things. Ninagawa's draft

report of the survey complains of "a foreigner's" observation that Japa-

nese like novelty and shun old things and that people were selling arti-

facts from the temples and shrines of the western capital (Kansai). He

then warns that if this continues in a number of years there will be no

evidence of the ancient country (kuni no jOidai no jiseki).17 Ninagawa is

advocating the establishment of museums as sites for preservation and

display. At this early stage of the new state, we see recognition of the

need for history (enkaku). The past and wide dissemination of this

122 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

information - the education of the population - would foster belief in

the nation.

But we must not go too far. There is an idea of history, but it is

enkaku (closer to chronicles and accounts, histoire) not rekishi (today's

linear notion of developmental time).18 There is little teleology. At this

point, the Dajokan seemed concerned about destruction and neglect,

but a belief in value did not necessarily correspond to an articulation of

what that value is. Moreover, despite this newfound concern for the

past, not all shared it, especially those, such as temple officials, who

were in dire need of money - why not pawn a statue or painting rather

than watch a mob destroy it - for food or maintenance as well as those

who quickly learned a central tenet of modernity, self-interest.

More important, this event indicates a growing sense of separation

of the present from the past. Things are important because they are old,

not because they are tied to some form of belief or spirituality. The

materiality of the object or textual data takes precedence over the idea

and transmitted knowledge. Buddhist items that lost their connection to

previous ideational and political structures were deemed at this moment

particularly "worthless," their materiality as old not yet established. But

even in the desire to save there is a nostalgia, a fear of loss that is only

possible through recognition that an item is currently of another world.

Here the past becomes foreign.19 It is a separation that is necessary for

the production of history.

We must be careful not to confuse this interest in the past with our

current knowledge of Japanese history. Indeed, these men have largely

been forgotten. I believe that the principal reason for their demise was the

lack of history, especially the history of the nation (and East Asia) as we

know it today. Their past is not yet nation, national, though it is moving in

that direction.20 Ninagawa's invocation of the "foreigner" can at best be

read as a lament that Japan is discarding its charming artifacts; the delinea-

tion of this past as proof of distinct national cultures - Japan, China,

Korea, and so on-is absent. Ninagawa's interest in using artifacts to

educate the inhabitants indicates both an early recognition of the impor-

tance of the past in fostering support for the new government and the still

unformed idea of the nation-state. But, more important, the objects that

these men deemed important indicate that the national history had not yet

been written.

The principal object of the survey's attention was the Shosoin of the

Todaiji, probably because of a connection with the imperial family.21

Discoveries of the HOryuiji 123

The survey of the ShosOin, which lasted for twelve days, is indicative

of a veneration for old objects not seen throughout its history. From the

middle part of the Heian period, the objects in this storehouse had been

largely forgotten. Tastes had changed; the Tang culture that such objects

represented were pass6 (tai) having become commonplace from fre-

quency of intercourse as well as a changing style. When they had been

remembered since, it was often for a particular object, called an OjukkO

(an aromatic wood also known as ranjatai) related to an incense-smelling

game popular around the Muromachi period. The storehouse had last

been opened in 1833. The transformation that the 1872 survey set off is

summarized in the introduction to a recent history of the Shosoin: "It is

now always included in history textbooks, and today there is nobody

who does not know of the treasures of the Shosoin. But the attention

paid to these treasures is not very old."22

The transformation of the Shosoin is evident in the ceremony con-

vened to open its doors in 1872. It was a great event; Uchida likened the

excitement to a wedding ceremony or marriage meeting (miai). Nina-

gawa's diary records the anticipation; he writes:

We followed the procedure for removing the treasures from storage.

Present were Governor Shijo and three lower officials; among the

temple priests, one colored robe, three white robes, and six black

robes; ten temple officials; and four carpenters and blacksmiths. At

the storehouse, the previous day a platform across the front about

1.8 meters deep and a ramp were built. On a stage, the priests lined

up on the left and officials on the right; they sat on chairs. After

twelve o'clock we commenced the ceremony. A black-robed priest

called the yakushiin and four carpenters went up to the platform and

used a lever to remove the gate bolt from the south door, and then

they removed that of the middle and north. And then the head

priest (shiseibO), wearing a perfumed robe, removed the official

temple seal from the lock on the south; next the yakushiin removed

the bamboo wrapping of the imperial seal from the middle and

north. And then Seko [Nobuyo, the imperial envoy] went up, took

the imperial seal, and showed it to all. We looked. And then the

yakushiin took all seals from the lock. And then they inserted the

key. And then they opened the door, and everyone entered. They

removed ten long boxes, and the temple officials carried them to the

head priest. And then they closed the doors as before and removed

124 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

the lock. At this time, lots of people came from everywhere to look.

A line formed, and they opened the boxes.23

The continuous use of "and then" (tsugi) suggests the careful ritual

procedures the priests followed. It also suggests some exasperation at

the length of the ceremony; indeed, the sudden attention of many

people when the boxes were opened suggests a transformation of mean-

ing whereby the ritual had lost significance. Indeed, it was during the

process that Uchida in a conversation with Machida mentioned that his

feelings were like those of a wedding ceremony. The priests were con-

ducting the ritual, for the first time in thirty-nine years, as they remem-

bered it. Their ceremony indicated the value of imagination of what is

not seen. For the survey team, the value was in knowing and seeing,

something to be cataloged and displayed.

They were not disappointed when they finally saw the contents.

Ninagawa's account marvels at the craftsmanship of the objects, espe-

cially the koto, flutes, go boards, and boxes; they return him to the past,

a sense of the eighth century. He writes, "It is sufficient to envision the

ancient system (sei)."24 But the list of objects is different from today's

standard inventory of important objects from that age; in particular,

there are few Buddhist icons. Moreover, in the text I have seen Nina-

gawa does not distinguish what is Japanese from artifacts from the conti-

nent (or even the subcontinent).

The survey culminated three years later with the Nara Exhibition

(Hakurankai), which was held in Todaiji (another survey was conducted

to prepare for this exhibition). A phenomenon of the new international

world of the latter half of the nineteenth century was the plethora of

exhibitions and world's fairs.25 Indeed, one of the reasons for the 1872

survey was to locate material to send to the world's fair in Vienna.

Exhibitions were one of the new organizational forms through which

culture and technology could be distilled into a presentation for large

audiences. Public displays per se were not new, but the purpose was

quite different. A key difference was the prevalence of old objects, which

were usually displayed with little sense of historical order. Meiji displays

were usually public (i.e., sponsored by central and local governments),

presented as new, organized by categories rather than ownership, and

money making (they charged admission).26 Much of the Nara Exhibition

was historical, in particular, artifacts from the ShosOin and Horytiji; Nina-

gawa's hopes had come to fruition. At last, important objects that had

Discoveries of the Horyutji 125

been seen by so few people could be viewed by the vast public.27 But the

purpose of this exhibition, as well as most others, was to encourage indus-

try. Ninagawa also envisioned a connection between artifacts and the

production of a new arts industry of export items. In these early years,

artlike objects were seen as an important export commodity.

The display of these objects, however, indicates a transformation of

past cultural forms. First, the selection of the Todaiji represents a new

significance: it was a large enclosed site that could contain the exhibi-

tion. It no longer possessed the grandeur, spirituality, power, and wealth

of the past. It was now a public (i.e., empty) space (the closest thing in

1875 to a convention center) whose meaning depended on the contents

of the moment. The exhibition indicates a concern among government

officials to preserve important aspects of the past, especially those con-

nected to the imperial family and art objects, such as the register of

objects donated by Empress Koken to the temple and a cushion that had

once belonged to Shotoku Taishi.28 Religious objects did not dominate;

most of the objects, especially the large statues that now fill the art

history books on Japan, were not included. Those Buddhist icons that

were included were bronze statuettes of kannon and nyorai that demon-

strate the casting skills of Japanese artisans. The more famous of the 140

objects from the Horyuiji included in the exhibit were the Yakushi nyorai

from the main hall (kondO), the guardians Jikokuten and Tamonten, and

the Tamamushi shrine.

Perhaps the best indication of this transformation of meaning is the

removal of the Yakushi nyorai from the main hall of the Horyuji and its

display among many other objects in the Todaiji as an important artifact

of the past. This is a moment in the transformation of icons into aes-

thetic forms that grounds the process of change. The nyorai, the princi-

pal icon of the temple, was separated from that site and resituated in a

temporal framework as something old. The separation reflects that con-

tradistinction of mobility and stability. Old things (kyibutsu) become a

symbol of stability that can ground a rapidly changing society. More-

over, the removal of spirituality from this statue indicates an early stage

at which these objects become aesthetic images that speak for an ab-

stract idea, in this case a national past. Though not well framed yet,

Ninagawa's desire to display artifacts in order to inform the masses is an

early attempt at this integration of aesthetics into the project on moder-

nity. Lefebvre writes, "Aestheticism accepts the premise that there can

be such a thing as an art which can produce constructs and exceptional

126

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

moments while remaining in essence external to everyday life. It accepts

the premise that this art can penetrate everyday life from outside."29 The

icon was now outside, something for people to see (which was not usu-

ally possible in the past), and thus it penetrates the everyday. But it is

always outside, both as the distant past and, as will become evident

later, because of its connection to abstractions of the nation, the impe-

rial family, or fine art. This separation of the past from the present was

important to an emerging idea of the nation-state. It imposed a new

concept of time that organized and constrained people into a common

framework. It was a concept of the past as "experienced" by all. Those

who went to the exhibit saw evidence of the nation-state and experi-

enced the result of a specific sequence of changes that explained the

significance of what they had formerly known as a local site.30

The final moment of this discovery, the divestment of the objects

from their function, developed out of the exhibition and culminated in

1878.31 Chihaya JOcho, the head priest of Horytji, completed negotia-

tions with Machida for the donation of more than 300 objects to the

imperial household. In return, the temple received a donation of ten

thousand yen. From Chihaya's point of view, the donation would help

avoid the dispersal of the temple's objects (interestingly, they were now

seen as an integral collection), remind the government of the temple's

existence, and restore temple finances.32 In other words, it was neces-

sary to save the temple. All objects were not willingly relinquished; in

the early negotiations in 1876, the temple proposed donating 157 ob-

jects. The number was increased after a prefectural (Sakai) survey deter-

mined that the temple's buildings were so dilapidated that they could not

protect the objects. Some of the meaningful objects included on the final

list were shoes placed before the statue of a seated Shotoku Taishi (in

the Shoryoin), the sword from the statue of Mochikuni in the main hall,

and a brazier from the five-roofed pagoda. None of the large statues was

included.33 Yet from the viewpoint of Machida the donation was impor-

tant because it would provide a safe place to store the valued objects; for

Chihaya, the donated money would pay for repairs to the main hall

(kondO). But preservation in this case meant the restoration of struc-

tures of little value (at that time) at the cost of the most valuable objects

in the temple's history, which were shipped to a new museum in Tokyo.

It was the beginning of a system in which the nation-state would become

the abstract system that determined possession, not only in terms of

Discoveries of the Hioryiji 127

physical holding but in the criteria from which the objects gained their

meaning.

Discovery Three: Purity and the Temporalization of Space

In the 1880s, research on the history of the archipelago, especially a

reevaluation of the past, became quite pronounced. This has often been

mistakenly characterized as an anti-Western, neotraditionalist move-

ment. Yet the purpose was little different from that of Machida's survey

of artifacts: to understand the past in order to best develop a linear

trajectory of progress and educate the people as nationals. The differ-

ence in this period is a transformation in what was valued. This change

was part of a strengthening notion of Japan, especially the delineation of

what is Japanese, and the gradual separation of Japan from outsiders.

History (rekishi) became the primary means of effecting this transforma-

tion. Old objects, increasingly labeled as art, provided ready data for the

"writing" and visualization of that history.

The Horyuji was a central site in this reconfiguration. It was one of

the oldest extant temples, through Buddhism possessed of a history

connected to the continent as well as the imperial family, it had con-

tained a wealth of objects, and it was virtually untouched by the de-

struction of Buddhist icons (haibutsu kishaku). In other words, it con-

tained the data required to shift the past from a chronology of kingship

(i.e., the patronage of ruling families) to a history of Japan tied to the

Eurasian continent.

This shift was marked in 1884 by another commission sponsored by

the Meiji government, this time headed by C)kakura Tenshin (Kakuzo),

Kano Tessai, and Ernest F. Fenollosa. It is this commission that is usu-

ally cited for the discovery of the Kannon in the Yumedono of the

Horyuji. Both Okakura and Fenollosa claimed to have been the discov-

erer, the one who saved Japanese art. Each wrote a history of East Asian

art that has had a major impact on the field of East Asian art history.

Their overall narratives are very similar, almost the same, but the ways

in which they connect Japan to the outside differ. This difference is an

indication of a contestation over possession, whether the art of Japan

was to serve a national or universalistic (i.e., Western) purpose.34

Fenollosa's description, which is often phrased to show how he

"saved" Japanese art, raises the centrality of aesthetics - fine art - in the

128

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

formulation of belief in the nation. Thus, Fenollosa describes his "discov-

ery" of the Guze Kannon (Goddess of Mercy), a seventh-century gilt-

wood sculpture:

I had credentials from the central government which enabled me to

requisition the opening of godowns and shrines. The central space of

the octagonal Yumedono was occupied by a great closed shrine,

which ascended like a pillar towards the apex. The priests of the

Horiuji confessed that tradition ascribed the contents of the shrine

to Corean work of the days of Suiko, but that it had not been

opened for more than two hundred years. On fire with the prospect

of such a unique treasure, we urged the priests to open it by every

argument at our command. They resisted long alleging that in pun-

ishment for the sacrilege an earthquake might well destroy the

temple. Finally we prevailed, and I shall never forget our feelings as

the long disused key rattled in the rusty lock. Within the shrine

appeared a tall mass closely wrapped about in swathing bands of

cotton cloth, upon which the dust of ages had gathered. It was no

light task to unwrap the contents, some 500 yards of cloth having

been used, and our eyes and nostrils were in danger of being choked

with the pungent dust...

But it was the aesthetic wonders of this work that attracted us

most. From the front the figure is not quite so noble, but seen in

profile it seemed to rise to the height of archaic Greek art. . . . But

the finest feature was the profile view of the head, with its sharp

Han nose, its straight clear forehead, and its rather large - almost

negroid - lips, on which a quiet mysterious smile played, not unlike

Da Vinci's Mona Lisa's. Recalling the archaic stiffness of Egyptian

Art at its finest, it appeared still finer in the sharpness and individual-

ity of the cutting. In slimness it was like a Gothic statue from

Amiens, but far more peaceful and unified in its single system of

lines.35

Of course, this was not the "discovery" of an unknown object de-

spite the rhetorical flourishes. This passage reads differently when one

knows that artifacts of this temple were cataloged in 1872 and that many

were "donated" to the imperial household in 1878. One of the reasons

why the Yumedono was "forgotten" is that it is an eighth-century octago-

nal structure (not even unique) that had been built in the newer eastern

Discoveries of the Hiryiji

129

compound (tOmin). (The main hall, pagoda, and cloister comprise the

western compound, the oldest part of the temple complex.) Like Nina-

gawa's description, multiple pasts are evident, but in Fenollosa's words a

past, Benjamin's tradition as custom and habit, is replaced by the legacy

of anachronistic beliefs. The separation of statues from their former

religiosity (we must remember that many had a hand in this, from the

locals who participated in the destructive haibutsu kishaku movements

to those who pawned or sold temple possessions and priests who "will-

ingly complied" with a call for objects to be preserved and shown in the

museum) facilitated this creation of a pure form shorn of previous mean-

ing and open to new interpretations. The discovery of Fenollosa and

Okakura completed the separation of the contents from their site; now

statues became art, a form judged by its closeness to some pure aesthetic

ideal.

It is at this point that the alterity of the past is reintegrated into the

community - now as the past of the nation-state - and replaced with the

otherness of foreign places. Space is reconceptualized from symbolic

spaces to a unit within which subregions are connected directly to a

center.36 A narrative of development places a certain past into specific

temporal categories that explain the development of the present, that

center. In other words, the stabilization of the past - identification of an

origin - allows for a comparison with foreign places and temporal devel-

opments, reinforcing the past as a national, but now distant, earlier

stage of that nation-state. Through Okakura and Fenollosa's pens, the

Horyuji, or more accurately its statues, represents the originary mo-

ment, the Suiko period (552-645), of Japanese art history. Indeed, it

becomes the first evidence for a history of Japan. We must remember

that the earliest extant Japanese texts date to 710 and 712, the Kojiki and

the Nihon shoki, more than one century after the Horyuji was built.

Okakura proclaims this originary role of the Horyuji statues: "Without

doubt the extant artifacts of the Suiko period are the statues in the

HOryuji."37 The Horyuji and the Suiko period have become virtually

interchangeable; they signify that early moment, the rise from the primi-

tive to a cultural form. It is the beginning of a narrative of progress: the

connection to the continent, the coming of Buddhism, the rise of the

Yamato clan, and the formation of organized government (the Taika

reforms).

The selection of Buddhist icons for this history marks a significant

transition in the valuation of artifacts. Only six years earlier, the objects

130 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

displayed at the Nara Exhibition had spanned time from the seventh

century through the Tokugawa period; many were religious objects, but

most showed the temple's connection to the imperial family. Impor-

tantly, the display was composed of objects from the Shosoin and

Horyuji. But Okakura ignored most of those artifacts, instead focusing

on the large Buddhist statuary he identified as belonging to the Suiko

period. Old things were displaced for objects tied to a specific, originary

era. The objects of the Horyuji that gain importance are those statues

that for various reasons had remained at the temple. Moreover, the

elevation of these Buddhist icons (still with their heads) supplanted

artifacts more closely tied to the imperial family. Objects from the

Shosoin are now located in a time line as Tenpyo (710-94) artifacts,

separating them from the Horyuji. This is especially interesting when

they are placed in the context of the emergence of State Shinto. It seems

to mark that contradistinction of modernity, the stable and mobile, now

as timeless and timeful. Here spirituality is one of those abstractions that

would determine the subjectivity of the nation and establish the grounds

for possession of objects. Buddhist icons become historicized, an impor-

tant example of spirituality in the narrative of national development,

while the imperial system becomes sacred and eternal, removed from

history.

The explanatory power of this origin is twofold: to establish the

ahistorical character of the nation-state and to make connections to the

expanded world, both ancient and contemporary. First, one of the para-

doxes of the modernity is the simultaneity of mobility and stability - the

constant change in a narrative of transformation raises questions, anxi-

eties, and fears brought on by the loss of foundational ideas and sym-

bols. The origin not only marks the first moment of the narrative, but it

also reestablishes those fundamental forms. Suiko marks that moment

when "Japanese" characteristics - always from or compared to foreign

qua national objects - become evident.

The key to the discoveries of Okakura and Fenollosa is in the orga-

nizing structure, a Hegelian notion of aesthetics that establishes these

objects as the fine art of a Japan and connects them to other significant

parts of the world: in Fenollosa's case, ancient Egypt and Greece, Han

China, Gothic France, and Renaissance Italy; and in Okakura's writings

as examples of Japan's superior spirit.38 The temporal markers in

Fenollosa's description make possible a comparative narrative that re-

inforces the idea of the nation. Okakura's version of the opening of the

Discoveries of the Horyuji 131

Yumedono differs slightly from Fenollosa's in ways that emphasize the

nation-state. While acknowledging the former spirituality of the Guze

Kannon as a "secret Buddha" (hibutsu), he positions it in a superior

position to European forms:39 "The sculpture of Greece is something to

boast about, but I believe that when contrasted with our art of the Nara

period, the latter is not a bit inferior. It is just that the difficulty is in the

comparison. In judging the source of ideals in such things as religion and

literature, Greece is depictive, Nara is idealistic."40 Nara is both a tempo-

ral category of early Japan and a place, a metonym of Japan.41 Okakura

connects these objects to a framework that explained the development

of the nation by using Greece (i.e., the West) to reinforce the idea of the

nation. Once the parameters of place are established, by placing objects

in subsequent temporal periods such as the Nara, which follows Suiko

(also called Asuka), Buddhist icons become art objects that are used to

demonstrate the development of Japan. Okakura, for example, de-

scribes the qualities of later periods as artistically more refined, charac-

terized by influences principally from the Tang and later Song dynasties.

A second change that stabilizes pasts from alter to same is facilitated

through the identification of essential characteristics made evident

through the careful study of art. Okakura finds a spirituality (Buddhism),

a sense of harmony (the naturalism and serenity of the objects), and

adaptability (the keen sense of adapting important aspects of foreign

cultures and harmoniously assimilating them into one's own). Old things

are celebrated for a "patina of age" that Okakura defines through an

immanent characteristic, the concept of kOtan (refined simplicity), a cele-

bration of a lack of complexity in earlier periods. But spirituality here

shifts from Buddhism as a religion to Buddhist icons as a reflection of

reverence for nature.42 What was once seen as outmoded, is now depicted

as evidence of an earlier, fundamental characteristic of the nation.

Harmony is used to occult the simultaneity of mobility and stability.

The transformation, learning, and adaptation necessary for a develop-

mental, progressive society potentially indicate a lack of continuity, but

harmony demarcates difference along national boundaries that mark

indigenous characteristics in juxtaposition with forces of change from

the outside. Okakura locates this in an innate characteristic of all Japa-

nese, yabi. In his Ideals of the East, he describes this notion of beauty in

terms of harmony: "It modified the tilted roofs of Chinese architecture

by the delicate curves of the Kasuga style, in Nara. It imposed their

feminine refinement on the creations of Fujiwara." In other words, the

132 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

national genius has never been overwhelmed. There has always been

abundant energy for the acceptance and reapplication of the influence

received, however massive.43 "Proof" of this characteristic is provided

by the otherness of the West - gentleness contrasted with harshness,

hills with mountains, and rice paddies with oceans.

Finally, adaptability is a corollary of the idea of harmony. Okakura

writes of Japan's early contacts with China:

The wars and disruptions of China made our country a sanctuary for

her exiles and repository of her art works, and we have deliberately

sought her teachings by sending over our scholars from the very

earliest times. . . . There has never been any lack of lively national

feeling, or of ability to discriminate what suits our peculiarities and

to reject the dross.44

Here Suiko also serves as the moment that allows the identification and

separation of a Japan (note that the nation is now assumed) from China,

East Asia, and even ancient Greece. Now Buddhist doctrines and icons -

a predominant epistemology of the elite for almost fifteen hundred

years- is foreign. He says, "One can say in actuality of the origin of our

country's art that a major portion came from foreign countries."45 Having

such a foreign heritage is not disgraceful; he acknowledges that Japanese

culture was coarse and simplistic before cultural interaction. He points to

the way in which Western civilization (especially the United States, En-

gland, Germany, and France) has incorporated ancient Greece and Rome

as its own. According to Okakura, it is inconceivable to discuss the rich-

ness of Suiko without reference to Japan's earlier occupation of Mimana

(a kingdom on the Korean Peninsula) or its direct contact with the Six

Dynasties.46

In other words, by harking back to the Six Dynasties Okakura con-

nected the archipelago to Eurasia and also provided for the separation of

Japan from China. At that time, Chinese culture was well developed and

Japan's was rather primitive. But Japan adopted the best of the continent

and had become the repository for this new category of East Asian art.

Moreover, the comparison with the formation of the West, especially

ancient Greece, is a common strategy of Okakura's: Japan's development

was part of the same universal process that explains the rise of Western

civilization. The patterns or stages of change are identified by claiming

the past of another for oneself through national divisions.

Discoveries of the HiOryutji 133

This rather contradictory process is facilitated by slippage in another

totalized form that also establishes separation - a unitary "Asiatic" -

while feigning unity. The idea of a common Asian culture was also new

at this time, made possible by the presence of a West and its category

the Orient. Indeed, the above characteristics should each be seen in

relation to an idealized notion of the West as rational and competitive.

This is evident in the new significance of the Horyuiji as a museum of

East Asian culture. Artifacts of East Asian art, Okakura asserts, have

largely been destroyed by wars or decayed from neglect. Only Japan

has maintained such evidence. He writes, "Japan is a museum of Asi-

atic civilisation; and yet more than a museum, because the singular

genius of the race leads it to dwell on all phases of the ideals of

the past, in that spirit of living Advaitism which welcomes the new

without losing the old."47 Horyuji possesses the qualities - site of ori-

gin, original structures, and an intact collection - that embody and

possess a reunited past and present, the Asiatic. Here the temple gains

a new sacredness as a museum for the early art pieces of Japan (and

thus East Asia); it is important because it housed ancient objects that

simultaneously depict the history of Japan and explain Japan's incorpo-

ration of the best of Asia. But the lines between Japan as East Asian

and East Asia as foreign are quite blurry (and remain so at least up to

1945). Their maintenance relies upon a new faith that an Asia exists -

hard to dispute because of its long presence as an idea in the West -

and that the histories of its subcultures are and have always been

distinctive.

There is a contradiction in this formulation that has troubled subse-

quent writers - the simultaneity of Asia as both a part of Japan's past and

foreign. The resolution was the power of the overarching narrative of a

Japanese art that obscured the details of its foreignness. But this opera-

tion of elision occurs within the multiple images that statues possess. W. J.

T. Mitchell writes, "The true literal image is the mental or spiritual one;

the improper, derivative, figurative image is the material shape perceived

by our senses, especially the eye."48 The potential for two "images," the

material and the true, is not new to modern Japan, but there is a change in

the relation between the figurative and the true. Whereas the two images

were probably closer because they were rarely seen, now the images are

displayed. The "true" has shifted from connections to a religious mean-

ing to a likeness of the Japanese character, and because the figurative is

tied to impropriety and derivation - the foreignness of the icons, for

134 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

example - the priests' recollection that the Guze Kannon came from

Korea is deemphasized.

Okakura and Fenollosa did much to return the Horyuji to a level of

importance it had not seen for over a millennium. But it is an impor-

tance that is completely different, one that is now priceless for the

temple's contents. It reflects the divestment of all meaning previously

held by the temple (and its objects) and its replacement with a collection

of objects that stand as both an expression of Japaneseness and a mo-

ment in the evolution of Japan. The new framework established the

Horyfji as the metonym for the beginning of Japanese history, the point

from which contact was established with the world but also from which

an essence of being Japanese can be extracted.

Discovery Four: Repetition and the Sublation of

Space to Time

The 1880s and 1890s were decades of considerable historical skepticism

and positivistic research. Knowledge of the past that had been handed

down for centuries was questioned and exposed as myth. For example,

historians disputed Motoori Norinaga's long-accepted interpretation that

the location of Yamatai-koku, the kingdom of Wa (Japan) recorded in

the Wei chih, was in Kyushu. By the end of Meiji, this debate grew into

an institutional rivalry between the history departments of the Imperial

Universities of Tokyo and Kyoto, the former promoting Kyushu and the

latter Yamato. This debate was part of a general historical inquiry that

would lead to the writing of a "proper" history of Japan. Modernity,

paradoxically, needs the past; the nation-state must locate its origins,

explain its connections to other areas, and explicate its development (or

lack thereof).

The problem in this debate (as in all debates over origins) was the

realization that textual data, the Kojiki and Nihon shoki, are unreliable

and empirical data on protohistoric society are needed. As I have shown,

some artifacts, now constituted as art, were emptied of previous signifiers

and became important historical data. But this reorientation did not yet

extend to ancient architecture, especially shrines and temples such as the

Hokoji, ShitennOji, Horinji, and Horyuji, that predates extant written

texts. In contrast to the recognition increasingly accorded to selected

items among their contents, these old structures, though no longer being

torn down, sold, or burned, were suffering from considerable neglect.

Discoveries of the HOryiji

135

Indeed, in the case of the Horyuji the poor condition of the buildings was

cited as a reason to remove more artifacts to the imperial household than

originally planned.

A key event in the changing attitude toward these old buildings

occurred in October 1893 with Ito Chuta's lecture on the architecture of

the Horyuji, the last "discovery" of that temple.49 Ito investigated the

HOryuji as a graduate student at the Imperial University (Tokyo) under

the supervision of Tatsuno Kingo. The significance of this discovery is in

the incorporation of architecture into the narrative of Japanese history

and art history: the progressive narrative of architectural history re-

peated, thus further authorizing, the developmental narratives of Oka-

kura and Fenollosa; and, second, it brought spatial forms back into the

social orbit, though now as a site that is only significant in relation to

temporal categories.

Ito proclaimed the HOryuji to be the most important historical build-

ing in Japan: "When searching for the most remarkable lineage, the

oldest, and most superb construction among our country's architecture,

without hesitation, the first about which the public should know is the

Horyuji garan [the western complex, comprising of the main hall, pa-

goda, cloister, and gate] in Yamato. It is certainly no exaggeration to

declare the Horyuji garan as this country's most valuable ancient archi-

tecture."50 It was not the first Buddhist temple built nor the oldest extant

building. But it was believed to be the oldest complex to have survived

relatively intact; temple history claimed that the main complex was origi-

nally built in 607. The importance of originality was also tied to the

separated past that was now representing stability in modern society. Ito

continues, "Only our Horyuji has not altered its old appearance; thus,

we can experience the beauty of over a thousand years, come to under-

stand the ancient sages, and see the true beauty in the antique patina,

novel forms, and original methods."51 Here it is important to remember

that prior to the Meiji the most powerful temples and shrines, such as

the KOfukuji and Ise, were rebuilt periodically as an indication of their

power, wealth, and importance.

Subsequently, in December 1897 a commission on the preservation

of old buildings identified twenty for preservation and recorded sixty

objects as national treasures.52 This, however, was not the first recogni-

tion of or attempt to preserve buildings; in 1880, the Ministry of Home

Affairs had established a capital fund for the preservation of cultural

resources (bunkazai) and old things (furumono). Most temples and

136

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

shrines received small grants, hardly enough to begin basic repairs let

alone restoration; the two largest disbursements, 2,400 yen, went to the

Tamunomine Shrine and the Horyiji.

Ito recognized that he was not the first to bring the temple to the

attention of the modern public. In a rather backhanded way, he acknowl-

edges the contributions of foreigners such as Fenollosa and Bigelow; he

says that the temple's fame rose "in part from a strange, twisted interpreta-

tion produced from their curiosity and in part from careful examination of

their new discovery."53 This fame, he argues, resulted from the attention

accorded to the extraordinary sculptures, but it also demonstrates a deval-

uation of the temple itself. This devaluation is evident in Ito's first encoun-

ter, which provides quite a contrast to Fenollosa's impression.

When one arrives at Horyuji and first faces the south gate (nandai-

mon), there is a dignity that has not succumbed to the deep wounds

from battling hundreds of years of rain and dew. The roof is like the

open wings of a phoenix, and its curve resembles the powerful foot-

print of a lion. But, upon entering the gate and visiting the office, its

considerable dilapidation becomes evident. Floors are rotten, and

weeds are sprouting up; pillars are decayed, and a strange fungus is

apparent. The pitiable head priest, Chihaya, is blind in both eyes and

greets us from his sickbed. The haggard monk solitarily defends the

desolate temple. When one enters the compound (garan), the unpar-

alleled craftsmanship of long ago, the Asuka [Suiko] period, is re-

lived: the wonderful beauty of the layout of the gate, corridors, main

hall, and pagoda tower; the indescribably noble style of that form;

and the remarkable design of the columns, bracketing, rafters,

curved railing, and so on. But, unless one seriously undertakes re-

pairs, the damage will lead to a sorrowful state - the columns will

bend and lean, the main hall will fall into ruins, sacred objects will

scatter, and the tower will collapse-like when the cranes leave.54

We should remember that when Ito visited the temple, Chihaya had

already embarked upon repairs, using the funds from the donation of

artifacts to the imperial household and from the Ministry of Home Af-

fairs. This was the condition of the temple after some repairs!

Its condition notwithstanding, Ito compared the temple to the Par-

thenon of ancient Greece. Like Okakura and Fenollosa, he suggested a

Eurasian connection as far west as ancient Greece. (In 1902, he began a

Discoveries of the Horyutji 137

three-year journey on a donkey from Peking to Istanbul to trace this

development, specifically of Buddhist architecture.) And, like his prede-

cessors, he used a progressive time of cultural development that natural-

ized the nation while showing interaction with the continent. A major

difference between his narrative and Okakura's is the reintegration of

nature (as environment) into this history. In other words, architecture

provides the means with which to reintegrate space as a stable form in

the mobility of time - progress.

Ito argued that the Horytiji is located at the crossroads of pre- or

protohistory and history (or History). He acknowledges over a thousand

years of rule since the age of the gods, but he complains that this society

lived in darkness, that "everything, everyone was in a perpetual sleep,

as if dead." This condition is evident in architecture (more accurately,

what he imagined it to be). In its primitive state, architecture in Japan

reflects a simple society, the "perpetual sleep, as if dead." Buildings only

warded off the rain and dew; materials were natural, wood and bamboo.

The shrines of Ise and Izumo are the closest to this early, primitive state.

Then, "like a flash of lightening from the west, this darkness was lifted,

and the realm for the first time became light. Everywhere people rose

from their slumber and became active. This was the arrival of Bud-

dhism."55 At this time, it was not embarrassing, as it would become

later, to admit that early inhabitants, indeed, the mythical rulers, were

primitive. After the introduction of Buddhism, architecture changed:

"In our country architecture (kenchikujutsu) actually began after the

arrival of Buddhism, and we can say that the Suiko style is the origin of

our country's architecture."56 Buildings were larger, materials were

manufactured, and colors (ornamentation) were added. The imposing

structures created a sense of adoration/admiration well beyond their

functional requirements.57 As in art, the architecture of Suiko became

that originary moment, now as the first architectural style (ryiaha) or the

outset (hekitO) of Japanese architectural history that demonstrates trans-

formation and immanence. (Interestingly, the Shinto shrines, Ise and

Izumo, are omitted.)58 Like Okakura, the central premise of Ito's nar-

rative of progress is the need for occasional interchange with outside

cultures. But in this case, rather than basing change on the abstract

conceptual structure of the Hegelian idea, Ito grounds it in nature, the

moment of man's separation from nature in Japan.

This delineation of interaction refines the notions of inside and

outside and change and immanence, the problem of Asia as both the

138 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

same as and foreign to Japan that is evident in Okakura. Ito uses the

analogy of child rearing to naturalize categories of indigenous, Chinese,

and Western. The child, he argues, learns much from teachers and

friends, not just from one's parents. If one learns only from the latter,

then there would be little change in one's character, that is, little develop-

ment. Teachers and friends represent the outside world. Without educa-

tion, one is always a child. Without the outside world, architecture does

not change, a point proven in Ito's mind by looking at inner African

aborigines and Eskimos - always the child. In architecture, it means to

use the supply of materials, adopt what is suitable using the "knowledge

and natural talents of the people (kokumin)," and gain new skills

through training.59 As the metaphor of the child suggests, there is also

something essential and unique in the child. He states:

It goes without saying that architecture, the architecture of a certain

country, emerges from the conditions of that country's topography

(tochi)-in other words, what I call the national land (kokudo)-

and the needs of the humans that live in that land - what I call the

nationals (kokumin). Of course, in each region of the world there is

no place where the conditions of the national land is the same. ...

To use a metaphor of human life, children are born from a father

and mother and no child is exactly the same. The architecture, the

baby, which is born from the national land as mother and the nation-

als as father, is different throughout the world and none are the

same. . . In other words, in Japan there is what one calls a unique

(tokushoku) Japanese architecture, and naturally (tiozen) it is differ-

ent from the architecture of China and the architecture of Eu-

rope. . . . [T]his is the way the gods have made us. In other words,

Japanese architecture is eternally (eikyii) Japanese architecture; it

will not turn into foreign architecture."60

The similarities to Okakura's history are obvious. We need only

recall the status of these objects in the mid-1870s to see the transforma-

tion that had occurred. Near the end of the nineteenth century, an

understanding of a historical past was emerging, one that made good use

of tropes of modernity that occlude its own historicity. The idea of the

nation is naturalized in several ways. First, the idea of change necessi-

tates a baseline, nature, which is now confined to a series of fixed

conceptual (national) spheres. It is located in an originary moment,

Discoveries of the Horyuji 139

grounded in connections to (and separation from) the natural world, and

explained through the human body. The discussion of change, growth,

and interaction, while located in the certainty of the human body, is a

powerful analogy frequently found in progressive frameworks. But this

change and these very aspects facilitate the naturalization of a space

endowed with certain immutable characteristics that are removed from

the realm of history. The argument is circular, but, because it is located

in unquestioned (national) concepts, the conceived is conflated with the

phenomenal but in a way in which the former defines the latter. As with

the power of icons, the truth resides in an abstraction, not what is readily

visible.

Within this structure, the logic of nation and East Asia remains

unquestioned. History removes its own historicity from contestation; the

nation only develops through interaction with outsiders here, on the

Eurasian continent. This progressive scheme is central to the inversion

of relations between the archipelago and the continent. Ito acknowl-

edges the superiority of Chinese culture (the Six Dynasties) over Japan.

But this superior culture is turned around to indicate connection and

difference: "However, we should observe that the aesthetics of oriental

architecture have separately opened up a common universe [heaven and

earth, kenkon], and within the architectural world demonstrated a new

art form." The "oriental" is never really defined; moreover, Chinese

culture now stands in for Buddhist forms and ideas. That new art form is

that of Japan; in the process of adaptation, it took a middle path, not

opting for the grand, the ornate, or an esoteric transformation. In other

words, it took the best of the East and adapted it to its needs. But this is

not an innocent exercise in self-understanding; it also entails possession

of connections and relations with others. Ito writes:

In looking for representative examples of such architecture, in Korea

all the temples have been destroyed, the region of Inner Asia has long

been in decay, and Greek temples are too varied in their connection.

Fortunately, today Suiko architecture, which reached the pinnacle of

the eave style, is isolated gloomily in a cold village named Horyuji

in the region of the old capital, Nara. The village received its name

from this complex. In other words, the true value for the architectural

world is actually here in Horyiji. In its form, the desires of the

Chinese style are clearly evident. There are faint reminders of the

traditions of an Indian style, and the vestiges of a Greek style remain;

140 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

thus, interest [in the temple] is gradually increasing. Clearly, this

is the role of the Horyuji in the architectural world.61

In this narrative the Horyuji undergoes another transformation as the

model of Suiko architecture. The bulk of Ito's article discusses in detail

the key architectural features that identify the Horyuji as characteristic

of the Suiko style. He listed twenty-four features that set it off from

temples representative of later styles in the Tenchi (Hakuh0) and Tenpyo

eras. Beginning in the seventh century (645) Tenchi was indicative of a

changing influence, from the Six Dynasties to Tang culture. When It0

discusses other temples of this style, the three-story pagodas of the

Horinji and the HOkiji, an interesting shift occurs: the Horyuji becomes

that standard by which these earlier temples are judged. There was some

uncertainty at this time as to whether these pagodas originally had five

stories or three. Nevertheless, Ito says that their forms and techniques

place them on the same plane as the Hiryuji.62 He also mentions the

ShitennOji as being clearly Suiko (built by Shotoku) but ends by noting

that some parts, the overall form and details, were changed by later

generations. Interestingly, the Horyji becomes the standard by which

the other temples of Suiko are measured. Even though the pagodas were

built prior to the Horyuji, the latter is the standard for comparison, and

Ito also claimed in a note that the layout of the ShitennOji is very

strange.63 In other words, the HOryuji has been transformed from datum

to model.

This shift is common in history. Yet it is remarkable in the context of

discussions on the nation in which beliefs about the nation often persist

despite empirical data to the contrary. This is true of the Horyuji. We now

know that the current structures were not built during the Suiko period;

indeed, they are not even on the original site, nor do they have the same

layout as the original. Yet the temple retains its position as the founding

moment, the Suiko style.

Until 1938, scholars engaged in an often heated debate over the

period in which the existing garan of the Horyuji was actually built. The

implications could have questioned the temple's newfound archetypal

status. Contradictory evidence existed that the main temple complex, the

garan, had been destroyed by fire in the seventh century and rebuilt.

Until the Meiji period, most people accepted (if they cared at all) the

official temple account that the garan, though repaired and restored, was

original. Yet numerous textual accounts suggest conflagration; for ex-

Discoveries of the HiOryutji 141

ample, a passage in the Nihon shoki mentions that the temple at Horyuji

was completely burned in 670, while the JOgu Shotoku Taishi-den Hoke-

tsuki, a biography of Shotoku Taishi, reported a fire at Ikarugadera in

610.64 Around the 1890s scholars such as Suga Masatomo and Okakura

argued that the Nihon shoki could not be ignored, and most agreed that

the temple did burn and was probably rebuilt around 707. Yet architec-

tural evidence suggested that the temple, clearly different from the

eighth-century temples influenced by Tang China, could not have been

rebuilt in what would have been an anachronistic style, and in 1905 two

scholars, Sekino Tadashi and Hirako Takurei, separately wrote essays

arguing that the Horyuji is indeed original and could not have been

rebuilt. One of the strongest points of Sekino's argument was the use of

the Koma shaku (a unit of measure from Kokuri, one of the ancient

kingdoms on the Korean Peninsula) in the existing structure. He argued

that because the principal unit of measure was changed to the Tang shaku

in the Taika reforms (645) the Horyuji could not have burned and been

rebuilt with an anachronistic measure.

In 1938, archaeologists uncovered the remains of the Wakagusa-

dera. For decades, scholars had debated, ignored, conflated the names

used for the Horyuji, Wakagusadera, Ikarugadera, and Horyt gaku-

monji. Texts are ambiguous and often merit their conflation. The dis-

covery of the remains of the garan of the Wakagusadera to the south-

east of the present garan, however, proved the existence of an earlier

temple that had been destroyed by fire. Interestingly, the layout of this

temple was the same as that of the Shitennoji, called strange by Ito

when comparing it to the Horyuji. Since this discovery (as well as

evidence found during the restoration project in the 1930s), few have

disputed the notion that the garan of the Horyuji does not date to 607.

Current scholarship dates the rebuilding to the end of the seventh

century.

Interestingly, this locates the architecture of the Horyuji in the

middle of the Nara not the Suiko period. Indeed, there is no extant

temple complex of Suiko architecture. Yet many books still describe it as

an example of Suiko style; the originary role of the temple lives on. Now

it is important because it is old, very old. It rightfully belongs in the early

moments of narratives of Buddhist architecture. But these narratives are

interesting: while the text often acknowledges this archaeological evi-

dence, the overall narrative maintains the position of Horyuji as in the

Suiko style, as if it had been built in 607. The power, or "true," is more

142

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

in the connection to what is not seen, as a likeness of an ideal, than in

phenomenal (figurative) data.

Epilogue

In 1919, Watsuji Tetsuro published Koji junrei, his ruminations and

impressions of a pilgrimage to Nara. This text proved to be immensely

popular, and, as if produced in the advertising offices of Tsukiji, it

generated ridership for the new railway lines in Yamato. Watsuji's text

achieved the early aspirations of Ninagawa and Machida in the 1870s but

with an accumulation of knowledge and repetition of narrative frame-

work of their successors. His description is filled with now familiar com-

parisons, the columns whose entasis is similar to that of Greek temples,

the distinct curve of the roof compared to temples of Tenpy5 (such as the

Toshodaiji), the statues of Suiko compared to those of the Fujiwara

period, and Fenollosa's Mona Lisa.

Watsuji's discussion of Fenollosa is instructive. It exhibits his accep-

tance of the hagiography that has emerged, of Fenollosa (Watsuji does

not mention Okakura) as the discoverer of the Guze (Yumedono)

Kannon and the savior of Japanese art. The repetition, the narrative of

art history codified by Fenollosa, is evident, as is the struggle for posses-

sion. Watsuji does not agree with Fenollosa's analogies; in particular, he

is wont to point to the complexity and physicality of the West evident

through the Mona Lisa in comparison with the simplicity and transcen-

dence of the Kannon. He writes that the Mona Lisa, produced in a

climate of spiritual unrest and fear where there is a separation of body

and mind, expresses human hope and darkness, whereas the Kannon,

produced in a climate of simple spiritual needs where body and mind

were unified, expresses a freedom produced from deep meditation. In

other words, the Kannon is more transcendent and closer to some kind

of purity, "a mysteriousness difficult to describe."65

Watsuji questions other comparisons in Fenollosa's moment of dis-

covery: he denies any connection to Egyptian sculpture; accepts an eery

similarity between the Gothic statues of Amiens and the Kannon, which

he attributes to a religiosity of a young nation [italics original] (wakai

minzoku); and he virtually denies the Korean influence on this early art

and architecture. Watsuji's passage shows the further domestication of

the temple. He is further removing it from direct comparisons with the

West, instead retaining (and relying upon) an implicit otherness. The

Discoveries of the Horyiji 143

Kannon is more simple, meditative, and transcendent than anything in

Europe. It is also Japanese, not Korean.

By 1919, the Horyuji had come full circle: from a temple of the

political elite; to a relatively forgotten regional place; and by the Taisho

period, having survived the ravages of the destruction of bodhisattvas,

to a spiritual site as the origin of an interpretive structure of the nation-

state that could be experienced through the growing tourist industry.

This site is an archetype of the spirituality of the national past so stable

that data that contradict it cannot destabilize it. Perhaps now, in an age

of constantly shifting meanings and forms, the temple has attained a

stability beyond any period when it possessed a function as a religious

site. Watsuji begins his encounter with the Horyuji as follows:

On the following day, Mr. E and I set out in the morning for the

Horyuji. The weather was beautiful, and we were in good spirits.

From the [rail] stop for the Horyuji, we proceeded about a mile to

the village along a farm road, and as we got closer we could clearly

see the five-roofed pagoda. Our hearts danced, and we became

happier and happier; it was an exhilarating feeling.66

NOTES

I am thankful to Kevin M. Doak for the topic of this chapter; he

refused my initial suggestions and accepted a topic that at the time was only a

faint idea. Doug Howland, Masao Miyoshi, Suzuki Hiroshi, and Eiji Yutani

provided important help and suggestions that kept me on track.

1. As early as the eighth century, though still listed as one of the seven

great temples of Nara, the prestige and patronage of the Horyuji was declining,

having been eclipsed by the Todaiji.

2. Henri Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, trans. John Moore (Lon-

don: Verso, 1995), 224.

3. Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and the Avant-Garde

(London: Verso, 1995), 134-35.

4. Takada Ryoshin, Horyuji no nazo to hiwa (Tokyo: Shogakkan, 1993),

22.

5. In comparison, the Kofukuji received more than 15,160 koku, the

Todaiji 3,115 koku, and the Toshodaiji, Saidaiji, and Yakushiji 300 koku each

(ibid., 19-20).

6. E Kornicki, "Edo no kaicho," in Kitamura Gyoon, ed., Kinsei kaicho

no kenkya (Tokyo: Meicho Shuppan, 1989). Enterprise was not new to the

Horyuji priests in the Edo period. In the sixteenth century, they sold the contracts

144 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

of some dependent cultivators (myOshushiki) on temple lands (Ikaruga no sho) to

samurai, though because the peasants protested the temple was forced to return

the money. See Katsumata Shizuo, Ikki (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1982), 139-40.

7. This law is usually translated as the Law Separating Buddhism and

Shinto. I have instead followed Allan Grapard's practice, which recognizes the

syncretism of what we now separate as two distinct religions. See Allan G.

Grapard, Protocol of the Gods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

8. James Ketelaar describes the discovery of a graveyard of decapitated

Buddhist statues in Kyushu. It has now been turned into a local shrine, the Hall

of the Headless Kannon (Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan: Buddhism and

Its Persecution [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990], 57).

9. Murakami Senjb, Tsuji Zennosuke, and Washio Junkei, Meiji ishin

shinbutsu bunri shiryO, vol. 2 (Tokyo: TOho shoin, 1921), 171-73.

10. In contrast to 104 pages of material on the Kofukuji in ibid., the five

pages on the Horyuji were essentially speculation as to why it did not suffer

much damage. Murakami et al. suggest that in addition to the connection of

Shotoku Taishi to the imperial line the tutelary deity of the Horyuji was not on

the temple premises.

11. Takada Ryoshin, Horyuji, vol. 1, Rekishi to kobunken (Osaka: Hoi-

kusha, 1987), 88.

12. Nara Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan, ed., Nara kokuritsu hakubutsukan

hyakunen no ayumi (Nara: Nara kokuritsu hakubutsukan, 1996), 6.

13. Tokyo kokuritsu hakubutsukan, ed., Tokyo kokuritsu hakubutsukan

hyakunenshi (Tokyo: Tokyo kokuritsu hakubutsukan, 1973), 73-74 (hereafter

TKH100). Many of the site visits were rushed (including those to the Shosoin

and Horyuji) because the leaders had to return to Tokyo to participate in the

decision on the location of the proposed national museum. In addition to Ueno,

Oji was being considered.

14. Other members of this team were Kashiwagi Masanori, who copied

text; Yokoyama Matsusaburo, who photographed objects; Kasakura Tetsuno-

suke; and painter Takahashi Yuichi.

15. Drawing from Henri Meschonnic, Osborne writes, "'Modernity,' then,

has no fixed, objective referent. 'It has only a subject, of which it is full.' It is the

product, in the instance of each utterance, of an act of historical self-definition

through differentiation, identification and projection, which transcends the order

of chronology in the construction of a meaningful present" (Politics of Time, 14).

16. TKH100, 75.

17. Ibid., 77. Much of the information from this survey derives from

Ninagawa's unpublished diary, "Nara no setto." See also Christine M. E. Guth,

Art, Tea, and Industry: Masuda Takashi and the Mitsui Circle (Princeton: Prince-

ton University Press, 1993), 100-109.

18. See Reinhart Koselleck's account on the rise of Geschichte from

histoire in his Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith

Tribe (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 21-38.

19. David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press), 1985.

Discoveries of the HOrytuji 145

20. TKH100, 74-75.

21. Even though they did visit the Horyuji, little has been written about

that visit; see, for example, ibid. Interestingly, a recent history of the Horyuji

omits this survey, instead emphasizing the resourcefulness and resolve of the

head priest at that difficult time. See Takada Ryoshin, Horyuji senyonhyakunen

(Tokyo: Shinchosha, 1994), 89. The desire to tie the past to the emperor is

parallel to the rituals and pageants described by Takashi Fujitani that turned

the emperor into the public centerpiece of the nation (Splendid Monarchy:

Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan [Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1996]).

22. NHK Shosoin Purojekuto. Dokyumento Shosoin: 1200 nen no tobira ga

hirakareta (Tokyo: Nihon hoso shuppan ky6kai, 1990), 178.

23. THK100, 80.

24. NHK Shosoin Purojekuto, Dokyumento Shosoin, 183-84 (the quote

from 184).

25. See for example, Robert W. Rydell, All the World's a Fair: Visions of

Empire at American International Exhibitions, 1876-1916 (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 1984). For the transformation of public displays during the

Meiji, see F. Kornicki, "Public Display and Changing Values: Early Meiji Exhibi-

tions and Their Precursors," Monumenta Nipponica 49, no. 2 (1994): 167-96;

and Yoshimi Shunya, Hakurankai no seijigaku: manazashi no kindai (Tokyo:

Cho Koronsha, 1992).

26. Kornicki, "Public Display."

27. NHK Shosoin Purojekuto, Dokyumento ShOsoin, 185.

28. Tokyo kokuritsu hakubutsukan, Horyutji kenno homotsu mokuroku (To-

kyo: Tokyo Hakubutsukan, 1959), 4.

29. Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, 216.

30. Norbert Elias, Time: An Essay, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford:

Blackwell, 1992), 28ff., 76-80.

31. For a discussion of the relation between the function and subjectivity of

a divested object, see Jean Baudrillard, "The System of Collecting," in The

Cultures of Collecting, edited by John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 1994).

32. Takada, Horytuji senyonhyakunen.

33. For a list of the donations, see Tokyo kokuritsu hakubutsukan, HOryuji

kenno.

34. See my "Imaging History: Inscribing Belief in the Nation," Journal of

Asian Studies 53 (February 1994): 24-44.

35. Ernest F. Fenollosa, Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art, vol. 1 (New

York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1911), 50-51.

36. Yi-fu Tuan, Passing Strange and Wonderful: Aesthetics, Nature, and

Culture (New York: Kodansha, 1995).

37. Okakura Tenshin, Nihon bijutsushi, in Okakura Tenshin zenshu, vol. 4

(Tokyo: Rokugeisha, 1939), 47.

38. Hegel's history is but one of many linear frameworks from which Japa-

nese intellectuals drew.

146 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

39. The hibutsu were often the most sacred objects of worship in a temple,

shown rarely to enhance their importance. See Donald McCallum, ZenkOji and

Its Icon: A Study in Medieval Japanese Religious Art (Princeton: Princeton Uni-

versity Press, 1994).

40. Okakura, Nihon bijutsushi, 79.

41. In the chronologies used in art history, the Nara period generally ex-

tends from 645 to 794 and is divided into the Hakuho (645-710) and Tenpyo

(710-94).

42. Okakura, Nihon bijutsushi, 86, 263, 172.

43. Okakura Kakuzo, Ideals of the East (Rutland, VT: Tuttle, [1903] 1970),

19.

44. Okakura Kakuzo, "Japanese Temples and Their Treasures," in Col-

lected English Writings, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1984), 257.

45. Okakura, Nihon bijutsushi, 17.

46. At this moment in the nascent historiography of Japan, Korea could

still be the more advanced country. Okakura acknowledged that Chinese culture

had reached ancient Korea before continuing on the archipelago. He writes that

the Chinese considered it the takarakuni (country of jewels) and that Jingo sent

an expedition because of this wealth. Japanese went over, and through Korea

they learned more and more of China. By the end of the occupation of Korea,

they had surpassed Korean culture (ibid., 17-19).

47. Okakura, Ideals, 7-8.

48. W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: Univer-

sity of Chicago Press, 1986), 32.

49. Ito published this lecture in the November issue of the journal Kench-

iku zasshi, and it was revised in 1898. See Ito Chuta, "Horyoji Kenchikuron,"

Tokyo teikoku daigaku kiyo 1 (1898): 1-176. I have relied on this latter version.

50. Ibid., 1.

51. Ibid., 175-76.

52. Nara kokuritsu, 126-27.

53. Ito, "Horyoji Kenchikuron," 1.

54. Ito Chuta, "Horyuji homonki," in RonsO zuihitsu, manpitsu (Tokyo:

Hana Shobo, 1982), 642.

55. Ito, "Horyuji Kenchikuron," 174.

56. Ibid., 175.

57. Ibid., 174-75.

58. Isozaki Arata argues that Ise, as we know it today, is not an example of

some pure Japanese architecture that existed prior to the influence of Buddhism.

He points out that the rituals that connect the imperium and the gods was

established in the late seventh and early eighth centuries ("Ise: shigen no

modoki," in Shigen no modoki (Tokyo: Kagoshima Shuppankai, 1996).

59. Ito Chuta, Nihon kenchiku no hensen (Tokyo: Keimeikai, 1934), 18.

60. Ibid., 6-7.

61. Ito, "Horyuji Kenchikuron," 9.

62. Ibid., 169.

63. Ibid., 170.

Discoveries of the Horyuji 147

64. I have reduced this rather heated and complex debate to very basic

components. For more detailed information, see Murata Jiro, Horyuji no

kenkyishi (Osaka: Mainichi Shimbunsha, 1949). In English, see Alexander Co-

burn Soper III, The Evolution of Buddhist Architecture in Japan (New York:

Hacker Art Books, [1942] 1978); and Machida Koichi, "A Historical Survey of

the Controversy as to Whether the Horyt-ji Was Rebuilt or Not," Acta Asiatica

15 (1968): 87-115.

65. Watsuji Tetsuro, "Koji junrei," in Watsuji TetsurO zenshu (Tokyo:

Iwanami Shoten, 1961), 184-85.

66. Ibid., 165.



Chapter 5

Political Ritual in the Early

Republic of China

Peter Zarrow

Power is necessarily ritualized as an expression of authority and as a

means of naturalizing rulership. Such ritualization may be nearly in-

visible or may itself be naturalized during periods when political hege-

mony faces no direct challenges. Americans today seldom think twice

about such familiar political rituals as the inauguration parade or the

state of the union speech, much less the ceremonial aspects of the secret

service agents, helicopter rides, and limousine processions that surround

the president. Chinese literati in the eighteenth century were intensely

concerned with determining the proper rituals for imperial sacrifices

through textual research, but they never questioned - could never con-

ceive of questioning - the propriety and power of the rituals them-

selves.1 The historicity and the transcendental nature of ritual are gener-

ally taken for granted, at least as long as the cultural systems in which

they are embedded do not themselves suffer from radical questioning.

However, at times of political flux and open struggle, if the system and

not just the personnel question is at stake, all expressions of power may

become suddenly vulnerable. The cultural symbols on which various

rituals, especially symbolic behavior in the political realm depend may

themselves lose their meaning or resonance. If, in spite of its rootedness

in standardized repetitive actions, ritual is always changing, as most

students of the topic agree, it changes more at some times than others.2

The Revolution of 1911 marked such a time in China. Previous

dynastic change had of course brought about new sets of state rituals as

new sets of rulers cemented their control over politics and extended

their hegemony over society. But at the most fundamental level of cul-

tural assumptions - about what legitimates power, where authority origi-

nates, and how elites could ratify themselves and force deference from

149

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Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

others - most previous periods of dynastic interregnum saw relatively

little or only incremental change. Even if the Manchu conquerors in the

seventeen century had not consciously decided to adopt most of the state

rituals and ceremonies of the Ming, and even if they had not simulta-

neously faced the need to find a ritual language for their dealings with

Mongols, Tibetans, and other peoples of the new empire, political ritu-

als would have evolved as the Qing cemented, expanded, and main-

tained their power.3 The situation facing Chinese elites in the early twen-

tieth century, however, had changed beyond recognition. The attempt to

establish a republic and the general rhetoric of democracy and equality,

since they were unprecedented, seemed to disallow use of the ritual

language developed through long years of imperial history. The Qing

had deliberately followed both Han and non-Han models of rulership,

but in terms of the state rituals specified in the Collected Regulations of

the Qing and the Comprehensive Rites of the Qing most followed the

trajectory laid down by previous Chinese dynasties. The Qing's 256 state

rituals, classified under the categories of auspicious, joyous, military,

guest, and misfortune, ranged from the accession of a new emperor to

the throne and the four "Grand Sacrifices" to Heaven, earth, the impe-

rial ancestors, and at the Altar of Soil and Grain down to less august

matters such as the reception of embassies and troop reviews.4 But how

many of these could be of use to a government not headed by an em-

peror and his officials but by a president, his cabinet, and the national

assembly? Did the ritual categories even make sense any more? More

importantly, how much of the vision of reality conveyed by those rituals

was still compelling: to urbanites, rural folk, Confucians, and the youth

educated in a deliberately Westernized curriculum? The most sacred of

imperial rituals, the sacrifices to imperial ancestors and powerful spirits,

were in form much like the sacrifices within individual families and at

local temples that centered around offerings of food and wine. Thus,

even if his right to sacrifice to Heaven was jealously guarded and the

magnificence of courtly rituals was unique, the emperor, especially

through the Grand Sacrifices, exemplified what was thought to be univer-

sal behavior. The emperor, too, after all, was a filial son who took his

place in the cosmic order. Family and local temple sacrifice practices

hardly disappeared in 1911. Nonetheless, whether the political, social,

and cosmic orders were still thought to be homologous or whether,

indeed, the nature of order was itself still valued in the old ways is open

Political Ritual in the Early Republic of China 151

to doubt. What is clear, however, is the ongoing need to ritualize politi-

cal behavior in one way or another.

Political ritual thus became part and parcel of the intense struggles

for power that marked the early Republic. The Revolution had led to

the collapse of the Qing dynasty and, it soon became clear, the two-

millenia-old imperial system. The empire was replaced by a "Republic,"

the political and institutional failures of which have long been a major

topic of historical analysis (as they were of contemporary comment).

Since the presidency of Yuan Shikai and the institutions of the early

Republic lasted only a few years, it is virtually inevitable that they be

regarded in terms of failure or perhaps transition. Here, however, I wish

to focus on the play of the different ritual elements - the vocabulary of a

ritual grammar - and the efforts of different social groups to define

ritual. Ritual power and agency suddenly became unusually open to

manipulation in the years after the Revolution. In experiments to define

political rituals in efficacious ways, an inexact process of appropriation

and synthesis both reflected and exacerbated political instability.

Broadly speaking, we might distinguish two basic ritual tendencies

in the early Republic. One was top-down, centering, hierarchical, and

imperial. It can be associated with Yuan Shikai and those who sought to

inherit the centralizing powers of the monarchy. The other tended to be

slightly more bottom-up, horizontal, egalitarian, and republican. It can

be associated with the Tongmenghui revolutionaries surrounding Sun

Yat-sen and local power holders who were immediately aware of the

need to deal with street crowds. The former can be symbolized most

neatly by Yuan's decision to conduct sacrifices to Heaven at the winter

solstice in December 1914. The latter might be symbolized most aptly

by the celebrations of "Double Ten" - the October 10 anniversary of

the Wuchang uprising in 1911, which was taken to represent the begin-

ning of the Revolution. Double Ten celebrations became an instant

popular diversion and perhaps mark urban China's first civic festival.

However, this ideal-type bifurcation between top-down and bottom-up

categories may be misleading in some respects. Reality was not nearly

so simple. Both groups claimed to speak for the nation or people; both

in fact spoke in the argot of modernity: progress, national identity, and

the will of the people. And both sought to discipline the citizenry in an

effort to create a strong and wealthy nation-state.5 Yet it is not quite

adequate to say that the two differed more in techniques than goals. In

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Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

ritual activities as well as rhetoric, they displayed a different ethos. If

only because Yuan inherited a complex bureaucratic state firmly embed-

ded in a set of practices associated with the imperial monarchy while the

revolutionaries had sought to establish an ethnically based republic,

their ritual strategies naturally differed. The revolutionaries were per-

haps no more likely to turn real political power over to the masses than

was Yuan, but their conception of the social basis of politics was none-

theless considerably broader and their sense of the social forces that

might be politicized was more accurate.

The new leaders of the Republic faced a problem: how to find a new

language of power. Power must always be expressed in some way, and it is

only partially possible to distinguish the expression from the thing itself.

This chapter thus falls into a relatively recent genre of historical analysis

of the "representedness" of power and social construction of symbolic

and ritual representations. Such works should not, in my view, displace

older concerns with who has the guns (who can organize violence), the

role of ideology, the distribution of economic power, and so forth.

Rather, they supplement these Weberian concerns in an effort to answer

larger questions about the nature and mechanisms of power, and they

respond to the inadequacy of purely materialist interpretations of hege-

mony. Previous studies that ignored ritual and ceremonies or treated

them as relatively unimportant decorations on the real structures of

power missed an important element of how power is actually exercised.

Excessively functionalist approaches often assumed that ritual belonged

to the past in contrast to a progressive tendency of growing rationaliza-

tion, secularization, and intellectualization, an assumption that appears

erroneous as soon as one opens one's eyes to the processes of rit-

ualization. Materialistic approaches to history treat ritual as part of the

superstructure, which can only assume that people of the time treated

ritual seriously as a result of false consciousness.

It is certainly true that the meaning and overall importance of politi-

cal ritual vary by time and place - and that they are always rooted in

social relations - but this simply means that ritual has to be studied in its

historical specificity, not that we can afford to ignore it. Ritual strategies

in the early Republic thus reveal differing conceptions of the state and

the nation. This brief chapter focuses on Yuan Shikai and national-level

politics. I do not present a complete survey of political rituals even in

just the few years after the Revolution. For example, I do not discuss the

rituals that surrounded the Revolution itself, the provincial secessions,

Political Ritual in the Early Republic of China 153

the Wuchang and Nanjing governments, Sun Yat-sen's brief presidency,

or even the details of Yuan Shikai's monarchical movement of 1915-16.

Nor do I discuss important and closely related topics such as cutting

queues, changing dress habits, and reforming the calendar or the rela-

tionship between family, lineage, and religious rituals, on the one hand,

and political and civic rituals on the other. Rather, I attempt to elucidate

the relationship between state ritual and nation building. For the Chi-

nese nation began to emerge in the interstices of rituals the meanings of

which no one could control and which inevitably brought the nation or

people (minzu) onto the political stage, willy-nilly making China into a

genuine nation-state.

Ritual and Nation

Classical Confucian theory placed ritual (li) at the heart of the state

while it lacked any clear or strong notion of the nation as a discrete

political community marked by strong ties of ethnicity, language, reli-

gion, and the like. The anthropologist Stephen Feuchtwang has noted

that Chinese elites thought the correct performance of ritual to "have

lasting effect, to exemplify the order of the universe, and to maintain the

correct distinctions" - that li constituted a kind of "ideological con-

trol."6 It should be remembered that ritual and li, a much broader term,

are not semantically coterminous. Ritual was seen as simultaneously

expressing truth (cosmic order) and maintaining morality (social order)

through discrete sets of sacrifices, including imperial sacrifices, which

were both homologous and exemplary. It is worth noting that the

"people," although sometimes excluded from li, played a prominent role

in the Confucian scheme, especially in the Mencius, which postulated

that they formed the basis (minben) of the political system conceived in

largely paternalistic terms. As well, the ancient Chinese certainly pos-

sessed a sense of identity, distinguishing themselves from border peoples

on several grounds.7 Nonetheless, this differed from a modern sense of

nationalism for many reasons. Prasenjit Duara points out that although

political communities existed early, what we mean by nationalism today

could not have developed prior to the competitive international state

system.8 Following Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner more closely

than does Duara, I would emphasize, along with discursive practices,

the central role of modern institutions such as the school system, the

press, and other communications media (print capitalism), the general

154 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

role of the state in promoting industrialization, and other factors that

have increased the agency of the political community.9 Still, the point

remains that many of the ingredients we can identify as nationalism were

long in place before they fused into the political loyalty and psychologi-

cal identity tied to the nation-state. By late imperial times, all Chinese

participated in rituals revolving around the family and lineage, an aspect

of popular culture that had strong if ambiguous political implications.

Although families might, on rare occasions, split away from the state,

for the most part the patriarchal family was seen as analogous to the

structure of the state. Indeed, this was no mere analogy (father:family,

emperor:state) but also a cosmic model in its own right. The system was

paternalistic in both senses of the word: socially, fathers were placed at

the apex, and politically rulers treated the people as children. If the min

were excluded from li in classical Confucianism, such was no longer the

case in the late imperial state. But the question remains: how was ritual

linked to conceptions of the political community?

It may be that the value of loyalty to the emperor became newly

prominent in the development of neo-Confucianism; it is clear, at any

rate, that the late imperial dynasties (Yuan, Ming, and Qing) all empha-

sized loyalty. Loyalty to the throne was apparently subsumed in the even

more basic quality of filiality. The Qing emperors worked hard to display

their filial piety, which exemplified their virtue and therefore expressed

their right to the throne; indeed, filiality nicely linked virtue to birthright

claims.10 Nonetheless, identity remained very fluid, defined largely

through family (and gender) and birthplace, with only a small role allot-

ted to national identity. If Chinese reformers in the early twentieth

century hoped to replace loyalty to the emperor with loyalty to the

nation-state, they found this an unexpectedly difficult task. The transi-

tion was certainly not as automatic as foreign examples seemed to indi-

cate. In the Chinese case, the nation could not be formed in the image of

the monarch as has seemingly happened in Britain, Japan, Germany,

and perhaps Russia. The reasons for this await further analysis. One

factor, of course, was the "foreignness" of the Manchu overlords, which

was being defined as such vis-h-vis the Han Chinese nation precisely at

this time (on the Han, see Kai-wing Chow's chapter in this volume).

Neither the symbolic resources nor the practical powers of the Chinese

monarchy proved capable of generating the reforms that leading mem-

bers of the Chinese elite wanted.

By the time of the 1911 Revolution, republicanism had come to domi-

Political Ritual in the Early Republic of China 155

nate mainstream nationalist discourse. I am not claiming that the advo-

cates of a constitutional monarchy were marginalized; on the contrary,

they maintained an influential voice right up to the eve of the Revolution.

As is well known, the main spokesman for constitutionalism, Liang

Qichao, essentially argued that the Chinese were not ready for democ-

racy, that the monarchy could guarantee political stability while reforms

were pursued, and that revolution would be disruptive. However, this

means that Liang accepted (as, indeed, he had played a major role in

originally introducing) the basic principle of popular sovereignty. The

rapidity with which local and national elites (including Liang) accepted

republicanism in 1911-12 indicates that the basic premises of republican-

ism had already become widespread.11 Few political activists seem to have

retained any belief in the charismatic authority of the emperor during the

last decade of the Qing. The Chinese nation required fundamentally new

forms of expressing and displaying political leadership and new tech-

niques of linking subjects/citizens to rulers. Such changes could not occur

overnight. The ritual demands of republicanism led to a period of experi-

mentation and struggle over the expression of political power.

Political rituals are solemn and repetitive practices that connect lead-

ers and communities with larger, higher forces, be these God or gods,

transcendental movements of history, the fate of the nation, the future

of the people, or whatever. Such rituals are abstract and symbolic expres-

sions open to various interpretations. Even their inventors may not

know what all the details of a given ritual (are supposed to) mean,

although experts are needed to guide the practitioners, explain the sym-

bols, guard the traditions, and maintain the relevant texts. The range of

political rituals is huge; the question is why some are chosen while other

possible rituals either remain entirely latent or simply do not "take." In

one sense, ritual practices are the opposite of logic and narrative. They

elevate the body over the mind, reflexivity over reflection, and the

immediate moment over a chain of events. In another sense, however,

rituals are performances based on analogy and homology, and so they

tell stories. Body movements are used to mimic natural or social pro-

cesses, and this leads to narration, explanation, and intellectualization.

If set above time, rituals are still inevitably performed in time. If set in a

mythical space designed to capture cosmic forces - like Beijing's Altar

of Heaven - they are still inevitably performed in mundane space.12

Rituals, and especially political rituals, do not hide their essential func-

tionalism. They possess both private and collective meanings tied to

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Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

explicit, practical objectives. Yet their meanings are not defined by the

ritual itself but produced from the outside. Whether designed to make

rain or commemorate the war dead, rituals are embedded in the larger

society: produced, enjoyed, and understood in terms of ordinary social

relations.

But what do political rituals have to do with the nation? The quick

answer is that as an invisible abstraction the nation can be made con-

crete in the form of ritual symbolism, like the imagery of stamps, money,

flags, and so forth. More to the point, political ritual refers to at least

two phenomena. First, all power, even simple, personal brute force, is

inevitably ritualized. Kings carry scepters, soldiers wear uniforms and

march in order, and torturers begin by treating their victims with false

courtesy. As force becomes legitimate authority, ritual becomes all the

more important to the maintenance of hegemony. Therefore, second,

political rituals stem from more or less conscious efforts to carry on,

adapt, and on rare occasions, create pageantry.

Such pageantry appeals to three basic audiences. The international

use of political rituals is critical in state to state relations. The British

monarchy became a symbol of the glory of the entire empire under

Victoria.13 European imperial rivalries were expressed in the ceremonial

grandeur of the monarchy. The question of whether royal power was

actually waxing or waning was irrelevant to the political rituals involved.

The growth of rituals of state in the West in the late nineteenth century

thus marked a period of relations among states conceived as sovereign

entities. The Chinese imperial reception of foreign tribute missions also

represents a ritualized foreign policy. Second, elites themselves consume

political rituals as a ratification of their own positions. Rituals bring key

political actors together in such common and solemn causes as an ac-

cession ceremony or funeral. Indeed, rituals may be seen as constitutive

of power; they also help set the parameters within which intraelite

struggles take place. Finally, the populace forms a vast target audience.

If the people accept the notion that the political system possesses some

kind of transcendental nature, they may be more willing to accept a

system that gives them minimal rewards. Political ritual is an intrinsic

part of hegemony; by helping to define the very sense of reality, rituals

channel and limit action.

Thus, in terms of the political community as a whole, the pageantry

that has surrounded power in the twentieth century helped to build the

nation. It created ties between rulers and the ruled, linking them both in

Political Ritual in the Early Republic of China 157

a larger identity. It symbolized both the state and the nation, forming

the nation-state as an amalgam of shared interests. Ultimately, a kind of

ritual construction of the "people" occurred as they were captured in

their essential quality, whether as subjects of the emperor or citizens of

the Republic. Such rituals as National Day celebrations both unite the

people, overriding distinctions of class and region in the fervor of na-

tional identity, and establish new sources of stratification in terms of

closeness to the center. Who stands on the dais and who stands below,

who speaks and who listens, who marches and who witnesses all serve as

new markers of political elites. The public quality of such occasions -

rulers and ruled (in various degrees) staring directly at one another -

serves to unite and differentiate simultaneously.14 Still, to honor revolu-

tionary martyrs and war dead is to exult in the glory of the nation,

imbuing it with a quality that transcends both rulers and ruled. To com-

memorate the founding moment of the nation-state is to recapture the

most sublime sense of shared purpose.

Finally, political rituals establish claims to the land. When National

Day celebrations are held at the same time in various cities and towns,

this action acknowledges the claims of nationhood across space. Simi-

larly, imperial processions define space by means of routes that tend to

link distant places. Both the imperial state and the modern nation-state

share a need to make territorial claims, though their notions of bound-

aries and centers may be different. Both make use of sacred sites -

Mount Tai in Shandong, Notre Dame in the center of Paris, Arlington

Cemetery outside Washington. Both make use of the principle of simul-

taneity; as all National Day celebrations are held at the same moment,

so, too, did Qing local officials conduct sacrifices to the land and grain

spirits simultaneously - an expression of territorial domination - as well

as laying claim to the territory through other common sacrifices held in

provincial and county capitals. However, imperial ritual is designed to

confirm the monarch's claims over the land and people, and so the

emperor retained unique access to certain rituals; conversely, national

rituals are designed to secure the people's links to the land, and so they

limit the rulers' ritual functions. It is the people who have made the land

sacred with their blood, commemorated by cemeteries, temples, and

statues.

At the same time, however, successful rituals render their mecha-

nisms invisible, for official representations of the group work best if they

are seen as natural rather than constructed. In the formulation of Pierre

158 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

Bourdieu: "Officialization is the process whereby the group (or those

who dominate it) teaches itself and masks from itself its own truth, binds

itself by a public profession which sanctions and imposes what it utters,

tacitly defining the limits of the thinkable and the unthinkable and so

contributing to the maintenance of the social order from which it derives

its power."15 Yet, since rituals naturally become an arena of political

struggle, a complicated process of masking and unmasking is always

under way. As the social collectivity comes to see itself in political ritu-

als, these rituals thereby become efficacious representations of the na-

tional community. The attempt to objectify social relations inherent in

the ritualization of the social body rests ultimately on the consent of

subordinate groups.16 "Consent" does not necessarily imply either false

consciousness or a lack of resistance; rather, it emerges from a complex

process of struggle and negotiation that is always ongoing. This scarcely

implies consensus, for different groups and individuals ascribe different

meanings to ritual while struggling to adapt and appropriate them. Still,

these very negotiations create a relatively unified social body. Thus, the

failure of China's rituals in the early Republic to become embedded in

the social order no doubt stemmed to a great extent from the inability of

dominant social groups to agree among themselves or to convince the

populace of their authority. This created a disjunction between ritual as

invisible practice and ritual as political empowerment.

Rituals of the Revolution

Still celebrated today on Taiwan, the Double Ten festival commemo-

rates the revolutionary (sacred) founding moment of the Republic. Its

origins, however, lie in the confused tangle of postrevolutionary politics.

For the first few months of 1912, China had two presidents: Sun Yat-sen

in Nanjing and Yuan Shikai in Beijing, but Sun soon resigned in favor of

Yuan in the name of national unity. Yuan served officially first as provi-

sional president and then as president of the Republic of China until he

attempted to become emperor in the autumn of 1915. As the premier

military leader and bureaucratic honcho in late Qing politics even after

his forced retirement, Yuan had led a political network that made him

by far the most likely, even inevitable choice for the presidency from the

beginning of the Revolution. Yet he faced a major legitimation problem.

Although Yuan had used his powers to force the abdication of the Qing

(which occurred on February 22, 1912), in no way had he made or even

Political Ritual in the Early Republic of China 159

supported the Revolution. The southern revolutionaries had agreed to

allow Yuan to become president partly in the hope that they could limit

his powers if the capital of the new Republic became Nanjing rather than

Beijing. However, Yuan stayed in Beijing and quickly consolidated his

rule, ignoring the constitution, disbanding the new parliament, assassi-

nating opponents, and ruling, all in all, as a dictator. The legitimacy

problem was compounded by vestigial loyalties in the military and espe-

cially the bureaucracy to old ways of doing things if not active loyalty to

the Qing. Aside from the revolutionaries on one side, Yuan thus had to

deal with extreme conservatives on the other. The unfamiliar terminol-

ogy of republican institutions masked an assumption, widely felt, that

this might simply be an interregnum period between dynastic cycles.

Nonetheless, in the end Yuan felt compelled to acquiesce in the Double

Ten commemoration of the Revolution, and he was even able to co-opt

it by presiding over the Beijing Double Ten celebrations.

Since the meanings of rituals are found in the details, the following

descriptions are as inclusive as space allows. The imperial abdication

was to be celebrated by a holiday on February 12. This in effect com-

memorated Yuan's own role in negotiating the abdication. But Double

Ten struck a stronger cord, especially in South and Central China. By

September of 1912, various groups were calling for "commemoration of

the national day" (guoqing jinian) on Double Ten. Hubei natives living

in Beijing, who naturally felt some pride that the uprising began in their

province, compared the moment to the French July 14, 1789, and the

American July 4, 1776.17 They wanted to see a national Double Ten

celebration; they favored celebrating January 1, the first anniversary of

the Nanjing government, and February 12 as well. Shanghai merchants

were also excited by the idea of Double Ten.18 Even Yuan's own vice

president favored the holiday; after all, Li Yuanhong's political career

had begun when he was pressed into service as the initially reluctant

leader of the Wuchang uprising.

At first, it appeared that Central China might celebrate the October

holiday on its own. But finally, responding directly to the urgings of the

State Council, Yuan proclaimed that all provinces would mark Double

Ten by closing government offices for the day, putting up flags and decora-

tions, conducting military processions, sacrificing to the martyrs of the

Revolution, giving alms to the poor, and banqueting. As well, punish-

ments of criminals such as executions would not be carried out. This last

provision, which might seem to have been unnecessary if government

160 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

workers were being given a day off, corresponds with the practice of

imperial amnesties on auspicious days and perhaps reflects Yuan's sensi-

tivity to symbolic continuity.

Yuan's encouragement of sacrifices to the martyrs of the Revolution

might seem to have been something of a concession to Tongmenghui

sympathizers in South and Central China. Such sacrifices would have

been performed in Wuchang and Nanjing even without his approval. But

Yuan was able to incorporate them into a larger celebration of his author-

ity. The ceremony to be followed was established by the Home Ministry

(Neiwubu). After people were properly assembled, music would be

played, flowers and fruit would be offered to the spirits, prayers would

be read, people would bow three times, music would be played again,

and then the people would leave.19 Yuan sent the premier as his represen-

tative to one of the most sacred spots of the old Qing empire, the Altar

to Heaven, to conduct sacrifices to the spirits (ling) of the martyrs,

informing them that the imperial system had ended and the Republic

established.20 Sacrifices to the martyrs thus became a coordinated ritual

carried out by officials throughout the land.

In Suzhou, for example, the representative of the Jiangsu military

governor led the ceremony. 21 The ritual hall of the governor's palace was

decorated with lanterns, colored balls, and pine and cypress (the tradi-

tional evergreen symbols of life in death). Soldiers, the police, merchants,

and students were all ordered to show that they had not forgotten the

gratitude owed to the dead and to praise their merit. The soldiers saluted

with their rifles and officers with their swords while the merchants, stu-

dents, gentry, and civil officials removed their hats and bowed three

times, all while military music was being played. Girls from the women's

schools were allowed in at 3:30 and individuals not part of officially recog-

nized groups between 4:30 and 5:30 P.M. A banquet was held for invited

guests, including Westerners. And in Nanjing the sacrifices were per-

formed in the former Qing Wanshougong (Palace of Ten Thousand Years)

under hundreds of electric lights. A schedule similar to Suzhou's was

established so that various groups could display their gratitude.

Military and civil officials thus led a new ritualization of the new

Republic in China's major cities. Bowing replaced the three kneelings

and nine prostrations of the full ketou (kowtow), but the fundamental

act of presenting the spirits with offerings was maintained. In Beijing,

Double Ten was marked by a military procession of some eleven thou-

sand troops, whom Yuan watched with invited guests from a platform in

Political Ritual in the Early Republic of China 161

front of the presidential palace.22 The ceremony started at 6 A.M. at a

pailou (ceremonial arch) built at the Zhonghuamen (China Gate, for-

merly Zhengyangmen). The Qing's abdication edict was written at the

top of the pailou; thus did Yuan remind the nation that the Wuchang

uprising had led to the Republic only by way of the abdication he had

arranged. Military music was played, and Yuan himself was in uniform

as the troops marched west in front of the platform. Yuan was said to

have appeared strong, confident, serious, and alert - the virtues of a

ruler. The military review was followed by a reception for parliamentari-

ans, civil officials, foreign ambassadors and their staffs, reporters, and

living buddhas from Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet.

These official rituals offered the Chinese a shared experience while

carefully differentiating selected groups in a hierarchy that privileged the

official and male. In other parts of China, the day was celebrated with

more popular participation and festivity. Shops in Shanghai were closed.

Flags and five-color lanterns were hung everywhere. In separate events,

there were military salutes, flag-raising ceremonies, award ceremonies,

school exercises, dances, banqueting, firecrackers, fireworks, puppet

shows, and martial arts displays.23 Numerous pailou were erected around

the city and decorated with ilex, pine, and cypress. It was reported that

marchers in processions sung the national anthem. Particularly notable

were the evening lantern processions featuring the five colors of the

Republic (representing the five peoples). In Nanjing, lanterns also dis-

played birds, animals, and flowers.24 However, the local educational

authorities forbade women's schools from holding lantern assemblies

and the police prohibited a prostitutes' assembly. Sun Yat-sen and Wu

Tingfang attended a merchants' banquet in Shanghai. Hubei itself, how-

ever, remained relatively quiet.25

Over the course of the following year, 1913, Yuan moved to domi-

nate Parliament by any means necessary and in the summer easily put

down a brief revolt led by several of the former revolutionaries. Yuan

was formally elected president by the Parliament in 1913. He took the

oath of office on the tenth of October, thus hijacking the holiday en-

tirely. (Yuan had taken the oath of provisional president on March 10,

1912, in Beijing.)26 At 9:30 A.M., Yuan arrived at Tiananmen in a cere-

monial carriage (liche) and, accompanied by a military band, entered

the imperial city. At ten, officers, guards, officials, and other spectators

were led into the Taihedian, where the oath taking would occur. Foreign-

ers were led to a viewing area in the northeast corner. During this time,

162 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

"national music" was played and a 101-gun salute fired. Yuan then

ascended the platform at the north end of the hall, facing south, with

officials on either side of him. When the music stopped, Yuan took the

oath; the audience bowed to him once, and he bowed back. Then Yuan

read a declaration; the audience bowed to him three times, and he

bowed back three times. Finally, music was played as Yuan and the

audience left.

Yuan's inauguration did not follow the enthronement rituals of em-

perors, but in facing south he emulated the single most critical feature

that had marked the enthronement and imperial authority generally

since the most ancient times.27 Again, bowing constituted a modern way

to give and acknowledge obeisance. And since the early eighteenth

century this critical moment of the ascension rituals of the Qing emper-

ors had taken place in the Taihedian. After Yuan's first inauguration, a

second ceremony was performed for the foreigners, illustrating not only

the influence that the Western powers held over China's fate but also

how China was marking itself as a republic in the international commu-

nity. Perhaps there were also elements of the traditional goal of awing

visitors from afar. With Yuan's formal election to the presidency, four-

teen nations recognized the new Republic. It might also be noted that

the Qing emperors had separately performed ascension rituals for differ-

ent audiences, distinguishing the inner court from the civil officials (who

witnessed the Taihedian rituals). At 9 A.M., foreign ambassadors were

carried from Tiananmen in palanquins into the imperial city. After the

oath taking, they were led out of their viewing area through the east

gate and back in through the main gate. As music played, they lined up,

from the British ambassador on the east to the Belgian ambassador on

the west. Then Yuan returned to the platform and bows were ex-

changed. Speeches were translated, and all shook hands. The ambassa-

dors then took palanquins to Tiananmen for the military review, though

their staffs had to walk. This was followed by a third ceremony for the

representatives of the Qing house. The old royalty was brought north

through the middle gate; again, Yuan faced south on the platform as

bows, speeches, handshakes, and more bows were exchanged.

Then the foreign ambassadors, top officials, representatives of the

Qing house, and Yuan Shikai himself witnessed the military proces-

sion.28 For almost four hours, six military units marched in front of the

viewing stands, including infantry, sailors, Yuan's bodyguards, and capi-

tal guards. Yuan wore an army generalissimo uniform with a long sword.

Political Ritual in the Early Republic of China 163

His blue cap displayed a five-color, five-pointed star, its sides were of

gold chrysanthemum, and it featured a tall white plume. His uniform

was of blue wool, with gold braid and decorative motifs. His boots were

of black leather. His trousers had three red stripes, and his sleeve ends

were red. In all, Yuan's sartorial inclinations seem to have'followed the

late-nineteenth-century European movement of Caesarism.29 National

unity among the new European states focused on a strong ruler, and

Germany's Emperor William I had started something of a fashion in

generalissimo wear. Yuan, too, ruled as a military figure as well as in his

capacity as president.

When the Beijing ceremonies were over, ordinary citizens could

obtain free tickets to enter the imperial city to see where Yuan had taken

the oath of office.30 In terms of the traditional sanctity and perhaps even

taboos surrounding this place, Yuan was acting to secularize rulership.

But in terms of his own power his ritual performances were part of a

process of personifying the new state.

In other parts of China, the 1913 Double Ten was more subdued

than in the previous year. In Nanjing, the holiday seems to have been

dominated by official ceremonies at the expense of popular lantern

assemblies and other displays of bottom-up organization. In Wuchang,

the streets were crowded but there are fewer reports of lantern as-

semblies, flag-raisings, pailou, and the like.31 And reports from Shang-

hai frankly announced that the 1913 festivals were not as rousing as in

1912. One analysis attributed this to the aftereffects of the "distur-

bances" - meaning the summer's revolt of many of the former 1911

revolutionaries against Yuan's government.32 Business had not yet re-

covered. There were even rumors that "rebels" would take advantage

of police laxity on the holiday to attempt to seize arms. Yet it may also

be that the lack of popular enthusiasm reflected urban disillusionment

over Yuan's high-handed ways of accruing power. Short of such a con-

scious political reaction, local social leaders may simply have wished to

lower their profiles, especially at a time when Double Ten was perhaps

losing some of its meaning.

Yuan's domination of Double Ten continued in 1914. On October

10, Yuan arrived on horseback at Tiananmen and was carried to the

balcony in a red-cushioned sedan chair, with guards, some carrying long

lances, in front and behind.33 Yuan stood with the vice president, the

secretary of state, and other ministers - with invited foreigners on the

eastern side of the balcony of Tiananmen - to review twenty-thousand

164 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

troops passing below. Yuan specially invited high officials and foreigners

to join him. After the soldiers had passed (taking an hour and ten

minutes), a thousand students selected from Beijing's public schools

came to the parade grounds in black uniforms, with the primary school

students actually joining the procession. The students were then ex-

horted to pursue "civic virtue," "self-dependence," and "military spirit."

No longer would China suffer humiliation because literary qualities were

prized over the military. The review was followed by Yuan's formal

opening of a museum to display art and relics from the old Qing palaces

at Rehe and Mukden (Shenyang). The newspapers soon informed read-

ers that they might tour parts of the old imperial city - formerly forbid-

den them - where they would find Yuan's portrait already installed.34

As well, representatives of the president again conducted sacrifices to

the martyrs of the Revolution.

It seems to me that this can be read as an attempt to instill the values

of the Republic as seen by Yuan Shikai after nearly three years of rule.

Symbolic references to the number five pointed to the five peoples consti-

tuting the Chinese nation. The repeated invocations of revolutionary

martyrs imbued the new regime with some of the sacrality of the dead. In

assuming the right to conduct sacrifices to their spirits, Yuan was treating

them as his ancestors. He thus appealed to common cultural norms not

only by displaying a kind of extended filial piety but also by taking their

charismatic strength into himself, as, indeed, he assumed more and more

of the mantle of a revolutionary leader. (Using traditional parlance, the

revolutionaries who had challenged his power in 1913 were referred to as

bandits and "those who would sow confusion.") Yuan's use of military

symbols also appealed to what had become a widespread value. Militari-

zation had been a radical demand since the turn of the century; by no

means was literary culture - or at least an overemphasis on literary

learning - denigrated simply by the likes of Yuan. Generalissimo wear

and military reviews, then, could reach out to a larger urban public. At

the same time, the Qing house was deliberately reduced to museum

status. Tiananmen, the Gate of Heavenly Peace, which once marked the

entrance to the imperial city, thus became a republican civic monument,

looking outward to the newly opened spaces of the wide boulevard and

square below rather than inward to the palaces. Yuan was achieving

ritual dominance of the new state.

Yuan also showed that he was building a modern nation in a variety

Political Ritual in the Early Republic of China 165

of legal gestures. One issue of the day had to do with that symbol of

allegiance to the Manchus, queues. In mid-1914, regulations were pro-

posed to prohibit queues for government workers, rickshaw pullers, and

merchants. (Meanwhile, a censor's request to revive the kowtow was

summarily refused.)35 Like the queue and short hair for men and

women, the Double Ten celebrations functioned in a larger discourse of

modernity and national identity. The president, following international

custom, also held formal receptions to meet foreigners and Chinese

individually and in groups. Mongol princes seem to have been especially

well looked after, for obvious reasons of state. In this category, I would

also put the official attempt to celebrate the solar New Year's Day and

curtail the traditional lunar New Year's of early spring, the most impor-

tant holiday in the Chinese calendar. The solar calendar did not have the

same popular appeal as queue cutting or Double Ten, but the govern-

ment celebrated the new New Year's Day by closing offices and inviting

officials and foreigners to banquets.36 Calendar reform was of course

both an aspect of Westernization and a traditional prerogative of new

dynasties.

The military parades conducted in front of Yuan and before officials

in various cities on the one hand represented order, discipline, and the

citizenship of members of a state. On the other hand, mass participation

in National Day festivities represented a sense of the nation as defined by

solidarity and commonality. The great efforts that went into imagining the

nation as the Han race (outlined by Kai-wing Chow's chapter in this

volume) created a problem of dominant and subordinate ethnicities for

the new Republic. It may well be that the political ritualization considered

here thus far was designed to suppress ethnic identity. At one point,

however, while considering plans for Yuan's worship of Heaven in 1914,

the government rejected the use of the Yellow Emperor - Huangdi, the

ancestor of the Han people - to personify Heaven precisely on the

grounds that the Republic had to encompass the five peoples.37 How

republican rituals in fact brought ethnicity into play remains a topic for

further research. Perhaps they ratified the position of the "Han" insofar

as they suggested that Mongols, Tibetans, Uighurs, and especially Man-

chus lacked their own perspectives on the Revolution. Double Ten thus

became an important means of defining a larger Chinese identity. How-

ever, its impact diminished in inverse proportion to Yuan's domination of

the celebrations at the expense of popular pageantry.

166 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

Yuan Shikai's Rituals of the Center

We have already seen how Yuan Shikai associated himself with Double

Ten, although the origins of this holiday had little to do with him. Yuan

oversaw the evolution of a variety of state rituals designed to celebrate

the Republic as well as those that might be called the ceremonies of

power: granting audiences, traveling in state, appearing with body-

guards, and the like. These are nearly universal in the modern world and

apply equally to kings, dictators, presidents, and prime ministers.

Yuan's birthday was marked in expanding style. In 1914, he modestly

declined gifts (gongxian) from the provinces and canceled formal cele-

brations for plans to inspect his troops.38 Nonetheless, local officials and

merchants in Shanghai held their own party in his honor. Foreign con-

suls and merchants paid their respects. The hall where they met was

decorated with flowers and cypress boughs, a symbol of long life, as well

as the national flag, colored lanterns, and red candles. The distinguished

body of men thrice wished Yuan long life.39 It may well be that some of

the attitudes toward imperial birthdays, which were always public and

sometimes extremely grand occasions, had rubbed off on Yuan.40

As for such rituals of state as greeting foreign dignitaries, these are

of course intrinsic to almost any behavior we would recognize as official.

Categorized as "guest rites" (binli), Yuan seems to have taken special

care with them. The American ambassador, Paul Reinsch, recounted the

presentation of his credentials to Yuan as a kind of fairy-tale journey.

Reinsch was a political scientist sharply aware of the importance of

ritual, even if his emphasis on its particular applicability to China may

sound rather orientalist to modern ears.41 Yuan sent an ornate carriage

"enameled in blue with gold decorations" and drawn by eight horses for

Reinsch. The ambassador was accompanied by Yuan's cavalry escort as

well as his own American marines and the legation staff, since, after all,

ceremonial forms had to be upheld by the American side as well. They

arrived at the Zhongnanhai (that part of the imperial city that Yuan had

taken over and is still used by the Communist Party leadership today)

and were taken to Yuan's home, which Reinsch understood to be the

palace where Guangxu had been held virtual prisoner during the last

years of the Qing. Reinsch's reactions perhaps held less awe for the

power and glory of China than those of the ambassadors of earlier

generations looking up to Tiananmen as they approached the imperial

city from the south, but he was nonetheless moved.

Political Ritual in the Early Republic of China

167

We alighted at the monumental gate of an enclosure that surrounds

the lovely South Lake in the western part of the Imperial City. .

The remote origin of its buildings, their exquisite forms and brilliant

colouring, as contrasted with the somberness of the lake at that

season, and the stirring events of which they have been the scene,

cannot fail to impress the visitor as he slowly glides across the Impe-

rial lake in the old-fashioned boat, with its formal little cabin, cur-

tained and upholstered, and with its lateral planks, up and down

which pass the men who propel the boat with long poles.42

Unlike many Western visitors, Reinsch quite liked the architecture of

the imperial city, which he found pleasant, spacious, and even reserved.

Conducted through various rooms into Yuan's presence, Reinsch was led

through files of extremely large guardsmen, who reminded him of Freder-

ick the Great's preference for tall men and led him to reflect on the

German influences on modern China in general. Finally, the formal intro-

duction of ambassador to president was made. Reinsch himself felt that

"This rather naive emphasis on externals and on display is born of the old

imperialism, a more significant feature of Chinese political life than it

may seem. . . . The rustle of heavy silks, the play of iridescent colour, the

echoes of song and lute form the theatre - all that exquisite oriental

refinement still seems to linger."43 Reinsch did criticize the audience

room where he formally met Yuan as a "pretentious modern structure

erected by the Empress Dowager." He also "read" the ceremonies to

reach a conclusion about Yuan's character. "Republican in title he was,

but an autocrat at heart. All the old glittering trappings of the empire he

had preserved."44 It is, of course, not literally true that Yuan preserved

Qing ritual in its entirety; it is true that the question of state rituals was

carefully considered and many of the features of the past were deliber-

ately perpetuated.

Here I will focus on the decision to conduct sacrifices to Heaven in

December 1914. As Yuan's presidency faltered under imperialist pres-

sures, debt, and the difficulties of gaining control over the provinces, he

turned increasingly to "traditional" forms of ritualization. I am not sug-

gesting that Yuan attempted to substitute rituals for other forms of

control but simply that in the ritual sphere he embarked on a new and

arguably more conservative course in 1914. Those opposed to Yuan

certainly saw things in this light at the time. All along, of course, he tried

to combine new and old rituals - a formula that was proving successful

168 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

around the world. However, he inevitably faced a choice between main-

taining new rituals that affirmed the modern nation-state or following

rituals more in line with the old imperial vision of the state. Indeed, the

prospect of establishing his own monarchy eventually proved irresistible

to Yuan, though there is no evidence that he decided to found a new

dynasty before the summer of 1915. Still, by 1914 he was putting greater

emphasis on Confucianism and traditionalism. Speaking in the name of

modernity, Yuan's critics instantly voice the fear that he was preparing

to sacrifice the Republic and restore the monarchy.

Others distrusted even his slight gestures toward nationalism and

popular participation and favored stricter social discipline. Some, though

by no means all, of these conservatives favored the establishment of

Confucianism as the national religion. The Kongjiaohui (Confucian Soci-

ety), for example, urged that Confucianism be established as the national

religion to foster morality and strengthen the state.45 Yuan rejected at-

tempts to establish Confucianism on the practical ground that this would

be divisive (as well as contradicting constitutional guarantees of religious

freedom), but he did give official recognition to Confucianism by treating

it as the moral basis of education (the school curriculum was to include the

Confucian classics) and establishing the Confucian spring and autumn

sacrifices as an affair of state.46 Yuan's relationship with formal Confucian-

ism will be discussed in more detail later. In the end, he was not so much

trying to forge a middle way as to find a means to link his new government

to ultimate sources of power. If aligning himself with a relatively progres-

sive vision of modernity and the nation-state did not do this, he would try

to enlist more traditional symbols in his cause. Yuan did not turn his back

on modernity; clearly, he did not simply revive earlier forms of rit-

ualization but rather modified them in ways explicitly tied to modernity

and the nation. Yet this course soon led him to the disastrous attempt to

found a new dynasty from which the Republic never recovered. Yuan's

dynastic ambitions were couched in terms of constitutional monarchy, but

most of China's leaders feared his increasingly dictatorial tendencies and

disliked the prospect of his son Keding inheriting the throne. His leading

generals thus refused to support him when a rebellion - led by former

Tongmenghui revolutionaries, provincial leaders, and former political

supporters such as the distinguished Liang Qichao - broke out. Yuan

died in June 1916 as he was suing for peace, but the institutions of the

Republic, although theoretically restored, in fact fell to the reality of

warlordism.

Political Ritual in the Early Republic of China 169

As early as the winter of 1913-14 Yuan floated plans to revive an

imperial ceremony, the worship of Heaven at the winter solstice, as well

as sacrifices to the earth in the summer and the spring and autumn

sacrifices to Confucius. Yuan thus proposed to emulate two of the four

"grand sacrifices" of the former Qing emperors-to Heaven and earth,

which also comprised a cosmic triad with humanity - and proposed in

effect to substitute the sacrifices to the imperial ancestors and at the

Altar of Soil and Grain with regular sacrifices to Confucius. If Yuan saw

something he wanted in the sacrifices to Heaven and earth that showed

the emperor (or the president) as the unique man who could link the two

with humanity, he seemed more willing to drop the conspicuous filial

symbolism and social and geographic unity of the other two grand sacri-

fices.47 However, while resisting attempts to turn Confucianism into an

established religion, Yuan proposed honoring the founder of Chinese

culture in a new national context. Furthermore, as we will see, he also

proposed turning the sacrifice to Heaven into the unifying symbol of

governance previously part of the sacrifice at the Altar of Soil and

Grain: rituals carried out simultaneously by all officialdom.

Yuan strenuously denied imperial ambitions. The case publicly

made for conducting the sacrifices was essentially utilitarian: that the

moral standards of the people had been declining since the Revolution

and that Heaven and Confucius represented virtue in the popular imagi-

nation. Finding a more modern basis of morality was not yet practical. It

was said that the few years of the Republican era had been racked by

violence while rites and music (liyue, the Confucian code for good gov-

ernment) were ignored. For three years, the worship of Heaven with

burnt offerings had been neglected, with only Kang Youwei urging that

the old rituals be updated.48 Religious scruples about the rituals were

deemed irrelevant to their political purpose. If the government ne-

glected the worship of Heaven, the people would blame the government

in the event of crop failure.49 Despite the practical, even cynical tone of

the explanation, popular sentiment was undoubtedly a real consider-

ation, but this point does not contradict the possibility of real religious

feeling that Yuan's informants may not have wished to convey to the

American. The key point remained that "Although the president was

different from the emperors, he is still in the end the leader of the state

(yiguo yuanshou), representing the nation (guomin) in modifying and

performing the grand sacrifice."50

Yuan proposed a deliberate mixture of traditional and updated rituals.

170 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

There would be a bullock sacrificed, silk and wine offered, bowls, a gold

incense burner, one jade cup, and so forth. The full ketou of three

kneelings and nine prostrations would be performed and ancient music

resuscitated. The worship of Heaven would take place before dawn, as

during the Qing, while the Temple and Altar of Heaven would be fes-

tooned with electric light bulbs to illuminate the ceremony.51 A new

anthem suitable to a republican age would be composed. Yuan would

wear neither modern clothes nor the imperial dress of the Qing but

supposedly would wear the coats of high dukes of the ancient Zhou

dynasty.52 Yuan himself argued that the sacrifices had originated to

honor Heaven as the source of all things and that to eliminate them

would be tantamount to abandoning the creation of a commonwealth

(tianxia weigong) and the linkage of humankind to Heaven.53 The an-

cient rulers understood that Heaven was a barometer of the people's will

and so protected the people impartially, and Yuan pointed out that all

this was perfectly compatible with republican principles.

The greatest break with the past, however, was the decision to allow

the private worship of Heaven (shuren siji) and to mandate local govern-

ment participation. No longer would sacrifices to Heaven be a mono-

poly - though the president would stand as the exemplary and "chief

officiate" (zhuji).54 In February of 1914, Yuan ordered that the worship

of Heaven be made "general" (tong) and that citizens (guomin) "might"

(ke) conduct the appropriate rituals in their homes.55 I have thus far

found only this single official reference to the complete "democratizing"

of the worship of Heaven. It should be noted that the term guomin

possesses a range of meanings, including national citizens and even "na-

tion": no simple translation can do justice to the full meaning of the term.

As opposed to minzu, guomin seems to me to represent a less ethnic

concept of the nation resting on a notion of citizenship, although Yuan

himself may have thought little about these distinctions or even the differ-

ences between subjects of an emperor and citizens of a Republic. As will

be seen, he retained a paternalistic attitude toward the populace. At the

same time, he emphasized that the president would represent the nation

(guomin) in the worship while local officials would represent local people

(difang renmin). Local officials were enjoined to follow the ritual proce-

dures established by the central government, while in Beijing all govern-

ment offices were expected to dispatch a representative to participate in

the main ceremony.56 It is my belief that in practice few if any private

households sacrificed to Heaven, though local officials, following orders,

Political Ritual in the Early Republic of China 171

certainly did so. In Shanghai, special platforms were built as a temporary

Altar to Heaven at the Industrial Training Depot outside the south gate.

Local education officials were in charge of the ceremony.57

It may be that the Temple and Altar of Heaven had been desacra-

lized by repeated secular use. Foreign troops had deliberately dese-

crated the precincts in the wake of the Boxer Uprising, and in the first

years of his administration Yuan had complained about American sol-

diers playing football there. Nonetheless, the architecture, like the idea,

remained. Yuan's sacrifices occurred, then, on the winter solstice, De-

cember 23, 1914. For first time, Heaven was worshiped by the president

and local officials throughout the realm. Yuan fasted for three days

beforehand (not five like the emperor and his entourage had) and left

his presidential palace before dawn on the day in question. Paul Reinsch

recorded that Yuan "drove surrounded by personal bodyguards over

streets covered with yellow sand and lined threefold with soldiers sta-

tioned there the evening before."58 Yuan was accompanied by a number

of his ministers, high officials, and generals to the Temple of Heaven,

where he was then joined by the ritual experts: "the sacrificial meat-

bearers, the silk and jade bearers, the cupbearers, and those who

chanted invocations." Yuan changed into the sacrificial robes in a tent

set up on the grounds and washed his hands. He then signed a ceremo-

nial board with prayers to Heaven in red letters. He ascended the altar

itself, facing north (the direction of submission, as had the Qing emper-

ors) on the second platform, kneeling and bowing four times. His reti-

nue moved ahead to the first platform with the items of sacrifice. The

sacrificial firewood was lit, and then Yuan moved to the first circle, lifted

the tray of silk, which was then placed on a table. Yuan returned to the

second circle for another round of bowing; then the sacrifice of meat and

the reading of prayers followed in the same way. Music, dancing (or

posturing), and incense accompanied the ceremonies. Yuan offered sev-

eral prayers, such as the following:

Heaven, Thou dost look down on us and givest us the nation. All

seeing and all hearing, everywhere, yet how near and how close: we

come before Thee on this winter solstice day when the air assumes a

new life; in spirit devout, and with ceremony old, we offer to Thee

jade, silk, and meat. May our prayer and our offerings rise unto

Thee together with sweet incense. We sanctify ourselves, and we

pray that Thou will accept our offerings.

172

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

This was followed by Yuan's partaking of wine and meat symbolizing the

blessings he received from Heaven on behalf of the people. Finally, the

jade was offered to Heaven and all the items burned.

The 1914 sacrifices to Heaven turned out to be a unique event in the

history of the Republic. Besieged the following year by opposition to his

monarchical plans, Yuan let the sacrifices fall into abeyance and in time

the grounds of the Temple and Altar of Heaven became a park and

museum. Double Ten did not survive Yuan in good shape either. In

1915, although government offices were closed on October 10, the mili-

tary review was canceled as China headed toward a civil war provoked

by the monarchical movement. Double Ten had to await the rise of the

Guomindang before it could again achieve significance.

Before concluding this section, I would like to add a word on a few

of Yuan's other attempts to ritualize the new state. Official worship of

Confucius in the spring and fall was designed to convey a sense of

continuity across the boundary of revolution.59 The Confucian Associa-

tion (Kongjiaohui) headed by the famous philosopher Kang Youwei and

the eloquent scholar Chen Huanzhang was a powerful grassroots lobby

devoted to making Confucianism a marker of Chinese identity. Tied as

he was, however, to other markers of modernity and the nation (the five

peoples of China were not necessarily all Confucian and Confucianism

as a religion seemed a reactionary step to many), Yuan tried again to

find a middle way. China would have no national religion but would

officially honor Confucius. If filial piety had been a model for loyalty to

the emperor, the republican government hoped to draw a link between

filiality and patriotism. Yuan tried to use Confucius both as a technique

of legitimation - he succeeded to age-old Confucian rites - and as a

means of fostering his conservative notion of state building.

The autumn 1913 Confucian sacrifices were held in the old Imperial

Academy (guozijian), and two leaders of the Republic, Liang Shiyi

(officially representing Yuan) and Tang Hualong, officiated.60 Before

the ceremonies, the offerings were viewed by Beijing's elite, including

foreign reporters, educators, and diplomats. The ritual itself seems to

have been conducted with considerable formality, although it was re-

ported that some felt the ceremonies had deteriorated. In September

1914, Yuan personally led the sacrifices to Confucius as chief priest,

proceeding to the Wenmiao in his armored car through crowds of sol-

diers, as with his worship of Heaven. Although men now exchanged

bows, Confucius still received the full ketou. This was followed by offer-

Political Ritual in the Early Republic of China

173

ings of wine, animals, and paper money in the classical fashion, followed

by another four ketou.61

Yuan emphasized that Confucianism was a protean system that had

evolved with the ages.62 Yuan "defended" Confucius from charges that

he had promoted autocracy by pointing out that he was born in an

aristocratic and despotic age: the implication was that Confucius tried to

ameliorate the conditions of his own time but could hardly be judged by

contemporary standards. In this evolutionary scheme, which seems to

have been very effectively promoted by Kang Youwei, Confucius had

promoted the Lesser Peace (xiaokang) while predicting the eventual

Grand Unity. In a curious way, Yuan, who in most ways seemed comfort-

able with autocracy, accepted much of the rhetoric - and some of the

worldview - of the radicals. But like the Confucian publicists he insisted

that Confucius had known about the future democracy of the Grand

Unity and led China toward it as conditions allowed. Heaven had given

birth to Confucius as the teacher of the ages. Yuan thus ordered public

schools to continue sacrifices to Confucius in 1913. The following year,

the Ministry of Education ordered middle and elementary schools to

emphasize self-cultivation and morality using Confucian textbooks.63

Yuan also linked learning (represented by Confucianism) to political

progress, on which in turn the survival of the nation depended.

Yuan also supported worship of the great hero-gods of war and

loyalty, especially Guan Di and Yue Fei. More than most members of

the traditional pantheon, they could be transmuted into symbols of mod-

ern patriotism. Yuan himself did not offer the sacrifices to them but

ordered his minister of war to do this. The 1914 sacrifices were to be

conducted with ceremonies for the martyrs of the Republic.64 Perhaps

this was Yuan's way of diluting any revolutionary messages in the ritual.

The ceremonies of the Confucian sacrifices were to be followed with

different music.65 Additionally, troops were brought in to witness the

ceremonies, bow their heads, file past the spirit tablets of the heroes,

and renew their oaths of allegiance.66 Yue Fei played a special role in the

early Republic. The Qing had not treated him with the same respect

they lavished on Guan Di.67 Yue Fei, after all, was the Han Chinese

hero who had resisted the northern invaders - thought to be relatives

and predecessors of the Manchus - in the twelfth century. It was thus

left for Yuan Shikai to elevate Yue Fei to a status equal with that of

Guan Di. In 1914, it was ordered that they share the highest honors in

what had been Guan Di's bailiwick, the Military Temple (wumiao), and

174 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

a new temple was also dedicated to them, where they and twenty-four

associates were represented by their spirit tablets. Yue Fei was termed

martial and loyal (wu zhong). The significance of the rise of Yue Fei lies

in his becoming a symbol of the new nation-state. The Chinese imperial

state had long honored the "sages and worthies" of the Confucian

Temple and had loosely regulated popular religion through its official

pantheon (with both temple and pantheon subject to much political

contestation). But Yuan Shikai was moving to popularize national he-

roes in a new way.

Indeed, Yuan even moved to have one of his ancestors given the

rank of a national divinity.68 As the monarchical movement got under

way in 1915, this seventeenth-century ancestor promised two advan-

tages: such a powerful ancestor gave Yuan a certain charismatic quality

even while his devotion illustrated his filial piety, both imperial attri-

butes; and at the same time this ancestor served as a kind of representa-

tion of the nation, for since he had supposedly resisted the Manchu

invasions of the 1600s he made an apt symbol of Han Chinese claims to

the throne. Petitions were received urging that he be canonized as a

national hero on the same level as Guan Di and Yue Fei. Such a move

would have demonstrated Yuan's filiality while also tending to absolve

him of the crime of betraying the Qing since his higher loyalties lay with

clan and race. Only the failure of the monarchical movement prevented

Yuan's ancestor from achieving this kind of immortality. The worship of

Guan Di and Yue Fei was continued at the Spring Sacrifices of 1916

(March 22), though without Yuan's personal presence.

In sum, the ritualization of the early Republic raises several difficult

questions. Was Yuan's "traditionalism" a step backward into the past?

Was it the beginning of Yuan's monarchical movement? What did

"Heaven" mean to the people? Could the attempt to bind citizens to

Heaven possibly ritualize modern nationalism? These questions cannot

be answered definitively. Yuan's worship of Heaven was simultaneously

designed to unite the nation and constitute his own power. It thus had an

entirely different meaning than the emperor's worship of Heaven, which

constituted imperial power but also generated the literati's hegemony

over Chinese society.69 Yuan himself emphasized the differences.70 He

claimed that he worshiped as the chief representative of the nation,

which was conceived as united through its officials in the ritualization.

The emperor, on the contrary, worshiped not as a representative of the

nation but primarily in his singular role; and, although it might be ar-

Political Ritual in the Early Republic of China 175

gued the emperor was a representative of humankind, he also stood in a

unique relationship to Heaven, a claim Yuan never made. Yuan aligned

himself more clearly with humankind. At the same time, Yuan was

clearly trying to assert himself as successor to the emperor and to associ-

ate himself with the charisma of Heaven. There can be no doubt that

Yuan was attempting to create a ritualization of political life based on

ascribing new meanings to old rituals as well as creating new rituals. The

simultaneity of Yuan's sacrifices to Heaven with general solstice sacri-

fices marked a new sense of the nation. However, he was largely seen at

the time as returning to tradition or in terms of "restoring antiquity"

(fugu), and, indeed, Yuan's traditionalism was hard to reconcile with

the militant nationalism that marked many of the urban elites.

No revolution changes the habits and attitudes of a people over-

night. Much of Yuan's behavior can be explained as instinctive to any

high official in late imperial China. Nonetheless, major decisions were

taken about rituals only after considerable discussion and calculation.

The fundamental contradiction between the different types of ritual

Yuan favored lay not in the modern-traditional dichotomy per se but in

the gap between nation and empire. Yuan's authority as president de-

rived from revolution and the creation of a new state, but he apparently

did not completely understand this, still perhaps seeing himself in the

imperial mode. The evidence suggests that urban China took great de-

light in Double Ten festivals, and Yuan's eventual rejection of Double

Ten nicely symbolizes his rejection of the nation. Militarism itself might

be honored by either empire or nation, but patriotic heroes are national

heroes only and armies that swear oaths of allegiance to the abstraction

of the nation are entirely different from imperial armies. For China in

the second decade of the twentieth century armies and militia could well

symbolize the new nation: militarism needed no further justification in a

social Darwinist world. Heaven, however, inevitably remained lodged in

a cosmos of Confucian universalism and hierarchy. It was neither so-

cially nor logically possible to democratize it, though the imperial rituals

of power still possessed a genuine hold over Yuan and much of his

generation.

Chinese State Ritual in International Context

The late nineteenth century seems to have been a period of intense "inven-

tion of tradition" in the West, including many rituals of state.71 Under

176 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

pressures of social change and political transformation - especially the

rise of mass politics - European elites turned to symbol and ritual to

augment their authority. At a time when older social hierarchies were

undermined, the relatively new nation-states sought "a strengthening of

the subject's direct bonds to the central rule" even as the ideology of

democracy became a legitimating motif.72 Popular politics in one form or

another was not a technique for disguising power but a reality to which

rulers had to adapt. In distinctive but overlapping ways, the monarchies

of Britain, France, Germany, and Russia were used to cement social ties

and symbolize the nation. The British monarchy, for example, conveyed

a sense of stability and continuity.73 Whether or not monarchs held real

power (as in Russia and Germany), they attempted to stand above the

political fray. In retrospect, this seems a natural function of modern

monarchies.

My point is not that Western examples show what China should or

even might have become; rather, it is that the Chinese Revolution oc-

curred in a particular international context, a fluid context of experimen-

tation in state forms and techniques of rule. By no means were Yuan's

attempts to ritualize his rule doomed simply because of their experimen-

tal nature. China's elites deliberately sought to use those Western politi-

cal forms that appeared useful. On the one hand, to some Chinese

intellectuals the monarchy and any form of autocracy seemed tied to

ignorance and reaction; on the other, many Chinese sought to pre-

serve - and update - aspects of tradition, possibly but not necessarily

including monarchism, that might support a modern nation-state. This

latter view seems to me closer to "mainstream" opinion among Chinese

elites than the better-known radicalism, which explains why Yuan

Shikai began with a certain base of popular support. The subject needs

further research. In any case, the key questions facing the Western

nation-states and China were the same: how to reconcile a sense of

the continuity of the "people" (and "civilization" in the Chinese case)

with the founding of a new order; how to combine the "essence" of the

culture with progress into the future; and how to maintain social order

in a time of fundamental transformation. It is useful to remember that

events in China were not aberrant but themselves part of an internation-

alizing process. However unique China's exact historical course, many

features of the early Republic reflected the "technical innovations" of

rulership being adopted throughout the world, from the appearance of

Yuan's portrait on money and in ritual halls to the construction of new

Political Ritual in the Early Republic of China 177

ritual spaces and forms of ritualization. The public display of state ritual

was designed to draw the people into psychological oneness with it,

through both formal means such as those discussed earlier and informal

means such as, to take just one example, sports - another new feature

of international relations.

Chinese in the late Qing and the early Republic were of course most

familiar with Japan. They saw a stable constitutional monarchy in the

Meiji-Taisho polity.74 Yuan Shikai's political adviser was the Japanese

Confucian Ariga Nagao, a man considerably more familiar with China

than was Yuan's constitutional adviser, the American political scientist

Frank Goodnow. Japan had created a dynamic yet orderly society using

some of the same resources of Confucianism evidently available in

China.75 Above all, the emperor emerged as the premier symbol of the

state, growing into a kind of theological essence of the nation itself. The

Japanese emperor became both a Confucian paragon and the center of

Shinto. The ritualization of the Japanese nation-state thus consisted

chiefly of imperial rites. Shinto reemerged in the last years of the nine-

teenth century as a source of imperial mythology: the divine origins of

the emperor and hence of Japan. Shrines to the war dead were built with

government approval, and they became a major focus of official ideol-

ogy, linking harmony, the gods, the ancestors, and the nation. School-

children visited and helped care for Shinto shrines, and priests often

taught in public schools. State sponsored shrines were not only linked

upward to the emperor himself but taught "loyalty and patriotism"

through worship of the war dead. Shinto - focused upward ultimately to

the emperor - gradually helped unify the nation temporally as local com-

munity rites and festivals were replaced with the national ritual calendar

coordinated with the imperial rites. The emperor not only worshiped his

own ancestors, but he prayed for harvests, offered thanks, welcomed the

New Year, and so on, thus becoming a cosmic figure in his own right. It

was a congeries of ritualization named Shinto, especially after the Meiji

Emperor withdrew somewhat from public life after the 1880s, that medi-

ated between the center and localities.

What all this meant, if anything, for Yuan Shikai and other Chinese

must remain speculative for the moment, though the Japanese influence

was almost certainly profound. The early Republic saw considerable dis-

cussion about the desirability of turning Confucianism into a state reli-

gion. Kang Youwei and others urged that China follow the British ex-

ample of an established church. It thus made sense for Yuan, while

178 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

rejecting the notion of an established church, to favor some kind of state

recognition of Confucianism (closer to Japanese Shinto than the Church

of England). Without the institutional apparatus of Shinto and most

emphatically stripped of its imperial connections, Confucianism was sup-

posed to play a somewhat similar role as a focus of national unity and a

link between center and locality. Not an emperor but the sage of sages

was to provide the focus for popular devotion. Yuan supported the injec-

tion (or retention) of Confucian classics in the basic school curriculum,

treated the Confucian sacrifices in the capital as an affair of state, and

demanded official sponsorship of biennial Confucian rites throughout the

land. However, the movement to turn Confucianism into a modern reli-

gion, which was rooted in local elites not especially concerned with

Yuan's fate, fell apart when his regime collapsed.

The Impotence of Ritual?

Two fundamental problems lay behind the politics of the Republic and

ultimately how power was ritualized at this time. First, the crisis of author-

ity was brought to the fore by the collapse of the imperial system and the

ever-present threats of the foreign powers. Second, the definition of Chi-

neseness was ultimately related not just to state claims but to the entire

adjustment to the international nation-state system.76 During the 1895-

1911 period, the construction of nationhood in China revolved around a

slippery discourse of minzu (people, race, nation). The attempts after

1900 on the part of the Qing government to inculcate a state-based nation-

alism failed in no small part because it was unable to attach itself to the

minzu discourse. Even what we might call anti-Manchu constitutionalists

such as Liang Qichao were forced to define Chineseness in the same terms

as ethnic nationalism: peoples marked as distinct by a mix of blood, lan-

guage, territory, and customs and culture, notions that, indeed, Liang did

much to introduce to China. The Revolution, however, brought to the

fore the fundamental contradiction between ethnic and state nationalism

(if these two categories are not diametrically opposed modes of national-

ism, they still remain a heuristically useful distinction). The Han nation

inevitably could be imagined only in some tension with a "China" encom-

passing large minority territories. This dilemma had been foreseen, but its

relentless logic was largely avoided until 1912. If Han Chinese as a minzu

deserved their own nation (territory, state sovereignty), then why not

Manchus, Mongols, Uighurs, Tibetans, and so forth?

Political Ritual in the Early Republic of China 179

Various answers to this question emerged. Some scholars have seen a

healthy evolution of Chinese nationalism from narrower to broader

scope.77 In this view, the anti-Manchuism of the revolutionary era, itself

more politically focused than the genocidal anti-Manchuism of the

Taiping Rebellion, was replaced with an ethnically inclusive nationalism

the ultimate target of which was imperialist oppression not just of China

but any weak nation. Nationalism, as a kind of process of self-recognition,

naturally proceeds from a narrower ethnic consciousness to a broader

national consciousness based on the multiethnic state and eventually de-

velops into an egoless international utopian state. The particular cosmo-

politanism of Marxism provided another sort of answer (see Hung-yok

Ip's chapter in this volume), emphasizing anti-imperialism and class

struggle, issues that continued to play out in China at least through the

1960s. And in practice the twentieth century has seen various Chinese

governments pursue policies ranging from assimilation (at its extreme,

cultural genocide) to granting a measure of autonomy to officially defined

minority peoples. At the same time, it has become clear that nationalist

discourse during the Republican era developed in new directions such as

gendered authenticity or political progressiveness.78 However, the point

here remains that at the beginning of the Republic the new state under

Yuan Shikai faced the twin tasks of retaining control over the territories of

the Qing (partly in the name of a hegemonic Chinese nationalism that had

blamed the Manchus for betraying China to the imperialist powers) and

asserting its authority over the centrifugal tendencies of Chinese society

itself. Since the imperial state claimed suzerainty over diverse peoples, it

should be no wonder that Yuan turned to what I have loosely labeled

imperial rituals. Yet Yuan was not interested in "traditionalism" for its

own sake or even particularly following past models through inertia;

rather, he was searching for immediately useful techniques of rule. It is

true that Yuan hoped to build a more modern and hence more efficient

and intrusive state, but he planned to do this on the basis of the institu-

tions and relations of power that he had inherited. Yuan was trying to

work out a ritual synthesis appropriate to his needs. His notion of Chinese

nationalism rested on the desire that it be built and shaped by the state.

He did not yet see it as a force that he could mobilize - though of course

he did have to respond to nationalist currents he could not control. Yuan

presented himself as the one man who could save China from disorder and

dismemberment.

Thus, the struggle for power that emerged in the wake of the 1911

180

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

Revolution was partly fought over the definition of the Chinese nation.

Conservative bureaucrats, reformers, former revolutionaries, and Yuan

himself largely were agreed on the goals of a united and disciplined

populace and a strong and wealthy state. They disagreed, of course, on

many issues of political style, pace, strategies, and so forth, and perhaps

above all on whether the "people" were to be active or passive. But

regardless of their disputes it is important to remember that the Chinese

nation was in fact being defined on a daily basis willy-nilly: in hair and

clothing styles, in rhetorical imagination and social movements, and in

the changing rituals of the day. These included not just political ritual

but such quotidian actions as handshaking, which began to supplement

bowing. But these did include political ritual as well, and the struggles

over political ritual at the national and local levels were part of the

ongoing process of defining the Chinese. In other words, not simply the

final forms of political ritualization but their evolving and disputed na-

ture contributed to Chinese identity in the early Republic.

Revolutions create "beginnings" that are particularly open-ended

and fluid. Ritual, on the other hand, usually denotes a sense of timeless-

ness, continuity, and constancy. The point here is not simply that rituals

too are invented and have their own genealogies, histories, and disjunc-

tions but also that even when we discuss ritual genealogically we assume

its success and hence some kind of settledness. Rituals are taken to

"work" or else they are not rituals. Yet there are many examples of

attempted or failed rituals, actions clearly ritual in nature that did not

plant roots in a given society. Times of political upheaval might be

expected to be rich in such "failed rituals." After all, these are times

when various players attempt to claim power, which must be ritually

expressed, even while such rituals cannot possibly erase their own cre-

ation quickly enough to appear natural. Furthermore, the problem of

finding an appropriate, meaningful language of power (meaningful to

both power holders and citizens/subjects) remains particularly unsettled

at such times. How was the notion of the Chinese Republic to be ex-

pressed? Regardless of the precise political institutions that emerged,

the question was never more than partially answered. Specifically in

terms of ritualization, two issues quickly surfaced with the success of the

Revolution.

First, new political rituals had to express the nation as well as the

state. If a distinction is drawn between state building and nation build-

ing, then Yuan Shikai's use of ritual to express his authority might seem

Political Ritual in the Early Republic of China 181

to fall into the category of state more than nation. However, given that a

new nation was coming into being no matter what Yuan wished, rituals

of state necessarily represented the nation. The ritualization of Yuan's

power spoke to China's modernity, to its joining the world nation-state

system, and to both its unity and its hierarchies of status and power. By

linking the people and the land to itself ritually, the new state was

contributing to the construction of the people no less than when it man-

dated compulsory education. The invention of public military parades

and national holidays, for example, were ritual components of a larger

narrative of the Chinese nation. Even Yuan's monarchical movement,

which was proclaimed in the name of the people's will and framed in

terms of elections (rigged elections but all the more ritualistic for follow-

ing steps clear beforehand), was in part the ritual expression of the

nation. Before dismissing Yuan as a mere traditionalist or reactionary, it

should be remembered that imperial cults were explicitly tied to national-

ist goals in Britain, Germany, Russia, and Japan; before World War I,

republics remained the exception. Indeed, kingship proclaimed the an-

cient character of the nation. So, too, did the postrevolutionary rit-

ualization of Confucius.

Second, political rituals had to appeal to the people by expressing a

seamless, continuous culture even while naturalizing a fundamentally

new nation-state. This presented ritual makers with a series of dilem-

mas. The battles over ritual could even cut across the usual political

lines. The former revolutionaries supported Double Ten and opposed

Confucianism. They opposed Yuan Shikai's ritualization of the center,

but they were not necessarily any more populist. When the revolutionar-

ies were still in command of Guangzhou in 1912, for example, they tried

to limit public observations of Confucianism and abolish study of the

classics in the schools. However, great popular participation in the street

festivities surrounding Confucius's birthday in October 1912 illustrated

widespread animosity toward the government.79 When all is said and

done, nonetheless, it is only a slight simplification to claim that Double

Ten on the one side and Heaven on the other constituted two opposite

poles of ritualization of the nation as well as the state. Politically, Yuan

was able to capture Double Ten, but in doing so he inevitably accepted

the new norms of the nation. He abandoned Double Ten only in the

hope that other ritualization would prove more powerful.

Yuan thus sought to link his rule to sources of authority by appropri-

ating, experimenting, and synthesizing, but he could never turn to great

182 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

victories, growing prosperity, or approaching modernity. Yuan had little

maneuvering room since he was facing severe pressure from Japan,

which was becoming the dominant imperial power in China at the onset

of World War I and was deliberately seeking to keep the Chinese govern-

ment weak. The attempts to ritualize Yuan's power, then, occurred in an

atmosphere of increasing adversity. In the end, he simply did not have

the time to establish a new order in his own image. Under these circum-

stances, imperial ritual proved irresistible, leading Yuan toward the di-

sastrous decision to try to found a new dynasty in 1915. In presenting a

Confucian justification for his choice of ritual, Yuan made both himself

and Confucianism seem more reactionary than they actually were. As

Catherine Bell notes, "Ritualization is probably an effective way of

acting only under certain cultural circumstances."80 That is to say, ritual

functions best under some historical circumstances and not under oth-

ers. After all, even when rituals clearly contribute to the maintenance of

patterns of power relations and link these to higher truths, there are still

alternatives, satires, and resistance. Since rituals are inherently loose

and multivalent, they do not function to enforce inflexible social or

political orders. Rather, as in Yuan's case, rituals are consciously and

unconsciously designed to express the transcendental basis of power,

naturalize the relationship of the state to society, and define legitimacy.

It may well be that as far as Yuan was concerned the ritual expression of

the nation was merely an unintended and unwelcome consequence, but

it was also an inevitable consequence of the ritualization of the state.

NOTES

This chapter is based on my essay for the conference Narratives, Arts,

and Ritual: Imagining and Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia,

which was held at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, November

14-17, 1996. I am grateful for the comments of Patricia Ebrey, the discussant;

Kai-wing Chow, Kevin M. Doak, and Poshek Fu, the organizers of the confer-

ence; and the other participants as well as the press's readers. Different versions

of the chapter were presented at the conference State and Ritual in East Asia,

Paris, June 29 to July 1, 1995, and at the 1996-97 Past and Future of Social

Science Seminar, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University, December

4, 1996. I am grateful to all the participants in those discussions, and I would

particularly like to thank Catherine Bell, Jiwei Ci, Prasenjit Duara, Clifford

Geertz, Russell Kirkland, and Richard Lufrano for helpful comments. This

chapter originated in my current research interest in the decline of theocratic

Political Ritual in the Early Republic of China 183

thinking in modern China. None of the people named here should be blamed for

the mistakes that remain in what is still a preliminary analysis of this complex

topic.

1. Angela Zito, Of Body and Brush: Grand Sacrifice and Text/Perfor-

mance in Eighteenth-Century China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1997). Zito emphasizes that text-based studies were an intrinsic part of the ritual

process, as officials linked "a performance of texts and a textualizing perfor-

mance" (4). The gentry class, of course, depended on the legitimacy given its

status by the emperor, who stood at the head of the examination system. See

also Kai-wing Chow, The Rise of Confucian Ritualism in Late Imperial China:

Ethics, Classics and Lineage Discourse (Stanford: Stanford University Press,

1994); and Richard J. Smith, "Ritual in Qing Culture," in Kwang-ching Liu, ed.,

Ritual and Orthodoxy in Late Imperial China, 281-310 (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1990).

2. Covering disparate social systems, see inter alia such works as Clifford

Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton: Prince-

ton University Press, 1980); Clifford Geertz, "Centers, Kings, and Charisma:

Reflections on the Symbolics of Power," in Sean Wilentz, ed., Rites of Power:

Symbolism, Ritual, and Politics since the Middle Ages, 13-38 (Philadelphia:

University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), from which the contemporary Ameri-

can example is taken; Christel Lane, Rites of Rulers (Cambridge, Cambridge

University Press, 1981); David I. Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power (New

Haven: Yale University Press, 1988); Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French

Revolution, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988);

and Werner Sollors, ed., The Invention of Ethnicity (New York: Oxford Univer-

sity Press, 1989). See also the essays in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger,

eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1983); and Wilentz, Rites of Power. The study of cultural invention is magnifi-

cently represented in Asian studies by T. Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy: Power

and Pageantry in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

Convincing recent analyses of Qing ritualization may be found in: Evelyn S.

Rawski, The Last Emperors: A Social History of Qing Imperial Institutions

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), esp. 197-294; and Zito Body

and Brush.

3. Raswki, Last Emperors, 198, 208.

4. Ibid., 200-201. See also the discussion in Zito, Body and Brush, 81-86.

5. Much of the literature depicts the revolutionaries as progressive and

Yuan as reactionary and an inveterate betrayer. See Jerome Ch'en, Yuan Shih-

k'ai (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972), 195-215. For a more nuanced

view of Yuan as a "modernizing conservative," see Ernest P. Young, The Presi-

dency of Yuan Shih-k'ai: Liberalism and Dictatorship in Early Republican China

(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977); and "The Hung-hsien Em-

peror as a Modernizing Conservative," in Charlotte Furth, ed., The Limits of

Change: Essays on Conservative Alternatives in Republican China, 171-90 (Cam-

bridge: Harvard University Press, 1976).

6. Stephen Feuchtwang, "School-Temple and City God," in G. William

184 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

Skinner, ed., The City in Late Imperial China, 581-608 (Stanford: Stanford

University Press, 1977), 593. Or, as Angela Zito puts it, as constitutive of a sense

of reality: "Li allows us to see that constructions of the social and its limits are

politically significant because they connect the person and a larger collectivity in

a way that seems 'natural' to participants" (Body and Brush, 49). What ritual

could not do was define the collectivity or community as such.

7. See Frank Dikotter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China (London:

Hurst, 1992). A distinctive Chinese identity at the level of popular culture is

outlined in Myron L. Cohen, "Being Chinese: The Peripheralization of Tradi-

tional Identity," Daedalus 120, no. 2 (spring 1991): 113-34. James L. Watson

points to the importance of "orthopraxy" or proper ritual/etiquette to the Chi-

nese sense of identity-see "The Structure of Chinese Funerary Rites: Elemen-

tary Forms, Ritual Sequence, and the Primacy of Performance," in James L.

Watson and Evelyn S. Rawski, eds., Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern

China, 3-19 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). Conversely, Eve-

lyn S. Rawski provides an important correction to Watson, in the same volume

(20-36). See also James L. Watson, "Rites or Beliefs: The Constitution of a

Unified Culture in Late Imperial China," in Lowell Dittmer and Samuel S. Kim,

eds., China's Quest for National Identity, 80-103 (Ithaca: Cornell University

Press, 1993). While the significance of popular religious practices was open to a

wide variety of interpretations, the production of ritual knowledge was taken

seriously by court and local elites, as will be further argued later.

8. Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing the Nation from History: Questioning Narra-

tives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 55-81.

9. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins

and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991); Ernest Gellner, Nations and

Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983).

10. Rawski, Last Emperors, 207-10; Zito, Brush and Body, 185-206

passim.

11. The degree to which local elites saw an opportunity to attain greater

power in the Revolution is explored in Joseph Esherick, Reform and Revolution

in China: The 1911 Revolution in Hunan and Hubei (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1976), esp. chap. 7. There is a large literature on the relation-

ship between local elites, nationalism, and the complex devolution of Qing

power; outstanding examples include Mary Backus Rankin, Elite Activism and

Political Transformation in China: Zhejiang Province, 1865-1911 (Stanford:

Stanford University Press, 1986); and Bryna Goodman, Native Place, City, and

Nation: Regional Networks and Identities in Shanghai, 1853-1937 (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1995).

12. In addition to those cited in note 2, works on ritual I have found most

useful (though often adapted for my own purposes or simply misunderstood)

are Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford Univer-

sity Press, 1992); Maurice Agulhon, "Politics, Images, and Symbols in Post-

Revolutionary France," in Wilentz, Rites of Power, 177-205; and comments in

Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stan-

ford University Press, 1990).

Political Ritual in the Early Republic of China 185

13. David Cannadine, "The Context, Performance, and Meaning of Ritual:

The British Monarchy and the 'Invention of Tradition,' c. 1820-1977," in Hobs-

bawm and Ranger, Invention of Tradition, 101-64, esp. 120-32 passim.

14. T. Fujitani, in his discussion of the Meiji Emperor, also points to the

disciplinary effect of the emperor's "centralizing gaze" as imperial processions

brought him out into the open where he could see his people (see Splendid

Monarchy, 52-55). I would add that in some cases, especially when the rulers

lack the transcendental claims of royalty, the disciplinary effect of "gazing" may

work both ways: the people also gaze upon their rulers, watching how well they

fulfill the responsibilities of power.

15. Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, 108.

16. Cf. Bell, Ritual Theory, 206-8, 212-18.

17. Shibao, September 24, 1912, 3.

18. Shibao, October 9, 1912, 5.

19. Shibao, October 12, 1912, 4.

20. Shibao, October 17, 1912, 3.

21. Shibao, October 14, 1912, 4.

22. Shibao, October 17, 1912, 3.

23. Shibao, October 9, 1912, 5; October 10, 1912, 5; October 12, 1912, 5.

24. Shibao, October 13, 1912, 3.

25. The Shibao reporter attributed this to a fear that war might return

(October 18, 1912, 3). However, another factor might have been a heavier

government presence.

26. The description below is taken from Shibao, October 11, 1913, 4; Octo-

ber 12, 1913, 4; October 14, 1913, 3-4.

27. Facing south was associated with Chinese rulership from the most an-

cient period, while enthronement was central at least from late imperial times.

From the eighteenth century on, Qing rulers had completed the accession cere-

mony by ascending the throne and facing south, receiving the obeisance of the

princes and officials. See Rawski, Last Emperors, 203-7; and especially her

"The Creation of an Emperor in Eighteenth-Century China," in Bell Yung et

al., eds., Harmony and Counterpoint: Ritual Music in Chinese Context, 150-74

(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).

28. See also Shibao, October 11, 1913, 4.

29. George L. Mosse, "Ceasarism, Circuses, and Monuments," Journal of

Contemporary History 6, no. 2 (1971): 167-82.

30. Shibao, October 12, 1913, 4.

31. Shibao, October 18, 1913, 4.

32. Shibao, October 13, 1913, 7.

33. The following description is taken from Zhengfu gongbao (Govern-

ment public reports, hereafter ZFGB), September 18, 1914, no. 512 ("cheng");

ZFGB, October 13, 1914, no. 876 ("tonggao"); ZFGB, October 14, 1914, no.

877 ("cheng"); and Peking Daily News (hereafter PDN), October 11, 1914.

34. Shibao, October 30, 1914, 4.

35. PDN, December 29, 1914, 4.

36. See Henrietta Harrison, "Spreading the Revolution beyond Politics:

186 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

Queue Cutting, Calendar Reform, and the Revolution of 1911," paper pre-

sented at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Washington,

DC, April 1995. As Harrison points out, queue cutting was one of the few

policies of the revolutionary regime that had much local impact (in rural areas).

37. See ZFGB, February 8, 1914, no. 631 ("mingling").

38. Shibao, September 16, 1924; Shibao, September 15, 1924, 3; ZFGB,

September 6, 1914, no. 840 ("cheng"); ZFGB, September 18, 1914, no. 842

("cheng"); ZFGB, September 19, 1914, no. 853 ("cheng").

39. Shibao, September 17, 1914, 7.

40. Qing imperial birthday rituals are discussed in Rawski, Last Emperors,

272-73. The point I would emphasize here is not the specific ceremonies but the

public nature of the occasion.

41. Paul S. Reinsch, An American Diplomat in China (Garden City, NY:

Doubleday, Page, 1922).

42. Ibid., 4.

43. Ibid., 3-4, 5.

44. Ibid., 1-2.

45. It is true that some Kongjiaohui members shared the modern discourse

of linear progress and even welcomed the Republic as the fulfillment of Confu-

cian utopian promises; however, the concern for moral and social order predomi-

nated. For typical examples, see "Chi Beijing jiaoyuhui pohuai Kongjiao zhizui"

(Condemnation of the Beijing Ministry of Education for destroying Confucian-

ism), Shibao, April 12, 1913, 6; "Kongjiao xinwen: shen lun Xushi Shaozhen si

tian pei Kong yi" (Confucian news: essay on Xu Shaozhen's essay on worshiping

Confucius with Heaven), Kongjiaohui zazhi, 1, no. 4 (1936): 6-7; Xi Song, "Lun

Cai Yuanpei teyi xuexiao buji Kongzi" (On Cai Yuanpei's proposal to abolish

the worship of Confucius in schools), Shibao, July 20, 1912, 1; and Zhang

Ertian, "Yu ren lun changming Kongjiao yi qianggu daode" (Letter to explain

how Kongjiao can solidify morality), Kongjiaohui zazhi, 1, no. 5 (1913): 21-24.

46. See "Mingling" (commands), Shibao, June 27, 1913, 2; and "Dazong-

tong fu xuexiao ji Kong mingling" (Presidential command reinstating sacrifices

to Confucius in the schools), Kongjiaohui zazhi, 1, no. 6 (1913): 11-12; and

"Mingling," Shibao, February 10, 1914, 2.

47. Zito, Body and Brush, 2-3.

48. Shibao, December 21, 1914, 3.

49. The American ambassador was bemused by this explanation. See

Reinsch, American Diplomat, 24-25.

50. Shibao, December 21, 1914, 3.

51. Shibao, December 18, 1914, 3.

52. PDN, January 16, 1914, 4.

53. ZFGB, December 21, 1914, no. 945 ("mingling").

54. PDN, January 24, 1914, 4; Shibao, December 21, 1914, 3.

55. ZFGB, February 8, 1914, no. 631 ("mingling").

56. Shibao, December 18, 1914, 3.

57. North-China Daily News (hereafter NCDN), December 21, 1914, 15.

58. Reinsch, American Diplomat, 25-26. Reinsch seems to confuse the

Political Ritual in the Early Republic of China 187

dates, recalling the sacrifices as occurring in December 1913 instead of 1914.

This description is also taken from PDN, December 24, 1914, 4-5; and Shibao,

December 23, 1914, 4.

59. PDN, September 28, 1914, 4; see also note 39.

60. "Benhui jishi: zonghui" (Notes from the headquarters of this associa-

tion), Kongjiaohui zazhi (Journal of the Confucian Association), 1, no. 8 (1913):

1-4; and "'Guozijian Dingji zhi shengyi" (Various ceremonies of the Ding wor-

ship at the Imperial Academy), Shibao, September 11, 1913, 3.

61. PDN, September 29, 1914, 5.

62. "Mingling," Shibao, June 27, 1913, 2; "Dazongtong fu xuexiao ji Kong

mingling" (Presidential order reinstating sacrifices to Confucius in the schools),

Kongjiaohui zazhi 1, no. 6 (1913): 11-12.

63. "Jiaoyubu xuanshi zun Kong zongzhi" (The Ministry of Education an-

nounces its goal of respect for Confucius), Shibao, July 2, 1914.

64. NCDN, November 26, 1914, 7-8. See also Prasenjit Duara, "Super-

scribing Symbols: The Myth of Guandi, Chinese God of War," Journal of Asian

Studies 47, no. 4 (1988): 778-95.

65. PDN, March 27, 15, 4.

66. R. F. Johnston, "Chinese Cult of Military Heroes," New China Review

3, no. 2 (1921): 89-90.

67. Ibid., 83-86.

68. Ibid., 121-22.

69. "For the literati, the imperium consecrated the claim of successful ex-

amination candidates to be the representatives/inscribers of culture in general as

they wrote the emperor's rites" (Zito, Body and Brush, 216).

70. Shibao, December 18, 1914, 3.

71. Hobsbawm and Ranger, Invention of Tradition. See also Agulhon,

"Politics."

72. Eric Hobsbawm, "Mass Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870-1914," in

Hobsbawm and Ranger, Invention of Tradition, 263-307, quote is from 266. See

also Mosse, "Caesarism," 167-70.

73. Cannadine, "Context," Although (or because) the institution was politi-

cally weak, its ceremonial splendor contributed to its popularity. Eric Hobs-

bawm ("Mass Producing Traditions," 282) points out that "technically" the politi-

cal use of the monarchy was the same whether monarchs held actual power or

merely symbolized the state, but it seems to me much harder to make power

holders attractive. Such use of "tradition" need not be especially conservative,

but it is fully compatible with moderate progressivism, as Walter Bagehot urged.

Bagehot published his The English Constitution in 1867, combining a journalistic

account of the politics of his day with prescriptions, including the use of the

"dignified" parts of the constitution such as the monarchy, to convey a sense of

continuity even in times of dramatic change.

74. The question of sino-Japanese contacts is discussed in Douglas R. Reyn-

olds, China, 1898-1912: The Xinzheng Revolution and Japan (Cambridge: Har-

vard University Press, 1993); D. R. Howland, Borders of Chinese Civilization:

Geography and History at Empire's End (Durham: Duke University Press,

188

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

1996); Lin Mingde, "Qingmo Minchu Riben zhengzhi dui Zhongguo de ying-

xiang" (The influence of Japanese politics on China in the late Qing and early

Republic), in Yue-him Tam, ed., Sino-Japanese Cultural Interchange: The Eco-

nomic and Intellectual Aspects, 3:187-191 (Hong Kong: Institute of Chinese

Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1985); Peng Zezhou, Chagoku no

kindaika to Meiji isshen (The modernization of China and the Meiji Restoration)

(Kyoto: D6b6sha, 1976); and Wang Xiaoqiu, Jindai Zhong-Ri qishilu (Modern

Sino-Japanese revelation) (Beijing: Beijing chubanshe, 1987).

75. The following account is based largely on Carol Gluck, Japan's Modern

Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

1985); Helen Hardacre, Shinto and the State, 1868-1988 (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1989); Helen Hardacre, "The Role of the Japanese State in

Ritual and Ritualization, 1868-1945," paper presented at the conference Ritual

and State in East Asia, Paris, June 29 to July 1, 1995; Shen Caibin [Chin Saihin],

Tenno to Chugoku kotei (The Japanese and Chinese emperors) (Tokyo: Rokko

shuppan, 1990); and Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy.

76. This is not the place to examine either issue in any depth. For back-

ground, see James Townsend, "Chinese Nationalism," Australian Journal of

Chinese Affairs, no. 27 (January 1992): 97-130; and Duara, Rescuing the Nation.

77. Li Guoqi, "Zhongguo jindai minzu sixiang" (Modern Chinese national-

ist thought), in Zhou Yangshan and Yang Xiaoxian, eds., Jindai Zhongguo

sixiang renwulun: minzu zhuyi (Modern Chinese intellectual figures: National-

ism), 19-43 (Taibei: Shibao wenhua chubanshiye, 1985), 42. Li is specifically

describing Sun Yat-sen's ideas.

78. See the chapters in this volume by Prasenjit Duara, Andrew F. Jones,

and Poshek Fu.

79. "Yuesheng shangtuan zhu sheng zhi renao" (The excitement of Guang-

zhou's merchant groups' commemoration of the sage), Shibao, October 17,

1912, 4; "Zaizhi Yuesheng gejie Kongtan zhudian zhisheng" (A second report

on various commemorations of Confucius's birthday by each circle in Guang-

zhou), Shibao, October 18, 1912, 3.

80. Bell, Ritual Theory, 141.

Chapter 6

In Search of HISTORY in Democratic

Korea: The Discourse of Modernity in

Contemporary Historical Fiction

JaHyun Kim Haboush

When one observes the popular discourse of contemporary South Ko-

rea, one is struck by the rapidity with which it shifts and the multiplicity

of its strands. Most contemporary societies exhibit these characteristics,

but in Korea, where social and political changes of gargantuan propor-

tion have occurred at a dizzying pace in recent decades, this seems to be

especially pronounced. It is rather difficult to imagine now, less than a

decade later, the frothing euphoria and palpable excitement that the

public exuded over the establishment of a democratically elected civilian

government (munmin changbu) in 1992, ending a decades-long period

of military rule. In the wake of what was called the miracle on the Han

River, South Korea was transformed from a developing third-world

economy into an industrial and newly developed one in just two or three

decades,' Koreans were anticipating the fruits of full-fledged democracy,

including freedom of speech and ideas.

What made the attainment of the double prize of political and eco-

nomic rewards particularly sweet for Koreans was the deeply felt senti-

ment that they had won them the hard way and through their own efforts

in the face of scorn2 and skepticism3 from the outside. They felt that

during those years of struggle for democracy even the sympathies of

American liberals and intellectuals were tinged with a condescending

sense that the troubled situation in Korea was the expected fate of the

people of a neocolonial society. Unlike their independence from Japan

in 1945, which Koreans felt was given to them,4 or the two subsequent

governments in North and South Korea in 1948, which were seen as not

having been of their own making,5 Koreans seemed to feel a sense of

189

190 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

ownership toward the 1992 democratic government. If they conceded

the government's contribution to the economy, they claimed the entire

credit for the new political system.

This sense of exhilaration was accompanied by a sobering conscious-

ness that the arrival of democracy was an epochal metamorphosis for the

identity of the Korean nation. It was at long last leaving behind victim-

hood, claiming subjectivity and parity with other economically and politi-

cally mature nations. This moment was a happy ending to narratives of

the han (suffering, sorrows, pains) of the Korean people: The people

who had suffered innumerable hardships and trials had finally tri-

umphed through their own efforts, perseverance, and determination.

Indeed, Koreans seemed to share a widespread consensus that the narra-

tives of han and the emotions associated with them should achieve clo-

sure. Although Koreans were aware of the missing element required for

the proper ending of these narratives - a grand finale would require the

reunification of North and South Korea - they felt that South Korea as a

nation had arrived.

The widespread sense of the nation's coming of age elicited a desire

to reevaluate Korea's positionality in relation to its past and global

geography. Two issues in particular were felt to be in urgent need of

reassessment. One was the question of modernity. Although the dis-

course of modernity has been present in Korea at least since the latter

half of the nineteenth century, and it invariably changed in tenor in each

period depending on what Korean perceptions of their relation to mo-

dernity were and what Korea sought from it, its constant leitmotiv has

been the country's thwarted modernity. Another issue was Koreans'

ressentiment of Japan, the former colonizer and the object of hatred,

envy, admiration, and, most conspicuously, competition. Liah Green-

feld points out that in many cases ressentiment of a country or region

that is perceived as having superior cultural resources is an important

condition for generating and sustaining consciousness in developing a

national identity.6 Korean ressentiment of Japan can be described as

having been a main motivating force in Korea's drive for moderniza-

tion. Now that Korea felt that it had achieved modernity and was enter-

ing an international community as a full-fledged member, a reevaluation

of these two issues emerged as dominant in public discourse.

In this chapter, I will take historical fiction as a site of discourse of

national identity. I will discuss the two most popular works of historical

fiction of the early 1990s, Mokmin sims6 (Heartfelt treatise on shepherd-

In Search of HISTORY in Democratic Korea

191

ing the people, 1992) and YOngwOnhan cheguk (Eternal empire, 1993).

Heartfelt Treatise on Shepherding the People, a five-volume novel by a

woman writer, Hwang In'gy6ng, is about Ch6ng Yagyong (Tasan, 1762-

1836), the famous scholar of practical learning (sirhak), while Eternal

Empire, which was made into a very popular movie, is by Yi Inhwa, a

professor of Korean literature, and is set in King Ch6ngjo's (r. 1776-

1800) court, where the young Tasan played a small but important role. I

will also examine Mannam (Encounter, 1986), their mid-1980s precur-

sor, which depicts the older Tasan in the last thirty years of his life.7

Written by the well-known author Hahn Moo-Sook (Han Musuk), En-

counter is held in high esteem8 and has enjoyed considerable popularity.

I will attempt to place these works in a wider political and intellectual

context.

In choosing to discuss changes in the social imagination of contem-

porary Korea through its discourse of history, particularly that repre-

sented in fictional narratives of history, I am making two propositions.

The first is that civic discourse is carried out through the discourse of

history in Korea. This is closely related to the Korean concept of his-

tory. History is not an impersonal force to be studied but an ethical

system of justice, of cause and effect. The present is viewed as an

moral confirmation of one's past. Thus, the present state signifies one's

moral worth in its entirety. In this way, it permeates the personal and

national psyche in almost the way that religion does. I would like to

point out that in many societies civic discourse is carried out through the

discourse of religion. This is true of the United States, as Sacvan Berco-

vitch (American Jeremiad) Ernest Tuveson (Redeemer Nation), and

Henry May (The End of American Innocence: Enlightenment in Amer-

ica) have persuasively shown.

There are various ways in which Koreans express their intense and

personal engagement with history. The first is the pervasiveness of the

discourse of history. It is not limited to the academy or the intellectual

community but is carried out in many venues, including television dra-

mas and popular novels, and has become a focal point of national dis-

course. In both the 1980s and 1990s,9 for instance, the best-selling novels

were those that dealt with history.

My second assumption is that by the way in which these best-sellers

construct their narratives they manifest what Raymond Williams refers to

as "structures of feeling"'1 of the time when each of these texts was

produced and consumed and that by a careful reading of these texts we

192 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

may be able to at least partly reconstruct the structures of feeling of those

moments. I believe that these historical novels represent popular aes-

thetic and narrative transformations punctuated by, if not exactly parallel

to, these metamorphoses of national and global geography. What I would

like to do is identify changing modes of narration associated with different

genres and discuss various constitutive elements of them, including their

human and temporal sites and their significations. This will allow me to

examine the way in which the past is reconfigured in relation to changing

perceptions of the present positionality of Korea and the way in which this

was related to the shifting discourse of modernity.

The Search for a National Soul: The 1980s and

Historiographical Metafiction

The 1980s was a decade when Korean intellectuals and the public felt a

deep ambivalence toward their national past and the West. The year

1972 witnessed the establishment of the yushin regime, which gave un-

restricted power to Park Chung Hee (Pak Ch6nghfi), the military dicta-

tor who had come to power in a coup d'6tat in 1961. To Koreans' cha-

grin, Park's assassination in 1979 did not usher in democracy. Instead,

another military strongman, Chun Doo Hwan (Ch6n Tuhwan), seized

power and in the famous Kwangju incident, which was to become the

rallying cry of the minjung (mass, people) movement,11 massacred sev-

eral hundred people who rose against him. The American government's

role in these political upheavals was perceived as either active coopera-

tion or at least compliance with the dictatorship. In this political and

intellectual climate, the binaries of West and East were fundamentally

reevaluated. Disillusioned with the West and wishing to tap the people's

sense of empowerment with regard to the nation's political life, dissident

intellectuals wished to seek inspiration and strength in their own tradi-

tion. At the same time, the very movement that they advocated was

based on the premise of the unbearable oppressiveness of the present,

which was seen as a continuation of the past.

As a way to resolve this contradiction, the minjung movement was

launched in which Marxist binaries of freedom versus oppression and

the oppressor versus the oppressed were adopted. The narratives of

struggle between us and them of this period harked back to the early-

twentieth-century revolutionary historian Sin Ch'aeho (1880-1936),

who in his epochal history ChosOn sanggosa (The history of ancient

In Search of HISTORY in Democratic Korea

193

Korea), adopted a thesis that the history of the nation was a constant

struggle between a (self) and pia (nonself), that is, between Koreans and

non-Koreans. For example, he expressed a strongly irridentist outlook

toward Manchuria, claiming that the territory had belonged to Korea in

ancient times and that it should be restored to it.12 He critiqued the

ruling elite, especially the Confucian elite of the Chos6n period, as

having been insufficiently aware of self and the autonomy of Korean

culture. He described it as having slavishly embraced a cosmopolitan

Confucian culture that had led them to formulate the history of their

nation from a sinocentric perspective. He located a hope for the contin-

uation of indigenous culture in the people who lived with native customs

and beliefs.13 He further assigned to the people the ownership of the

nation, seeking in them the willpower to claim their nation while portray-

ing the elite as having no sense of or desire for nationhood, entranced as

it was with imported Chinese culture and having thus failed to protect

the nation.14 In this context, the narrative of class struggle in which the

minjung movement was framed allowed the dissidents to privilege reli-

gious and artistic traditions such as shamanism, which were seen as

nativistic and of the people.15

However, Confucianism, identified as the intellectual tradition of

scholars and officials who were cast as oppressors, remained problem-

atic. The views of Confucianism within and outside of the academy in the

modern period are too complex to be summarized in this space.16 Suffice

it to say that, except for the study of Confucianism as moral philosophy

and metaphysics at philosophy departments in universities, it was as-

sessed mostly within the framework of modernization theory - that is, by

evaluating whether Confucianism exerted a negative or positive influ-

ence on modernization. As long as Confucianism was viewed as the

ideology responsible for social stagnation and loss of sovereignty, the

verdict on it could not have been anything but disapproving. Confucian-

ism was termed antimodern, antiprogress, and antitechnology, and its

practitioners were criticized for having been concerned only with empty

ideas (kongni kongdam) with no regard for national well-being or the

welfare of the people. In addition, those Confucian officials who were in

power were seen as corrupt and power seeking. Nonetheless, as Confu-

cian views of the moral universe and Confucian family and ritual prac-

tices had long since become inseparable elements of the Korean mental-

ity, it was not easy to dismiss Confucianism as an imported ideology

practiced only by the elite. One can detect in Korean attitudes toward

194

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

Confucianism a certain amount of what Joseph Levenson termed the

dilemma between intellectual rejection and emotional commitment.17

Beyond this, the Koreans exhibited a strong desire to locate moder-

nity within rather than outside their tradition. The practical learning

school, which began in the seventeenth and flourished in the eighteenth

and nineteenth centuries, was touted as the native sprout of modernity. 18

In the 1980s, younger scholars and those in minjung movement circles

singled out the practical learning school as having invigorated nativistic

culture and championed technological innovation in the late Chos6n,

although it could not rescue Korea from bankrupt Confucianism.19 Un-

like effete Confucians, practical learning scholars were embraced as

precursors of the minjung movement.20 Although the academy was in-

creasingly dominated by a minjung historiography of class struggle, histo-

rians of a less ideological stripe also produced sophisticated scholarship

during this period. Such topics as factionalism, which had been viewed

as the embodiment of what was corrupt and evil in Confucian politics

and had been thought to be responsible for the decline and demise of the

Chos6n dynasty, began to be reevaluated.21 Western views of Confucian-

ism also shifted during this period. As the economy of the East Asian

region developed rapidly, Confucianism, which was viewed as a common

heritage of the area, came to be seen as a source of social stability and

economic vigor rather than stagnation.22 Thus, while minjung historians

depicted members of the Confucian elite as oppressors of the people,

this took place within the context of a wide range of contesting images of

Confucianism.

Dissidents' views of the West were no less complex. Although the

leaders of the minjung movement sought to locate the forces for democ-

racy in the history of the people's struggle,23 they were not oblivious to

the idea that the West could at least claim priority of practice. They were

also aware of the irony that, despite their expressed anti-Americanism,

the success of their democracy movement to a great extent depended on

media exposure and pressure from abroad, especially America. More-

over, they had to compete with the government's vision of the Korean

future, that it was leading Korea toward a bright, prosperous future

from a dark age of poverty and that when the economic goal was

achieved democracy would follow. The dissidents countered this by por-

traying the government as causing instead of easing the han of the

people and hence illegitimate. The persuasiveness of the free Korea for

In Search of HISTORY in Democratic Korea

195

which they were fighting, however, rested on the country becoming a

proud member of the world rather than being isolated from it.

The approach taken to resolving these contradictions was not to

dissect or discuss them but to construct a holistic image of Korea with

which to transcend them. A spiritual rather than practical solution was

sought. Attention was devoted more to the people than their oppressors.

Intellectuals mythologized both the plight of the people and their struggle

for deliverance. Repeatedly, their han was rendered as epic; redemption

was sought in the recovery of the national soul. The rhetoric of the

minjung movement constantly referred to the importance of the recovery

of this soul, which would lead to the deliverance of the people from their

oppressors, be they colonialists or military dictators.24

Literary production clearly embodied the spirit of this period. Two

major categories of fiction were in vogue and received critical acclaim.

One was the literature of resistance, a crucial ingredient of the minjung

movement, which captured the ideological structures of feeling of the

period vividly.25 A leitmotiv of the minjung movement was the need for

a metamorphosis of the people's self-perception. They were to be re-

imagined as empowered subjects who took control of their and the

nation's destiny, no longer powerless objects upon which society acted at

whim.26 Correspondingly, although minjung literature concentrated on

the lives of the socially downtrodden and the politically oppressed and

often employed the style of social realism, many of these works end on a

note of hope as the socially disadvantaged discover their own resources

and powers and the will to fight.27

It was, however, novels in historical settings that seem to have cap-

tured more poetic structures of feeling and were more popular. They

often depicted the sufferings of individuals or families as the result of

recent historical events such as the Japanese colonization, the Korean

War, and the division of the country. Most popular were multivolume

romans-fleuves, which can be described as historiographical metafic-

tion.28 True, unlike more typical works of historiographical metafiction

such as Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children and Shame, these Korean

novels are less pointedly metaphoric and more psychological.29 Nonethe-

less they fictionalize recent Korean history. They are structured in such a

way that the fates of anonymous protagonists embody and parallel the

sufferings and conflicts of the nation. There are, in a subtext, ruminations

on the metaphysical or fundamental nature of Korean civilization, which

196 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

might have caused the nation's ill fate. Both the literature of resistance

and historiographical metafiction depict the accumulated han of the

people, although the literature of resistance is more focused on utilizing

these sufferings as psychic resources with which the people might over-

come their plight and fight for their dignity.

The Search for a Heroic Past: Historical Novels

In the political trajectory of the early 1990s, the discourse of identity

drastically shifted its modes of inquiry from the metaphysical or funda-

mental nature of Korean civilization to such specific questions as the roots

of Korean modernity and the timing of its arrival. Luka6s's study shows

that the historical novel, in its employment and structure, displays a high

degree of political engagement with its nation of subjects.30 For this rea-

son, historical fiction emerges as a site of ideological and political dis-

course about specific questions and events. After Gorbachev ascended to

power in the Soviet Union, for instance, many historical novels devoted to

reassessing Stalin and Stalinism were published, engendering a great deal

of public and media attention.31 Post-Napoleonic Germany between 1815

and 1830 also witnessed a tremendous vogue in historical novels of iden-

tity, mirroring the concerns of its aristocracy and bourgeoisie, who were

called upon to redefine their identities and to shift their Europe-wide,

class-bound ones to region-based national identities.32

Now historical fiction about famous personages symbolizing a shared

"glorious heritage and regrets" rather than the historiographical metafic-

tion of anonymous characters emerged as the preferred medium. Ernest

Renan said that "a heroic past, great men, glory" are the social capital

upon which one builds a concept of nation and that this is true because it

provides "the fact of sharing, in the past, a glorious heritage and regrets,

and of having, in the future, [a shared] programme to put into effect, of

the fact of having suffered, enjoyed, and hoped together."33 Thus, it is not

strange that at this intense political moment history was narrativized as

literature in the public discourse of national identity in Korea.34

All three novels that I will discuss, Encounter, Heartfelt Treatise, and

Eternal Empire, are set in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centu-

ries. This is one of several periods in Korean history that have been the

focus of unending debate. The eighteenth century has generally been

viewed as a latter day golden age in Korean history but one whose bril-

liance was followed by decline and fall in the late nineteenth and early

In Search of HISTORY in Democratic Korea

197

twentieth centuries. The issue under contention is whether one should

view the period in its own right as the culmination of traditional Korean

culture or, alternatively, with a retrospective gaze as one in which modern-

ization could have been initiated but was missed. Small wonder then that,

given the general structures of feeling intent on reexamining the relation-

ship of the Korean past to the present, this prime location of ambiguity

concerning modernity became the site for reevaluation.

Both Tasan and Ch6ngjo were chosen because they are perceived,

separately and together, as embodying the ambiguity of their period.

Tasan was arguably the greatest scholar of the practical learning school,

which is interpreted as straddling the divide between tradition and mo-

dernity. He flirted with Catholicism, and he had a meteoric political

career during the reign of Ch6ngjo who favored him and upon the

king's death spent eighteen years in exile until he was allowed to return

to his home where he lived out the remainder of his life in retirement.

Ch6ngjo is viewed as one of the most accomplished of Chos6n rulers

and his rule as one of the most brilliant. The contemplation of his reign,

however, brings pangs of regret for Korea's potentially great plans and

possibilities, which went unrealized because of his sudden death in 1800.

Subsequent policies of intolerance toward Catholics35 and the general

view of the nineteenth century as a period of slow decline36 render a

special poignancy to his passing.

In discussing the discursive meaning of historical fiction, the decon-

structionist view of a text as a cultural production seems particularly

suitable. To quote the all too famous pronouncement of Roland Barthes,

"a text consists not of a line of words, releasing a single 'theological'

meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God), but of a multi-dimensional

space in which are married and contested several writings, none of which

is original: the text is a fabric of quotations, resulting from a thousand

sources of culture."37 In its discourse of modernity, each of the three

novels selects from among a repertoire of familiar myths, ideas, and

symbols, all of which have multiple layers of intertextuality and poten-

tial interpretation, and employs them in such a way as to create a new

meaning. Tasan and Ch6ngjo were complex figures who lend themselves

to markedly different portrayals. I will discuss the myths, ideas, and

symbols with which the discourse of modernity has been unfolded. Addi-

tionally, I will discuss the ways in which each text selects popular images

of its protagonists and well-known events, supplements them with ficti-

tious or legendary elements, and reassembles these elements to manifest

198 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

structures of feeling of the time during which each text was produced

and consumed. Although I am not concerned with historical veracity, I

will consider historical and nonhistorical elements to highlight the par-

ticular usage of these elements in the texts.

Encounter and the Discourse of Spirituality

Within the context of the general literary culture of the mid-1980s, En-

counter, in both its genre and subject, was something of an anomaly.

Unlike the more popular multivolume historiographical metafiction with

a cast of thousands,38 Encounter is a straightforward historical novel

about a famous personage. Moreover, while Encounter unfolds along the

intellectual and religious trajectory of Korea in the early nineteenth cen-

tury, it focuses on Tasan's psychological conflicts and spiritual growth.

This emphasis on the interiority of the preeminent scholar's individual

self places it at odds with the more minjung-oriented literature of anony-

mous persons of the 1980s. Tasan, however, received a great deal of

attention from minjung-oriented historians, who saw him as representa-

tive of antiestablishment persons who contributed a great deal to Korean

society. 39 Thus, Tasan's spiritual awakening can be seen as a metaphor of

hope for the political freedom for which Koreans yearned. Moreover, the

way Encounter poses questions and seeks resolutions also shares many

mid-1980s perceptions of the Korean past. In these respects, it is embed-

ded in the structures of feeling of the time of its appearance even while it

looks ahead in its subject.

Encounter displays a holistic approach to history and problematizes

the question of Korean modernity as a fundamental question of state of

being. One immediately notices that the novel's vision of modernity is

distinct from the accepted Western version of secularism and anticleri-

calism. In contrast to the modernity of the Enlightenment model, a

triumph of rationality over religous spirituality, a triumph from which

political freedom, material progress, and scientific and intellectual in-

quiry ensue,40 the vision of modernity that Encounter constructs is a

space beyond rationality, one in which individuals are allowed freedom

to attain religious spirituality and by implication in which society ac-

quires political freedom. In other words, religious spirituality is equated

with freedom rather than tyranny and with progress rather than con-

straint. In fact, the protagonist's search for spiritual completion is de-

picted as heroic in the novel and it seems to parallel the political rhetoric

In Search of HISTORY in Democratic Korea

199

of the 1980s, which mythologizes as epic the people's struggle to achieve

freedom.

The problem is that the religious spirituality that the text presents as

a culmination is Catholicism, and Encounter must reconcile this impli-

cation of the superiority of Catholicism with a reluctance to see Korean

tradition as negative and Western tradition as superior. More than that,

the text must go so far as to find a way to concede the nation's spiritual

space to a foreign religion. In most cases, this space is not conceded to

something exterior to native tradition. Chatterjee argues persuasively

that colonial and postcolonial societies maintain their autonomous space

by separating their worlds into an inner spiritual domain and an outer

material domain and that, while they may concede the outer domain,

they preserve their spiritual one.41 Encounter adopts several strategies to

resolve these problems.

First, Encounter eschews the dichotomous division between rational-

ity and spirituality and replaces it with a hierarchy in which spirituality is

placed above rationality but rationality has an important function. In

this framework, the Korean intellectual tradition is represented by Con-

fucianism, which is in turn equated with rationality and is thus, to a

degree, affirmed as a worthy system of values. The academy has long

been divided over whether the practical learning school was a develop-

ment within or in opposition to Confucianism. Encounter avoids this

question altogether and thus is able to present as rational the major

traditional system of values in its entirety. In fact, as if to refute the

charges of backwardness and provincialism leveled against Confucian-

ism, the text engages in long expositions of the virtues of Confucian

metaphysics and its social system. At the same time, the text refers to

the incompleteness of Confucianism by pointing out the inherent limits

of rationality. Rationality, however, is not an obstacle to but a useful

ingredient in achieving spirituality. Likewise, Catholic spirituality is pre-

sented not as something opposed to Confucianism but the state Confu-

cianism could achieve if it were to acquire spirituality. It is interesting to

note that in contrast to the many discussions of Confucian theories there

is virtually no discussion of Catholic theology.

Tasan symbolizes this progression from Confucian rationality to

Catholic spirituality. In the beginning, he appears as a tortured intellec-

tual who, despite his awesome ability to acquire knowledge and his

unsurpassed scholarship, is acutely aware of the incompleteness of his

life and seeks to fill this void. He is also a man of progressive ideas,

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Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

including the abolition of the rigid class system, and yet he has remained

aloof from commoners in the village and others who serve him. Gradu-

ally, he is transformed - he opens himself to his natural self. His decision

to take a local woman as a mistress, his appreciation of her simple and

delicious cooking, and his empathy for the child born of this union are

presented as an acceptance of the noncerebral aspects of self. Once he

embraces emotion and sensuality, which nurture and comfort him, his

rational self is complete and he is ready for spirituality.

It is well known that the historical Tasan was fascinated with Catholi-

cism in his youth, but when Catholicism was declared heterodox he, as

well as his brother Ch6ng Yakch6n (1758-1816), recanted. One of his

brothers, Ch6ng Yakchong (1760-1801) adhered to his Catholic faith

and was martyred in 1801. Tasan's recantation is presented in the novel

as having been born of his reluctance to disappoint King Ch6ngjo, who

had placed so much trust in him,42 but it was nonetheless a source of

constant guilt and pain. These conflicts, which are both supported and

undercut by his rationality, are overcome only when he reembraces

Catholicism. His resubmission to the Catholic faith is presented as an

acceptance of his interior spiritual self; no longer in conflict, he finds

peace and completion. Both conversions are based on rationality, but

the later one is born of the realization of the insufficiency of his rational

beliefs.

The antithesis of Tasan is his nephew, Ch6ng Hasang (1795-1839),

the son of his martyred brother Yakchong. The historical Hasang played

a leading role in the fledgling Catholic community and contributed

greatly to bringing foreign missionaries to Korea. He also wrote the

seminal Sang Chaesang so (A letter to the State Council), a systematic

defense of Catholic faith widely read by Catholics in Asia.43 The novel

portrays Hasang as a man of natural spirituality to whom faith came

providentially but also as a birthright through his father's martyrdom. In

contrast to his conflicted uncle, Hasang grew up tall and physically

strong but illiterate, learning to read and write only as an adult. He is an

idealized representation of the simple goodness of people who work

with their hands, effortlessly achieving unity between faith and reason,

mind and body, and love of God and love of kin. The idealization of

Hasang signifies the obsession of the 1980s with the nobility of working

people and their superiority over persons of intellect. Not only does

Hasang realize his own spirituality with ease, but he offers solace to his

uncle and helps him to realize his own.

In Search of HISTORY in Democratic Korea

201

Hasang also symbolizes Koreans' inclination to appropriate Chris-

tianity as their own heritage. Through Hasang and other Catholic fig-

ures, Encounter evokes the universality of Christianity and claims Kore-

ans' autonomous discovery of it, thereby subtly circumventing the thorny

issue of the Western origin of Catholicism. To be sure, the story of

Korean Catholics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is a remark-

able chapter in the annals of Church history. At first, intellectuals, at-

tracted by its theology, converted to it. Soon, without the benefit of a

missionary, it spread to all classes. The Catholic community persevered

despite repeated and severe government persecutions in the nineteenth

century.44 To date, with 103 canonized Catholic saints, Korea boasts the

fourth-largest number of saints of any nation.45 Encounter makes the

most of this story. In addition to a Christian view of a person's ability to

discover the immanence of God, it claims the Catholic heritage as Ko-

rea's own birthright.

If the Hasang of Encounter is an idealization of the historical per-

son, Tasan's return to Catholicism in his old age is even more fanciful.

Although French missionaries and the Catholic Church claim Tasan's

return, nowhere else is this claim supported. Not one piece of Tasan's

copious collection of writings indicates a reembrace of Catholicism.46

That the author of Encounter was a Catholic might explain her rendering

of Tasan's return to religion. It is more significant, however, that spiritu-

ality is made a central ingredient in the meaning of an individual life as

well as a criterion by which the value of systems of thought and religion

are to be measured.47 And in this Encounter shares contemporary struc-

tures of feeling that searched for metaphoric significance for the spiri-

tual life of the nation and its people. It seems that Tasan and Hasang

represent present and future Korea, respectively.

This vision of modernity as a space of freedom is obviously embedded

in the political oppression of the time and the democracy movement in

Korea. Dissident rhetoric presented liberation from oppression as a fulfill-

ment of the people's destiny and the completion of the nation's soul. The

acceptance of the superiority of Catholic spirituality and the appropria-

tion of it as Korea's religious heritage must be viewed in this context. The

Catholic Church played a crucial and visible role in the democracy move-

ment. Images of street demonstrations flitting across television screens

almost every evening during the mid-1980s, for instance, often showed

the My6ngdong Cathedral in downtown Seoul to which demonstrators

retreated and which offered sanctuary to the political activists hunted by

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Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

the military government. In these moments, democracy and spirituality

did appear to be inseparably linked.

Heartfelt Treatise on Shepherding the People and the

Discourse of Arrested Time

A euphoric sense of accomplishment about their present in the early

1990s seems to have induced the public to eagerly claim indigenous roots

for Korean modernity and to see it as a fulfillment of a great and

thwarted potential in earlier Korean civilization. A troubling element in

this proposition was the timing of its arrival: if Korea had contained the

seeds of modernity and greatness, why did democracy and modernity

arrive only recently? This question required an answer because, stand-

ing at the crossroads, Korea had to come to terms with the suffering and

sacrifices of those who had prepared for this moment. Even during the

most recent dozen years or so, how many dissidents and students had

died, wasted away in jail, or been destroyed in the course of pursuing

democracy? What of the long tragic years before that? How many had

been displaced or killed during the Korean War? And what of coloniza-

tion, the event seen as the source of national tragedy and humiliation,

the mere mention of which causes Koreans to seethe with anger? Why

did Korea have to become Japan's colony for thirty-five years? How

many lived in misery and died in exile? In order to bring closure to the

han of these long years, not only was it necessary to remember those

who had suffered but meaning had to be given to these lives and sacri-

fices. Thus, the historical past once again was appropriated to confirm

the nation's greatness and at the same time provide plausible historical

contingencies for the explanation of the delay in Korea's modernization.

Perhaps better geared to popular taste than the other two books,

Heartfelt Treatise draws upon the timeworn notion that posits Confucian-

ism and practical learning as a dichotomy, assigning to the former engage-

ment with empty theory and an obsession with the past and to the latter

such modern attributes as progressiveness, pragmatism, and an interest in

science and technology.48 A concomitant idea is that it was the corrupt

Confucian elite that suppressed the reform plans of the progressive practi-

cal learning scholars and was thus responsible for the decline of the

Chos6n dynasty. As a way of showing Tasan's anti-Confucian pragma-

tism, the novel depicts him as disparaging his contemporary intellectual

culture as an obsession with how "Confucius said this, Mencius said thus"

In Search of HISTORY in Democratic Korea

203

(Kongja wal Maengja wal).49 This fictional Tasan also criticizes Zhu Xi as

follows: "Master Zhu excessively pursued empty theories and concepts in

order to inquire into metaphysical philosophy, but he completely ne-

glected to place scholarship into practice."50 Neither of these remarks

would have occurred to the historical Tasan, a scholar with a traditional

sensibility who worked within neo-Confucian metaphysics.

Unlike Encounter, Heartfelt Treatise uses a more common division

between the spiritual and material domains, assigning the former to

native tradition while conceding the latter to the outsider. This enables

the narrative to admire the novel inventions and scientific progress the

West was making and to lament how Korea, closed to these innovations

and uninterested in them, lagged hopelessly behind. In the spiritual

domain, however, Korean tradition was sufficient. Tasan embodies this

division. He unreservedly admires the technological innovations of the

West, freely admitting that Korea must adopt them in order to improve

people's lives and build a strong nation.51 His assessment of Catholicism

is portrayed in a different light.

First of all, unlike Encounter, Heartfelt Treatise does not privilege

Catholicism as spiritually superior, although it recognizes it as a valid

religion.52 Tasan's involvement with Catholicism is presented as a brief

fascination born of intellectual curiosity, which ends with his realization

that it is incompatible with Korean beliefs and customs and his own

visions and commitments in life.53 Unlike the Tasan of Encounter, he

harbors no regrets or guilt on this matter. Later he comments: "Even if

one learns diligently but does not think for oneself, then one only slav-

ishly follows. Conversely, if one thinks for oneself but does not learn,

one can easily fall into foolish ideas."54 The novel defines spirituality as

residing not merely in a religious quest associated with faith but in a

search for moral perfection based on knowledge and meditation. It re-

jects the dichotomy between the sacredness of otherworldly concerns

and the mundaneness of this world. Tasan does not wish to be elevated

by religious spirituality; rather, he seeks to fulfill himself as an individual

in the intellectual and emotional domains, in his familial relationships,

and as a social being. One should note that this vision of a moral quest is

based on the Confucian ideal, the creed the novel nominally disparages.

Indeed, the portrayal of Tasan in Heartfelt Treatise is the polar oppo-

site of the one in Encounter. Instead of a tortured apostate, Tasan is a

man who achieves harmony and balance in all aspects of his life. The

novel presents his ability to harmonize as the source of his growth and

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Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

fulfillment. He achieves greatness because he does not deny but rather

embraces different elements such as emotion and reason and metaphys-

ics and technology. Likewise, he successfully combines his public duty

when he is in office with his personal life as a husband, father, son, and

brother. His outlook on Korean tradition and its relations to the external

world is similarly balanced. He is conscious of Korea's intellectual and

cultural identity but is open to and curious about new ideas and believes

in the necessity of their continuous flow. The vision of modernity de-

picted through Tasan is a society in which intellectual and religious

pluralism is allowed; imported and indigenous ideas coexist, mutually

influencing each other; people of different classes are treated fairly, in

accordance with their abilities; and art and technology exist side by side.

If this vision of a pluralistic society is a clarion call for a democratic

Korea free of the recent political culture of confrontation, the tardy

arrival of democracy and modernity has still to be explained. Tasan lived

in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Modernity came to

Korea in the 1990s. How can one account for this arrested time? In fact,

the dramatic tension in Heartfelt Treatise rests on the discrepancy be-

tween the infinite possibilities Tasan exemplifies and the political ex-

clusion of him, that between the potential for social application of his

ideas and continuous obstruction of their utilization, and the way in

which its protagonist resolves his frustrated dreams. Whereas Encounter

begins when Tasan is an old man in his place of exile, Heartfelt Treatise

begins when Tasan is twenty-one years of age, just before he passes the

civil service examination, and it follows him to his death. The central

event that terminates his dreams of fulfillment is King Ch6ngjo's death

in 1800. As a young man, Tasan exhibits extraordinary talent, which

earns him the high esteem and trust of the king. A special relationship of

affection and respect develops between the middle-aged king and the

young scholar-official. Surrounded by regressive Confucian officials,

Ch6ngjo eagerly awaits the day when he can employ Tasan in a position

of responsibility and with him carry out great reforms for the country.

Ch6ngjo's untimely death at the age of forty-eight puts an end to the

promise of reform and the utilization of Tasan's ideas. Tasan is banished

to the remote countryside, and there, forgotten, lonely, and far from

family and friends, he spends eighteen years.

It is in its interpretation of Tasan's years of exile that Heartfelt Treatise

confronts the question of the long delay in the realization of modernity in

Korea. Were these eighteen years a waste? The novel proposes that,

In Search of HISTORY in Democratic Korea

205

during this period of trial, Tasan achieves true greatness. Rather than

succumbing to despair, Tasan devotes his time to scholarship and com-

pletes many tens of treatises perfecting his work. Tasan is even glad that

he has been given this opportunity to pursue his ideas uninterrupted by

the demands of a public career. He writes and teaches disciples. Tasan's

resolution of his years of trial seems to represent an affirmation of Korea's

long years of suffering, suggesting that those years matured and prepared

Korea for its present triumph. In this way, it acknowledges and gives

meaning to all those who paved the way for the greatness of their nation.

The novel, however, still expresses ambivalence over the time gap.

When Tasan is finally recalled from banishment, his disciples express a

hope for his reentry into government: "If someone like our teacher were

to govern the country, we could also make big ships and cannons and build

a wealthy and powerful nation."55 It seems that this might occur. Some of

the officials in power are aware of the crisis the country is in and recom-

mend Tasan as the only person who might lead it out of disaster, but this

hope is again dashed. About this final missed opportunity, the novel

comments: "Had [Tasan] Ch6ng Yagyong entered the cabinet at this time,

the situation would have been quite different. Most likely modern pro-

gressive ideas would have been imported before they arrived in Japan."56

That it arrived in Korea later than in Japan and thus caused long

years of suffering and humiliation certainly rankles. Tasan, however,

spends his final years peacefully at home surrounded by his loving fam-

ily. Historical contingencies did not allow Tasan's genius to be put to use

earlier, but that does not nullify his greatness or his fulfillment. Simi-

larly, the long delay does not deprive those who lived before democracy

of meaning. They shared the common heritage of a nation whose day

has now arrived. In some way, Korea is perhaps stronger and readier as

a result of its many trials.

Eternal Empire and Korea's Search for HISTORY

The missed opportunity for reform occasioned by King Ch6ngjo's death

in 1800 and its signification for Korean history are the central themes of

Eternal Empire. The novel is a short thriller of the deconstructionist

variety reminiscent of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. Like the

Italian murder mystery set in a medieval cloister, Eternal Empire at-

tempts to re-create a visceral sense of its historical setting. Unlike the

Italian novel, which relies on a painstaking reconstruction of details, the

206 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

Korean work uses much more rapidly shifting visual images in a cine-

matic style.

It is constructed as the memoir of a fictitious character, Yi Inmong,

a royal historian. It follows the events of one day in 1800. The day begins

at dawn within the palace precinct with Yi Inmong's discovery of the

murder of his fellow historian, one of Ch6ngjo's trusted coterie of junior

scholar-officials, and it ends late at night with an intimation of impend-

ing regicide. The entire day is devoted to a race between the royal party

and the officials of the Noron faction in a search for a secret document.

This document, supposedly written by King Y6ngjo (r. 1724-76) for his

grandson, would enable Ch6ngjo to declare a long-intended yushin, a

restoration of absolute power to the throne. The breathtaking race be-

tween the two groups, in which the young Tasan unwittingly plays a

minor but important symbolic role, ends with a scene in which the royal

historian falls into an abyss with the torn document in his hands, failing

in his mission to deliver it to the king.

The regicide of Ch6ngjo is a rumor that has been widely circulated.

Many seem to believe it. Encounter, for instance, presents it as a fact.57

The commonly offered reason is that Ch6ngjo, hoping to reform the

government according to his vision, was planning to eliminate the Noron

officials, who had long held power and were opposed to royal wishes,

and that the Noron made a preemptive strike. One may not subscribe to

this theory, but it is universally accepted that an intense rivalry existed

between Ch6ngjo's royal party, staffed mostly by members of the Namin

faction, and the Noron officials. It is also popular among professional

historians to see the victory of the Noron bureaucrats as having ad-

versely affected Korea. This is because a polity headed by a powerful

ruler, unlike nineteenth-century Korea, which was headed by suppos-

edly weak and indecisive rulers who squandered national sovereignty, is

viewed as more efficient, especially in times of crisis.58 For some time,

the Noron officials have been seen as corrupt and self-seeking. More

recently, however, academic historians have noted ideological differ-

ences between the rival groups. The royal party was devoted to the

restoration of royal power based on a vision of the ancient sage kings'

era as represented in the Six Classics, while the Noron bureaucrats

subscribed to the neo-Confucian vision of a polity that stressed the

bureaucratic constraint of royal power as described in the Four Books.59

Being a member of the academy and familiar with the recent scholar-

ship, the author gives full play to the ideological schism between the

In Search of HISTORY in Democratic Korea

207

rival groups in Eternal Empire. Members of both parties are presented

as men of conviction who are completely devoted to their visions of the

Korean polity and its civilization. Not only the royal party but also the

Noron officials, even though they are devious and use wiles, risk their

lives to fight for their visions. The author, however, unabashedly inter-

jects his preference for the royal party:

At this point, we should consider the concept of yushin that Inmong

discusses. From today's perspective, Yi Inmong's blind monarchism,

which wholeheartedly seeks to strengthen royal power, might appear

to go against the course of history. Conversely, the Noron viewpoint,

which was opposed to royal power, might seem more progressive.

But what is the course of history? For a hundred years from the

time of Ch6ngjo's murder to the time when our nation was elimi-

nated by Japan, our history was nothing more than the chaos that

followed the disappearance of the sage king. . . . We were elimi-

nated not because we could not adopt "progressive" parliamentary

politics but because we could not install Hongjae yushin, that is, the

absolute royal power of King Ch6ngjo. . . . All states that built inde-

pendent sovereign nations under less competitive and unfavorable

circumstances had to go through a period in which the state possessed

absolute power . . . Because of the Meiji yushin, modern Japan

could exist. Because of the failure of Hongjae yushin, the history of

our nation was set back 160 years. Our misfortune was that we had to

experience Park Chung Hee's October yushin (1972) instead of

Hongjae yushin.60

What is the meaning of this emotional outburst? Is this a lament for the

late arrival of Korean modernity? The loss of 160 years? More than

anything else, it expresses a palpable anger at the fact that because of

this missed opportunity Korea was made inferior to Japan and, worse,

was erased from history.

There have been historical novels about royal persons to whom an

opportunity to fulfill their missions was denied. When the Tonga Ilbo, a

daily newspaper, serialized Mati t'aeja (1926-27), the story of the last

crown prince of Silla when it was annexed by Kory6, and Tanjong aesa

(1928-29), the tale of the boy king whose throne was usurped by his

powerful uncle, King Sejo of the fifteenth century, they became popular

presumably because the Korean public identified the tragic fates of these

208 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

princes with that of their nation.61 In contrast, Ch6ngjo's Korea in Eter-

nal Empire is the very image of prowess. It is portrayed in a startlingly

idealized manner:

Chos6n at the time was the most advanced country in the world in

terms of its people's literacy, its quantity of publications, the auton-

omy of national finances, national security, and the level of adminis-

trative service to the people. It was a prosperous and peaceful age.

Internally, its people proudly claimed it to be the cultural center;

externally, they practiced diplomacy based on the principle of un-

equal and deferential relations with the powerful and equal and

friendly relations with the rest. . . . Who could have imagined that

such an advanced nation, within a hundred years of King Ch6ngjo's

death and under Noron power, would be reduced to a most back-

ward nation of the worst sort about to become Japan's colony?62

What does this aggrandized image of the Korea of the eighteenth

century signify? What is at work here seems to be inverse logic. By

making the loss incomparably great, it renders greatness to the Korean

past and reclaims this heritage for the present. Because of unfortunate

historical contingencies, Korea was erased from history for thirty-five

years. For the subsequent fifty years, Korea's encounters with history

were not occasions for celebration. Now it wishes to possess history. It

appears that Koreans are not content to merely reclaim the quotidian

history that every nation has, but rather they long to possess history in the

Hegelian sense.63 This seems to represent a deep yearning on the part of

contemporary Koreans to be major players on the world scene. They

want to be in the center, not at the periphery, and they wish to influence

and shape world history, not be influenced and shaped by others.

Epilogue

In the years since 1992, when the first civilian government was installed, a

great deal of change has taken place in South Korea. Under Kim Young

Sam (Y6ngsam), the yOksa paro chapki (rectification of history) move-

ment was launched. In 1995, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of

Korean independence from Japan, the top of the building that had housed

the office of the Japanese governor-general was blown up to symbolize

the Korean erasure of colonial memory. Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae

Woo (No T'aewu), the two former military generals turned presidents

In Search of HISTORY in Democratic Korea

209

who were held responsible for the 1980 Kwangju massacre, were brought

to trial, sentenced to death and life imprisonment, respectively, and later

pardoned. It was not long after this that Kim Young Sam himself suffered

disgrace, with his son convicted of embezzlement and jailed. The presi-

dent was blamed for the corruption and incompetence of his family as well

as his regime. The economic crisis that required an IMF bailout in 1997

and 1998 sealed his reputation and the fate of his party, which lost the

presidential election of 1997 to Kim Dae Jung (Taejung), the leader of the

opposition and the former leader of the democracy movement.

Popular structures of feeling and public discourse continuously

shifted while these changes took place. In the first half of the 1990s, an

obsession with han directed at Koreans' past and their government was

channeled into an intensified ressentiment of Japan. Moreover, the pub-

lic was intent on seeking out and ratifying the greatness of the nascent

cultural development that had been prevented from coming to full fru-

ition by historical contingencies. This desire to affirm the present

through the past was also expressed in other publications and media.

The books Tongiti pogam and T'ojOng pigyOl, both nonfiction best-

sellers, for instance, are respectively about the mystery and efficacy of

native medicine and geomancy. By 1996, public interest had shifted

again. One title that headed the best-seller list was The Story of the

Romans, a translation from Japanese of a popular history of the Roman

Empire.64 It appears that Koreans' longing to be at the center of the

world stage65 has led them to expand their attention beyond their own

history. One heard reports that The Story of the Romans appealed to the

reading public because of its description of the complex negotiations of

power and diplomacy among various countries.

While the election of Kim Dae Jung was hailed abroad as the matur-

ing of Korean democracy, the predominant mood within Korea during

the time of economic difficulty, especially in 1998, seems to have been

one of acute insecurity and self-reproach. Practically everyone confessed

sins of excess that Koreans had collectively committed - their self-

deluded sense of prosperity, their extravagant living on borrowed

money, their arrogance born of shortsightedness, and so on. They can be

divided into two distinct categories. In one, Koreans confessed that in

their greedy pursuit of material wealth they had veered away from their

Korean selves and that they should retreat into a primordial space to

restore the balance between emotion and reason and to recover purity of

being. A melodrama entitled Pulhyoja niin upnida (Your unfilial son is

weeping), which played to sold-out houses, typified this mode. This

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Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

story of a successful businessman who neglects his self-sacrificing mother

but repents after she dies seems to have symbolized the regret and guilt

of the urban middle class. In the last scene, the son, carrying his

mother's ashes in a box strapped to his neck, would leap into the audi-

ence, where his wails reputedly would be echoed by members of audi-

ence. The second type of confession, often voiced by business and politi-

cal leaders, involved lamenting that one had made a terrible mistake by

following the Japanese model, a decision at least partly responsible for

one's financial disasters. Such persons univocally foreswore the imita-

tion of Japan. Did this signify a final release from ressentiment toward

Japan? Although Koreans displayed an unavoidable suspicion toward

America, which directed the reform plans as a condition of the bailout,

their reaction was surprisingly mild. Could it be that Korea is finally

achieving an autonomous discourse of modernity?

What has remained constant throughout is the intense and personal

relationship Koreans seem to feel toward history. The heroization of

King Ch6ngjo as a visionary has been gaining momentum. In 1999 a

popular television drama was devoted to him, and popular as well as

academic books about him continue to appear. Civic discourse has been

continuously conducted through the discourse of history. The emotional

undercurrent one detects in the way this discourse of history is con-

ducted, which is also present in the historical fiction that I discussed,

seems to be rooted in a view of the present as an ethical confirmation of

one's past. As this ethical concept of history is embedded in the vision of

a Confucian moral universe, it will be of interest to see whether it will be

replaced with other concepts of history. At the moment, however, much

as Koreans seek to possess HISTORY in the Hegelian sense, they are

moved less by a desire to command power66 than by a search for confir-

mation of their ethical superiority and moral worth.

NOTES

I would like to thank Nancy Abelmann, Koen de Ceuster, Kevin M.

Doak, Michael Robinson, and Boudewijn Walraven, who read an earlier version

of this chapter and made useful comments.

1. Soon after the civilian government was in place, per capita income

reached ten thousand dollars per annum.

2. Only several decades previously, the World Bank and the International

Monetary Fund had scorned Korea as an economic basket case. For a historical

In Search of HISTORY in Democratic Korea

211

overview of the economic development of Korea prior to the 1970s, see Edward

S. Mason et al., The Economic and Social Modernization of the Republic of

Korea (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980).

3. The U.S. government, with its usual air of skepticism toward the realiza-

tion of democracy in non-European societies, had cooperated with and acqui-

esced to military dictators. The first American acquiescence was to Park Chung

Hee's military coup in 1961. Then, in 1972, when Park made constitutional

changes called yushin, rendering it virtually impossible to challenge his one-man

rule, the American government said nothing. After Park was assassinated in

1979, Koreans were expecting the establishment of a democratic regime. In-

stead, Chun Doo Hwan took over, and when the people of Kwangju rose against

him in 1980 Chun sent paratroopers to massacre them. The American govern-

ment again acquiesced to the Korean military dictator. This alienated the Ko-

rean public from America, and anti-Americanism became widespread. See Kim

Ky6ng-dong, "Korean Perceptions of America," in Donald N. Clark, ed., Korea

Briefing, 1993 (New York: Asia Society, 1993), 171-83.

4. For an example of this sentiment, see Richard E. Kim, Lost Names

(New York: Praeger, 1970), 182-86.

5. Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, vol. 1 (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1980), 135-427.

6. The prominent cases Greenfeld cites include the eighteenth-century

French ressentiment of England and Russian ressentiment of the West. See Liah

Greenfeld, Nationalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 23,

222-35.

7. Mannam has been translated into English under the title Encounter.

See Hahn Moo-Sook, Encounter, trans. Ok Young Kim Chang (Berkeley: Uni-

versity of California Press, 1992).

8. It received much literary acclaim. It was, for instance, the winner of the

1986 Grand Prix of the Republic of Korea.

9. Some of these titles were sold in the millions of copies. In Sunman,

"Munhak t'ejo, silyong s6j6k posang," Chugan Choson, February 11, 1996.

10. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford Univer-

sity Press, 1977), 162.

11. Yun Chaehyu, "Kwangju iii w6n kwa han," Sin Tonga 335 (August

1987): 495-517.

12. Andre Schmid, "Rediscovering Manchuria: Sin Ch'aeho and the Politics

of Territorial History in Korea," Journal of Asian Studies 56, no. 1 (1997): 26-46.

13. Sin Ch'aeho, Choson sanggosa in Tanje Sin Ch'aeho chOnjip, 2d ed., 4

vols. (Seoul: Hy6ngs61 ch'ulp'ansa, 1987), 1:31-354, esp. 35-47.

14. Michael Robinson, "National Identity and the Thought of Sin Ch'aeho:

Sadajuai and Chuch'e in History and Politics," Journal of Korean Studies 5

(1984): 121-42.

15. Kwang-ok Kim, "Rituals of Resistance: The Manipulation of Sha-

manism in Contemporary Korea," in Charles H. Keyes, Laurel Kendall, and

Helen Hardacre, eds., Asian Visions of Authority, 195-219 (Honolulu: Univer-

sity of Hawaii Press, 1994).

212

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

16. One of the more interesting essays on the topic is John Duncan's "Uses

of Confucianism in Modern Korea," which was presented at the conference

Rethinking Confucianism in Asia at the End of the Twentieth Century, held at

UCLA in June 1999.

17. He used this term in describing the late Qing and early-twentieth-

century Chinese intellectual attitude toward Confucianism. See Joseph Leven-

son, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate: A Trilogy (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1968).

18. Y6ksa hakhoe, ed., Sirhak y:n'gu immun (Seoul: Ilchogak, 1973).

19. Kim Changt'ae, Han'guk sirhak sasang yOn'gu (Seoul: Chibmundang,

1987).

20. Yu W6ndong, Han'guk sirhak kaeron (Seoul: Ch6nghm munhwasa,

1984), 290-324.

21. Yi T'aejin, ed., ChosOn sidae chOngch'isa iii chaejomyOng (Seoul:

P6mjosa, 1985).

22. David Steinberg, "The Transformation of the South Korean Econ-

omy," in Korea Briefing, 1993, 34. There are various works representing this

revisionist mode of thinking. One of them is Gilbert Rozman, ed., The East

Asian Region: Confucian Traditions and Modern Dynamism (Princeton: Prince-

ton University Press, 1991). Although published in 1991, this reflects shifting

views of Confucianism, which had begun earlier.

23. "Ig6t ch'am k'inil ikunyo," Minju i~ii hamsong 1 (1984): 12-13.

24. See, for example, "Uri kojang iii minjuhwa nin uri soniro," Minju iii

hamsong 1 (1984): 8-9.

25. Kim Yoon-shik cites 1978 as the point at which literature changed from

minjok munhak (national literature) to minjung munhak (people's literature).

See Kim Yoon-shik, "The Korean Novel in an Age of Industrialization," Korea

Journal 29, no. 6 (1989): 26.

26. See, for example, the "S6ngmy6ngs6" (Manifesto) declared by the

Association of Christian Farmers on November 26, 1985.

27. Representative works of this type include Hwang S6gybng's Kaekchi

(Strange land), published in 1971, and Cho Sehii's Nanjangi ka ssoa ollin

chagan kong (A dwarf launches a little ball), published in 1976. See Hwang

S6gy6ng, Kaekchi (Seoul: Ch'angjak kwa pip'y6ngsa, 1974), 5-103; and Cho

Sehii, "A Dwarf Launches a Little Ball," in Peter H. Lee, ed., Modern Korean

Literature, 328-67.

28. Linda Hutcheon claims that historiographical metafiction became popu-

lar in the 1980s because it suited the ambiguity of postmodernism. See her A

Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge,

1988), 4. This analysis might not be applicable to the Korean case.

29. For a discussion of Rushdie's novels as representative of historiographi-

cal metafiction, see Luisa Juarez Hervas, "An Irreverent Chronicle: History and

Fiction in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children," in Susana Onega, ed., Telling

Histories (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995), 76.

30. Gyorgy Lukads, The Historical Novel (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humani-

ties Press, 1978), 332.

In Search of HISTORY in Democratic Korea

213

31. Rosaline Marsh, "Reassessing the Past: Images of Stalin and Stalinism

in Contemporary Russian Literature," in Sheelagh Duffin Graham, ed., New

Directions in Soviet Literature (New York: St. Martin's, 1992), 89.

32. Brent O. Peterson, "German Nationalism after Napoleon: Caste and

Regional Identities in Historical Fiction, 1815-1830," German Quarterly 68, no.

3 (1995): 287.

33. Ernest Renan, "What Is a Nation?" In Homi K Bhabha, ed., Nation

and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), 19.

34. For a discussion of the relationship between history and literature

through the ages, see Susana Onega, "'A Knack for Yarns': The Narrativization

of History and the End of History," in Onega Telling Histories, 7-17.

35. Although there was small-scale punishment of Catholics for not erect-

ing the ancestral tablets or performing requisite mourning rituals before 1800,

full-scale persecution did not begin until 1801 when about three hundred were

killed. See Kim Chang-Seok Thaddeus, Lives of 103 Martyr Saints of Korea

(Seoul: Catholic Publishing House, 1984), 8-10; and James Huntley Grayson,

Early Buddhism and Christianity in Korea (Leiden: Brill, 1985), 70-83.

36. The nineteenth century is not well studied, but this has been assumed.

An attempt to reevaluate this period has begun, but no new ground has been

broken. As an example of the new attempt, see Han'guk y6ksa y6n'guhoe, ed.,

Choson changch'isa, 1800-1863, 2 vols. (Seoul: Ch'6ngny6nsa, 1990).

37. Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author," in The Rustle of Lan-

guage, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989),

52-53.

38. Such well-known titles as Pak Ky6ngni's Toji (The land), Ch'oe My6ng-

hui's Honpul (Spirit fire), and Cho Ch6ngnae's T'aebak sanmaek (The Taebaek

mountain range) were published either in part or in their entirety during this

period. Kw6n Y6ngmin says that these are novels of han in which the sufferings

and resilience of the Korean people are rendered in an epic mode. See Kw6n

Y6ngmin, Han'guk hyOndae munhak (Seoul: Minumsa, 1993), 340-48.

39. Kang Mangil, ed., Chong Tasan kwa kit sidae (Seoul: Minumsa, 1986);

Kang Man'gil, Han'guk kiindaesa, 150-72.

40. For details, see Ronald Grimsley, From Montesquieu to Laclos: Studies

on the French Enlightenment (Geneva: Droz, 1974); Ulrich Ricken, Linguistics,

Anthropology, and Philosophy in the French Enlightenment: Language Theory

and Ideology (London: Routledge, 1994).

41. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postco-

lonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 6-7.

42. Encounter, 26-27.

43. For a discussion of Hasang's Sang Chaesang so, see Don Baker, "A

Different Thread: Orthodoxy, Heterodoxy, and Catholicism in a Confucian

World," in JaHyun Kim Haboush and Martina Deuchler, eds., Culture and the

State in Late Choson Korea (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 1999),

225-28.

44. Grayson, Early Buddhism, 71-83.

45. For biographies of these 103 saints, see Kim, Lives of Martyr Saints.

214

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

46. See Don Baker's foreword to Encounter, xviii-xx. See also Baker,

"Different Thread," 212-17.

47. In the novel, shamanism is depicted as the least spiritual, and thus it is

placed at the bottom of the hierarchy.

48. This view has also elicited critical responses. For an example, see James

B. Palais, Confucian Statecraft and Korean Institutions (Seattle: University of

Washington Press, 1996).

49. Mokmin sims6, 3:225.

50. Ibid., 4:293.

51. Ibid., 4:225-26.

52. Ibid., 4:185-86.

53. Ibid., 1:100-102.

54. Ibid., 3:35-36.

55. Ibid., 5:198-99.

56. Ibid., 5:267.

57. Encounter, 31.

58. Yi S6ngmu, "Sipch'il segi tii yeron kwa tangjaeng," in Yi S6ngmu et

al., ChosOn hugi tangjaeng ti chonghapchk kOmch'al (S6ngnamsi: Ch6ngsin

munhwa y6n'guw6n, 1992), 80-82.

59. For a discussion of H6 Mok, the representative Namin official of the

royal party, see Ch6ng Okcha, "H6 Mok Misu y6n'gu," Han'guk sahak 5 (Octo-

ber 1979): 199-204. For the philosophy of Song Siy61, the founder of the Noron

party, see Son Munho, "Song Siy61 iii ch6ngch'i sasang y6n'gu," Hoso munhwa

nonch'ong 4 (1989): 33-47.

60. Yongwonhan cheguk, 266-67.

61. Cho Tongil, Han'guk munhak t'ongsa, 3d ed. (Seoul: Chisik san6psa,

1994), 5:309-10.

62. Yongwonhan cheguk, 199.

63. Hegel expounded his views on world history in his Philosophy of His-

tory. For Hayden White's discussion of them, see his Metahistory: The Historical

Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univer-

sity Press, 1973), 123-31.

64. The Story of the Romans was written by Shiono Nanami, and it was on

the best-seller list for most of 1996 and 1997.

65. This longing to possess history manifests itself in many ways in Korean

life. There appears to be an intense desire to be where things are happening on

the world stage. International forums for sports or art are avidly sought and

enthusiastically embraced. It was interesting to observe how closely the public

watched every step of Korea's bid to sponsor the World Cup in 2002 and how

extensive and detailed the media reports of this process were. The International

Fair of Contemporary Art (FIAC), held in Paris in the fall of 1996, recorded

participation by a dozen galleries from Korea, the second-largest number after

those from the host country.

66. For a discussion of the totalitarian character of Hegel's world history,

see Diane Elam, Romancing the Postmodern (London: Routledge, 1992), 89.

Chapter 7

Cosmopolitanism and the Ideal Image

of Nation in Communist

Revolutionary Culture

Hung-yok Ip

Historians of China have paid much attention to how nationalism

shaped the political, cultural, and intellectual developments of modern

China. We should note, however, that in addition to acknowledging

nationalism as a shaping force of modern Chinese history, scholars now

also stress the importance of studying nationalism and the concept of

nationhood as sites where "nonnationalist" perspectives and "non-

national" identifications exerted their influences. Analyzing how the

concern for the nation contributed to an "Enlightenment mode" in vari-

ous narratives of nationhood, Duara at the same time emphasizes that

nonnational identifications and intellectual positions- for instance, gen-

der and class identities-influenced the individuals' ways of imagining

the nation.1 As he stresses the interplay between national identity and

other identifications,2 Duara actually echoes what Hobsbawm stated a

few years ago: "[National identification] is always combined with identifi-

cations of another kind, even when it is felt to be superior to them."3

Examining how nationalism both shaped and was shaped by history -

this is a dualistic approach to the study of nationalist and national issues.

I find such an approach highly useful, as I am interested in studying

a particular kind of national narrative in communist culture, the narra-

tive that reveals communist intellectuals' ideal image of the nation.4

Wishing the best for one's nation certainly is nationalism, but the con-

tent of the ideal image is conditioned by thinking that may or may not be

of nationalist origins. This chapter addresses the question of how

cosmopolitanism-internationalism helped communist intellectuals imag-

ine the ideal image of nation in the course of revolution.5

215

216

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

Cosmopolitanism-internationalism was, in the context of modern

East Asia, marked by a clear acceptance of the idea of Westernization

and by the belief in Western discourses on progress, culture, nation, and

race. Contributors of this volume note how in the modern period the

West, particularly Europe, prompted East Asians to rethink their na-

tional identity or reimagine the nation.

Tracing the history of hairstyles in late imperial and modern China,

Chi-kong Lai examines how queue cutting symbolized the rejection of

a "backward" Chinese tradition and the adoption of a Westernized

and thus modernist identity. In his chapter on the emergence of the

Hanzu identity, Kai-wing Chow analyzes how in the late Qing period

the Chinese internalized, reconfigured, and resisted European and

Japanese orientalism. And Kevin M. Doak delineates how racial theo-

ries of Western origins were involved in Japanese attempts to re-

structure East Asia as a meaningful geographical space. Exploring the

influences of the West on Chinese perspective(s) on nationhood, my

chapter focuses upon how internationalism-cosmopolitanism became

an integral part of the Chinese Communist reconstruction of the ideal

image of China.

Communism is cosmopolitan - that we all know. And as a matter of

fact, cosmopolitanism-internationalism within Chinese Communism is

not a totally uncharted issue.6 In The State, Identity, and the National

Question in China and Japan, Germaine Hoston deals with the important

question of how Chinese and Japanese thinkers reconciled their commit-

ment to their nations with the Marxist internationalist and stateless ide-

als.7 Dirlik points to May Fourth socialists' cosmopolitanist view on the

Chinese nation: for them, "Global problems were China's national prob-

lems, and China's national problems were global problems."8 Studying

contemporary Chinese intellectuals' nativism and nationalism, Zhao

Suisheng does not forget to mention Mao's Westernized image of the

ideal Chinese nation - that is, a China "catching up to Great Britain and

the United States."9

It is obvious, however, that when historians study Chinese Commu-

nism or nationalism in the Communist Revolution, cosmopolitanism-

internationalism has not attracted as much attention as the Communist

concern for China's national interests and anti-imperialism. Aware of

Mao Zedong's insistence that there was no conflict between nationalism

and the quest for internationalist socialism, Hoston nevertheless empha-

sizes that "the pursuit of China's national interests had constituted the

Cosmopolitanism and the Ideal Image of Nation 217

CCP's [Chinese Communist Party's] most potent basis of legitimacy

because the party claimed to lead a revolution that had begun as a

movement of national liberation." In the post-1976 era, many people,

including scholars in mainland China, understand Communist - or what

they sometimes call Maoist - anti-imperialism as a kind of harmful

isolationism. Experts on China also believe that anti-imperialist nation-

alism and related policies, building a wall around China, were self-

destructive.10 While I do not intend to refute these assertions, I would

like to insist that when studying Communist thinking and culture we

should not let the potency of nationalism as the foundation of the

Communist Revolution blind us to the significance of cosmopolitan-

internationalism. This chapter is an attempt to probe the historical

significance of cosmopolitanism-internationalsm in the Chinese Commu-

nist Revolution by examining the Communist intellectuals' cosmopoli-

tan-internationalist ideal image of the nation. To some extent, I draw

on current scholarship that has already elaborately discussed the integra-

tion of internationalism in the ideological rhetoric on the nation since I

believe that such integration was an important part of the Communist

imagining of an internationalist-cosmopolitan nation. But I mainly con-

strue my study as an investigation of cosmopolitanism at a nonideologi-

cal level, as I focus on how cosmopolitanism operated as a visible

cultural trend, shaping radicals' narratives on China and the world, how

the Communists disseminated the image of China as an internationalist

nation in the context of mass mobilization, and how, apart from discuss-

ing their internationalist view on China as a political entity, revolution-

aries also embraced the ideal of a new Chinese nation as a cosmopoli-

tan cultural unit.11

Envisioning a Cosmopolitan Nation and National Culture:

The May Fourth Era

During the May Fourth period, advocating Westernization as moderniza-

tion, iconoclastic radicals showed great enthusiasm for merging the

nation into the world. What were the assumptions buttressing such

enthusiasm?

The eagerness to "merge" was to a large extent derived from

the iconoclasts' nationalistic concern - their commitment to national

strength, prestige, and survival. Chen Duxiu, expounding the impor-

tance of "being cosmopolitan, not being isolationist," noted that

218 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

the contemporary world witnesses the existence of various na-

tions .... Even if a nation is strong, it cannot neglect what happens

in the world and isolate itself. Although there are national variations

regarding institutions and culture, definite and obvious is the fact

that a nation's survival depends upon its adjustment to the major

trend of the world.12

Meisner, on the one hand ignoring the nationalist utilitarian basis of

Chen Duxiu's position, stressed on the other hand that Li Dazhao did

not voice anything similar to Chen's appeal for cosmopolitanism.13 We

must, however, note Li's insistence on China's attempt to merge with

the major trends of the world: not only did he praise Western culture as

"dynamic,"14 but he stressed that dynamic culture was the trend of the

day. Assuming that China's static culture was in a dangerous position

vis-h-vis the contemporary major trend, he could not help but trumpet

"a change to a dynamic life."'5

It is justified to think, however, that cosmopolitanism did not

merely establish itself upon the grounds of nationalist utilitarianism:

May Fourth iconoclasm embodied not only nation-oriented concerns but

of contempt for the inherent nature of tradition. How could Lu Xun

condemn a tradition of eating people only on nationalistic grounds? By

the same token, when Wu Yu conceptualized the Confucian emphasis on

hierarchy as barbarian and cruel, he revealed great discontent with the

inherent nature of the practice itself.16 Thus, when the iconoclasts es-

poused cosmopolitanism, they also admired the values embedded in the

"advanced" cultural trends of the world.

In addition to calling for China to merge with the advanced currents

of the world, May Fourth iconoclasts demonstrated a longing for the

emergence of a new China in an ideal world marked by unity, egalitarian-

ism, and human brotherhood.

As early as 1917, Li Dazhao had complained of white people's

attitudes toward Asians - their disinclination to treat Asians as humans

according to Western humanitarian principles. Later he suggested the

dichotomy between "Pan . . . ism," and democracy: "pan . . . ism,"

which provided a basis for relationships among different nations, areas,

warlords, and parties, was the reliance on might to suppress others and

gratify one's desires, whereas democracy, composed of equality, liberty

and rationality, was its opposite. In his view, the inevitable result of the

Cosmopolitanism and the Ideal Image of Nation 219

confrontation between "Pan . .. ism" and democracy was the latter's

victory in both the international and national arenas.17

Mao Zedong also wished to remove oppression in the international

arena. In 1919, identifying "the doctrine of the common people"

(pingmin zhuyi) - a term with socialist overtones - with democracy, Mao

vehemently proclaimed: "We should use the doctrines of the people to

overthrow all kinds of power [i.e., oppression], including. . . power in

the international realm." Nationalism was embedded in the call for reject-

ing this type of might: "Power in the international arena, namely [in the

form] of Japan, is pressing us hard. We should use every kind of social

movement.., to cope with Japan's oppression."'18

Li's and Mao's visions of an egalitarian international order obvi-

ously came from their discontent with aggression from and domination

by foreign countries. We should note, however, that the commitment to

an international "democratic" order arose not merely from the national-

ist reaction against unequal international relations, a desire based on

nationalist sentiments; it was also linked to the aspiration to build a

better international relationship, one characterized by different races'

love for and willingness to help one another. What Li Dazhao hoped for

was not a confrontation between the Asian and white peoples but close

relationships among different races.19 The eagerness to reject the inter-

national power responsible for China's suffering led Mao to embrace

Kropotkin's idea: "There is a group of people who hope to merge all the

nations on earth into a single whole, to unite all humans and form a big

family. . .. The leader of this group is Kropotkin, a Russian."20 In these

statements, what they cherished was a China that would coexist as other

nations' equal in the new world order. Chen Duxiu even assigned to

those he called "the new Chinese intellectuals" the mission to love and

help different races of the world.21

To be sure, the May Fourth radicals must have been motivated by

nationalism to construct an egalitarian - or "democratic" - international

order, since for them such an order would ensure the independence and

dignity of the weak nations. Even so, nationalism did not narrow radi-

cal intellectuals' cosmopolitan vision to an exclusive concern for the

elimination of oppression but inspired them to appreciate the more

positive elements-love, mutual respect, and mutual aid-at an inter-

national level. In fact, having examined the May Fourth thinking, Mi-

chael Luk believes that radical intellectuals were genuinely interested in

220

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

international fraternal union and after a new China that could enjoy

and contribute to it:

Chinese intellectuals . . . were also concerned about the future di-

rection of world evolution and speculated on its ultimate destiny.

Completely contrary to their vision of a contemporary world domi-

nated by savage Darwinian struggle, their views on the future were

remarkably optimistic, as they almost invariably looked forward to a

time when a pacifist, humanitarian, and cosmopolitan spirit would

prevail. . . During the First World War period, intellectuals such

as Chen Duxiu, Li Dazhao, and Hu Shi entertained high hopes that

a new international order governed by the democratic principle

would be established after the war.22 And to explain the origin of

this cosmopolitan worldview, Luk emphasizes the influence of tradi-

tion - the "fundamental Chinese belief in a universal order."23

Sometimes, it is not too much to say that the commitment to brother-

hood led to a concern for the well-being and dignity of peoples outside

the Chinese nation. Therefore, Chen Duxiu sang the praises of the

French Revolution in terms of its contribution to all humankind, as Li

Dazhao, applauding the Revolution of "the Russian people," passion-

ately proclaimed: "[W]e long for the victory of the common people in

the world, not that of any particular race; we pray for the liberty of the

common people on this earth, not that of any specific national group."24

More interestingly, not only did the Chinese radicals assume that they

should be concerned about other peoples' existence, but the radical circle

also hoped, if not fancied, that other peoples would sympathize with

China's plight and struggle. Before joining the Communist Party, Zhang

Wentian in 1924 wrote a story entitled "Life's Journey," which was about a

Chinese engineer working in California. There he fell in love with an

American radical who promised to leave the United States for China and

join the revolution led by a patriotic organization called the Great China

Revolutionary Party. Unfortunately, the woman died on the eve of their

departure. The heartbroken engineer returned to China alone, became a

brave revolutionary, and sacrificed his life for the struggle. The story

more or less reveals the wish that China's struggle for a better situation

will become a goal shared by "progressive" Westerners.25

It is clear, therefore, that for the May Fourth radicals a new China

should be a cosmopolitan nation, swimming with the stream of the "ad-

Cosmopolitanism and the Ideal Image of Nation 221

vanced" cultures of the world and helping in the construction of an

international union that would transcend national boundaries. Besides

discussing what China should do in order to become a cosmopolitan

nation, the Chinese radicals also cherished a vision of China taking its

place in an international community that would be sympathetic and

characterized by harmony, equal justice, and liberty.

But the imagining of the Chinese nation as a cosmopolitan political

entity was only part of the story regarding the influence of cosmopolitan-

ism on the May Fourth ideal vision of the nation. In the Chinese icono-

clasts' thinking, the image of China as an internationalized nation was

accompanied by that of a cosmopolitan Chinese culture. China's cosmo-

politan culture, in their view, would be marked not only by the adoption

of Western liberal values but by familiarity with Western cultural achieve-

ments and customs.

We should note, interestingly enough, that exploration of the West-

ern cultural dimension was often explained in nationalistic language.

Emphasizing educated youths' responsibility to study and search for

effective means of national survival, an official announcement in New

Youth stated: "At present, our Chinese youths do not have a strong

presence in the international arena and are still in the process of study-

ing [truth and useful knowledge]." It then suggested: "We have to de-

velop a keen interest in the world." "This magazine," said the editor, "is

devoted to the introduction of various dimensions of foreign countries

from interesting happenings to scholarship and intellectual currents."26

As a returned student from the United States, Hu Shi was keenly

disappointed by China's educational system, which, according to him,

had created a generation of students ignorant of the world who would

thus fail China.27

Not unexpectedly, active intellectuals of the May Fourth era were

quite enthusiastic about transmitting knowledge of foreign cultures, es-

pecially those of the West, to a Chinese audience. In New Youth, we find

a wide range of information translated or originally written by the Chi-

nese on topics ranging from Western political institutions and social

conditions to Versailles and the Louvre and literature and the arts.28

There were also writings about such exotica as the rituals involved in a

duel29 and elite fashions involving hunting, horse racing, and the social

life of London.30

But, despite their seriously and publicly proclaimed goal of broad-

ening Chinese readers' intellectual horizons, May Fourth intellectuals

222 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

introduced foreign cultures out of a genuine interest in Western accom-

plishments and customs - in short, they reveled in things that had little

relation to the kind of knowledge that might have been useful in China's

salvation. Let us, say, look at Liu Bannong's essay on Western "flower

poems."31 In this article, he translated and wrote commentaries on En-

glish poems, choosing roses, violets, and forget-me-nots as motifs. It is

clear that he savored this aesthetic undertaking when he was elaborating

on the transcendence of Byron's poetry or the subtlety of Horace

Smith's "Hymn of the Flower." A translator's introduction to a play by

Oscar Wilde also betrayed this person's cosmopolitanist longing for cul-

tural sophistication: "Wilde's dramas are marked by local color and a

vivid representation of the English upper class. . . . Foreigners always

find them difficult to understand, but this is the very reason why they

delight me so."32 And when Zhang Wentian read and wrote about

Wilde, contrasting him with the highly esteemed Ibsen, he praised the

former's aesthetic style: "His techniques are unconventional and his

style elegant. He was both a genius and a monster."33

We can say, therefore, that the May Fourth period witnessed the

presence of a cosmopolitan ideal image of the nation consisting of at

least two dimensions - one political, emphasizing China's integration

into the dominant trend of the world and its dignified existence in a

fraternal world order that it would help construct, and the other cul-

tural, aspiring to a new China that could show a substantial degree of

familiarity with foreign cultures.

How, then, did the Commuinist revolutionary culture inherit the

cosmopolitan ideal of the nation - in both its political and cultural

aspects - from China's modernist tradition? Although historians of mod-

ern China always emphasize the importance of the May Fourth tradition

in the emergence of Chinese Communism,34 we still need to analyze

more concretely how the Communist movement continued or discontin-

ued various trends in that tradition, so well known for its eclecticism.35

We do see, however, the continuation of the cosmopolitan ideal image of

the nation in Communist revolutionary culture. Such an image was

probably sustained by a few conditions.

First, many early Communist leaders were active participants in the

May Fourth movement. Second, Communist internationalism and the

Chinese Communists' connection with the Comintern helped perpetu-

ate the cosmopolitan-internationalist expectation of the Chinese nation.

And, third, the impact of the May Fourth movement was still being felt

Cosmopolitanism and the Ideal Image of Nation 223

by the generations growing up years after the heydey of the movement

itself. For instance, Yang Mo, a well-known Communist writer, recalled

that, coming of age in the 1930s, she submerged herself in May Fourth

and Western bourgeois literature.36

In the discussion that follows, I will examine how the cosmopolitan

ideal image of the nation continued to be present in Communist revolu-

tionary culture and at the same time will analyze briefly how to some

degree the ideal itself changed and developed during the protracted

revolutionary process.

An Ideal China as an Internationalist Nation:

Narrative and Mass Mobilization in the

Communist Revolution

Some May Fourth intellectuals, not unexpectedly, interwove the cos-

mopolitan perspective on their beloved China with their appreciation of

socialism and the Bolshevik Revolution. The hope that China would

improve itself by keeping up with the most advanced trends of the

world was intertwined with the radical group's admiration for socialist

and communist radicalism. Bolshevism, socialism, and "the people's

union" were now regarded as the vanguard of human culture. When Li

Dazhao asked the Chinese to accommodate the progressive trend of bol-

shevization, he was thinking about the survival of the Chinese people in

a new, egalitarian, and free world through their adoption of common

people's ethics, which valued hard work.37

In 1920, Chen Duxiu argued that the capitalists' undemocratic, ex-

ploitative treatment of the workers deprived workers of opportunities to

receive an education and therefore would lead to the decline of the race.38

For him, the solution lay in socialism. Chinese laborers must, he insisted,

aspire to a higher level of consciousness, which would be embraced by the

laborers in the world. That, he said, was the awareness that workers

should demand the right of management.39 In his view, China's struggle

for survival depended upon the adoption of the world's most progressive

consciousness by a specific group of Chinese, the working class.

While Chen thought that Chinese laborers should develop an ad-

vanced consciousness, Deng Zhongxia assumed that Chinese workers

would contribute to the birth of a new world. In 1920, explaining why he

and his comrades, the members of a communist study group in Beijing,

were publishing the magazine The Voice of Labor, Deng Zhongxia said:

224

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

"We hope that we can contribute to the Chinese laboring people's soli-

darity and their union with the laborers in other nations. On the basis of

this union, working people can change the world."40 In him, we see a

Marxist version of the expectation that China could help build a new and

united international community.

After the founding of the Communist Party, and during the process of

bolshevization in the 1920s, as the Chinese Communists strove to deepen

their understanding and improve their use of Marxism-Leninism, commu-

nist internationalism became quite an important issue for the CCP's lead-

ing theorists. Drawing on their writings, Michael Luk shows minutely the

Chinese Communists' conceptions of China's relationship with the out-

side world and their discourses on the interplay between nationalism and

internationalism.41 Here I would like to portray the Communist inter-

nationalist-cosmopolitan image of the nation by drawing substantially on

Luk's study.

Driven by patriotism and the need to establish a patriotic public

image, Chinese Communist intellectuals devoted themselves to the task

of defining the nation in the context of Marxist-Leninist theories of

internationalism. To be sure, Chen Duxiu and Li Da preached interna-

tionalism at the expense of nationalism, and the private decisions of the

party in 1922 concentrated on the doctrine of proletarian international-

ism. We should note, nevertheless, that the Communists, however inter-

nationalist, actually spent a huge amount of energy contemplating the

place of China - and at an abstract level the nation - in what they called

the world revolution.42

In the opening issue of the new Xin Qingnian, the Chinese Commu-

nist Party linked China's struggle for survival to the anti-imperialist and

anticapitalist world revolution: "Old Chinese society was not only feu-

dal, but it was to be swallowed up in a wave of world capitalism. It

shares the same fate as the proletariat of the world."43 In the mid-1920s,

important theorists, including Zheng Chaolin, Ren Bishi, and Qu

Qiubai, celebrating the October Revolution, pondered the national

question. In their view, the true solution to the national problem was

only found after the October Revolution, as the Bolsheviks had "put an

end to the Tsarist oppression of the small nationalities and fully realized

the ideal of national equality and sovereignty." Chen Duxiu even cre-

atively suggested that there was a proletarian type of nationalism, the

essence of which was anti-imperialist, as it advocated "self-determina-

tion for all nationalities."44

Cosmopolitanism and the Ideal Image of Nation 225

The CCP, moreover, elaborated the question of what the Chinese

nation should do and would achieve in the international revolution by

following the Leninist concept of world revolution. The concept divides

the process into the stages of anti-imperialist and proletarian revolution.

As Luk points out (182):

In 1923, Qu Qiubai first wrote on the importance of the National

Revolution of China to the proletarian world revolution. . . Qu

claimed that China had been placed in a particularly important posi-

tion in world politics because it was the "last market" able to accom-

modate the further expansion of capitalist imperialism after the First

World War. If China's National Revolution were to succeed, he pre-

dicted, it would strike a major blow to imperialism and inevitably

precipitate the outbreak of the proletarian revolution of the world.

The role played by China, therefore, was more than that of being

part of the world revolution; it would be essential for the success of the

oppressed peoples' global struggle for liberation. Nevertheless, this was

only a kind of desperate optimism, as Qu talked about China's potential

contribution in a context that emphasized the crucial importance of

China's struggle to survive.45

Luk believes that the influences of Lenin's theories of world revolu-

tion on the CCP ideology were "evidently widely felt and lasting,"46 but

we certainly need further research to explore the continuation and modi-

fication of these nationalist and internationalist views on the nation. In

addition, as Hoston puts it, the Shanghai coup in 1927 forced the Chi-

nese Communists to confront this question: "How far could or should

any native communist party sacrifice the interests of its own national

revolution for those of the international revolution, or of its fatherland,

the Soviet Union?" According to her, doubts about the validity of the

Bolshevik path for the Chinese sanctioned "Mao's pursuit of a revolu-

tion that was at once nationalist and socialistic, in isolation from the

Comintern to whose often contradictory policies he merely paid lip ser-

vice."47 Interestingly but ironically, it was Stalin's well-known concept of

"socialism in one country" that bolstered the Chinese conception of an

independent state: determined to build "socialism in one country," Mao,

though regarding the Chinese Revolution as an important part of the

world revolution, aspired mainly to building socialism in China as a

nation with its own distinctive history.48 While Hoston always stresses

226

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

the importance of the Chinese Communists' nationalism in their at-

tempts to reconcile nation-oriented concerns with internationalism, I

intend to use the Communists' integration of internationalist language

and ideals in nationalist discourse to highlight the significance of interna-

tionalism for Communist nationalism and culture.

In fact, in the post-1927 course of the Revolution, the CCP contin-

ued to cherish the internationalist ideal image of China and at the same

time seemed to embrace such an image with increasing self-confidence.

During the Yan'an period, the party still celebrated internationalism.

Mao, the arch opponent of the Russian-trained Communists and the

most enthusiastic advocate of sinicization, revealed an internationalist

tone in his essays and speeches. In a speech he gave on the occasion of

the October Revolution, published in Jiefang ribao, he said on behalf

of the party and the Chinese people, "We the Communists . . . soldiers,

and people should unite and struggle . . . so as to defeat Japanese impe-

rialism, to build a nation in which liberty and equality will prevail, and to

participate in international cooperation and [China's] reconstruction as

a new country."49

Similar ideas were echoed in his more serious writing. As the civil

war unfolded, Mao began to contemplate the transition from "new de-

mocracy" to "socialism."50 After all those years of struggle, he finally

had the opportunity to envision the coming of socialism. In On the

People's Democratic Dictatorship, written by him as a party leader to

celebrate the anniversary of the Communist Party, Mao elatedly wrote

about the party's prospects in Marxist internationalist language: "Under

the leadership of the proletariat and the Communist Party, China will

gradually transform itself into an industrial country, will leave the stage

of new democracy, will proceed to socialism and communism, and will

eliminate the class system and realize worldwide harmony."51 Like the

revolutionaries decades earlier, Mao expounded on China's contribution

to the world. Gone, however, was the desperate cry that China, as one

of the weak nations, must struggle in the waves of anti-imperialism in

order to reject foreign oppression and domination. Mao's (or the Com-

munist Party's) optimistic view of China's international contribution

was, we can say, intertwined with a leader's grand vision of nation build-

ing on the eve of victory.

Comparing the iconoclastic intellectuals' representations of China

and those of the socialists and Communists, we see in the latter a much

more prominent presence of the notion that the Chinese laboring class

Cosmopolitanism and the Ideal Image of Nation 227

was important for the fate of their country and the world. We should

note, in addition, that the Communist leaders not only integrated their

internationalist expectation of China into their own narratives but

they made genuine attempts to spread the idea that China and the

Chinese masses were significant for international politics in the context

of mass mobilization.

From the 1920s to the 1940s, revolutionary intellectuals employed

various devices to develop the Chinese peasants' and workers' interna-

tionalist consciousness. Sometimes revolutionary leaders themselves con-

veyed internationalist messages to the masses directly. While organizing

his soviet, Peng Pai explained Marxism to the peasants and workers in a

lively way: "Mr. Marx used his telescope, clearly observing [the capital-

ists' exploitation of the workers]. Therefore, he organized a Communist

Party, which leads the workers and peasants all over the world to struggle

with the rich. He did not pay attention to national boundaries."52

It was possible that the party made particular efforts to cultivate the

soldiers' internationalist consciousness. Gao Xiucheng, who was a cap-

tain at the end of the Second Sino-Japanese War, recalled:

During the eight years of resistance against the Japanese, political

education in the military (budui) often had a strong emphasis on the

Soviet Union. I seem to recall that after the Soviet army occupied

Manchuria the party distributed a new textbook. The Soviet Union,

the textbook told us, was the country of Lenin, the main force oppos-

ing fascism. . . . We loved learning all about this and assumed that

the Soviet Union was as lovely as paradise. We sincerely wanted to be

friendly with the "big brother" (lao dage) . . . Before heading for

Manchuria from Qidong, the party had attempted to mobilize the

army, telling us that we were going to have a union with our big

brother. I cannot describe how happy and excited we were. At that

time, people were enthusiastic and simple.53

It is not clear whether Gao, who was quite well educated by Chi-

nese, and particularly Communist, standards, illustrates for us the inter-

nationalist sentiment of the low-ranking officers and soldiers.54 How-

ever, let us look at how great a stir the impending union caused in the

army in which Gao served as captain: over and over again, the soldiers

tried to brush the dust off their old, dirty uniforms, wiped the badges on

their caps, and cleaned their weapons. What the army wanted was to

228 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

make a deep impression on the big brother.55 Whether the soldiers did

all this on their own we cannot tell. Moreover, the emphasis on friend-

ship with an ally may be different from internationalism. But the commo-

tion itself certainly conveyed a message to the rank and file, the message

that there was intimate bonding between the two Communist powers.

Such a message, sent in a historical context containing a belief in world

revolution and international harmonious interdependence, was one of

internationalism.

If Gao's recollection, recorded years after the revolutionary days,

does not reveal most accurately the Communist attempts to "interna-

tionalize" the soldiers, there are many examples that demonstrate how

the Communists used literature and the arts to inject the Chinese masses

with internationalist sentiments. Some Communists exploited the sym-

bolism of the color red. In the Sichuan-Shaanxi soviet, the following

inscription, aimed at introducing rural people to the grand vision of

world revolution, was engraved on a stone monument:

The red flag will wave all over the world;

The red light will brighten the five Continents.56

After the Soviet period, Communist cultural workers helped spread

internationalist ideas by relying heavily upon music and the performing

arts. During the 1930s, plays performed in the Jiangxi Soviet Areas

contained loud and clear internationalist messages. For instance, the

play The Roaring Metropolis, which was about the urban Communist

movement, ended with the singing of the "Internationale."57 In another

play, the performers sang a song to stir up the audience's anger against

British imperialism: "Imperialism is fierce and unfair; / let us rise up and

struggle with it. / Unite with workers and peasants of the whole world; /

Support our socialist Soviet Union."58

Cultural workers of the Soviet period even made use of traditional art

forms in implanting the internationalist ideal into the minds of the rural

masses. For instance, a popular revolutionary song, "The Sweet Os-

manthus of August," borrowing the melody of the folk song "Baduanjin,"

began with these words: "The sweet osmanthus of August blooms every-

where, / and the red flags wave in every corner. /. . . A bright, colorful

new world is emerging. / My fellow workers, my peasant friends, / Let's

sing the 'Internationale' to celebrate our soviet."59

In the Yan'an period, internationalist messages did not subside.

Cosmopolitanism and the Ideal Image of Nation 229

There was a relatively popular yangge opera entitled Twelve Sickles,

which was about a peasant family that worked hard for the goals of

national resistance and economic production. In the play, the hero sang

so as to educate his wife: "If we the laboring people join the revolution, /

an ideal society will come. / During the new era, all the people in the

world will work hard, / and they will enjoy happiness and justice."60

During World War II, the Communist Party was eager to persuade

the masses that the fate of China as a nation was being influenced by

international politics. The party explained what was going on in the

international arena by means of artistic performances. In all of Central

China (huazhong), Shandong, Guangdong, and the Jin-cha-qi areas,

Communist cultural workers put on performances to celebrate the occu-

pation of Berlin by the Soviet army. 61 A well-known novel about peasant

revolution, The Bitter Flower, describes a parade organized in a village

in Shandong, an event in which the impersonators of Mussolini and his

wife shamelessly degraded "themselves." In the procession, moreover, a

self-abasing Mussolini and a dead Hitler were followed by a defeated

Suzuki. Adopting an international perspective to convey the nationalist

message that the Japanese invasion would soon collapse, the party told

the people that China was an integral part of the world.62

But why did the Communists invoke the internationalist image of

China in the process of rural mobilization? Did they just habitually

adhere to this image wherever they went to launch the revolution? Or

did they believe that the Chinese masses, the peasants included, should

be exposed to the internationalist message(s) and taught to link China

and the world? When we look at Communist attempts to explain interna-

tionalist messages to the rural masses, it is justifiable to say that the

revolutionaries - to some extent at least - were interested in making the

peasant masses more internationalist, as they themselves were devoted

to making China an internationalist nation.

Cosmopolitanism, Literature, and the Arts

In this section, I would like to consider how the Communist incorpo-

rated cosmopolitanism into the new "Chinese culture" that they built in

the revolutionary context. To highlight the significance of cosmopolitan-

ism for their culture, I concentrate on literature and the arts, an area

best known for its nativism and call for localization.

In terms of cultural orientation, there was a significant difference

230

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

between the May Fourth movement and the Communist Revolution.

Despite some of its veterans' efforts to examine or reexamine Chinese

traditions, the major cultural impact of the May Fourth movement on

modern China was the idea of Westernization. Although during the

1920s and 1930s, the left-wing cultural movement showed a strong de-

gree of Europeanization and Western-trained Communist intellectuals

tried hard to create for themselves Europeanized identities,63 Commu-

nist culture has mostly been noted for the cultural populism of the

Yan'an period.64 It is, therefore, well worth exploring two interrelated

questions: how did cosmopolitanism survive amid the Yan'an populist

policy on culture and what was the status of the cosmopolitan image and

art in the Communist milieu from the 1920s to the 1940s?

Historians believe that after Mao's Talks at the Yan'an Forum on

Literature and Art, using culture as propaganda, the Communist Party

fought Europeanized cosmopolitanism in the realms of literature and

art. Mao only achieved partial success in politicizing and popularizing

the arts, as he allowed cultural works some freedom to interpret his

policy. But still the nativization and localization campaigns were quite

effective. Although Western forms and techniques were used to some

extent, Mao's Talks, aimed at building a nationalist and populist culture,

served as a fundamental text in China's cultural politics. Besides, incom-

plete as the popularization was, the populist-politicized mode of cultural

policy powerfully suppressed the "transcendent spark of creativity."65

Whether this composite analysis is accurate I do not plan to evaluate.

What I want to do here is discuss, in a more focused and systematic way,

the question of how cosmopolitanism was present in Communist culture,

which has drawn historians' attention for its populist and nativist tenden-

cies, and to investigate cosmopolitanism in Yan'an. Let me begin by

reexamining Mao's and Maoist discourses on art and literature.

In Talks at the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art, Mao rejected

what he regarded as Trotsky's view that "politics should be Marxist; the

arts should be bourgeois." But, in explaining how art and literature

should serve political purposes, he echoed to some extent the Marxist-

Leninist, and also the Trotskyist, belief that old cultural heritages should

be valued in progressive culture(s):

No matter whether we are concerned about popularization or rais-

ing standards, we should ponder the question of what the source of

literature and art is. . . . Books and existing artistic products ...

Cosmopolitanism and the Ideal Image of Nation 231

were born as our ancestors and foreigners built upon the founda-

tions of the people's literature and art. We should learn critically

from these traditional and foreign elements, and even from feudal

and bourgeois culture, while we strive to reshape the raw materials

we take from the masses' culture. . . . Such learning determines the

difference between naivete and refinement, the distinction between

crudeness and elegance.66

Suffice it to say that for Mao, the leading populist, the selective integra-

tion of foreign elements was important for the creation of a new culture.

In charge of the "rectification" of the Lu Xun Arts Academy, Zhou

Yang condemned the academy's eagerness to learn from Western litera-

ture and art and urged Westernized intellectuals to pay more attention to

China's "cultural legacy."67 Even so, he recognized the significance of

studying Western classics: "[Western] skills, compared to our traditional

techniques, are much more advanced, much more scientific. It is entirely

necessary to learn from them."68

In addition to this official theoretical endorsement of cosmopolitan-

ism, Communist "populist" creations also revealed an artistic commit-

ment to cosmopolitanism. In the latter stage of the yangge movement,

some medium- and large-scale operas appeared - Liu Hongying, A For-

midable Militia, and so forth. Their music was more complex than that

of pure yangge: in these creations, the artists attempted to combine

Western music and Chinese folk music.

We can now read a cosmopolitan element in Kraus's representation

of the renowned White-Haired Girl. He subtly observes: "When popu-

lism is dominant (as at Yan'an or in the Cultural Revolution), the

musicians' task is to adopt national forms into modern music that

serves the revolution." Noting the influences of both Western and tradi-

tional folk music on The White-Haired Girl, he chooses to emphasize

cosmopolitan intellectuals' adaptation, forced or autonomous, to native

art as the party carried out the populist policy. "Indeed," he says, "it

was only after the Yan'an Forum that music students were required to

study folk song and local opera."69 Bearing in mind the cosmopolitan

element in Maoist populist discourses and post-1942 artistic creations, I

find it equally accurate to state that The White-Haired Girl was a

product of a cultural context in which the dominance of populism

reduced, but by no means eliminated, the admiration for a cosmopoli-

tan approach to art.70

232

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

Thus, it is clear that cosmopolitanism had its own legitimacy in

officially approved cultural activities. The discourses on cultural popu-

lism approved of a certain degree of cosmopolitanism, which was re-

flected in creative processes that produced populist literature and art.

The Communists strove to create a populist culture that helped win the

masses' support for the Communist Party and the war against Japan. In

so doing, they utilized the resources, including Western/foreign styles

and techniques, that they regarded as useful. But political dimensions,

including the nationalist concern for national resistance, were not all

there was to it. Mao's recognition of foreign cultures' contribution to

elegance and Zhou's emphasis on the superiority of Western techniques

betray the fact that cosmopolitan aesthetics by itself sometimes also

commanded eminent populists' respect.

But how much did the Communists treasure cosmopolitan art and

literature? To measure the status of cosmopolitanism in Communist

culture in general and Yan'an culture in particular, I would like to move

beyond the official dimension and explore the unofficial side of the

Communist milieu from the 1920s to the 1940s.

During the Soviet period, while the party struggled to create a cul-

ture that could help mobilize the masses with very limited resources,

cultural workers still believed in the power of Westernized art, culturally

remote though it was from the Soviet areas, to move audiences. A

salient example was a play written by Qian Zhuanfei, the conception of

which, according to the playwright himself, was inspired by Da Vinci's

painting, the Last Supper.7' Reminiscences of cultural workers in the

Soviet areas show, apart from this uncritical belief in the power of cosmo-

politan art, that there was a tendency to worship foreignness - or rather

"Westernness." The cultural atmosphere was, in other words, marked

by a belief in the superiority of Western cultural accomplishments as well

as the assumption that Western and Westernized styles signified refine-

ment, elegance, and chic.

Faith in Russia as the socialist fatherland together with admiration

for Western art and literature led to a collective understanding that

things from Russia were superior. Li Bozhao was a case in point. A

Communist who received her training in Moscow, she was sent to the

Soviet area in 1931.72 There she became a popular cultural star, teaching

people the dances she had learned in Russia and performing them on the

stage. What deserves our attention is her image in the Soviet area. A

member of the Warrior Troupe of the Central Soviet recalls:

Cosmopolitanism and the Ideal Image of Nation 233

Dance was regarded as an elegant, classy form of art. When Com-

rade Li Bozhao organized a dancing class in Ruijin, the Warrior

Troupe sent some members and brought back such programs as

"The Workers' Dance," "The Marine's Dance," and "The Ukrai-

nian Dance" to our own stage. Comrade Li learned them during her

stay at the University of Moscow.73

The same person also observes:

The opera To Expand the Red Army was the first program we re-

hearsed. Our playwright was Li Bozhao, a woman comrade trained in

Moscow.... Her play was considered orthodox art (zhengtong di

yishu), the yangchun baixue of the Soviet area.74

Perhaps it is too much to assert that the deep admiration for Li was

caused solely by her Russian-educated qualification. However, the juxta-

position of Li's Russian-trained background and her contribution still

shows how her cosmopolitan identity impressed, if not overawed, those

in the Soviet area.

The Yan'an period witnessed the further development of a cultural

hierarchy, a stratification corresponding to the individual's or group's

degree of "metropolitanization" or "cosmopolitanization." Under the

circumstances, the word tu connoted rusticity, backwardness, and a lack

of sophistication.

When the Struggle Troupe of He Long's army was about to leave for

Yan'an, He told its members: "Don't worry if people there call you

'rustics' (tu baozi)."75 In fact, a member of the troupe recalled several

decades later: "To be honest, on the eve of departure, I was wondering

how people in Yan'an would receive us, a bunch of rustics (tu baozi)

from the battle front."76 The story nevertheless has a happy ending:

arriving in Yan'an in summer 1942 - that is, when the party was imple-

menting the policy of cultural populism - the troupe members found

their artistic style acclaimed by Zhou Yang, who encouraged them not to

be awed by the label "rustics."77

But, despite the official populist approval of tu, the word often seems

to have been used in a negative way at the nonofficial level of Communist

culture. In 1946, the Battle Front Troupe, which served in the Hebei

area, invited a well-known musician to teach its members basic skills like

harmony. The students were acutely aware of the difference between

234

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

their teacher and themselves: showing respect for their esteemed teacher,

they called themselves tu baozi.78 During the civil war, cultural workers

were concerned about the fact that non-Communist intellectuals in the

newly occupied areas tended to consider the Communist arts as tu and

called the Communists tu balu. A member of a troupe in Liaoning re-

counted how the Communists changed this unfavorable impression.

They performed the White-Haired Girl and a few other programs so well

that urban intellectuals, as they elatedly noticed, did not regard the

Communists as rustics anymore!79 To be sure, they did not choose foreign

programs to impress their audience.80 We should note, however, that the

Communist cultural workers were proud of their success in convincing

others that they were not tu but not so concerned about changing the

negative connotation of the term. Their pride revealed their cultural

preference for "modernness."

The populist discourse on art and literature, populist creations that

contained Western elements, and the concern for tu- all this demon-

strates the Communists' expectation that the culture they built would

contain cosmopolitan ingredients and meet international standards.

Observing Contemporary Chinese Culture

Imagining what their nation should become, Communist intellectuals

cherished the hope that it would be cosmopolitan, both politically and

culturally. This imagining, as Communist cultural cosmopolitanism

shows, sometimes unfolded not only at the official but at the informal,

more casual level. In addition, the cosmopolitan-internationalist imagi-

nation of the nation manifested itself in both the thinking and the action

of mass mobilization. But how can we evaluate Communist cosmopoli-

tanism as an integral part of Communist legacy? Was cultural cosmopoli-

tanism robust enough to remain alive during the upheaval of the mid-

1960s to mid-1970s?

Although this chapter focuses on Communist culture in the pre-

1949 period, I still contend that the experience of that period is relevant

to our understanding of the post-1949 regime, including the period of

the Cultural Revolution. While the Chinese state appeared to be isola-

tionist and fiercely anti-imperialist, cultural cosmopolitanism may have

been persistent during the Cultural Revolution. It seems unlikely that

the revolutionary frenzy of the time succeeded in compelling educated

Chinese, even in the midst of intellectual and emotional disarray, to

abandon entirely their respect for and memory of cosmopolitan culture.

Cosmopolitanism and the Ideal Image of Nation 235

Besides, post-1976 developments show very well how cultural cosmo-

politanism survived the Red Guards' merciless onslaughts: in novels and

stories published in the late 1970s, intellectual characters quote numer-

ous foreign figures - Pushkin, Romain Roland, Shakespeare, and so

forth. The authors represent different generations of Chinese writers

from Dai Houying, who obtained her degree before the Cultural Revolu-

tion, to Zhang Kangkang, who had once been a sent-down youth. All

this shows how cosmopolitan literature survived in people's memories

and also possibly in forms ready for republication. Otherwise, the quota-

tions from such a wide range of Western figures would not have been

available. Certainly, cosmopolitanism has often had to struggle to sur-

vive in the Communist tradition. But the fact that it has survived indi-

cates that attention to the cosmopolitanist national narrative will shed

an important light on characteristics of Communist culture and society,

a context that has been only too well known for its revolution-oriented,

nationalist, and populist nature.

Cosmopolitanism and the Ideal Image of

Chinese Intellectuals

To discuss the influence of cosmopolitanism on post-1949 Chinese cul-

ture, we may examine how the cosmopolitan narrative of the nation was

accompanied by a cosmopolitan representation of the ideal personality

of Chinese intellectuals.

The cosmopolitan description of revolutionary intellectuals seems to

have been a marked, though perhaps not essential, trait of revolutionary

literature under the Communist regime. As a matter of fact, the cosmo-

politan image of revolutionary intellectuals existed as early as the 1920s.

In Zhang Wentian's story "Life's Journey" (Lutu), the Chinese engineer

turned revolutionary also happened to be a man who was able to discuss

literature with refined American women and steal their hearts.81 Yang

Mo's Song of Youth, a novel extremely popular among students and

young intellectuals in the 1950s, echoes the cosmopolitan approach to

the portrayal of radicals and contains several powerful images of radical

intellectuals: Zheng Jin, a Moscow-trained heroine, tells Lin Daojing,

the aspiring revolutionary, how Communists in another prison had

founded a "university," spending their time learning English, Russian,

German, and Japanese.82 And in A Young Newcomer in the Organiza-

tion Department, Wang Meng shows the cosmopolitan aesthetic taste of

two young and idealistic party members: Lin Zhen and Chao Huiwen

236

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

are intoxicated with Tchaikovsky's Capriccio Italien as its beautiful mel-

ody drifts through the room.83

The motif of these novels, we should note, was the praise of revolu-

tionary intellectuals' political idealism or/and nationalism. Neverthe-

less, the authors' integration of cosmopolitan traits into the images of

heroic revolutionaries reflects their assumption that idealistic intellec-

tuals should at the same time be cosmopolitan.

Growing up in a revolutionary tradition that, however emphatically

populist, harbored cosmopolitan tendencies, Chinese intellectuals and

educated youths developed a keen interest in foreign culture. In My

Fathers, Dai Qing lists her favorite writers: "[Before 1996,] I only

read . . . Pushkin, Dickens, Goethe, and Mark Twain."84 If this seems

only the idiosyncracy of a young woman from an extremely privileged

background, Wang Meng's Long Live My Youth (Qingchun wansui) tells

of some high school students' interest in Western culture(s) in the

Beijing area: Yang Qiangyun, a bright student, enjoys discussing trans-

lated novels with her friend, Li Chun.85 More interestingly, in Wang's

very delightful portrayal of educated youths' life in the 1950s we find an

episode in which a young Communist cadre dons a pair of Western-style

shoes to meet the girl he loves.86

This is not to say that Chinese intellectuals totally despised their

own cultural heritage. However, the evidence we have here warrants the

conclusion that for Chinese intellectuals cosmopolitanism was a valuable

trait. Their admiration for cosmopolitanism, together with the cultural

hierarchy that degraded tu points to the existence of cultural snobbery in

Communist culture. Further exploration of the issue of cultural hierar-

chy will certainly enable us to think more about certain questions. How

did Chinese intellectuals, including many veteran revolutionaries, treat

cultural populism when they did not need to wear their public populist

mask? Did cosmopolitanism become the "unofficial" dominant trend of

post-1949 culture? And how did cultural and political cosmopolitanism

contribute to their elitist perception of the less well educated echelons of

Chinese society?

The Complexity of National Identity

In light of the Communists' cosmopolitan perspective on the nation,

how can we reflect upon the issue of national identity in contemporary

China? Especially interesting here is the question of how Chinese intel-

Cosmopolitanism and the Ideal Image of Nation 237

lectuals switched from the cosmopolitanist mode of the 1980s to the

nativist mode of the 1990s in defining Chinese identity.

Emphasizing that isolationist, anti-imperialist nationalism character-

ized the national identity and project in pre-1976 China, Edward Fried-

man treats the post-1976 national narrative, which privileges the "dyna-

mism of the south," as a negation of the Maoist nationalist-isolationist

discourse and the southern-oriented national identity as a "natural" re-

sponse to the market-oriented activities of southerners.87 But as his-

torians dissect the national narrative of the 1990s they are more sensitive

to how Chinese discourses on the nation and national identity have

changed: while Chinese intellectuals rejected China's backwardness and

identified with the West in order to rejuvenate the nation in the 1980s,

the nationalistic writings in the 1990s emphasize Chinese collective resis-

tance to Western influences, show self-assurance derived from wealth,

and argue for the development of "a new ideological vision that drew

selectively from China's traditional culture."88

By demonstrating the presence of a Communist cosmopolitan angle

on the nation, by revealing the Communists' attempt to "internation-

alize" the masses and revolutionary culture, and by analyzing the unoffi-

cial admiration for a cosmopolitanist cultural identity, the present study

shows how internationalism-cosmopolitanism became an integral ele-

ment of the Communist intellectuals' "revolutionary tradition." It is

worth examining further how the internationalism-cosmopolitanism of

the revolutionary period laid the foundations of a more outward ori-

ented- be it southern or global-national identity in the post-Mao era.

In addition, we should take into account the cosmopolitanist-

internationalist tendency of Communist culture in order to understand

the complexity of the anti-imperialist and nativist trends of the 1990s.

Resentment of the failure of the Chinese bid for the 2000 Olympics,

Wang Qiming's hard-won success in the virtually inhuman American

capitalist system, and Zhou Li's accomplishments as a Chinese business-

woman in Manhattan who is always inspired by her beloved mother-

land's culture89- these examples indicate that in the 1990s the celebra-

tion of the individual's financial success as China's triumph over the

West, the excitement of trumpeting a superior Chinese spirit, and hatred

of the unfair Western treatment of the Chinese always coexist and/or are

intertwined with a yearning to be "oriented toward the world." The

assimilation of cosmopolitan aspirations into Chinese nationalism and

national identity is always an intriguing issue for those interested in the

238

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

Communist Revolution, the Maoist regime, or the post-Mao Chinese

culture and state.

Also worthy of our attention is Chinese intellectuals' changing

views on the essence of Chinese Communism and culture. In the anti-

traditionalist and cosmopolitan 1980s, alienated intellectuals, both emi-

nent and inconspicuous, did not hesitate to apply the label "peasant"

(nongmin) when they reflected seriously on the Communist Party, many

of its members, and its leaders (particularly Mao). The label itself "con-

notes" very explicitly a substantial amount of contempt for the Commu-

nist Party, the peasantry, and Chinese traditions.90 Intellectuals de-

graded the Communist Party and Chinese culture by marginalizing, or

even deploring, the peasants and "peasantness" in their discourses on

modernization and progress. In the 1990s, however, some Chinese intel-

lectuals and artists began to look to "Mother Earth," presented "a

loving portrayal of peasant culture and traditional values," and eulo-

gized Mao, once insolently called a peasant, as a national hero.91

Lucian Pye observes, and Zhao Suisheng agrees, that Chinese intel-

lectuals failed to create a nationalism that combined elements of tradi-

tion with appropriate features of modern world culture.92 Chinese intel-

lectuals' quick swing from vocal iconoclasm to an equally strident

conservatism, I have to admit, attest to their point. But, on the other

hand, may I suggest that, despite the undeniable contrast between

Western-oriented and China-centered nationalism, iconoclastic cosmo-

politanism and nativism made two uneasy bedfellows in the various

chronological contexts of Chinese Communism. How were aspirations

after Western standards related to anti-Western attitudes? How were

anti-imperialist and nativist trends intertwined with Western-oriented

nationalism? These are important questions for us to ponder if we are

interested in exploring the intellectual-emotional worlds of different

generations of politically active Chinese intellectuals.

NOTES

1. Prajensit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation (Chicago: Univer-

sity of Chicago Press, 1995), 9-12; also see Lydia Liu, "The Female Body and

Nationalist Discourse: Manchuria in Xiao Hong's Field of Life and Death," in

Body, Subject, and Power in China, edited by Tani Barlow and Angela Zito

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

2. Duara, Rescuing History, 9.

Cosmopolitanism and the Ideal Image of Nation 239

3. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-

sity Press, 1990), 11.

4. In this chapter, I define communist intellectuals as a group that includes

those who received a high school education, its equivalent (such as training in

technical schools), or more. The Communist Party addressed people at these

levels of education as intellectuals. For the intellectual composition of the first

communists, see Jonathan Spence, The Gate of Heavenly Peace (New York:

Viking, 1981), 141-42.

5. I define the term cosmopolitanism at two levels: it means, first, longing

for world unity and human brotherhood, and, second, enthusiasm for learning

and absorbing other people's cultures. I use the term as I describe the thinking of

the May Fourth era and the May Fourth and communist intellectuals' interest in

foreign (especially Western) culture. The term internationalism is used to denote

the communist faith in world revolution. I want to point out, however, that

students of Marxism usually consider Marxist internationalism to be a kind of

cosmopolitanism. See Tom Bottomore et al., A Dictionary of Marxist Thought

(Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 231-33; and Jozef Wilczynski, An Encyclopedic Dic-

tionary of Marxism: Socialism and Communism (London: Macmillan, 1981).

Sometimes I use the compound cosmopolitanism-internationalism for the com-

posite phenomena that show the influences of both non-Marxist cosmopolitan-

ism and Marxist internationalism.

6. More than two decades ago, in Revolution and Cosmopolitanism, J. R.

Levenson showed ingeniously how the Communist use of the term Chinese

people paired internationalism with nationalism. ([Berkeley: University of Cali-

fornia Press, 1971], 8). In addition, he described how Communist intellectuals in

the 1950s created a cosmopolitan cultural orientation by focusing on the Commu-

nists' use of the concepts of the people and class as justifications for their interest

in Western plays (9).

7. Hoston is sensitive to the conflicts between the nation and humankind

in the Marxists' pursuit of human liberation. (Germaine Hoston, The State,

Identity, and the National Question in China and Japan [Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1994], 9-10.)

8. Arif Dirlik, The Origins of Chinese Communism (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1989), 9. For Dirlik's attention to the cosmopolitan nature of

the May Fourth movement and socialism, see pages 62 and 74.

9. Zhao Suisheng, "Chinese Intellectuals' Quest for National Greatness,"

China Quarterly 152 (spring 1997): 726.

10. Hoston, 102, 398. For mainland scholars' arguments, see Edward Fried-

man, "Reconstructing China's National Identity: A Southern Alternative to

Mao-Era Anti-imperialist Nationalism," Journal of Asian Studies 53, no. 1

(1994): 68-69. In fact, Friedman also thinks that the Maoist attitude was anti-

imperialist and isolationist (67 and 69).

11. In writing this chapter, I do not mean to treat the ideal as a goal

hopelessly detached from reality. I would like to emphasize, on the contrary,

that sometimes the boundary between the ideal and reality was blurred. When

the Communists acted and behaved in congruence with their cosmopolitan-

240

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

internationalist ideal, they were transforming their revolutionary China in the

image they valued. Only in this way did cosmopolitanism-internationalism be-

come a concrete presence in the revolutionary context and the Communist

state.

12. Chen Duxiu Duxiu wencun (Shanghai: Yadong tushuguan, 1922), 1:7.

13. Maurice Meisner, La Ta Chao and the Origins of Chinese Marxism

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 37.

14. Li Dazhao, Li Dazhao wenji (The selected writings of Li Dazhao)

(Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, [1917] 1984), 1:439.

15. Li, Li Dazhao wenji, 1:440.

16. See Lo Mengzheng, "Wusi siqi di Wu Yu," Zhongguo shehui kexue-

yuan jindaishi yanjiushuo, Jinian wusi yundong liushi zhounian xueshu taolunhui

lunwenji (Essays in commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of the May

Fourth movement) (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1979), 2:403.

17. Li, Li Dazhao wenji, 1:449; 450-51.

18. Mao Zedong, Mao Zedong ji (The works of Mao Zedong) (Hong

Kong: Qindai shiliao gongyingshe, [1919] 1975), 1:54.

19. Li, Li Dazhao wenji, 1:451.

20. Mao, Mao Zedong ji, 1:59-60.

21. Chen Duxiu, Duxiu wenchun (Collected essays of Chen Duxiu) (Shang-

hai: Yangdong tushuguan, [1919] 1922), 1:366.

22. See Michael Luk, The Origins of Chinese Bolshevism (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1990), 12-13. In fact, prior to the May Fourth generation,

people like Liang Qichao and Kang Youwei had already talked about interna-

tional harmony. See Don Price, Russia and the Roots of the Chinese Revolution

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), chaps. 1, 4, and 6.

23. Luk, Origins of Bolshevism, 13.

24. Hung-yok Ip, "The Origins of Chinese Communism: A New Interpreta-

tion," Modern China 20, no. 1 (1994): 44; Li, Li Dazhao wenji, 1:491-92.

25. See Zhang Wentian, Zhang Wentian zaonian wenxue zuopin xuan (The

early literary writings of Zhang Wentian) (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1983).

There is a certain degree of parallel between Zhang's story and Shiba Shiro's

"Kajin no kigu" (Strange encounters of elegant females), which was interpre-

tively and selected translated by Liang Qichao (see Philip Huang, Liang Ch'i-

ch'ao and Modern Chinese Liberalism [Seattle: University of Washington Press,

1973], 48-53). Both stories were about how the nationalist course of an Asian

man aroused the sympathy of Western, progressive women. However, in Zhang's

story there is no discussion of pan-Asianism or Japan's leading role in Asia's

struggle for independence.

26. Xin Qingnian (hereafter XQN) 1, no. 1 (1915):1.

27. XQN 4, no. 1 (1918) 20-26.

28. XQN, vols. 1-7.

29. XQN 1, no. 5 (1916).

30. XQN 2, no. 3 (1916).

31. XQN 3, no. 2 (1917).

32. XQN 5, no. 6 (1918).

Cosmopolitanism and the Ideal Image of Nation 241

33. Zhang Wentian, Zhang Wentian wenji (The Works of Zhang Wentian)

(Beijing: Zhonggong dangshi zhiliao chubanshe, [1922] 1990), 43.

34. See Dirlik, Origins of Communism, 5.

35. Arif Dirlik, "The New Culture Movement," Modern China 3 (1985):

253.

36. Shenyang shifan xueyuan zhongwenxi, Zhongguo dangdai wensue yan-

jiu: Yang Mo (Materials related to Yang Mo) (Shenyang: Shenyang shifan

xueyuan zhongwenxi, 1979), 25.

37. Li, Li Dazhao wenji, 1:595, 598.

38. Chen, Duxiu wenchun, 1:534; Chen Duxiu, Chen Duxiu wenzhang

xuanbian (Selected works of Chen Duxiu) (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, [1920]

1984), 2:49.

39. Chen, Chen Duxiu, 1:521.

40. Deng Zhongxia, Deng Zhongxia wenji (The works of Deng Zhongxia)

(Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, [1920] 1982), 2.

41. Luk, Origins of Bolshevism.

42. Ibid., 177. Assessing the relative weight of internationalism and nation-

alism in the party's propaganda and ideological development during the 1920s,

Luk thinks that themes of nationalism occupied a central place from 1922 to

1924, while "the spirit of internationalism surged prominently in the next few

years" (182).

43. XQN 1, no. 2 (1923).

44. Luk, Origins of Bolshevism, 181-82, 180.

45. For how Mao's thinking echoes the wish that China will be important in

the world revolution (but without the desperate tone), see Levenson, Revolu-

tion, 26.

46. Luk, Origins of Bolshevism, 199.

47. Hoston, 178.

48. Ibid., 66, 379-80.

49. Mao, Mao Zedong ji, 9:83-84.

50. Zhonggong zhongyang dangshi yanjiushi, Zhonggong dangshi daishi

nianbiao (The chronological table of the history of the Chinese Communist

Party) (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1987), 201.

51. Mao, Mao Zedongji, 10:300.

52. Peng Pai, Peng Pai wenji (The works of Peng Pai) (Beijing: Renmin

chubanshe, [1927] 1981), 284. Also see Luk, Origins of Bolshevism, 183.

53. Quoted in Zhang Zhenglong, Xue bai xue hong (White snow, red

blood) (Beijing: Jiefangjun chubanshe, 1989), 26.

54. Ibid., 27.

55. Ibid., 25.

56. Lin Chao, ed., Chuanshaan geming gunqudi shi (The history of the

Chuanshaan Base Area) (Chengdu: Sichuansheng shehui kexueyuan chubanshe,

1988), 261.

57. Wang Mulan, ed., Jiangxi suqu hongse xiju ziliaoji (Sources on the

"Red Opera" in the Jiangxi soviet area) (Tokyo: East Asian Studies Center,

Tokyo University, 1985), 45.

242 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

58. Ibid., 12.

59. Zhongguo renmin jiefangjun wenyi shiliao xuanbian: Hongjun shiqi

(Historical sources about literature and the arts of the Chinese communist army:

The Soviet period) (hereafter HJSQ) (Beijing: Jiefangjun chubanshe, 1986),

1:343.

60. Zhang Geng, Yangge juxuan (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe,

1977), 21.

61. Zhongguo renmin fiefangjun wenyi shiliao xuanbian: Kangri zhanzheng

shiqi (Historical sources about literature and the arts of the Chinese communist

army: the period of resisting Japanese invasion) (hereafter KRSQ) (Beijing:

Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1988), 4:291, 3:497, 2:402, 477. In Guangdong, it

was the party branch of the guerrilla force (the Dongjiang zongdui) that orga-

nized performances to celebrate the occupation of Berlin and the defeat of

Hitler (KRSQ, 4:461).

62. Feng Deying, Kucai hua (The bitter flower) (Hong Kong: Sanlian

shudian, 1962), 464.

63. Richard Kraus, Pianos and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1989), 61; Paul Pickowicz, Marxist Literary Thought in China (Berkeley: Univer-

sity of California Press, 1981), 99-111; Vera Schwarcz, Time for Telling Truth Is

Running Out (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 94-96, 102-3.

64. Kraus, Pianos and Politics, 59-61.

65. Ibid., 61; David Holm, Art and Ideology in Revolutionary China (Ox-

ford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 336-71. For the effectiveness of Yan'an

propaganda art, see Hung Chang-tai's chapter on Yan'an popular culture in his

War and Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

66. For Mao's interpretation of Trotsky, see Mao Zedong ji, 8:134; for his

views on feudal and bourgeois culture, see 8:127. Mao's approval of integrating

traditional and bourgeois elements into socialist culture resonates with Marx's

idea that socioeconomic determination of art does not restrict outstanding artis-

tic achievements' significance for more advanced cultures (see Bottomore, Dic-

tionary, 43). And like Trotsky, Lenin assumed that socialist culture should incor-

porate what was valuable in bourgeois culture (110).

67. Chen Shaoli, ed., Zhongguo xiandai wenxue yundong shiliao zhaibian

(Selected materials related to modern Chinese literature) (Beijing: Beijing

chubanshe, 1985), 2:171-3.

68. Ibid., 172.

69. Kraus, Pianos and Politics, 62-68.

70. KRSQ, 1:114-66.

71. HJSQ, 1:61, 94-95. Also see Kraus, Pianos and Politics, 54. For a

detailed description of arts created from limited resources, see KRSQ, 1:155-

59, 175.

72. KRSQ, 1:60.

73. Ibid., 1:145.

74. Ibid., 1:164.

75. Ibid., 1:427.

76. Ibid., 1:398.

Cosmopolitanism and the Ideal Image of Nation 243

77. Ibid., 1:398.

78. Zhongguo renmin jiefangjun wenyi shiliao xuanbian: Jiefang zhang-

zheng shiqi (Historical sources about literature and the arts of the Communist

army: the Civil War period) (hereafter JFSQ) (Beijing: Jiefangjun chubanshe,

1989), 2:774.

79. Ibid., 2:535, 539.

80. Ibid., 2:535, 539. Sometimes programs with a more foreign flavor were

performed (see 1:170, 2:558).

81. Zhang, Zhang Wentian.

82. Yang Mo, Qingchun zhi ge (Song of youth) (Hong Kong: Sanlian

shudian, 1960), 390-93.

83. Wang, Butterfly and other stories, 216.

84. Dai Qing, Wo di sige fuchin (My fathers) (Hong Kong: Ming bao

chubanshe youxian gongsi, 1995).

85. Wang, Qingchun wansiu (Long live my youth), 28.

86. Ibid., 212.

87. Friedman, "Reconstructing Identity," 68-79.

88. Zhao Suisheng, "Chinese Intellectuals' Quest for National Greatness,"

China Quarterly 152 (spring 1997): 730-33. Also See Geremie Barme, "To

Screw Foreigners Is Patriotic," China Journal 34 (July 1995): 228-33.

89. Zhou Li, another popular image that represents Chinese success in

American society, can be considered a kind of female equivalent of Wang

Qiming. But the story of her personal struggle in the United States seems to be

less bitter. See Zhou Li, Manhattan China Lady (Beijing: Beijing chubanshe,

1992).

90. For instance, see the conclusion to Yang Zhongmei, Zhuanyi huiyi yu

Yan'an zhengfeng (The Zhuanyi conference and rectification campaign in

Yan'an) (Hong Kong: Benma chubashe, 1989); and Liu Kwang-ching, "World-

view and Peasant Rebellion: Reflections on Post-Mao Historiography," Journal

of Asian Studies 40, no. 2 (1981): 300-302.

91. Barme, "To Screw Foreigners," 225; Zhao, "Chinese Intellectuals'

Quest," 735.

92. Lucien Pye, "How China's Nationalism Was Shanghaied," Australian

Journal of Chinese Affairs 29 (January 1993): 113; Zhao, "Chinese Intellectuals'

Quest," 745.



PART 3

Diaspora, Gender, and Ambiguity

of Identity



Chapter 8

Between Nationalism and Colonialism:

Mainland Emigres, Marginal Culture,

Hong Kong Cinema, 1937-1941

Poshek Fu

Hong Kong has been marginal to twentieth-century Chinese culture.

This marginality is owing both to the fact that Hong Kong is situated at

the periphery of China's geopolity and to a popular stereotype of the city

as a "cultural desert." This imagery began to circulate around the 1920s

among some mainland intellectuals who sought refuge in the British

colony. As children of the May Fourth Enlightenment, they were ill at

ease not only with the "exotic" local dialect but with what they consid-

ered to be its hybridized culture: simultaneously Westernized, feudal,

colonial, and provincial. Westernized as it appeared, Hong Kong had

never experienced a cultural revolution comparable to the May Fourth

movement, and its cultural discourse was controlled by colonizers,

taipans, compradors, and Confucian moralists. To many mainlanders it

was a "desert" at the periphery of Chinese culture where no progressive,

diverse modes of cultural practice could possibly take place. This stereo-

typical representation has until recently dominated both the popular and

scholarly imagery of Hong Kong.1

The colony's cinema, its major mass cultural product, has also been

largely ignored by China scholars.2 Movies "made in Hong Kong" were

perceived as merely "made for money": box-office driven, frivolous,

and devoid of artistic and social meaning. One of the early critics was

the Shanghai modernist writer Mu Shiying, who, after a brief stint with

the Cantonese cinema, ridiculed it as "the biggest joke in the world

and the greatest humiliation of the human race."3 Coming from the

center of the new Chinese culture, Mu's smug sense of cultural superior-

ity was all too evident.

247

248

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

This marginalization of Hong Kong is integral to what could be

called a Central Plains syndrome (da Zhongyuan xintai), which has been

embedded in the centralizing, anti-imperialist, state-building discourse

underlying the twentieth-century representation of Chinese culture. It

comes as no surprise that a master film historian such as Cheng Jihua

would block out Hong Kong's dynamic contribution to the birth of

Chinese cinema altogether.4 Cheng does include Hong Kong in his au-

thoritative history of the Chinese cinema, but he privileges only the two

periods (the 1930s and late 1940s) during which mainland intellectuals

allegedly policed and guided the local movie scene.5

In fact, since the beginning of the twentieth century Hong Kong has

been a dynamic site of disparate discourses and practices that center

particularly around the notion of mass culture. The colony was the

largest center of dialect filmmaking in Republican China, and after the

Communist takeover it replaced Shanghai to become the "Hollywood of

the East." Although dominated from the outset by commercial con-

cerns, the Hong Kong cinema has a complex history of contestation

between various political and ideological positions and aesthetic orienta-

tions. It was in this way not so different qualitatively from cinema on the

mainland, where, aside from the few canonized leftist films, the domi-

nant mode of the Republican screen was profit-driven, popular entertain-

ment. Likewise, ever since their inception around 1900, Hong Kong

films have been a significant part of the Chinese cinema, connected as

much by business rivalries as by artistic and financial interactions.6

This cinematic connection became particularly intricate during the

first years of World War II, between 1937 and 1941, when the Hong Kong

screen was swarmed with filmmakers, stars, and critics who had fled the

mainland to seek refuge in the colony or stopped over on their way to the

unoccupied interior. Many brought with them a political intensity and

sense of moral urgency, as well as a creeping Central Plains syndrome, to

the ideological contestation in the local cinema between patriotism and

profit and the collision of national demand with local interest. The war-

time Hong Kong cinema therefore provides us with a privileged vantage

point from which to explore the marginalization of Hong Kong in the

Chinese geocultural imagination.

At the same time, the war engendered an incipient sense of local

identity among the Hong Kong people. Identification, broadly defined,

is articulated in terms of the relation of self to Other, subject to object:

we define ourselves in relation to the Other. In a colonial situation, it is

Between Nationalism and Colonialism 249

common knowledge that the colonizer, in Sartre's words, "has been able

to become a man through creating slaves and monsters" out of the

natives - lazy, incompetent, and primitive.7 This situation was compli-

cated in the case of Hong Kong because of its marginalization in the

China-centered discourse of nationalism and modernization. Contami-

nated by British colonization, it was seen by the mainland cultural elites

as a land of slavishness, decadence, and backwardness, obstructing the

progress of the national project. The war dramatized this double margin-

ality. While the colonial government excluded the "Chinese," the racial

Others, from the military defense of the colony, the diaspora from the

mainland sought to mobilize the colonized to defend the "motherland"

against Japan. Yet at the same time, they continued to ascribe to them

traits of the contaminating Others.

The war also dramatized Hong Kong's sociocultural difference with

and geopolitical apartness from the mainland. I would argue that it was a

combination of this incipient sense of difference and this double margin-

ality (in the nationalist and colonial discourses) that generated a con-

struction, still tentative, of an ambivalent, hybrid identity that continues

to haunt Hong Kong natives today: they are caught between identifi-

cation with the past and the present, with the centralizing nationalism of

the mainland and the hybrid tradition of Hong Kong. This ambivalent

identity was subtly but powerfully projected in the local cinema. Based

on some recently discovered films, this chapter discusses the industrial

practices and production strategies of the wartime Hong Kong film indus-

try, the ways in which the mainland 6migr6s police and otherize the local

cinema, and its representation of a collective sense of identity for the

colonized subjects.8

1

World War II in China began on July 7, 1937, with the fighting at the

Marco Polo Bridge. Four months later, the premier center of Chinese

filmmaking, Shanghai, fell to Japan. Unlike the war-torn interior, the

British colony of Hong Kong stayed outside the hostilities. As a result,

there was a massive influx of wartime refugees into the colony. Between

July 1937 and July 1938, for example, according to official figures, a

quarter of a million people crossed the border. In the next two years,

another half a million mainland Chinese fled to the "haven of tranquil-

ity," sometimes at a rate of five thousand a day, which increased the

250 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

city's total population from less than a million in mid-1937 to 1.7 million

in 1939.9 Some of these "refugees" were social notables such as the

underworld boss Du Yuesheng and the Beijing Opera star Mei Lanfang,

whose wealth and exuberant lifestyles provided an impetus to the con-

sumer economy. But the bulk of the refugees were destitute. They cre-

ated an abundance of cheap labor, which coincided with a large demand

for war materials from "Free China." As a result, there was an "eco-

nomic boom" in the city. Thus, besides the great increase in foreign

trade, the number of factories with more than twenty workers, which

constituted the backbone of Hong Kong's small manufacturing econ-

omy, jumped from 689 in 1937 to 1,200 in 1941.10

The Hong Kong film industry thrived in this favorable environment.

By 1939, the industry boasted more than forty film studios employing

about two thousand people. As an important center of Cantonese pro-

duction since the late 1920s, the industry was dominated by Cantonese-

speaking natives. But the war brought in many Mandarin-speaking film

people from Shanghai, only a few of whom bothered to learn the local

dialect. Thus, in general film directors, cinematographers, and script-

writers were better able to rebuild a career in local production than were

the actors, whose performances were invariably affected by behind the

scenes dubbing.

One major reason for the unwillingness of these Shanghai 6migr6s

to learn the local dialect was their sense of cultural superiority. In their

eyes, the Hong Kong cinema, as a part of the colony's sociopolitical

culture, was "backward." Compared to the prewar Shanghai cinema, it

was small in capitalization, lacked artistic sophistication, and was un-

developed in technology. In fact, prewar Hong Kong was seen as a

colonial backwater in comparison with thriving, glamorous Shanghai,

which was the center of the region's international trade.1' The Hong

Kong cinema was also politically irrelevant. Unlike the mainland film

industry, except for occupied Shanghai, which since 1937 had been cen-

tralized under the Nationalist government in Chongqing to rally the

nation for continued resistance, and unlike Hollywood, which was trans-

formed by its alliance with Washington from "peacetime entertainment

to wartime engagement," the Hong Kong cinema remained aloof from

politics.12

This political aloofness was in fact largely a result of colonialism.

Typical of colonial situations, the Hong Kong government treated the

colonized, to use the apt words of Albert Memmi, as no more than an

Between Nationalism and Colonialism 251

"anonymous collectivity," a "mark of the plural."13 They were suspicious

and unworthy; they were the Other. Racism was rampant in the colony,

where social life was racially segregated. For example, not only were the

natives forbidden to live in residential areas like the Peak, which were

"reserved" for the Europeans, but they were paid less than Europeans

for the same work on the grounds of race. Only in 1937 were Chinese

allowed to become subinspectors in the police force, and even then they

were placed under the supervision of British officers junior to them.

Sir Alexander Grantham, the first governor of postwar Hong Kong,

summed up the colonial attitude pointedly: "The basis of the [European]

arrogance and [snobbery] is the assumption that the European is inher-

ently superior to the Asian, taking such forms as the exclusion of Asians

from clubs, downright rudeness or a patronizing manner."14

On the other hand, Hong Kong had been a "relative haven of tranquil-

ity" compared to the political turmoil and social chaos of the mainland

since the 1860s. Most Chinese came to the colony to seek refuge from

wars and rebellions. Their obsessions were to survive and, among the

rich, to protect their wealth. Indeed, the small, close-knit local elite was

"created by property-owning lineages," especially from South China.15

This created a strong tradition of political conservatism in the colony.

Exacerbated by colonial prejudice, this tradition bred, in the apt phrase

of two Hong Kong scholars, "a fear of politics" among the local Chinese.16

As a European professor at the elite University of Hong Kong exclaimed,

the Chinese "asked only that they should be left alone, they asked for no

shares in political control . . . They have no spirit of willing sacrifice for

the community."17

No wonder the British made no attempt to involve the locals when

they prepared for the defense of Hong Kong in 1937. To begin with,

partly because of its limited commercial importance, London saw little

strategic value in the colony. Instead, its naval defense in the region was

centered in Singapore.18 In Hong Kong, only British of "European

birth" were subject to conscription. The colonized were relegated to the

racially segregated auxiliary forces (the "Chinese Company") and "ju-

nior positions in civil defense." The colonial government exhibited no

interest in mobilizing the city's media industry for war propaganda,

except for installing in 1939 a chief censor (concurrently the University

of Hong Kong's vice chancellor) to police newspapers, pamphlets, and

entertainment in Chinese.19 The film industry was thus "left alone" in

the wilderness of market calculations.

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Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

Between 1938 and 1940, the heyday of wartime cinema, there were

more than forty movie companies in the colony, most of them small

independents making about one film each year. Only six major produc-

ers boasted their own movie studios and stars under contract. These

included the Daguan (Grandview) Film Company (Chiu Shu-sum/Zhao

Shusheng), Nanyang (South Ocean) Productions (Shao Zuiweng), and

the Nanyue (South Guangdong) Studio (Zhu Qingxian), the latter two

founded by Shanghai businessmen in 1933-35.2o In general, these stu-

dios were poorly equipped, rarely employing more than two cameras on

a shot. The industry was shocked in 1938 when Nanyue imported several

high-voltage projecting lights from Shanghai.21 Independents had to rent

film stars, studio space, and postproduction facilities from the six ma-

jors. Thus, production scheduling was tight and control over film equip-

ment and stars' shooting schedules often led to nasty fights.

The market for wartime Hong Kong films was limited. As the major

center of Cantonese productions, Hong Kong had marketed its products

throughout South and Southwest China prior to the war. After 1938,

when South China was under Japanese rule, its outlet was limited to

Hong Kong, Macao, and the Cantonese communities in Southeast Asia

(mainly in Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines) and the Ameri-

cas.22 After an economic boom between 1937 and 1938, the industry

contracted as a result of the inflationary spiral of 1939, when food prices

began to rise quickly and the export-import trade flattened due to the

Japanese hold on the Pearl Estuary and the onset of the European war.23

This change of fortune was clearly demonstrated in a drop in the indus-

try's gross profits from more than HK$900,000 in 1938 to less than

$500,000 in 1939.24

This sensitivity to market conditions and backward technology dur-

ing the war exacerbated the industry's prewar problems of low-budget

production and "sloppy craftsmanship." The average cost for each Can-

tonese feature-length picture in 1937-39 was about HK$7,000 to $8,000

(contemporary Shanghai films boasted an average of $30,000).25 To beat

the market meant cutting costs. Production companies paid little budget-

ary attention to scriptwriting or cinematography, investing only in the

proven box-office record of movie stars. Restrained by the problems of

scheduling studio space and stars' filming time, these companies were

under tremendous pressure to finish their projects fast. Seven to ten days

per film became the industrial norm during the war.26 Actors were com-

pelled to work hard and fast. The majority of them signed with one of the

Between Nationalism and Colonialism 253

six majors on a one- to three-year basis; during that period, they were

required, on paper, to make between nine to ten films each year. Except

for a few superstars like Sit Gok-sin (Xue Juexiang), who commanded a

salary of about HK$3,000 a film, most people got a basic salary some-

where between $80 to $300 a month, which barely kept them abreast of

the rising cost of living in post-1939 Hong Kong. To survive, most actors

had to find extra work with other independents, which would in turn pay

a fee to their home companies. Movie businessmen could make huge

profits by loaning out their contracted stars. For example, the standard

charge for "borrowing" the leading man Ng Chor-fan (Wu Chufang) from

Nanyang in 1940 was a hefty $1,200 per film. That was why all the majors

required their stars, whether they needed the extra income or not, to

work for other studios. As a consequence, each star would end up making

more than thirty movies a year, usually working on several projects at the

same time. Indeed, Cantonese Opera idols-cum-movie superstars such as

Sit Gok-sin had to be literally dragged, still wearing their stage makeup,

to movie studios after finishing their stage performances at midnight.

One could hardly expect them to perform at a high artistic level under

such conditions. Thus, "sloppy craftsmanship" (cuzhi lanzao) came to be

the standard criticism of the wartime Hong Kong cinema. This "sloppi-

ness" accentuated, as will be shown, the projected image of the Hong

Kong cinema as frivolous and "feudal."

2

Between 1937 and 1941, the film industry turned out an average of more

than 80 features each year. Most pictures were popular genre pieces like

folk dramas, tragic romances, and period pieces adapted directly from

Cantonese operas, folktales, and popular novels. Some were Hollywood

fantasies.27 Just as in wartime Hollywood, where no new "project of

cultural creation" was involved in its filmic expressions in spite of the

war mobilization, Cantonese genres were built on a foundation of the

generic elements developed in prewar films: simple and bipolar narra-

tives, melodramatic aesthetics, emotional identification, and stereotypi-

cal characters. Consciously invoking and appropriating past forms, as

Leo Braudy notes, genre films derive their power from an affinity with

the "existing audience." In fact, all of these filmic elements became

generic because they seemed to "answer well to the experience, intelli-

gence, and feelings of the audience."28

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Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

Who was the audience for Cantonese movies in the war years? The

lack of business statistics or company archives has presented a for-

midable challenge to Chinese film historians trying to reconstruct the

demographic and class makeup of the film audience. Judging from the

number and locations of venues, however, it seems that Hollywood and

Mandarin productions attracted the colony's small, close-knit commu-

nity of economic and cultural elites, who were cosmopolitan, bilingual,

and conservative (supporting, if not necessarily serving in, the colonial

parliament, the Legislative Council) and yet racially ambivalent.29

Among the thirty-one theaters in Hong Kong, eighteen catered to Holly-

wood films and two to Mandarin. Among them were the four first-run

venues in town, such as the plush Queen's Theatre in the Central and

the Lee Theatre in Causeway Bay, which had since 1940 shown Manda-

rin films from Shanghai. The Cantonese pictures were mostly shown in

second- and third-run venues like Jiurufang, Chongjing, and Guomin,

which were located in lower-middle and working-class neighborhoods

and staged Cantonese operas alternatively. Ticket prices ranged from

HK$1.20 to $3.00 for Hollywood premiers and four cents to $1.00 for

Cantonese pictures and five to twenty cents for second and third runs.30

Thus, the average moviegoer to whom Cantonese filmmakers appealed

was an illiterate or semiliterate urbanite who was economically disadvan-

taged, steeped in the moral universe of the local performing arts, and

unexposed to the May Fourth discourse of modernity. To many in the

Cantonese audience, motion pictures represented a less expansive and

more regular alternative to opera performances onstage - thus, the

popularity of opera-related films and the immense drawing power of

opera-cum-screen stars in the Cantonese cinema both before and during

the war.31

To modernizing intellectuals from the mainland, Cantonese movies

were without exception frivolous, superstitious, escapist, and racy, serv-

ing only to perpetuate the evils of the feudal mentality. The famous

leftist 6migr6 Cai Chusheng, a Shanghai-born Cantonese film director,

expressed his contempt unreservedly: "Owing to the backwardness of

Hong Kong culture as a whole, it inevitably has a proportional effect on

its cinema. Thus, although Hong Kong has produced many, many mov-

ies, and although 'artists' here claim that Hong Kong has replaced Shang-

hai since its fall to Japan and become the center of Chinese cinema, all of

these movies are frivolous and vulgar commodities. It is impossible . .

to find any title that would make Hong Kong deserving the claim of a

Between Nationalism and Colonialism 255

cinematic center - that is, the center of national defense films."32 Obvi-

ously, this critique stemmed from anxiety over the decentering of Chi-

nese cinema33 and the insistence that Hong Kong, with its political irrele-

vance and lack of authenticity, remained on its periphery. Yet I have

found no documentary evidence to justify Cai's claim that Hong Kong

was trying to project itself as the new center of Chinese cinema. His

anxiety might have reflected the assumed superiority of the mainland

filmmaking community.

In 1938-41, most of the filmmakers and intellectuals among the

mainland 6migr6s were from Shanghai, the foremost center of Chinese

modernity before the war. It is interesting to note that Shanghai, with its

Westernization and semicoloniality, was itself the object of nationalist

outcry and conservative attacks. It was "the other China." But when

Shanghai intellectuals and artists came to the colony they became the

Chinese by imposing a "slavish" Otherness on the Hong Kong natives.

This happened both because Hong Kong was inferior and alien to Shang-

hai owing to its total contamination by the British colonization34 and, as

Leo Ou-fan Lee points out, because Chinese intellectuals had always

imagined themselves to be the voice of the nation at the center of

national discourses.35

Many of these intellectuals and artists indeed found the colony a

charming yet "soulless" city and its men of culture "dull" and "slavish."

They were nostalgic for the "excitement" and "cultural vitality" of their

war-torn homeland and constantly chastised the city for its "indifference

to the national resistance."36 As the leftist writer Lou Shiyi complained:

"When I know that I have to stay here for a while and to live together

with all these listless, rotten (meilan) people, I become melancholic."37

They justified their melancholic exile as a "sacrifice" necessary to en-

lighten as well as mobilize the colony in China's defense. As one critic

wrote with a biting tone: "Three or four years ago Hong Kong people

had no culture to speak of. Only recently have we mainlanders (waijiang

lao) come and brought culture here."38 That smug sense of cultural

superiority was all too evident.

It was thus only natural that another diasporic filmmaker, Yan Meng,

would castigate local films as inferior to the mainland cinema: "Educated

Chinese are invariably scornful of Cantonese cinema. [Hong Kong film-

makers with social consciences are therefore] full of pain and anguish on

the one hand and deeply humiliated on the other. What we need to do

instead is change our approach to filmmaking."39 This critique obviously

256

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

grounded itself in the nationalism and Enlightenment values that consti-

tuted the May Fourth discourse of modernity. Thus, for its politically

irrelevant, "frivolous and vulgar" culture, Cantonese cinema in Hong

Kong continued to be the suspicious, illegitimate Other to this enshrining

national tradition.40

The marginalization of Cantonese production did not begin with the

war. Since circa 1931, the Nationalist government had been trying to

outlaw dialect (Cantonese) productions in its effort to create a new

national guoyu (Mandarin) cinema as part of its centralizing, state-

building project. The Nanjing government framed its prohibition in the

nationalist discourse of anti-imperialism and modernization. The Can-

tonese screen was represented as projecting a "feudalistic" and "supersti-

tious" mentality that allegedly impeded China's progress toward moder-

nity and must be swept away. This drive enjoyed widespread support

among the Chinese intellectuals espousing the May Fourth goals of na-

tionalism and enlightenment as well as Shanghai studio heads who had

been competing with their Hong Kong counterparts for market share in

South China, the Americas, and Southeast Asia. To kill off Cantonese

production would assure a larger profit and market control for the Shang-

hai industry. 41

Beneath this virulent representation of Cantonese film as a site of

backwardness and feudalism was the Nationalist government's attempt

to reunify the country by strengthening its hold on Guangdong Province

(formerly headquarters of the anti-Nanjing "separatist regime" of Hu

Hanmin and the militarist Chen Jitang), with which Hong Kong had

close geocultural connections based on kinship, language, and ethnic-

ity.42 The modernizing Chinese intelligentsia rallied behind this state-

building drive. Under a "centralizing nationalist ideology" that pervaded

the intellectual discourse of twentieth-century China, they saw the unpo-

liced perpetuation of a south-centered cultural discourse as in effect a

politico-linguistic weapon against their "hegemonic imaginary" of an

independent nation.43 Cantonese cinema, in this vein, was represented

as promoting a local dialect as well as an alternative imagination of

collective identity based on regional ties, which in their minds impeded

the modernizing project of state building, linguistic unity, and anti-

imperialist autonomy. Underlying this anxiety was the Chinese intellec-

tuals' creeping consciousness of da Zhongyuan xintai, which, by privileg-

ing the "Chineseness" of the northern plain, held in contempt all

cultures on the periphery of the mainland. By the 1930s, the Nationalist

Between Nationalism and Colonialism 257

government and the Communists, in pursuing their anti-imperialist agen-

das, had reformulated and celebrated the "old idea" of a primordial

identity for all Han Chinese of a shared origin in the North China Plains.

This Central Plains syndrome represented a hierarchy of cultural differ-

entiation derived from geographic, territorial, and cultural boundaries

between the mainland core and the periphery. Hong Kong was on the

margin, and colonization accentuated its marginality in the Chinese geo-

political imagination.44 Thus, the mainland intellectuals could readily

dismiss its lack of an articulated nationalism and elite culture as repre-

senting a "cultural desert," and they ridiculed and condemned its cinema

as the inferior Other.

In response, the Hong Kong motion picture industry took the lead

in 1936 in lobbying the national government and succeeded in post-

poning the prohibition for three years on the condition that it would pay

the cost of setting up a Central Censorship Bureau in Guangzhou to

expedite the review of dialect movies.45 The bureau had to approve all

the Hong Kong products before public release. By redirecting the

Nanjing government's strategic attention, the war saved the industry

from dissolution. However, a sense of uncertainty and bitterness was

prevalent among local filmmakers, who wondered aloud why the Can-

tonese cinema had been singled out for such an unfair attack and how

long this suspension would last.46 This demoralization, combined with

the problems of low capitalization and primitive technology, aggravated

the "sloppy" tendency of the local film industry. Most studio heads saw

filmmaking as a short-term moneymaking venture, a vehicle of "specula-

tion" to be quickly exploited when the market looked lucrative.

Although the prohibition was postponed, the framing rhetoric of the

cinematic critique remained in the early years of the war, only to be

transformed from a discourse of modernity to one of patriotism. During

the war, the Hong Kong cinema was condemned for its narcotic lure,

which blunted the patriotic spirit of the people. The editor of the

pro-Nationalist 6migr6 magazine Yilin, Peng Yannong, expressed this

rankled vox populi: "[Hong Kong films] are full of sex and ghosts

and monsters. They coincide with the demands of the fascists."47 An-

other critic concurred: "Filmmaking has been known [in China] as a

harbinger of cultural changes (wenhua xianqu). But it is now divorced

from our times, betraying the War of Anti-Japanese Resistance as if it

has forgotten that there is a gap between [Hong Kong filmmakers] and

the homeland. It makes us wonder why there would be people living in a

258

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

dream world, ignoring everything: our homeland, our hometown, jus-

tice, and even their own existence. The only thing they really care about

is money. "48 This equation of entertainment film with dreamy escapism

was typical of the May Fourth tradition of privileging bourgeois realism

as the artistic medium of social engagement, unifying the discursive

positions of both the leftists and rightists. Indeed, in terms of cultural

politics there was little contention between the Nationalists and their

nemesis, the Communists.49 It also brought to the fore the elitism of the

modernizing Chinese intelligentsia, who viewed the predominately mass

appeal Cantonese productions as polluting the people and thereby carry-

ing an odor of treason.

In fact, the marginalization of Hong Kong became the 6migr6 com-

munity's structuring theme for its institutional and cinematic discourses.

In order to rally the colony to China's defense, the mainland filmmakers

sought to create an alternative hegemony, to "cleanse" the local enter-

tainment industry of vices. This space was embedded in the mainland

politics of Nationalist-Communist relations. Under the wartime United

Front, both parties had branches, and various open or semiovert agen-

cies in Hong Kong aimed mainly to take advantage of the city's openness

to reach out to and police the Chinese diaspora communities. For ex-

ample, the Communists had established in late 1937 an Office of the

Eighth Route Army to raise funds from and direct propaganda toward

the Chinese diaspora as well as to gather military intelligence.50

The inland filmmakers involved in creating this alternative hege-

mony included the former Lianhua Studio boss Luo Mingyou, the young

director Yan Meng, leftist filmmakers Situ Huimin and Cai Chusheng,

and Nationalist film critic Peng Yannong, all recently arrived from Shang-

hai. They frequently invoked the authority of the Nationalist govern-

ment to legitimate their policing power. Indeed, they were the nation.

For example, besides involvement in various kinds of patriotic activities

organized by either Nationalist or Communist cells, they sponsored the

annual Guomindang All-Nation Spiritual Mobilization Campaign for the

local cinema in which all participants were required to sit through a long

series of patriotic speeches by prominent artists (e.g., Hong Shen and

Cai Chusheng) and political dignitaries (e.g., Madam Sun Yat-sen) be-

fore swearing unswerving loyalty to Chongqing.51 They also worked with

the Nationalist Overseas Chinese Commission to introduce visiting offi-

cials to local studio heads and filmmakers. So at a welcoming party for

the film censorship chief Xu Hao, who had been sent to bring the local

Between Nationalism and Colonialism 259

cinema in line with the official propaganda policy, Cai Chusheng re-

ported at the meeting that Japan was targeting HK$2 million to "buy up"

the Cantonese cinema. In other words, if any studio executive continued

to make frivolous and "trashy" films he must have been "bought" by the

enemy. According to one report, all the guests fell silent.52

These mainland diasporas articulated and circulated their nationalist

discourse in such publications as the Nationalist-sponsored Yilin (The

Arts) and Huashang bao (Chinese business news), which was financed by

the Office of the Eighth Route Army, and they set up networks of elite

mobilization by means of "patriotic" organizations like the Zhongguo

dianying jiaoyu xiehui Xianggang fenghui (Federation of Chinese Film

Education), which was headed by Luo Mingyou, and the Xianggang

Zhongguo dianying bihui (the Chinese Cinema's PEN), headed by Peng

Yannong, both local chapters of national film organizations based in

Chongqing. Probably in an attempt to highlight the "backwardness" of

the local film world, these groups were open only to those locals who were

patriotic and had led a "clean life" free of such vices as opium addiction

and prostitution (although there was no mention of how to test the appli-

cants). Chinese film workers, as everywhere in the world, were publicly

conceived as extravagant, self-indulgent, promiscuous, and scandalous.53

Yet none of these organizations excluded people on the mainland on the

basis of such "cleanliness." To single out the Hong Kong industry was to

underline its inauthenticity and marginality. Parallel to this institutional

discourse was a discursive boundary between patriots and traitors. The

former group included local filmmakers like the opera idols Sit Gok-sin

and Ma Shih-tsan (Ma Shizheng) and cinema stars like Bak Yin (Bai

Yan), Lo Tun (Lu Dun), and Ng Chor-fan, who either identified with the

mainland cause or did not want to offend the northerners. All the rest

were excluded as presumably unclean and unworthy others.

The 6migr6 filmmakers' nationalist discourse centered around two

structuring notions: Hong Kong was a part of the mainland but also

marginal to it. To be truly "patriotic," then, was not only to mobilize the

city to China's defense but also ultimately to subvert Hong Kong, that is,

to leave and discard the colony for the authenticity of China. This theme

came off forcefully in the several "patriotic" films made by the 6migr6s.

Between 1937 and 1941, the China Film Studio of Chongqing had an

office in Hong Kong to acquire film equipment from overseas and re-

cruit personnel from the mainland community. To take further advan-

tage of the colony's openness, in 1939 it founded the Dadi (Good Earth)

260

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

Studio to make Mandarin films. Included among its staff were all the

famous Shanghai filmmakers like directors Cai Chusheng, Situ Huimin,

and Fei Mu and female leads Li Lili and Li Zhuozhuo. A year later,

Dadi closed. Cai and Situ then founded the Xinsheng (New Life) Film

Company, which lasted long enough to finish one Mandarin picture. All

four of the releases of Dadi and Xinsheng - The March of Guerrilla

(Youji jingxinqu, directed by Situ Huimin, 1938), The Paradise of the

Solitary Island (Gudao tiantang, directed by Cai Chusheng, 1939), and

Homeland (Baiyun guxiang, directed by Situ Huimin, 1940) - were tar-

geted for China markets as well as the elite sector of Hong Kong. Their

principal roles were played by actors unfamiliar to local audiences, and

their settings were mostly framed on the imagined mainland. Particu-

larly significant was their ideological subtext of da Zhongyuan xintai. All

of these films were either about resistance heroism inside China or local

resisters leaving the colony's decadence and inauthenticity to "return" to

the mainland. They invariably represented Hong Kong as an allegorical

site of evil and backwardness. Moreover, while all the heroes and

heroines in these films were mainland stars, collaborator roles were

mostly given to minor Cantonese comedians whose Mandarin was

awkward - easily evoking the much-denounced image of Wang Jingwei,

the Cantonese-speaking head of the collaborationist regime, among the

(mainland) film audience!

The narrative structure of The March of Guerrilla, the best known

among the four Mandarin films, was typical of this strategy of mar-

ginalization. Directed and written by Cai Chusheng, the film follows two

lovers in a Lake Tai town who are separated by the Japanese occupation.

The enemy destroys their homes and kills their parents. Here private

and public emotions merge into a strong determination to fight for the

nation. The man (played by the Shanghai star Li Qing) goes off to join a

guerrilla group. His fianc6e (Rong Xiaoyi, also from Shanghai) has to

stay behind to care for the family. She is arrested and later raped by the

Japanese.

Recent scholarship demonstrates that national imagery is suffused

with gender politics. In the modernizing discourse of the Chinese state,

which represented a male-defined order, woman was the inessential

other whose body and agency were subsumed under the nationalist

agenda. It denied woman both her identity and her subject position in

the public sphere.54 The traditional allegorization of female chastity with

national purity was reinscribed within the nationalist discourse. The

Between Nationalism and Colonialism 261

violation of the female body by foreign invaders symbolized the ultimate

victimization of the Chinese state and the need to valorize the nation by

way of mobilizing national loyalties.55 Thus, this imaginative coupling of

raped woman and foreign invaders served to reduce the female to a

signifier of marginalization and sacrifice. This trope of raped woman was

the focus of the narrative structure of The March of Guerrilla. To stay

behind to care for the domestic order rather than joining the local guer-

rilla band, which, significantly, was an all-male force, the Rong Xiaoyi

character was peripheral to the Chinese resistance. It evokes a parallel

with the Crown colony's marginality to nationalist politics. Rong's viola-

tion by the Japanese in the climatic sequence, a powerful symbol of

intimidation and humiliation, dramatizes the need, and even the desire,

for complete sacrifice of the marginal to serve collective interests.

In the rape scene, which is crosscut with a surprise attack on the

Japanese by Li Qing's guerrillas set to a soundtrack of Wagnerian and

Beethovian music, there is none of the erotic allure typical of most rape

fantasies in the Chinese and Hollywood cinemas. Instead, the director

appears to avoid any onscreen sexuality (for fear of being criticized as

frivolous and racy) by only allowing sexual desire to be expressed in

the erotic gaze and lascivious and intimidating laughter of the rapist.

Framed in medium rather than low-angle shots, which creates a sense of

paralyzing intimidation on the victim's part, the sequence projects a

confrontational mood, further accentuated by the strutting caricature of

the Japanese colonel, who appears on the screen to be more a figure ripe

for ridicule than a superhuman fascist. He embodies all the Chinese

racial stereotypes about the enemy: womanizing, alcoholic and dim-

witted. Indeed, after a series of shots/reverse shots of the victim and the

victimizer, the camera stops at a medium closeup that commands re-

spect. Recovering her courage, Rong Xiaoyi picks up a knife and kills

the marauder.

Transforming herself into a woman warrior, Rong Xiaoyi raises a

national flag outside the Japanese compound to direct the guerrilla at-

tack. She is then shot by a malicious collaborator (Hong Kong comedian

Chow Chi-shing/Zhou Zhicheng) who is trying to escape from the at-

tack. When the guerrillas discover her death, they angrily throw Zhou

down the hill in a climax of moral revenge and nationalist passion. The

movie ends with Li Qing leading a horse carrying the rape victim's body

covered with the blue-sky white-sun flag and marching triumphantly

with the all-male troop to a patriotic tune, "Unity Brings Victory."

262 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

Symbolically, then, the marginal Other is now accepted into the national

body after making the ultimate sacrifice; Rong Xiaoyi becomes an em-

blem of patriotic devotion. Although there is no direct reference to

Hong Kong, the marginality and violation of Rong Xiaoyi and the denial

of her subject position in the form of complete sacrifice would invoke in

some audiences' minds a symbolic parallel to the need to subjugate the

colony to the national cause.56

The March of Guerrilla shows skillful camera control, but it lacked a

realistic and credible appreciation of the Japanese. Trying to rally resis-

tance, the movie was full of clich6s, exaggerations, and bigotry. The

acerbic remark of American producer David Hemstead regarding cheap

Hollywood antifascist farces was equally pertinent to these Mandarin

films: "No Nazi or Japs [sic] will be portrayed as a comic figure for ..

that would only provide a hero or heroine with windmills against which

to battle, and would kill dramatic impact."57 Lacking such "dramatic

impact" and filmed in Mandarin, The March of Guerrilla, like other

Dadi products, did poorly at local box offices.

The 6migr6 filmmakers also worked with local artists to make a few

Cantonese films, among them Situ Huimin's Baoshan in Bloodshed

(Xuejian Baoshan cheng, 1938) and Tan Xiaodan's Little Cantonese (Xiao

Guangdong, 1940) were most well known. Like all the Dadi's Mandarin

films, these were set in the Chinese interior, one in Baoshan near Shang-

hai and another in Canton, and both projected China-centered patriotic

heroism to instill nationalist sentiments in the locals. Xiao Guandong was

particularly emblematic of the Central Plains syndrome. The title phrase

has remained a demeaning, derogatory, "ethnic" slur often directed

against the Cantonese by their northern neighbors, especially the Shang-

hainese, who make offensive fun of their "physical smallness" and "slick-

ness." Both films got rave reviews in 6migr6 publications but had medio-

cre box office returns. In 1940, when Little Cantonese got the honor of

being one of the few Hong Kong films to be released in Chongqing, only a

handful of homesick Cantonese attended.58

3

While mainland filmmakers and critics tried to project and disseminate a

hegemonic nationalist discourse in Hong Kong, the local film industry

was struggling to negotiate the changing politics of the wartime cinema.

Unlike what some recent postcolonial scholars have theorized in other

Between Nationalism and Colonialism 263

contexts, local filmmakers produced no counternarratives of alternative

identification and cultural alterity with respect to the colonizer or the

"core" culture but rather an uneasy ambivalence accompanying a lim-

ited contest against the 6migr6 discourse of centralizing nationalism.59

Between 1937 and 1941, while Hong Kong stayed out of a war that

brought to China horrendous casualties and calamities, most local studio

heads and filmmakers seemed to be of two minds regarding the role and

function of cinema. This schizophrenia was a result of the colonial his-

tory of Hong Kong. Since 1842, at the end of the Opium War, Hong

Kong had been part of the global system of colonization. Classified as

Huaren (Chinese), the colonized, who were mainly immigrants from

South China, had been racialized and inferiorized in the colonialist dis-

course and excluded from the colony's public sphere. They were socially

marginalized and systematically depoliticized. The colonialist apparatus

had accordingly inscribed itself on the colonized by exaggerating their

conservatism and "fear of politics," resulting in the prevalence of popu-

lar entertainment cinema in prewar Hong Kong. This apathy fed into the

"sojourner mentality" of many of the locals, who, under the colonial

gaze, continued to identify with the mainland, particularly Canton, as

the "homeland" from which they traced their male ancestries, historical

memories, and cultural practices. Yet at the same time, with the increase

in locally born inhabitants from 26 percent (1921) to 32.5 percent (1931),

Hong Kong became a distinct geopolitical space with specific historical

and social formations. Peripheralized by the mainland, this difference

marked out a possible site for the articulation of a local identity.

The war experience presented a moment for identity construction,

and the film industry found itself unknowingly at the center of this histori-

cal uncertainty. Consistent with its policy of racial-political exclusion, the

Hong Kong government had made no effort to mobilize the local motion

picture industry for war preparation. Similarly, the Nationalist govern-

ment and the Communists, aside from rehashing their familiar anti-

imperialist rhetoric of national resistance, offered no practical advice,

guidance, or funding to the studios. However, this did not stop mainland

intellectuals and filmmakers from policing and censuring the Cantonese

cinema in the name of a centralizing nationalist ideology. With no experi-

ence in political cinema, the film industry therefore found itself on its own

in unfamiliar waters, treading a dangerous path between the conflicting

demands of the nation-state and local-colonial conditions.

Although some local film businessmen were interested only in a

264

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

quick return from low-budget, small-cast, escapist fare, the major stu-

dios, whatever their ideological orientations, could not afford to ignore

the nationalist demands. The future of Cantonese productions as well

as their own reputations were at stake. There were also some film-

makers and artists, notably the famous actors Ng Chor-fan, Bak Yin

and Lo Tun and directors Lee Fa (Li Hua) and Kwan Man-ching (Guan

Wenqing), who were close to the 6migr6 community. Praised in the

6migr6 press as serious, patriotic, and committed artists, they shared

the nationalist vision of a political cinema devoted to modernization

and national autonomy.

Right after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, all the major studio

employees contributed money and volunteered their time to make The

Critical Juncture (Zuihou guantou)- its production crew included every-

body who was anybody in the film world - to drum up support for

China's defense. Screen celebrities also became involved in various fund-

raising activities.60 And between 1937 and 1938, the industry brought out

a large number of war-theme movies. Their titles are revealing: Forward

(Qianjin qu, Daguan Studio), In Defense of South China (Baowei

Huanan, Da Zhonghua Company), and Return to the Homeland (Hui

zuguo qu, Nanyang Productions), which won praise from the Central

Commission of Film Censorship. After the fall of Canton in December

1938, however, the number of resistance-related films declined notably.

Judging from available synopses and movie stills, all of these "patriotic"

films were suffused with commercial elements of scholar-beauty ro-

mances, operatic interludes, and free-for-all farces. In the critical eyes of

the Nationalist government and the mainland intelligentsia, they were

with few exceptions, in the words of the Nationalist film censor Xu Hao,

racy and vulgar and by and large they misrepresented the military-

political situation on the mainland.61 In other words, the Cantonese pro-

ductions remained "backward" amid the rise of patriotic fervor.

What was absent in this diatribe was an emphatic recognition of the

Hong Kong film industry's lack of experience in handling propaganda

and political themes and the geopolitical differences of the colony. With-

out any funding or specific guidance from either the central or the colo-

nial governments, studio heads were uncertain about audience reception

and unable to come up with a coherent production strategy to deal with

the tensely ambivalent situation: China was at war, but Hong Kong

remained "peaceful." How to prioritize production planning? How to

reckon with the geopolitical specificity of Hong Kong?

Between Nationalism and Colonialism 265

The overwhelming majority of Hong Kong Chinese identified them-

selves as Huaren or Guangdong ren (Cantonese) or Huaqiao (of the

Chinese diaspora), depending probably on the level of collective identifi-

cation that demanded their commitment in a given time or situation.

They were in effect an overseas Chinese community in a colonial situa-

tion. While they supported the territorialized state of Republican China

as a matter of course, they lived in a Westernized, colonial, and highly

commercialized city that was distinct from the mainland. This became

especially obvious during wartime. Most modernizing exile intelligentsia

chose to deny the difference by instead marginalizing Hong Kong culture

as an unseemly hybridity of "new and old, redolent of colonial flavor

and suffused with feudal morality and obscene, degenerate (shangfeng

baishu) literature."62 And they renounced the younger generation of

Hong Kong natives, many of whom had been born there as slavish,

"forgetting that they were in fact Chinese," and "ignorant of Chinese

history and proud of knowing no Chinese."63 These harangues were too

moralistic and impractical for local filmmakers.

At a safe distance from the war, life in Hong Kong rapidly resumed

its normality after the resumption of horse-racing in early 1938. There

was indeed a widespread illusion before 1941 that the Japanese would

not attack Hong Kong for fear of provoking the British, whose priggish

complacency and racist underestimation of Japanese prowess led the

colonial government to claim itself as the "fortress of Asia."64 This

illusionary sense of security, what some mainland intellectuals deni-

grated as an "ostrich mentality," was reinforced by the continual influx

of refugees from across the border.65 Hong Kong was a paradise in a

war-torn world. On the eve of the Japanese invasion on December 8,

1941, the race track and movie theaters were packed.66 Few Hong Kong

people had the moral burden or emotional urgency as the mainland

6migr6s about the war. Indeed, the city's patriotic fervor began to drain

away in 1938 after the fall of Canton late that year.

Patriotic movies sold well as long as popular enthusiasm for the war

remained in force. The return to normalcy in Hong Kong corresponded

to film audiences' demand for entertainment. After 1938, many critically

acclaimed resistance-theme films turned out to be financial disasters.

For example, Ng Chor-fan closed his new film company in frustration

after the very poor opening of its first project, the political satire Two

Lovers in a Silver World (Yinhai yuanyang, 1938).67 The Daguan Stu-

dio's 1938 big-budget release Behind the Shanghai Front (Shanghai

266

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

huoxian hou) was a disappointment, despite the drawing power of the

female lead, Bak Yin. Yet at the same time Bak Yin's romantic tragedy,

Madame Butterfly (Hudie furen, based on the 1922 Toll of the Sea),

which exploited her on-screen trademark of tears and feminine passivity

and misery, sold well,68 as did superstar Sit Gok-sin's smashes Thief

Prince (Zei wangzi, 1939) and Gone Was the Love (Hu bu gui, 1940),

both adapted from his prewar Cantonese opera hits. Undoubtedly, there

were several popular patriotic movies, like Lau Fong's (Liu Fang's)

Song of Exile (Liuwang zhe zhi ge, 1941), a moving tale of love and

endurance about a Cantonese refugee music troupe's patriotic commit-

ment. But even these exceptions were spiced with familiar romance and

farcical elements.

Along with the changing market was the colonial government's cen-

sorship. Trying to maintain its "neutrality," it prohibited anti-Japanese

expressions in the public sphere. In 1939, for example, the secretary of

Chinese affairs, who doubled as chief censor, met with local movie busi-

nessmen several times to warn them against screening "explicit anti-

Japanese sentiments."69 In response to the Japanese consul's protest, the

Hong Kong government in 1940 banned the Chongqing-produced victory

short The Battle of Changsha (Changsha huizhan, 1939) and The March of

Guerrilla, which was released in 1941 only after undergoing severe cutting

and with a new title, Song of Righteousness70 (Chengqi ge).

Yet at the same time pressures from the mainland officials and

intelligentsia persisted. In addition to the discursive attack on the Hong

Kong cinema, there were death threats and political assaults. Several

famous film producers and directors received letters from a group

called the Patriotic Youth Corps containing "pictures of pistols and

bullets" and warning them to stop making "racy and feudalistic" pic-

tures.71 Many studio heads and filmmakers found the pressures both

unproductive and unfair. The Daguan Studio producer Chiu Shutai

(Zhao Shutai) aptly expressed the dilemma confronting the film indus-

try: "As a commercial cinema, we certainly have to be concerned with

the educational/inspirational values of filmmaking, serving the interests

of our country and people on the one hand. . . but we cannot ignore

market needs, making movies that suit the audience's entertainment

taste . . . in order to stay afloat."72 The veteran Cantonese film direc-

tor Hou Yiu (Hou Yao), who had been bitterly attacked by the 6migr6

press for his "senseless" films, was even more blunt and bitter in his

dissent. At a meeting with Central Censor Xu Hao and other local

Between Nationalism and Colonialism 267

Guomindang leaders, Hou urged the national government to either

nationalize the Cantonese cinema, as the Soviets had done with the

Russian film industry, or give it free rein as in the United States. In

other words, he wanted the national government to either back down

or back up its rhetoric with deeds. As soon as he finished the speech,

he was bitterly renounced by the participants.73

While Chiu and Hou used the China-centered nationalist idiom to

enunciate their dissent, some young filmmakers appropriated the famil-

iar language of nationalism to imagine an ambivalent, hybrid, local iden-

tity. This hybridity came out powerfully in a popular Cantonese film,

Two Southern Sisters (Nanguo jiemei hua, 1940). Directed by young

Hong Kong-born directors Lueng Bun (Liang Bin) and Leung Sum

(Liang Shen), it was produced by a small independent company founded

by the female lead Wu Dip-ying (Hu Dieying). Originally a major Can-

tonese opera singer, Wu had risen to become a major Hong Kong actress

after starring in the first Cantonese talkie, Genu qingcao (Romance of

opera stars, 1932), which had been produced by Daguan in San Fran-

cisco.74 The company folded after making this film, which was billed as

the last screen appearance of Wu before her retirement.

Two Southern Sisters was a high-budget and carefully crafted film.

Unlike the Dadi Mandarin productions, its cast was composed entirely

of local stars, including Ng Chor-fan and the buffoon Lau Kuai-hong

(Liu Guikang). And, unlike Mandarin films, the opening sequence of

sampans, fishing boats, subtropical landscapes, and Cantonese folk

songs firmly established the localness of the film. In fact, like most

Cantonese films, it was melodramatically didactic, with a narrative cen-

tered around family relations. Typical of the "hybridism" of local cin-

ema, it combines within the framework of a family drama various ge-

neric elements (romance, thrills, and social satire) and popular themes

(national defense, the stepmother syndrome, and triangular love) spiced

up with a long episode of Cantonese opera, all of which were familiar to

local audiences.

The film is narrated around a romantic triangle between a struggling

artist (Ng Chor-fan) and twin sisters (both played by Wu Dip-ying). The

sisters do not know of each other because they have been separated since

childbirth, the elder (Chow Wen-ying) adopted by a rich businessman

and the younger (Hsiu Dip) raised by her farmer father and stepmother

on an outlying island. Significantly, there is none of the romanticization

of rural idyllic purity that was typical of mainland leftist cinema. Instead,

268

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

on the one hand, we see the rich sister, well educated and assertive,

devoting herself to a wide variety of fund-raising activities (including

opera singing) to support the Chinese resistance and leaving home when

her father attempts to force her to marry the son of a business partner.

On the other hand, the poor sister tearfully and helplessly suffers the

abuse of her stepmother (her father looks on with pain but is too meek to

intervene). Old-fashioned and passive, she has had little exposure to

modernity and cares little about nationalism or the war. The artist falls in

love with Hsiu Dip when he moves to the fishing village in search of a

peaceful life. He teaches her such modern values as "independence" and

"struggle." One day Hsiu Dip disappears, and the artist goes to the city

to look for her. Instead, in a melodramatic twist, he brings back Wen-

ying, whom he mistakes as Hsiu Dip. The well-educated sister admires

the artist's talents and quickly develops a romantic relationship with him.

The stepmother is threatened by this newly independent-minded daugh-

ter and tries to kill her, but she ends up killing herself. At this juncture,

in another melodramatic turn, Hsiu Dip reappears. The twin sisters

happily rejoin, but they also have to make an agonizing choice: who will

marry the artist? The artist, like the twins' father, is an emasculated

male, weak and indecisive. He is not sure what to do with the two girls he

loves. The decision thus has to be made by the twins.

It is significant to note that Wu Dip-ying, Ng Chor-fan, and most of

the cast (including such famous character actors as Ng Wui/Wu Hui and

Lau Kuei-hong) were closely associated with the mainland filmmakers

and had been critical of the "political apathy" of the local cinema. They

were aware of the contestation within the wartime Hong Kong cinema.

In this context, it is interesting to note that the film ends with Wen-ying,

sadly but determinedly, leaving for the mainland to join the resistance so

that her younger sister can stay and marry the artist and care for the

aged father. Not knowing this, in a climatic sequence Hsiu Dip resolves

to sacrifice her love so that her elder sister can marry the artist. She runs

up a hill yelling frantically "I have to struggle! I have to struggle!" until

the artist finds her and tells her that Wen-ying has left.

The twin sisters' choice became an allegorized site where the identity

of Hong Kong was constructed. Interestingly, unlike the strong male

figure (the guerrilla leader) who defines the heroic spectacle and serves as

the object of woman's sacrifices in The March of Guerrilla, both the father

and the artist in Two Southern Sisters are irrelevant to the choice the

sisters must make except that they created the difficult situation for them.

Between Nationalism and Colonialism 269

The sisters have to make the choice themselves, and they sacrifice them-

selves for the happiness of the other, not for the men. They are thus

endowed with a subject position that was usually denied to women, who

were on the margins of the patriarchal order. This valorization of the

weak and marginal is, I would argue, an ideological subversion of the

Central Plains Syndrome and allegorically a construction of an identity

about Hong Kong, which was marginal within the China-centered dis-

course of nationalism.

Indeed, the melodramatic and dichotomous ending of Two Southern

Sisters dramatized a vision of local identity that was marked by a double

marginality. Being marginalized by British colonialism and Chinese na-

tionalism in a wartime situation, Hong Kong was unsure and tentative in

defining (and thereby asserting) itself. Thus, unlike Hong Kong Canton-

ese films from the 1960s on (like Lung Kong's Feinu zhengzhuan or

Teddy Girl, Allen Fong's Father and Son or Fuzi qing, Ann Hui's The

Song of Exile or Ketu qiuheng, and Stanley Kwan's Rouge or Yanzhi

kou),75 this film did not consciously engage in evoking a collective mem-

ory of Hong Kong or mapping an alternative discourse surrounding its

colonial situation. Rather, just as Wen-ying returned to the mainland

and Hsiu Dip stayed to marry her lover, there was an ambivalent hy-

bridity in the imagery of Hong Kong the film projected, marking out the

double marginality that framed it.

Unable to identify fully with British colonialism or with Chinese

nationalism, both of which shunned it as inferior and suspicious, Hong

Kong appeared to be positioned uncomfortably in between Chinese

tradition and Western lifestyle, moral commitment to the "homeland"

that was China and emotional attachment to the home that was Hong

Kong. As symbolized in the two mental worlds in which the southern

sisters lived, the cultural identity of Hong Kong consisted of an ambiva-

lent mixture of tradition and modernity, nationalism and local conscious-

ness. This colonial hybridity was threatened under the nationalistic pres-

sures of those in the Chinese diaspora, who imposed their wartime "us

and them" vision on the locals: either patriotic or slavish, Chinese or

traitorous. At the same time, the colonial government excluded the

locals from the defense of their own city because of their racial Other-

ness. Doubly marginalized, the identity of Hong Kong, as Two Southern

Sisters articulated it, took on an ambiguous, almost schizophrenic, turn:

it was torn between centralizing nationalism and local consciousness.

Thus, Wen-ying was made to leave for the mainland while Hsiu Dip

270 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

stayed in Hong Kong. This happy ending was nonetheless marked by an

uneasy compromise, a kind of wishful thinking.

On Christmas Day 1941, after three weeks of brutal shelling and

bombing, Japan took over Hong Kong. The colony now became part of

occupied China in the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere and was

no longer a wartime paradise. Privation and oppression reigned. The

whole entertainment business fell under Japanese control. Unwilling to

cooperate, many filmmakers and major stars fled to the safety of South-

west China, which led to the effective closing of the cinema until the end

of the war in August 1945.76

Thus, by the 1930s there was an incipient sense of a Hong Kong

identity shaped by its hybridized culture and colonization. The sense

that Hong Kong was linked to China by race, lineage, and language and

yet was different in cultural practices and its geopolitical situation was

now highlighted by the war. However, under the shadow of the China-

centered discourse of nationalism engendered by the modern Chinese

state and cultural elite, with their chauvinistic undertones, wartime was

also an ambivalent moment for imagining a local identity. Hong Kong's

marginalization in Chinese national imagery generated all the contempt

and attacks of the Cantonese cinema, which disempowered and sup-

pressed all the local voices. In fact, Two Southern Sisters was denounced

by the 6migre press as yet another "frivolous, escapist" offering.77 It has

been excluded from all the standard historical accounts of the Chinese

cinema, which include only films made by mainlanders.78

Trinh Minh-ha once remarked that there is a margin in the center

and a center in the margin.79 China's marginalization in twentieth-

century global politics is well known, but much less known is the Chi-

nese marginalization of other places and cultures inside and/or outside

its territorial boundaries. Hong Kong has been one of these Others. In

fact it has been doubly marginalized in the official discourses of Chinese

nationalism and British colonialism. As evidenced in the 1997 crisis, the

Chinese state and cultural elites continue to marginalize Hong Kong by

seeing it as merely an "economic city" of financial prowess but cultural

decadence, "a cultural desert" and, together with the colonial govern-

ment, by denying its people, many of whom have identified with neither

discourse, their right to self-determination. Also the Central Plains syn-

drome has contributed to a widespread belief in both the scholarly and

popular worlds that had they not been confronted with the "crisis of

legitimacy" of 1997 the colonized would not have had the collective

Between Nationalism and Colonialism 271

desire and discursive energy to construct a cultural identity of their own.

Yet this essay demonstrates that this view is wrong. Wartime represented

an important moment in the imagination and projection of Hong Kong's

identity, tentative and hybrid as it was, on the local screen. There must

have been many comparable moments of imagining an alternative vision

of Hong Kong in its colonial history. Further research will tell us.

NOTES

I want to thank James Barrett, Prasenjit Duara, and Daniel Littlefield

for their comments and suggestions. A slightly different version of this chapter

was published in Poshek Fu and David Desser, eds., The Cinema of Hong Kong:

History, Arts, Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Re-

printed with permission of Cambridge University Press.

1. The desert stereotype has been an underlying trope in almost all major

academic studies and literary representation of Hong Kong culture. For ex-

ample, see the various essays by Chinese writers collected in Lu Weiluan, ed.,

Xianggang de youyu, 1925-1941 (The melancholy of Hong Kong, 1925-1941)

(Hong Kong: Huafeng shuju, 1983); and Frank Walsh, A History of Hong Kong

(London: HarperCollins, 1993). Until recently, however, no writer has ever

questioned the semantic origin or discursive meaning of this cultural construct. It

is now time to deconstruct it. For a pioneering popular work on reevaluating the

cultural scene in Hong Kong, see Luo Fu, Xianggang wenhua mangyou (Wander-

ing through Hong Kong culture) (Hong Kong: Zhonghua shuju, 1993).

2. Recently, as a result of the critical and immensely popular reception in

film circles of such innovative filmmakers as Jackie Chan, Chow Yun-fat, and

Wang Ka-wei, film scholars have begun to look seriously at the cultural-political

significance of the Hong Kong cinema. But this pioneering trend has focused on

the filmic representation of heavily contested issues of identity politics of the

1980s and 1990s. No systematic study has been devoted to earlier periods. For

two fine examples of these pioneering works, see Rey Chow, "A Souvenir of

Love," Modern Chinese Literature 7 no. 2 (1993): 59-78; and Leo Ou-fan Lee,

"Two Films from Hong Kong: Parody and Allegory," in Nick Browne, ed., New

Chinese Cinemas: Forms, Identities, Politics (Cambridge and New York: Cam-

bridge University Press, 1994), 202-15.

3. Mu Shiying "Cinematique," Dianying quan (Hong Kong) 2 (February

1937): 2.

4. For a discussion, see Law Kar, "Xianggang zaoqi de dianying guiji,

1909-1915" (Early impressions of the early Hong Kong cinema), in Early Im-

ages of Hong Kong and China (Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1995), 27.

5. Cheng Jihua, Zhongguo dianying fazhan shi (A history of Chinese

cinema) (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1980).

6. See Paul Pickowicz, "The Theme of Spiritual Pollution in Chinese

272

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

Films of the 1930s," Modern China 17, no. 1 (1991): 38-75; and Guan Wenqing,

Zhongguo yingtan waishi (An unofficial history of the Chinese screen) (Hong

Kong: Guangjiaojing chubanshe, 1976), 128-96.

7. Jean-Paul Sartre, preface to Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

(New York: Grove, 1963), 26.

8. Recently an increasing amount of exciting research has been devoted to

decentering China and reconstructing a Hong Kong identity, principally through

film and literature. But this research has focused only on the period after the

1980s. See, for example, Rey Chow, "Between Colonizers: Hong Kong's Post-

colonial Self-Writing in the 1990s," Diaspora 2 no. 2 (1992):151-70; Leo Ou-fan

Lee, "Tales from the 'Floating City,"'" Harvard Asia Pacific Review 1 no. 1

(winter 1996-97):43-49; Leung Ping-kwan, ed., "Xianggang wenhua zhuanzi"

(Special issue on Hong Kong culture), Today 28 (1995):71-257; Luo Feng, Shiji

mo chengshi (Fin-de-siecle city) (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1995);

and Daisy Ng, "Back to the Future: Imaginary Nostalgia and the Consumer

Culture of Hong Kong," 1996, mimeo.

9. See G. B. Endacott, Hong Kong Eclipse (Hong Kong: Oxford Univer-

sity Press, 1978), 11; Walsh, History of Hong Kong, 404; Lin Youlan, Xianggang

shihua (An informal history of Hong Kong) (Hong Kong: Bajiao shufang,

1975), 148-56.

10. Endacott, Hong Kong Eclipse, 23-25; Lu Jin, Xianggang zhanggu (An-

ecdotes of Hong Kong), vol. 4 (Hong Kong: Guangjiaojin chubanshe, 1981).

11. For a vivid discussion of prewar Shanghai, see Harriet Sergeant,

Shanghai: Collision Point of Cultures, 1918-1939 (New York: Crown, 1990).

For wartime Shanghai, see Poshek Fu, Passivity, Resistance, and Collaboration:

Intellectual Choices under Japanese Occupation, 1937-1945 (Stanford: Stanford

University Press, 1993). The term colonial backwater is adapted from Walsh,

History of Hong Kong, 390.

12. See Du Yunzhi, Zhongguo dianyin qishi nian (Seventy years of Chinese

cinema) (Taipei: Zhonghua minguo dianyin tushuguan, 1976), 226-47; and

Thomas Doherty, Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World

War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 4-39.

13. Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, trans. Susan Miller

(New York: Beacon, 1991).

14. See Walsh, History of Hong Kong, 378-89 (the quote is from 386).

15. For a discussion of the social and political conservatism of the Hong

Kong elites, see Lynn White and Li Cheng, "China Coastal Identities: Regional,

National, and Global," in Lowell Dittmer and Samuel Kim, eds., China's Quest

for National Identity, 154-93 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).

16. Lau Siu-kai and Kuan Hsin-chi, The Ethos of the Hong Kong Chinese

(Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1988), 1-4.

17. Endacott, Hong Kong Eclipse, 26-27.

18. For two solid discussions of the much understudied British strategy in

Hong Kong, see Endacott, Hong Kong Eclipse; and Benjamin Proulx, Under-

ground from Hongkong (New York: Dutton, 1943).

Between Nationalism and Colonialism 273

19. Endacott, Hong Kong Eclipse, 29-45.

20. See Xianggang nianjian (Hong Kong annual report) (N.p., 1941). For

the founding and business strategies of these major studios, see Guan,

Zhongguo yintan waishi.

21. Yilin (Hong Kong) 43 (December 1938).

22. Yilin 62 (November 1939).

23. See Lin, Xianggang shihua, 154-56; Endacott, Hong Kong Eclipse, 22-

26; and Nigel Cameron, An Illustrated History of Hong Kong (Hong Kong:

Oxford University Press, 1991), 251-56.

24. Xianggang nianjian, n.

25. Yilin 63 (December 1939); 75 (June 1940). See also Bai Yan, Yige nu

yanyuan de zishu (An actress's autobiography) (Hong Kong: Dahua 1955), 15.

26. See Yilin 50 (March 1939); 72 (April 1940).

27. See Yilin 52 (April 1939); Yilin 53 (May 1939); and Dianyin yu xiju

(Hong Kong) 1, no. 1 (1941).

28. Leo Braudy, The World in a Frame: What We See in Films (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1976), 104-14.

29. The best examples of this conservatism and ambivalence are Sir Robert

Ho Tung and Sir Lo Man-kam. A Eurasian billionaire of his time, Sir Ho had

served in various major advisory positions with the colonial government and had

made countless financial contributions to London, but he was allowed to move

into an exclusive midlevel neighborhood only after his family suffered many

racist attacks. Perhaps as a psychological reaction, he wore only Chinese gowns

despite his Caucasian looks and was well known as a "patriotic businessman" for

sending his only son to serve in the Nationalist Army. He was the chief financier

of the Lianhua Studio. The son-in-law of Sir Ho, Sir Lo was a prominent

London-trained attorney who sat on many government committees. Known as

an outspoken member at the Legislative Council, he often criticized the racist

policy of segregation (which did not change until 1946), yet he was convinced

that the "Chinese did not expect to receive the same salaries as Europeans." See

Walsh, History of Hong Kong, 380-86. For biographical backgrounds of these

men as well as other elites in Hong Kong, a total of eighty-seven, almost all of

them in business, see Wu Xinglian, Xianggang (1937) Huaren mingren shilue

(Who's who in Hong Kong, 1937) (Hong Kong: n.p. 1937).

30. For ticket prices and locations of movie theaters, see Yilin 75 (June

1940); and Wu Hao, Xianggang dianying minzuxue (An ethnography of the

Hong Kong cinema) (Hong Kong: Ciwenhua tang chubanshe, 1993), 3-21. For

two samples of films shown across Hong Kong, see Huashang bao (Hong Kong),

August 20 and 21, 1941.

31. See Yilin 84 (October 1940); 96 (April 1941). The biggest Cantonese

box-office smashes in the war years were Zei wangzi (Thief prince, 1939) and Hu

bu gui (Gone was the love, 1940), both tragic romances based on prewar Canton-

ese opera hits of the same names, starring Sit Gok-sin, who had also been

featured in the stage original. The colonial government seemed to be aware of

the socioeconomic hierarchy of the film audiences. Thus, in 1940 it decided to

274

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

impose an entertainment tax on all prices higher than the twenty cents that were

what most Cantonese moviegoers were paying. See Yilin 75 (June 1940).

32. Cai Chusheng, "Zhanhou de Zhongguo dianying dongtai ji muqian de

gaijin yundong" (Chinese cinema after the outbreak of the war and the present

reform movement), Wenxian 4 (January 1939): I 2-3.

33. There was in fact widespread anxiety in the 6migr6 cultural community

over the decentering of new Chinese culture by the war in general. See Liao

Liao [Sha Kongliao], "Jianli xin wenhua zhongxin" (Establish a new cultural

center), Li bao, April 1938, reprinted in Lu, Xianggang de youyu, 101-2.

34. See, for example, Tu Yangci, "Jihuai Shanghai" (Nostalgic for Shanghai),

Yuzhou fen, May 1939, reprinted in Lu, Xianggang de youyu, 157-60. He wrote:

"Shanghai is still very much like a place of Chinese. But in Hong Kong, although

everything is Chinese . . . it has no Chinese flavor, it lacks a Chinese soul."

35. Leo Ou-fan Lee, "Xianggang wenhua de bianyuan xing chutan" (A

preliminary study of the marginality of Hong Kong culture), Today 28 (1995):

75-80.

36. All of these quotes are from Lu, Xianggang de youyu, 107, 157-59,

178, 207-9.

37. Lou Shiyi, "Xianggang de youyu," Xingdao ribao, November 17, 1938,

125-26.

38. Yang Yanqi, "Xianggang bannian" (Half a year in Hong Kong),

Yuzhou feng, May 1941, reprinted in Lu, Xianggang de youyu, 207-12; Liao

Liao, "Jianli xin wenhua zhongxin."

39. Yilin 84 (October 1940).

40. For a fine study of the Chinese filmic tradition, see Paul Pickowicz,

"Melodramatic Representation and the May Fourth Tradition of Chinese Cin-

ema," in Ellen Widmer and David Dar-wei Wang, eds., From May Fourth to

June Fourth: Fiction and Film in Twentieth-Century China, 295-326 (Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 1993).

41. For the Nationalist government's suppression of the Cantonese cinema,

see Zhiwei Xiao, "Film Censorship in China, 1927-1937," Ph.D. diss., Univer-

sity of California, San Diego, 1994, 212-57.

42. For the Nationalist regime's political and military relations with various

provincial authorities, see Lloyd Eastman, "Nationalist China during the Nan-

king Decade, 1927-1937," in Lloyd Eastman et al., The Nationalist Era in

China, 1912-1949, 1-52 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). For a

historical survey of Guangdong-Hong Kong relations, see also Ming Chan, ed.,

Precarious Balance: Hong Kong between China and Britain, 1842-1992 (Hong

Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1993).

43. See Prasenjit Duara, "Provincial Narratives of the Nation: Centralism

and Federalism in Republican China," in Harumi Befu, ed., Cultural National-

ism in East Asia, 9-35 (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1994). See also

his Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

44. Edward Friedman sums up the political-cultural meaning of da Zhon-

yuan xintai cogently: "The People's Republic of China in the Mao era presented

Between Nationalism and Colonialism 275

itself as the heir of a Han people who had come together millennia earlier in the

north China plain of the Yellow River valley, built a great civilization, fought to

preserve it, and expanded over the centuries by civilizing barbarian invaders.

Mao's anti-imperialist revolution was the culmination of this Chinese national

history" ("Reconstructing China's National Identity: A Southern Alternative to

Mao-Era Anti-Imperialist Nationalism," Journal of Asian Studies 53 no. 1

[1994]: 67-91).

45. Wu Chufan, Wu Chufan zizhuan (Autobiography of Wu Chufan) (Hong

Kong: Weiqing shudian, 1956), 1:74-79.

46. See Guan, Zhongguo yingtan waishi, 214-16; and Wu, Wu Chufan,

1:78-80.

47. Yilin 51 (April 1939).

48. Yilin 53 (May 1939), my italics.

49. See Pickowicz, "Theme of Pollution"; and Friedman, "Reconstructing

Identity." For a study of Chinese Realism, see David Der-wei Wang, Fictional

Realism in Twentieth-Century China: Mao Dun, Lao She, Shen Congwen (New

York: Columbia University Press, 1992).

50. After an agreement between Zhou Enlai and Sir Archibald Clark-Kerr,

the British Ambassador to China, the office was founded in the winter of 1937.

Liao Chengzhi, son of the former Nationalist leader and martyr Liao Zhongkai,

headed the office until it closed in December 1941. With his extensive family and

political connections with the business elites in Hong Kong and overseas, he was

able to establish an account at the Sino-Belgium Bank to which overseas Chinese

could make direct contributions to the Communist army. For the Communist

activities, see the memoir of one activist, Liang Shangwan, in his Zhonggong zai

Xianggang (Chinese Communists in Hong Kong) (Hong Kong: Guangjiaojin

chubanshe, 1989).

51. For an example of this political ritual, see Yilin 58 (July 1939).

52. See Wenxian 1 (October 1938), H 5-6.

53. Dianying shenhuo (Hong Kong) 4 (April 1940); Yilin 67 (March 1940).

For discussions of popular stereotypes of Chinese and Hollywood stars, see

Pickowicz, "Theme of Pollution"; and Doherty, Projecting the War, 180-91.

54. See Rey Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading

between West and East (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990);

Lydia Liu, "Invention and Intervention: The Making of A Female Tradition in

Modern Chinese Literature," in Widmer and Wang, From May Fourth, 194-

220; and Elizabeth Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Femi-

nist Thought (Boston: Beacon, 1988).

55. For a study of the wartime literary appropriation of the female for

nationalist purposes, see Fu, Passivity, chap. 2.

56. For example, see Ye Ming, "Zhengqi ge" (Song of virtues), Huashang

bao, June 14, 1941.

57. Quoted in Doherty, Projecting the War, 132.

58. See Yilin 83 (October 1940).

59. The important postcolonial studies that have influenced much of my

thinking here are inspired by the Subaltern School and the works of Franz Fanon.

276

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

Recently, their problematic and argument have become ever more nuanced and

less totalizing as more scholars and theorists are contesting their relevance in

different national or regional contexts and working to prevent them from slipping

into a mere badge of academic privilege. For some fine examples, see Iain Cham-

bers and Lidia Curtia, eds., The Post-colonial Question: Common Skies and Di-

vided Horizons (London and Routledge, 1996); Partha Chatterjee, The Nation

and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Studies (Princeton: Princeton Uni-

versity Press, 1993); and Henry Louis Gates Jr., "Critical Fanonism," Critical

Inquiry 17 (spring 1991): 457-70.

60. See Guan, Zhongguo yingtan waishi, 216-17; and Wu, Wu Chufan,

1:50-62. See also Yu Mo-wen, "Xianggang dianying de aiguo zhuyi chuantong"

(The patriotic tradition in the Hong Kong cinema), in Law, Early Images, 53-68.

61. Lingxing (Macao) 8 no. 6 (1938).

62. An Ping and Lin Guangtong, Gang Jiu jianying (A sketch of Hong

Kong and Kowloon) (Hong Kong: Gangjiu wenhua chuban gongsi, 1949), 8.

63. See Xu Dishan, "Yinian lai de Xianggang jiaoyu ji qi zhanwang,"

(Hong Kong education in one year and its prospect), Wenyi 487 (January 1939)

and Yang Yanqi, "Xianggang bannian," both reprinted in Lu, Xianggang de

youyu, 133-42, 207-12.

64. See Endacott, Hong Kong Eclipse, 43-111; and Jan Morris, Hong

Kong (New York: Vintage, 1989), 265-92.

65. Tang Hai, Xianggang lunxian ji (The fall of Hong Kong) (Shanghai: Xin

shenhuo chubanshe, 1946).

66. Ibid., 1-6; Ye Dehui, Xianggang lunxian shi (A history of the occupa-

tion of Hong Kong) (Hong Kong: Guangjiaojin chubanshe, 1982), 1-18.

67. Wu, Wu Chufan, 1:65-73.

68. Bai, Yige nu yanyuan, 26-27.

69. Yilin 44 (December 1939).

70. Dianying shenhuo 10 (May 1940); Yilin 74 (May 1940); Yilin 75 (June

1940).

71. Yilin 58 (July 1939).

72. Zhao Shutai, "Jianshe jinbu dianying de renwu" (The responsibility to

create a progressive cinema), Huashang bao, August 1, 1941.

73. Wenxian (October 1938).

74. Guan, Zhongguo yingtan waishi, 137-39.

75. For discussions of these films and contexts of their production, see

Poshek Fu, "The Turbulent Sixties: Modernity, Youth Culture, and Cantonese

Films in Hong Kong," in Law Kar, ed., Fifty Years of Electric Shadows, 34-46

(Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1997); Law Kar, "H.K. Film Market and Trends in

the Eighties," in Law Kar, ed., Hong Kong Cinema in the Eighties, 70-77 (Hong

Kong: Urban Council 1991); Li Chuek-to, Postscript to A Study in Hong Kong

Films in the Seventies, 123-31 (Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1984); Luo, Shiji mo

chengshi, 8-75; Stephen Teo, "The Squint-Eyed Gaze," in Law, ed., The Chi-

nese Factor in Hong Kong Cinema, 86-94 (Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1990);

and Esther Yau, "Border Crossing: Mainland China's Presence in Hong Kong

Between Nationalism and Colonialism 277

Cinema," in Nick Browne et al., eds., New Chinese Cinemas: Forms, Identities,

Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 180-201.

76. See Wu, Wu Chufan, 2:1-50; and Poshek Fu, "Patriotism or Profit:

Hong Kong Cinema during the Second World War," in Law, Early Images, 69-

79.

77. See Yilin, 74 (May 1940).

78. Cheng Jihua, Zhongguo dianying fazhan shi; and Du, Zhongguo dian-

yin qishi nian.

79. Trinh Minh-ha, "Who Is Speaking: Of Nation, Community, and First

Person Interviews," in Laura Pietropado and Ada Testaferri, eds., Feminisms in

the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).



Chapter 9

Trials of the Taiwanese as Hanjian or

War Criminals and the Postwar Search

for Taiwanese Identity

Jiu-jung Lo

On August 15, 1945, Japan's surrender to the Allies marked the begin-

ning of the end of its fifty-year occupation of Taiwan.1 The initial eupho-

ria of a happy reunion with the motherland soon dissipated, however. In

just a little more than one year, widespread disillusionment with the

provincial government led to street violence, culminating in the "Febru-

ary 28 Incident" of 1947. This incident, in which government agents

opened fire on an old female vendor selling cigarettes on the street,

came as the result of a variety of economic, political, and social prob-

lems that faced Taiwanese society after the retrocession. Emerging from

this outbreak of hostilities between the Taiwanese and the mainland

Chinese was a collective consciousness that has continued to play a role

in the search for Taiwanese identity even to this day.

In the wake of the incident, the Resolution Committee, a voluntary

body set up by Taiwanese representatives to negotiate with the authori-

ties, put forty-two proposals to the Chen Yi provincial administration

then in control. Of these, Resolution 32 demanded the immediate re-

lease of all the so-called Taiwanese hanjian and war criminals under

custody.2 The fact that this proposal was put forward by a group not as

homogeneous as generally assumed indicated how strongly the Taiwan-

ese as a group must have felt about the matter.3 To a large extent, the

message contained therein reflected the strains already evident in the

postwar relationship between the two groups. Moreover, while Resolu-

tion 32 expressed popular discontent with the Nationalist government's

treatment of the Taiwanese, it highlighted the important question of

what it meant to be a Taiwanese against the background of shifting

279

280

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

political circumstances so characteristic of modern Chinese history.

Within a period of half a century, the Taiwanese had been put under the

political domination first of the Qing, then of the Japanese, and finally

of the Republic of China. Under the circumstances, the government's

policy of subjecting the Taiwanese to any form of loyalty test was per-

ceived as an attempt to impose a new identity on them.

If the February 28 Incident marked the beginning of a new collective

consciousness in the postwar period, it also signified a rejection of the

Chen Yi provincial administration as well as of the Chinese identity that

had just recently been resumed. In an attempt to assert their Taiwanese

identity, people resorted to cultural and political symbols that bore

the unmistakable stigma of Japanese colonialism. Thus, at the height of

the street violence many native Taiwanese signaled out their targets by

making them speak Japanese or sing the Japanese anthem as a way to

distinguish mainlanders from the Taiwanese. That the Taiwanese chose

Japanese as the code language to differentiate themselves from the non-

Taiwanese is highly significant. Since collectively the Taiwanese were

comprised of natives of Minnan, people of Hakka descent, the aborig-

ines, there was no common working language. However, most people

had some command of Japanese after half a century of colonial rule.

Accordingly, this linguistic "proficiency" became a convenient tool to

employ as the boundary between "us" and "them."4 One cannot fail to

notice the irony here: many Taiwanese forged a close bond under politi-

cal symbols smacking of Japanese colonial rule, an experience that was by

no means wholeheartedly embraced by all the Taiwanese throughout fifty

years of Japanese occupation.

This chapter deals with the problem of shifting Taiwanese identity

from the perspective of the postwar trial of Taiwanese as hanjian and/or

war criminals. It is assumed that formation of an identity involves con-

stant interaction between how one perceives oneself and how one is

perceived by others. Bringing the Taiwanese to justice against a histori-

cal background in which they maintained close ties with the Japanese is

therefore understood as one way in which the Chinese government and

people expressed their views of the Taiwanese. While that perception

was to some extent influenced by the self-image of the Taiwanese during

the war, it eventually gave birth to a group identity by which Taiwan

people cast themselves as victims of the Nationalist government.

The fact that since 1895 Taiwanese history has been entangled with

those of Japan and China makes it necessary to examine the evolution of

Trials of the Taiwanese 281

Taiwanese identity in a historical context. The next two sections deal

with the problems of the Taiwanese under Japanese occupation and how

they were caught in the war between China and Japan between 1931 and

1945. There follows an examination of the charges against the hanjian

and/or war criminals and related problems, including nationality, individ-

ual responsibility, and degree of involvement. The trials of the Taiwan-

ese from the perspective of government policy and its implementation

are then investigated. The purpose is to examine the government's atti-

tude toward the Taiwanese when the latter were denounced as either

hanjian or war criminals. Was the whole incident the result of a deliber-

ate intention on the part of the highest authorities to put the Taiwanese

down, as was widely assumed? What was the role of the judicial and

military/intelligence departments in the prosecution of the Taiwanese?

The final section explores how the Taiwanese attitude about hanjian

changed in a matter of a few months and highlights the impact of the

trials on the local population.

Taiwanese Identity: A Brief Historical Review

During half a century of colonial rule, Taiwanese interaction with the

Japanese can be divided into three modes: resistance, co-optation, and

assimilation. While the overall trend was moving from resistance toward

co-optation and assimilation, it would be misleading to conceive of these

changes as linear developmental phases. Rather, there was a lot of over-

lap involved in which one influence was accompanied by, or intermin-

gled with, another. The ambivalence built into the Taiwanese relation-

ship with the Japanese was also found in their search for Taiwanese

identity in the postwar political environment.

The Taiwan Republic, the first anti-Japanese political body, was

established following the cession of Taiwan to Japan on April 17, 1895.

Within a fortnight, the resistance began losing momentum after its

leader, President Tang Jingsong, the former Qing governor-general, re-

turned to China. When his successor, Liu Yongfu, took the same course

and fled Taiwan in October 1895, the movement was never to recover its

lost ground.5 Although sporadic resistance broke out in various parts of

the island between 1895 and 1910, most anti-Japanese activities did not

uphold pro-Qing nationalistic causes.

For descendants of the early Taiwanese immigrants, who had identi-

fied themselves as ethnic Han Chinese and fled the Manchu conquerors

282

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

in the mid-seventeenth century, the Manchus were just as "foreign" as

the Japanese. Emigration from Mainland China to Taiwan sped up in the

early eighteenth century when the Qing government eased its controls

on immigrants. The bulk of immigrants to Taiwan then came as Qing

subjects, a vague concept before the rise of modern Chinese nationalism

in late nineteenth century. Not until the mid-nineteenth century did the

Qing dynasty begin increasing its investment in the infrastructure of the

island. In 1885, Taiwan was made a province of China. The historically

strong anti-Qing feeling on the island gradually subsided.

The 1786 Lin Shuangwen Uprising has been identified as the water-

shed between two types of rebellious activities: one politically moti-

vated, and the other economically. The former often revolved around

secret societies such as the Tiandi Hui and Bagua Hui.6 Whether these

subversive moves suggested the germination of a national identity re-

mains doubtful. Although Ming loyalism, as exemplified in the legend of

Koxinga, was often regarded as the earliest form of Taiwanese national

identity, scholars in recent years have tended to regard such an identity

as a romantic projection that was later imposed on the legendary Taiwan-

ese rebellion against the Qing government. Presented as the ideal of

dynastic loyalty, Koxinga underwent a series of reinterpretations over

time to accommodate changes in the political climate.7 Maurice Meisner

in his study of Taiwanese nationalism came to the conclusion that on the

whole anti-Qing revolts were little more than "local peasant rebellions"

in terms of their "character and motivations."8 Awareness of provincial,

local, and clan identities was apparently stronger than that of national

identity.9

The 1915 revolt of the Xilai Temple marked the end of two decades

of violent resistance to the Japanese. With more and more Taiwanese

having vested interests in the colonial regime, resistance now gave way

to co-optation. Taiwanese people found that they could benefit from

Japanese bureaucratic efficiency and economic prosperity. Eventually,

in fact, even old pro-Qing literati, who initially had shown their con-

tempt for the new regime by going back to China, returned to Taiwan

and became Japanese nationals.10 Indeed, co-optation later became the

very strategy the social elite adopted in their fight for parliamentary

participation and democratic rights in the 1920s.

As early as 1915, similar motivations prompted some Taiwanese

intellectuals to support the Assimilation Society, which held the view

that the Taiwanese should be integrated into Japanese society on an

Trials of the Taiwanese 283

equal basis. However, in view of the staunch nationalist stand of its

sponsor, Count Itagaki Taisuke, this kind of Japanese advocacy for Tai-

wanese assimilation as equals has to be put within the context of pan-

Asianism versus Western imperialism through which Taiwan was to play

a role in contributing to the buildup of Japanese hegemony in East Asia.

The Japanese governor-general in Taiwan found the idea of assimilation

quite unacceptable. However, a leading member of Taiwanese gentry,

Lin Xiantang, in a meeting with Count Itagaki in 1913, embraced it with

great enthusiasm. The fact of the matter is that Taiwanese intellectuals

took it as an opportunity to promote the political rights and social equal-

ity of the Taiwanese.11 In 1918, the Enlightenment Society (Qifa She)

launched a campaign for the abolition of Special Law 63 in Tokyo.12

Meanwhile, the year 1920 saw the birth of the League for the Establish-

ment of the Taiwan Parliament. As it was, Taiwanese people in their

struggle for political autonomy had taken advantage of the tide of democ-

ratization that was sweeping over Japan in the 1920s.13

Although concepts such as democracy and self-autonomy had an

international appeal, echoing U.S. President Wilson's Fourteen Princi-

ples, in Japan they were upheld against the backdrop of rising Japanese

nationalist expansionism in Asia. Under these circumstances, Taiwanese

maneuvering inevitably deepened the ambivalence of their relationship

with the Japanese. As Taiwanese gentry and intellectuals tried to out-

maneuver colonial officials by allying themselves with Japanese liberals,

it became imperative that they operate within the Japanese cultural and

political framework. Engaged in the strategy of resistance through co-

optation, they chose to treat the Japanese not as a homogeneous entity

but as a people of diverse convictions and beliefs. While this perception

was true to a certain extent, they often tended to underestimate the

homogeneity of Japanese society as a whole, especially when it came to

the question of patriotism. By carefully choosing their allies, Taiwanese

intellectuals and members of the elite nevertheless managed to broaden

the scope of their identity spectrum. Much as they were dismayed by the

haughtiness of Japanese colonialists in Taiwan, they were deeply im-

pressed by the decency and open-mindedness of some of the Japanese

friends they made in Japan as well as Taiwan.14

As co-optation became the overriding strategy of survival under the

Japanese occupation, Taiwanese ties with Mainland China weakened.

Indeed, Liang Qichao's advice to his Taiwanese friends during his visit to

Taiwan in 1910 highlighted the Taiwanese literati's attitude toward

284 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

China and Japan. In his conversation with Lin Xiantang, Liang pre-

dicted that in at least thirty years China would no longer have the ability

to help liberate the Taiwanese from colonial rule. He suggested that his

Taiwanese friends adopt the Irish model by associating themselves with

political leaders in Japan to counterbalance Japanese colonialists in Tai-

wan. In other words, instead of seeking help from China, the Taiwanese

should place more emphasis on self-reliance and self-preservation.15

Whether under the influence of Liang Qichao or not, this was indeed the

strategy that Lin Xiantang and Taiwanese intellectuals adopted in push-

ing for the abolition of Special Law 63 and the establishment of the

Taiwanese Parliament in the next two decades.

These movements were active approximately at the same time as the

May Fourth movement in China. Although the latter had inspired a

small group of Taiwanese intellectuals through its nationalist cause and

its introduction of vernacular literature, the Taiwanese nationalist move-

ment followed a separate course. This does not mean that Taiwan had

cut all its ties with China. On the contrary, the subsequent outbreak of

war between Japan and China, as well as Japan's efforts to accelerate

assimilation and mobilize the Taiwanese in preparation for war against

China, further complicated the issue of Taiwan's identity vis-a-vis Japan

and China.

The Taiwanese at War (1937-45)

Taiwanese living in Mainland China during the war can be divided into

four groups. First, there were the Taiwan ronnins. The people of this

group had long been unpopular with the local Chinese because of their

notorious involvement in prostitution and the opium trade. Enjoying

certain privileges under the protection of Japanese extraterritoriality,

their presence in Amoy had always been considered part of the Japanese

conspiracy to wreak havoc.16 Once the war had broken out, they were

given an even freer hand to exploit the chaotic conditions, often in

exchange for insidious services they provided to the Japanese. Many

were involved in intelligence work in one way or the other.

Second, there were ordinary Taiwanese who for various reasons had

gone to settle in China. They were, generally speaking, law-abiding

people. While the ronnins congregated mainly in the coastal provinces

such as Fujian and Guangdong, people of this second group took up

residence in various parts of China, including Manchuria. Their wartime

Trials of the Taiwanese 285

experiences in China, however, were not entirely negative. In the end,

they came up with various ways to survive; some hid their Taiwan identity,

whereas others were integrated into the Chinese community through

intermarriage. To some extent, how they got along with the local Chinese

depended on their professions; it was, as a rule, easier for physicians and

professionals to win the goodwill of the local people.17

The third group of Taiwanese living in Mainland China were the

paramilitary conscripts. Beginning in April 1941, as part of the Patriotic

Mobilization Movement (Komin hoko undo), Taiwanese were drafted to

serve in the Japanese Army. They went to China and South Asia as

laborers, translators, prison guards, and so on. The majority of them

were low-ranking paramilitary servicemen not involved in active combat

duties.18s The nature of their jobs was such that it often brought them into

direct conflict with the Chinese. Take the function of translation, for

example. In theory, translators served as mere intermediaries between

the Japanese and the Chinese. However, if a certain job involved interro-

gation during which suspects were subjected to physical violence, it was

very difficult for Taiwanese translators to be absolved of complicity even

though they had just stood there watching. The fourth group consisted

mainly of anti-Japanese resistance fighters who came to China to work

with the goal of liberating Taiwan. Toward the end of the war, they

helped the Nationalist government make preparations for the retro-

cession of Taiwan and played important roles in immediate postwar Tai-

wanese politics. However, despite the fact that these resisters shared the

same anti-Japanese stand, this group was far from homogeneous. A

distinction had to be made between people who based Taiwan's libera-

tion on that of China and those who advocated it independent of China's

break with imperialism. Although people of the former group were en-

gaged in anti-Japanese campaigns in Mainland China, they were simulta-

neously involved in Chinese factional strife both within the Nationalist

camp and between the Communists and the Nationalists.19 As for the

latter group, apart from adhering to the Taiwanese identity, they adopted

other identities that reflected different ideologies and political affilia-

tions. Many joined the Chinese Communist Party.

As far as self-identification was concerned, the Taiwanese dual

identity-being both ethnic Han Chinese and Japanese nationals-had

provided them with a wide range of options. At the same time, the fact

that they could change their identities quite easily made them appear

suspicious not only in the eyes of the Japanese but also in those of the

286 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

Chinese, a dilemma for Taiwanese people on both sides of the Taiwan

Strait. In fact, from 1931 to 1945, a number of anti-Japanese resistance

and espionage conspiracies were uncovered in Taiwan. Whereas war with

China gave the colonial authorities a pretext to get rid of so-called unco-

operative elements, Japan's uncertainty about Taiwanese loyalty at large

sometimes led to large-scale persecutions based on false accusations or

with unsubstantiated evidence. This was especially the case when Japan's

defeat looked imminent toward the end of the war. In the case of Ruifang

anti-Japanese forces, Taiwanese were incriminated by the hundreds for

their alleged involvement in anti-Japanese resistance activities.20

These incidents, however, have to be put in a larger context. Com-

pared to the resistance of the first decade of Japanese rule, underground

sabotage during the war was sporadic and lacked strong anti-Japanese

implications. Many involved conflicts of either local or personal interests.

The fact of the matter was that dramatic changes in Taiwan after 1931 had

changed the relationship between the Taiwanese and Japanese. In 1931,

the Japanese colonial government adopted new measures to impose cul-

tural assimilation on the Taiwanese. Apart from loyalty drills, exempli-

fied into Shinto worship, the Taiwanese were encouraged to live like the

Japanese: adopting Japanese surnames, speaking Japanese, and wearing

Japanese-style clothing. The Taiwanese confronted these changes with

mixed feelings. Although many resented such forceful pressures to inte-

grate, they were at the same time benefiting from the expeditious eco-

nomic development prompted by new Japanese policies. Japan's war with

China not only provided a new impetus for Taiwan's industrialization, but

it forced Japan to revise its colonial trade policy, making the Taiwanese

economy more self-sufficient. As a result, except for the later period of

the war, the Taiwanese during the war enjoyed a relatively high standard

of living. The broadening of the educated population both created an

energetic work force and injected confidence into the hearts of the youn-

ger generation. It made it possible for the Taiwanese to interact with the

Japanese colonialists on a more equal footing.21

Japan loosened its political control over Taiwan after 1942, when it

began to mobilize Taiwanese resources and manpower for the Pacific

War. The colonial government gave permission for local elections to be

held at the city, district, and town levels. It also abolished the long-

standing policy of segregation in the elementary public schools. It

seemed that with its invasion of South Asia in full swing Japan finally

decided to treat the Taiwanese more as their equals than had been the

Trials of the Taiwanese 287

case previously. However, behind all these efforts to incorporate Taiwan-

ese people into the grand scheme of pan-Asianism were doubts about

their true allegiance in moments of crisis.

The Japanese took great pains to keep the Taiwanese isolated from

Mainland China. One way to achieve this was to project a bad image of

China such as that seen from the Japanese point of view. The China the

Taiwanese learned about in textbooks was a backward country that had

nothing to boast of except its "seniority, opium, and bound feet."22 It was

nonetheless an image many Taiwanese intellectuals tried to dismiss. For

some, China in fact had become an emotional as well as a physical shelter

from colonial oppression. A force of "push and pull" had a strong effect,

particularly on Taiwanese youth. At an impressionable age, many were

sensitive to inequality and found the social injustices Taiwanese suffered

under the Japanese provocative. This applied not just to ordinary Taiwan-

ese like Li Youbang and Wu Zhuoliu but to the rich and privileged like

Guo Xiuzong.23 If colonial rule was pushing some Taiwanese away, the

"pull" of China was often met with dubious feelings.

Other than in Amoy and Manchuria, where the Japanese main-

tained a strong presence, the Taiwanese in China often claimed to be

Fujianese or Cantonese. Even in Nanjing, where Wang Jingwei's col-

laborationist government was situated, the Taiwanese were advised not

to reveal their true identity. Neither the Chongqing authorities nor the

Wang Jingwei collaborationist government seemed to have enough confi-

dence in the Taiwanese, which added to their insecurity.24 Disguised

identity was therefore a strategy for survival.

The apprehension of the Chinese, however, was not entirely un-

founded. Because of their historical connections with China, in wartime

the Japanese found the Taiwanese ideal candidates for information gath-

ering and other intelligence duties. In August 1939, the Nationalist gov-

ernment's intelligence agency received word that the Japanese were

planning to step up the influx of Taiwanese to Fujian and Guangdong

Provinces to consolidate Japanese control in the region.25 Nowhere was

this problem more acutely felt than in Amoy, where a large community

of Taiwanese seemed to be posing serious threats to national security.

The Chinese authorities' attitude toward these Taiwanese can only

be described as dubious. On the one hand, they did not want to treat the

Taiwanese too harshly, acknowledging the fact that the majority of them

were of Chinese ethnic descent. On the other hand, they were wary of

the potential danger some unruly Taiwanese posed to national security,

288

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

especially as China was now at war with Japan. The Fujian provincial

government, under the leadership of Chen Yi, rounded up all Taiwanese

living in the hinterland and sent them to the Chongan Plantation Farm.

Of the 432 Taiwanese of Japanese nationality who went there, 38 were

released on the grounds of old age and frailty.26 In mid-February 1940,

with the permission of the Nationalist government, Li Youbang, leader

of the former Taiwan Independent Revolutionary Party, took these Tai-

wanese, many with professional backgrounds, to Jinhua in Zhejiang

Province. Such was the origin of Taiwan Volunteers (Taiwan yiyong

dui).27 By making visible contributions to the war effort, the group was

created mainly in an attempt to dispel widespread prejudice and hostility

among the Chinese. Whether they did it voluntarily or not is another

matter.28

Taiwanese people's personal safety could have been endangered

because of this deep mistrust.29 Qiu Niantai, a high-ranking Taiwanese

official in the Nationalist Party, was a witness to the vulnerability of the

Taiwanese in wartime China. In late October 1938, as leader of the East

Region Service Corps - a militia group set up to mobilize the youth in

the Hakka region in Guangdong Province after the fall of Guangzhou-

he came across five Taiwanese adolescents who had been sentenced to

death on charges of spying for the Japanese. They claimed that, fleeing

Taiwan, they had been on their way to Chongqing to join the resistance.

Because the incriminating evidence was flimsy and Qiu was a family

friend of one of the group members, he pleaded on their behalf. The

death penalty was dropped.30

If the government's treatment of the Taiwanese in China incurred

resentment, it was rarely made public during wartime, partly owing to

the awkward position of the Taiwanese in straddling two warring states.

In contrast, things began to change after Taiwan's retrocession in 1945.

From then on, the government's handling of problems related to Taiwan

had a direct impact on how well the Taiwanese accepted their newly

acquired Chinese identity. How to incorporate political and legal identi-

ties into a cultural identity was the challenge the Nationalist government

had to face after the Japanese surrender.

Hanjian or War Criminals: Taiwanese on Trial?

In putting Taiwanese on trial, the major point to be clarified concerned

their identity: were they Japanese or Chinese at the time they committed

Trials of the Taiwanese 289

the crime of which they were being charged as hanjian? A semantic

understanding of the word hanjian consisting of the two characters han

and jian seemed to suggest that as an offense of treason it only applied to

Chinese nationals. This was in fact the impression many people, includ-

ing the famous lawyer Li Yichen, held when they used the word hanjian.

Li argued that its applicability to the Taiwanese depended on whether

the person in question was a member of the Republic of China (Zhong-

hua minguo ren). As it was, there was a lot of confusion concerning the

charges for which the Taiwanese were brought to trial.31

The "Regulations for the Punishment of Hanjian," which provided

the legal foundation for the trials, set no restrictions with regard to the

nationality of hanjian. To illustrate, it defined hanjian as a person who

"collaborates with the enemy state" and exploits his or her connections

with the enemy to "benefit the enemy or violate the interests of the

native country or its people."32 As there was no mention of the national-

ity of hanjian, this left some room for debate. In March 1946, the Com-

mittee for Unified Interpretation of Rules and Regulations of the Judi-

cial Ministry issued interpretation 3,078 to dispel doubts about Taiwan-

ese' legal status and its applicability to the charge of hanjian. First, it

established hanjian as a criminal charge for all individuals, not just those

of Chinese nationality. Accordingly, one Lithuanian, one Hungarian,

one Russian, one French, and two Portuguese were found among the

hanjian tried and sentenced by the Shanghai High Court.33 Second, it

maintained that Taiwanese were not just any foreign nationals; rather,

they were "nationals of the enemy state." Since the Taiwanese' status as

Japanese nationals was a fact established before the war, "they should be

subject to the rules of international law, not to the Regulations for the

Punishment of Hanjian."34

By using nationality as the criterion with which to decide on what

charges Taiwanese should be brought to trial, interpretation 3078 compli-

cated the issue even further. It in fact sent out contradictory messages:

Taiwanese could be tried both as hanjian and not as hanjian. If the hanjian

charge was not contingent upon nationality, then Taiwanese could be

prosecuted on the hanjian charge irrespective of their Japanese national-

ity. At the same time, interpretation 3,078 subscribed to the view that

Taiwanese, as "nationals of the enemy state," should be punished if found

guilty as war criminals and not as hanjian.

The ways in which Taiwanese became Japanese nationals made the

applicability of this criterion highly problematic. After the secession of

290

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

Taiwan to Japan in April 1895, Taiwanese were given two years to decide

whether they would return to Mainland China or stay on the island and

become Japanese subjects. The majority of the population stayed and

acquired Japanese nationality automatically after a two-year morato-

rium period. For Taiwanese, becoming a Japanese national in 1897 was

therefore not a choice to embrace Japan as a naturalized citizen; the

adoption was forced upon them. Most people simply acquiesced to politi-

cal realities over which they had little or no control.

Apart from the political situations under which the Taiwanese ac-

quired their Japanese nationality, consideration should also be given to

the fluid nature of their nationality, especially when the two countries

with which they were closely related were at war. Conflicts between

China and Japan in the 1930s and 1940s highlighted the ambiguity of

Taiwanese identity in that the people were partly Chinese and partly

Japanese. Whereas their Chinese identity was embedded in ethnic and

cultural ties inherited from their ancestors, their Japanese identity was

the corollary of the change in Taiwan's political status some four decades

earlier.

Even though assuming Chinese identity was a common practice for

many Taiwanese living in wartime China, it became a problem in the

postwar trials. It raised questions as to the standard and identity under

which the Taiwanese could be brought to trial. The verdict of case 131 of

the Hebei High Court ruled that Taiwanese who had posed as Chinese

nationals and worked for the collaborationist government during war-

time should be tried as hanjian, the reason being that the crime in

question had been perpetrated under that assumed identity. Li Yichen, a

lawyer who defended the Taiwanese in the courts, contested this judg-

ment on the grounds that, as a legal concept, nationality was not a

matter of subjective assumption. The law could not recognize a person's

nationality simply on the basis of his or her claims.35 A similar case

involved a native Fujianese who had joined the collaborationist govern-

ment under a false Taiwanese identity.36 Was he to be tried as a Taiwan-

ese or a Chinese?

The first court case in which a Taiwanese stood trial as a hanjian was

heard in the Hubei High Court. Defendant Zhuang Sichuan, who

worked for an official newspaper in Wuhan, was found not guilty. The

judge reasoned that as a Japanese national he was obliged to obey orders

and should not be held responsible for actions taken accordingly.37 Al-

though Zhuang Sichuan was acquitted because of his Japanese national-

Trials of the Taiwanese 291

ity, other Taiwanese were less lucky. Recognition of Taiwanese' Japanese

nationality could have led to an entirely different scenario in which they

were condemned not as hanjian but as war criminals.

In the "Regulations for the Punishment of War Criminals," promul-

gated on December 24, 1946, articles 2 and 3 defined war criminal in

terms of the actual conduct of both military and nonmilitary personnel.38

Article 6 confirmed the culpability of the Taiwanese for war crimes

despite their Chinese nationality, which had been resumed on October

25, 1945.39 The point was made quite clear in interpretation 3,313, which

had been issued by the Committee for the Unified Interpretation of

Rules and Regulations on December 7, 1946. As the committee saw it,

Taiwanese who had been drafted to serve in various capacities in the

Japanese or collaborationist regime and whose wartime conduct had

violated international law should be tried as war criminals.40 If the law

stated that the Taiwanese were culpable for crimes committed under

Japanese occupation, what did this mean for the Taiwanese people? Was

a war criminal charge the only alternative to that of hanjian?

There were two dimensions to the government's decision to put so

many Taiwanese on trial as war criminals: international and national. As

a member state in the Allied camp, China's prosecution of war criminals

constituted part of the postwar international effort to restore law and

order. As such, it could not be separated from the legal action taken by

the International Military Tribunal in the Far East against war crimes.

According to the resolutions of the thirty-sixth meeting of the War

Crime Investigation Committee of the International Military Tribunal at

Tokyo, the Taiwanese were punishable if they had violated the law while

serving in the Japanese Army. In other words, they were put on the same

footing as Japanese soldiers who had committed offenses in war, and no

allowance was made for them because of their special status. In Taiwan,

the Allies' investigation of war crimes focused on the Japanese soldiers'

ill treatment of Allied prisoners of war. Those suspected of wrongdoing

were arrested by the Americans and sent to Taiwan to be tried by the

British and American authorities. Of the defendants put on trial, eight

were Taiwanese.41 Cases that had nothing to do with Western prisoners

of war were handled by the tribunal of the Taiwan Garrison Command.

For the Taiwanese, the charge of being a war criminal was perhaps

even more unpalatable than that of a hanjian. Although they could not

argue with the American and British authorities, they resented similar

actions taken by the Nationalist government in China. The charge, as it

292

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

appeared to them, failed to take into account the historically rooted

ambivalence of Taiwanese nationality by denying them their Chinese

identity, on the one hand, and ignoring their bittersweet relationship

with Japanese colonialists on the other.

In addition to nationality, bringing the Taiwanese to justice on

charges of war crimes involved two problems that had no easy solutions:

(1) the volition of the Taiwanese in participating in the war and (2) the

degree of Taiwanese involvement in the war itself. There were two

divergent views as to whether Taiwanese should be tried as war crimi-

nals. The first emphasized the fact that Taiwanese under Japanese occu-

pation were passive agents caught in the political and military fighting

between China and Japan. The underlying assumption was that half a

century of colonization had deprived the Taiwanese of the right and

ability to be their own masters. As a result, Taiwanese who had served as

laborers, translators, spies, and guards in the Japanese Army should not

have to take individual responsibility for what they did in the war; they

were as much the victims of Japanese militarism as were the Chinese.42 It

was repeatedly pointed out that with few exceptions most Taiwanese

conscripts serving in China had played very insignificant roles. A strong

opponent of the government's bringing the Taiwanese to trial on either

hanjian or war criminal charges, Qiu Niantai argued that given Taiwan-

ese's low ranking in the hierarchy of the Japanese civilian and military

services, as well as its great distance from the decision-making center,

they were hardly in a position to commit any atrocity that merited the

label war criminal.43 While there is some truth in these arguments, the

question was how well they would hold up in the trials of war criminals

by the international tribunal.

The second view adopted a primarily humanist approach to the

problem such as that exemplified in the Nuremberg trials. Article 6 of

the "Charter Provisions of the Nuremberg Judgment" classified war

crimes for which individuals or "members of organizations" were punish-

able under the jurisdiction of the Military Tribunal under the following

headings: (1) Crimes against Peace, (2) War Crimes, and (3) Crimes

against Humanity. Any person who had committed crimes falling into

one of these categories was to be indicted. It is noteworthy that "Crimes

against Humanity" included acts committed against "any civilian popula-

tion" even before the war. Article 6 defined war crimes in such a way

that it held that "leaders, organizers, instigators and accomplices partici-

pating in the formulation or execution of a common plan or conspiracy

Trials of the Taiwanese 293

to commit any of the foregoing crimes are responsible for all acts per-

formed by any persons in execution of such plan."44 The judgment,

therefore, did not take for granted the correlation between ranks and

responsibility so far as war crimes charges were concerned.45 Moreover,

international law put more emphasis on the action actually taken rather

than the status of the agents in question.

In reality, the responsibility of war criminals in relation to rank is a

much more complex issue despite these classifications. It is notable that

A-class war criminals tried and sentenced by the Tokyo International

Military Tribunal were greatly outnumbered by those under the B and C

classifications. In addition to postwar U.S. strategic considerations, this

phenomenon can be partly explained by the fact that people in the latter

two groups had a greater chance of exposure to the enemy than those

in the first. Apart from a few prominent leading figures in various war

theaters, people in the last two categories as a rule had more personal

contact with the prisoners of war, often on unpleasant terms, and this left

an indelible impression on the victims. As it was, a low-ranking prison

guard or a junior police officer was more likely to incur hostility from

those under his charge than people who gave orders behind the scenes.

As people tried to redress the wrongs they had suffered under the Japa-

nese, it was more likely that they would direct their anger toward the

subordinates than their superiors and more toward the collaborationists

with whom they could communicate than toward the Japanese they knew

little or nothing about.

The postwar prosecution of Japanese war criminals by countries

such as the United States and Great Britain also showed that personal

contact had a direct impact on indictments. Many low-ranking Japanese

soldiers were punished for their personal involvement with the adminis-

tration of prisons in Southeast Asia. Of the 173 Taiwanese prosecuted,

26 received death sentences. Four of these were sentenced by the Ameri-

can tribunal, 26 by the British, 95 by the Australian, 7 by the Dutch, and

41 by the Chinese. The high percentage of British and Australian trials

was obviously correlated with the number of their citizens who had been

captured in Southeast Asia.46 Although judges may have taken into

consideration the ranks, positions, and responsibilities of the defen-

dants, it was not always easy to strike a balance between justice and

personal feelings. Seen in this light, although the argument that the

Taiwanese, as subjects of the Japanese colonial empire, had limited

choices was true to some degree, the Nationalist government showed

294

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

great reluctance to grant them full pardons. This was partly due to the

fact that there was an international dimension and partly for fear of

offending the Chinese population.

If neither volition nor a lower rank fully excused a misdemeanor in

war, as the International Military Tribunal at Tokyo showed, was it

justifiable that the Taiwanese should expect full pardons because of their

special status under Japanese colonial rule? For those Chinese who in-

sisted on bringing Taiwanese to justice, it did not matter whether they

were indicted on the charge of hanjian or war criminal. The Chinese saw

the Taiwanese as a group that had enjoyed the best of two worlds in the

protracted war between China and Japan. With this in mind, they would

have asked why collaborationists in France and Norway had been pun-

ished and yet Taiwanese had been allowed to go free. If the marginali-

zation of the Taiwanese in both Chinese and Japanese societies was the

main reason for this public fury, it also explained why the majority

of Taiwanese thought they were not answerable to either of the two

charges. However, the fact that they did stand trial as citizens of the

Republic of China meant that the national, rather than international,

implications of the trials had come to the forefront as the predominant

concerns of the government.

Government Policy on the Trials of the Taiwanese

The postwar government policy toward the Taiwanese was fraught with

contradictions and characterized by indecisiveness. This had much to do

with the overall political situation in postwar China; fierce fighting for

power among the collaborationists, Nationalists, and Communists had

been going on since 1940-41. Japan's defeat narrowed the contest to one

between the latter two parties. The trials of collaborationists was in one

sense an assertion of the political legitimacy of the Nationalist govern-

ment, even though the expediency and ambivalence surrounding war-

time collaboration hardly made it a fit subject for a government demon-

stration of its capacity to administer justice.

In the process of debating whether the Taiwanese should be tried as

hanjian or war criminals, the right of interpretation was of vital impor-

tance. It determined not just how these individuals were to stand trial but

also whether they should be tried and punished at all. A war was going on

among several government agencies and interest groups, including the

judiciary, the military, the intelligence services, and the Taiwanese. This

Trials of the Taiwanese 295

gave rise to a plethora of contradictory messages, which infuriated both

the Chinese and the Taiwanese. While the government's inability to act

promptly and settle the dispute was caused by the complexity of the

problem, it was also an indication of the administration's incompetence

and increasing loss of control.

Upon the Japanese surrender, "Measures on the Management of the

Taiwanese" (Taiwanren guanli banfa), promulgated by the Army's gen-

eral headquarters, provided the legal basis for the handling of the Tai-

wanese. Apart from having them rounded up and kept in custody by

local governments, it stipulated that those who had committed wrongdo-

ings during wartime should be sent to a nearby High Court for further

investigation and prosecution.47 On December 25, 1945, the Nationalist

government enacted the "Regulations for the Punishment of Hanjian"

(Hanjian shenpan tiaoli). At this early stage, both in China and in

Taiwan, it was assumed that the regulations promulgated for the punish-

ment of Chinese hanjian applied to the Taiwanese as well. As it was,

when the Taiwan Garrison Command issued an order in January 1946 to

round up all hanjian on the island, there was no attempt to draw a

distinction between the Taiwanese and the Chinese.48 The same applied

to Amoy, which had a large Taiwanese population.

In the beginning, the trials of the hanjian were dominated by a

strong military presence. This was largely due to the fact that military

and intelligence personnel were among the first to return to formerly

occupied territory. They accordingly took responsibility for restoring law

and order in the area. For instance, upon recovering Shaoguan in Fujian

Province in early September 1945, the military authorities immediately

ordered that the city gate be closed for three consecutive days, during

which period they rounded up more than two hundred hanjian suspects.

With the help of the local police, these people were sent to the Fuzhou

Garrison Command to be court-martialed.49 In a similar vein, in the

wake of Fuzhou's recovery, its Garrison Command assumed full respon-

sibility for the prosecution of all hanjian, military as well as civilian.50

Even later, when other government agencies became involved in the

trials of hanjian, the military constituted a major force that was not to be

taken lightly.

In Amoy, a committee composed of representatives of the govern-

ment, the party, the police department, intelligence, the military, and the

judicial branches was set up in early October to investigate the crimes and

atrocities perpetrated by the Japanese as well as collaborationists.51 All

296

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

cases, once established, were forwarded to the prosecution office of the

Fujian First Division High Court for processing. Such was the mission

assigned to the Jin-Xia Committee for the Handling of Hanjian (Jinxia

hanjian chuli weiyuanhui). However, despite the original proposal to

involve all parties concerned in the preliminary investigation work, the

Bureau of Investigation and Statistics of the Military Affairs Committee,

led by Dai Li, appears to have played a dominant role in the identifica-

tion and arrest of hanjian in Jinmen and Amoy. Because 125 out of the

226 hanjian suspects arrested were Taiwanese, the committee felt it had a

stake in the question of whether or not Taiwanese should stand trial as

hanjian or war criminals.52

A tug of war soon developed between the committee and the prose-

cution office of the Fujian First Division High Court. Between April and

May 1946, the media began to raise questions about the court's long

delay in bringing hanjian suspects to trial. In mid-May, members of the

provisional City Assembly also passed resolutions permitting them to

conduct investigations into the handling of hanjian and their property. 53

Chief prosecutor Zhang Shenwei was under tremendous pressure. To-

ward the end of May, he received an intimidation letter signed by the

Amoy Action Troops for the Extermination of Traitors and Corruption

(Xiamen chujian xingdong budui), which threatened to take his life if

justice were not properly done. Zhang, on his part, dropped hints in an

interview with journalists that the government had revised its policy

toward the Taiwanese hanjian even though he refrained from revealing

any details.54

Following instructions from high authorities and acting upon its own

understanding of interpretation 3,078, the prosecution office decided

that the Taiwanese should not be tried as hanjian. Before it released

the Taiwanese suspects on that account, however, it proposed releasing the

ninety-six Taiwanese and putting them once again at the disposal of

the Jin-Xia Committee for the Handling of Hanjian. Rejecting this ges-

ture of courtesy, the committee nevertheless contested the prosecution

office's reading of interpretation 3,078 that Taiwanese could not be tried

as hanjian. Mao Renfeng, deputy chief of the Bureau of Military Investi-

gation and Statistics, argued in a letter to the prosecution office that

despite their Japanese nationality Taiwanese should nevertheless stand

trial on hanjian charges as long as their participation in the war could not

be proven involuntary and their actions had indeed violated articles listed

in the "Regulations for the Punishment of Hanjian."55

Trials of the Taiwanese 297

The fact that the administration of justice had been heavily influ-

enced by the military was further corroborated by the following inci-

dent. When the prosecution office withdrew its charge against Chen Jie,

who had been accused of collaboration with the Japanese, the Jin-Xia

Committee for the Handling of Traitors protested and demanded a hear-

ing to review the whole case. The prosecution office acquiesced, and the

case was submitted to higher authorities for arbitration.56

On the other hand, the judiciary did not succumb entirely to the

mounting pressure coming from the committee as well as the general

public. Facing strong criticism and accusations of foul play from more

than one party, the prosecution office adopted a lenient approach toward

suspected hanjian in general and Taiwanese suspects in particular. As of

June 20, it had released dozens of Taiwanese hanjian suspects on bail.

According to the chief prosecutor, Zhang Shenwei, the fact that the

Taiwanese held Japanese nationality before the retrocession meant that

they were not answerable to the hanjian charge.57 The Bureau of Military

Investigation and Statistics disagreed. It went to the highest authorities

for clarification as to whether the Fujian First Division High Court had

the right to let Taiwanese hanjian suspects go unpunished. It also

asked Yang Lianggong, the Control Yuan's high commissioner for Fujian

and Taiwan, to conduct an investigation into the matter.58 In the mean-

time, many suspects out on bail took flight and returned to Taiwan. In

February 1947, the Control Yuan found Zhang Shenwei guilty of abusing

his power, but Zhang stayed in office. In April, he was transferred to the

Jiangsu Fourth Division High Court in Huaian, where he continued to

serve as chief prosecutor.59

The Bureau of Military Investigation and Statistics was not the only

intelligence agency that tried to interfere with the judicial branch's han-

dling of the Taiwanese hanjian problem. The Bureau of Central Investi-

gation and Statistics, the intelligence agency of the Nationalist Party,

also expressed deep concern about the government's decision that Tai-

wanese could only be tried as war criminals. Yet the judicial department

was adamant. In March 5, 1947, the Fujian High Court issued Decree

64, citing a government order of October 24, 1946, to the effect that all

Taiwanese suspected of war crimes were to be tried by tribunals under

the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Defense.60 This was less than a week

after the February 28 Incident engulfed Taiwan.

The struggle between the judiciary and the military/intelligence

forces centered on the question of whether Taiwanese should be held

298 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

responsible for what they did during the war. Unlike the judicial depart-

ment, the military/intelligence branches were hardly concerned about

technical questions such as nationality and what it meant to the Taiwan-

ese. For them, it was less a problem of whether Taiwanese should be put

on trial than whether they should be allowed to go unpunished. Conse-

quently, they insisted that justice be done irrespective of Taiwanese legal

status at the time the action in question was perpetrated.61

As government policy wavered between the judicial and the mili-

tary/intelligence groups, the Taiwanese tried to have their voices heard.

After the Japanese surrender, many Taiwanese in China took on a low

profile and accepted what came their way. In Taiwan, the majority of the

population, having been isolated from China for such a long time, went

through a quick change from euphoria to disappointment. At the sugges-

tion of Qiu Niantai, the Taiwanese in China made generous donations to

various government and military agencies in an attempt to win goodwill

and leniency. On August 29 1945, fifteen Taiwanese gentry, including

Lin Xiantang, made a trip to Nanjing and other places in China to pay

homage to Jiang Jieshi and the central government.62 In their interview

with High Court Judge Zheng Lie, they brought up the issue of the

Taiwanese being tried as hanjian.63 Ironically, it was in Shanghai that

they learned of the arrest of Yang Zhaojia, who had been charged with

war crimes. Yang, a Taiwanese member of the gentry who was known to

all members of the group, had earlier been a political activist promoting

the cause of Taiwanese self-government under Japanese rule.64 Although

Yang Zhaojia was released in less than a month and the accusation

proved groundless, the vulnerability of the Taiwanese was obvious.

Even if the Taiwanese voice was slight in the dispute between the

judiciary and the military/intelligence branches, the authorities neverthe-

less had a chance to become acquainted with the Taiwanese perspective.

One of the sources of information came from Qiu Niantai, a so-called half

mainlander (banshan) who had taken upon himself the task of bridging

the gap between the authorities and the Taiwanese. Immediately after the

Japanese surrender, Qiu, the leader of the Guangdong Eastern Task

Force, took some of his followers to Guangzhou. At that time, there were

approximately 20,000 Taiwanese in Guangzhou. Among them, 1,300 sol-

diers and 300 nurses on combat duty were handed over to the Guangdong

military authorities. The Second Field Army set up a Taiwanese camp and

put them on a two-month training program with Qiu Niantai serving as its

consultant. Facing the accusation of collaboration with the enemy, many

Trials of the Taiwanese 299

of the Taiwanese in custody were overwhelmed by depression; some at-

tempted suicide. Apart from lending a helping hand to the Taiwanese in

Guangzhou, Qiu did his best to brief the provincial government and

military authorities about Taiwan's conditions under Japanese occupa-

tion. Moreover, at his suggestion Taiwanese made voluntary donations to

the military, the police, and the provincial and city governments as a

gesture of allegiance to the government. These moves helped ease ten-

sions between the Taiwanese and the local community, hence alleviating

some of the hardship of the former.

Qiu Niantai tackled the problem of Taiwanese being treated as

hanjian from a different angle. First, he applied the logic with which

most Chinese were familiar to the Taiwanese issue. He drew a distinc-

tion between "big" and "small" hanjian. He argued that ordinary Taiwan-

ese were not capable of heinous crimes against the interests of China and

its people. The "real" hanjian, according to him, worked behind the

scenes and remained unknown to the public. Although he did not cate-

gorically reject the category of the Taiwanese hanjian, he strongly criti-

cized the government's handling of the Taiwanese issue. In his audience

with Jiang Jieshi and his ministers at Chongqing, he argued that the

Taiwanese should not be punished on either hanjian or war criminal

charges due to their Japanese nationality. He conceded that some war-

time behavior was indeed deplorable and hard to forgive, especially in

view of Taiwanese Chinese ethnicity. Still, a distinction had to be made

between moral and legal justice. What the Taiwanese needed, he said,

was legal rather than moral leniency. That was why, eager as he was

pleading for the Taiwanese, he refrained from calling for an indiscrimi-

nate pardon for all of the Taiwanese because of their Japanese national-

ity. While he objected to bringing Taiwanese to justice on charges of

being either hanjian or of war criminals, he thought they deserved moral

condemnation. The leadership in Chongqing and Guangzhou, according

to Qiu Niantai, listened to his appeal with "great understanding and

sympathy."65

Qiu was one of only a few Taiwanese who had access to and enjoyed

the confidence of the authorities on both the central and local levels.

Even so, he found the incongruity between theory and practice disheart-

ening. In spite of his repeated warnings against alienating the Taiwan-

ese, there was little he could do to have that "understanding and sympa-

thy" translated into concrete action to relieve the Taiwanese of their

plight. His audience with Jiang Jieshi and the government authorities in

300

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

Chongqing took place as early as November 1945. Upon his arrival in

Taiwan in early March 1946, he went to see Chen Yi and published

articles in Xinsheng bao pleading on behalf of the dozen Taiwanese

gentry prosecuted on war criminal charges. Qiu believed that his argu-

ment and personal appeal affected the government's attitude toward the

Taiwanese. For instance, the Taiwan Garrison Command, according to

him, stopped arresting Taiwanese after his audience with Chen Yi. Also,

some of the gentry were released in a few months.66

Beginning in early 1946, there was a shift in government policy to-

ward the Taiwanese, even though from April to June the dispute over

whether the Taiwanese should stand trial as hanjian or war criminals went

on unabated in Fujian Province. One gets the impression that the govern-

ment, wavering between the judiciary and the military/intelligence

branches, could not decide which side to take. One could reason, how-

ever, that the chief prosecutor of the Fujian First Division High Court,

Zhang Shenwei, could hardly demonstrate his generosity by releasing a

large number of Taiwanese on bail without the tacit approval of the higher

authorities. The fact that he was spared demotion despite the official

condemnation of the Control Yuan indicated that his decision did not go

unsupported. All of this seems to suggest that the government was caught

in a dilemma, for it neither wanted to alienate the Taiwanese, who ex-

pected leniency, nor wished to offend the Chinese, who demanded

revenge.

Part of this indecisiveness was attributable to the lack of a strong

central government as well as the personal politics that had been going

on since the early Republican years. Again, Qiu Niantai's experience

provides a glimpse into the matter. In the wake of the Japanese surren-

der, the jurisdiction of the Taiwanese in Guangzhou had been a cause of

factional strife, as they were approached by different agencies for vari-

ous reasons. As Qiu Niantai revealed, personal relations were vital in

getting things done. He believed his not being on good terms with the

Guangdong provincial government was the main reason why all his de-

mands made on behalf of the Taiwanese were stalled. As it was, the

provincial governor, Luo Zhuoying, declined the million-dollar dona-

tions made by the Taiwanese in Guangdong for refugee relief. Even

within the military circle, there was no consensus as to how to deal with

the Taiwanese issue. Although donations and arguments had won the

Taiwanese people the goodwill of General Zhang Fakui, commander of

the Second Front Army, leaders of the New First Army apparently did

Trials of the Taiwanese 301

not share his views. The plight of the Taiwanese was further exacerbated

by widespread corruption and embezzlement among government offi-

cials and intelligence agents.67

Under these circumstances, confusion about Taiwanese people's sta-

tus related to the trials lingered. In Taiwan, the provincial government

stopped prosecuting the Taiwanese as hanjian even though charges of

war crimes continued to be brought against them. In China, as late as

Autumn 1946 there were still some Taiwanese war criminals serving

prison sentences in Nanjing.68 In November 1946, the central govern-

ment issued an order to the provincial governments banning the indict-

ment of any Taiwanese as a hanjian. However, they were still amenable

to prosecution on war criminal charges should their wartime conduct

prove to have been inappropriate.

This raised questions about what the government's policy toward

the Taiwanese was in relation to hanjian and war criminals and whether

there was a discrepancy between government policy on the highest level

and its implementation on the bureaucratic level. From materials now

available and taking into consideration the shifting character of the Tai-

wanese legal status before, during, and after the Second Sino-Japanese

War, it seems that there was no overall policy toward either the Taiwan-

ese hanjian or war criminals. Even with the help of those Taiwanese who

had maintained various relationships with the Nationalist government,

few people foresaw the entanglements that later arose. The military/

intelligence branches' "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth" approach was

oriented toward protecting Chinese national interests as well their own.

However, as the formulation of government policy needed to be based

on wider considerations, the incongruity resulting from these struggles

for the right of interpretation had undermined the government's credibil-

ity in the eyes of the Taiwanese population.

Changes in the Taiwanese Attitude toward Hanjian

At first, few seemed to question the legitimacy of the Taiwanese being

put on trial as hanjian. This is found to be true not just in the ambigu-

ous interpretation given by the Judicial Ministry, mentioned earlier, but

in contemporary public opinion. The public tended to see the Taiwan-

ese as Chinese who had exploited their privileged status, that is, their

Japanese nationality, to work against the national interests of China and

its people. This sentiment took the strongest form in places where the

302

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

Taiwanese presence had led to a conflict of interest between the Taiwan-

ese and the locals, such as in Amoy. Even in Taiwan, where no similar

conflict of interest existed, the general public did not seem to have

serious objections to the government's bringing the so-called hanjian to

justice.

In Taiwan, the first cry to bring the hanjian to justice came from the

Taiwanese themselves. The term hanjian was defined in a broad sense as

someone who had made usurious gains by conspiring with the Japanese.

Antagonism against this group ran high in the wake of the Japanese

surrender, and posters were found on Taipei streets calling for justice.

Under attack were the so-called imperial running gentry (yuyong shen-

shi); one poster on the Da Qiaotou listed the names of eight Taiwan

members of the gentry who, according to the Traitor Extermination

Corps, as the organization called itself, were guilty of "making improper

profits during wartime."69 Other posters were less strident, but they also

demanded that these men "stand down." Hostility toward those Taiwan-

ese who had secured special privileges by ingratiating themselves with the

Japanese spread throughout the island.70 The imperial running gentry,

however, was by no means the only target of public resentment during

this period. Also under fire were those Taiwanese who had prospered

through dubious connections with the Japanese both in Taiwan and in

other parts of China.

A Mingbao editorial entitled "Punishing War Profiteers" (Decem-

ber 10, 1945) divided war profiteers into three categories: (1) those who

had used their Japanese connections to make a fortune at the expense of

their fellow Taiwanese; (2) those who were taking advantage of the

postwar power vacuum to conduct illicit trading in Japanese military

provisions, which were supposed to be kept intact until handed over to

the Chinese authorities; and (3) those who had taken advantage of their

special status as Japanese subjects to exploit and harass local people in

occupied territories in China or South Asia.71

The editorial singled out war profiteers as the enemies of the Taiwan-

ese people, who were said to have had a hard time under Japanese

occupation. They deserved "heavy and just punishment," which, accord-

ing to the paper, was not just "the kind of action state power should

take" but also represented "the unanimous demand of the people."

Moreover, echoing a recent news report that the investigation of sus-

pected wartime collaborators was under way in Beiping, as the city was

called at the time, it concluded the piece with a firm line: "While Tai-

Trials of the Taiwanese 303

wan's [wartime] situation was different from that of Beiping, the funda-

mental principle of bringing traitors to justice should be applied every-

where. We therefore ask the highest provincial authorities to take heed

of the concern and demands of the people."72

Two points can be made about this editorial. Although it accepted

that a distinction should be made between Taiwan and occupied territory

in China, it did not plead for a full pardon for all Taiwanese on the

grounds of their special status. Instead, it accepted the universal princi-

ple that evildoers should be punished by law, both in Taiwan and in

China.73 Second, it stated that not only collaboration with the Japanese

during wartime was punishable but also any conspiracy involving the

Japanese after August 15, 1945, that violated the interests of the Taiwan-

ese people.74

Long before the Taiwan Garrison Command took action against

hanjian suspects, the trials of hanjian had gotten under way; on October

15, Mingbao published a column called "Prosecution Yamen." Accord-

ing to the editor, the idea was to hold simulated trials on paper to

expose the Taiwanese hanjian. Adopting the form of "letters to edi-

tors," the column provided a public forum in which the public could

lodge their complaints against hanjian. To deter spurious accusations,

contributors were asked to give their identities as well as those of the

people they accused, even though such information would be withheld

from the readers.75 Between October 15, 1945, when the column was

first launched, and November 12, 1945, five articles appeared. With the

identity of the "plaintiffs" unknown, it was virtually impossible to verify

the authenticity of the contents of these accusations, but the cases pro-

vide at least some clues as to the Taiwanese perception of hanjian.

The first letter dealt with the famous case of several Taiwanese gentry

leaders implicated in a Taiwan independence conspiracy plotted by Japa-

nese militarists shortly before Japan's surrender on August 15, 1945.76

The second described a chameleon merchant of Taoyuan who made his

fortune first under the Japanese occupation and then after the surrender

by making use of his Japanese connections. Once the war was over, he

attached himself to the Nationalist government disguised as a patriot.77

The third case concerned a district head who was said to have made the

people of his district donate ten thousand dollars for the establishment of

a local Police Defense Corps in the aftermath of the Japanese surrender.

When the need for this no longer existed, he squandered the money on

treating corps members rather than returning it to the donors.78 The

304 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

fourth case concerned complaints about a former collaborationist official

who previously had served in the city government in Amoy. After the war

ended, he managed to find himself a middle-ranking position in the

Nationalist government.79 The fifth accusation was directed at a main-

lander, a so-called huaqiao (overseas Chinese). This former dressmaker

of Xinzhu had made improper gains by ingratiating himself with the

Japanese during the war and later with the Nationalist military authorities

after Taiwan's return to China.s80

Opportunism was characteristic of all five complaints. The accused

fit well into the category of "war profiteers," as denounced in the Decem-

ber 10, 1945, edition of Mingbao. The offenses in question involved

either political or economic misconduct. It is significant that the accusa-

tions were made against the postwar background in which Japanese milita-

rists and Nationalists colluded. In addition, personal vendettas and pri-

vate interests were taken into consideration. As shown in the case of the

district head, a violation of people's interests could sometimes lead to a

hanjian charge, even though the action may have taken place after the

war ended and had no Japanese connection. Tensions between the Tai-

wanese and overseas Chinese were also palpable, as in the case of the

Xinzhu dressmaker. The term hanjian, therefore, represented a rather

loose concept. Not until the Taiwan Garrison Command issued a commu-

niqu6 in mid-January 1946 did the Taiwanese people begin to ponder the

real meaning of the hanjian charge. As time went on, public opinion

began to shift.

While the Taiwanese still held that hanjian should be brought to

justice, they began to think twice about who the hanjian were and

whether it was possible to define the charge in clear-cut terms. Also in

question was the degree to which such offenses could be excused by

Taiwan's special status with regard to Japan. Previously, people had

accepted the fact that, despite Taiwan's unique position in comparison

with other parts of China, no allowances should be made for "collabora-

tion beyond necessity." Acknowledging the difficulty of drawing a line

between what was "necessary" and what was not, fewer and fewer

people thought the Taiwanese should be punished for their wartime

activities. Instead, as the argument went, only the people could deter-

mine who the hanjian were.81 After January 16, the author of the

Mingbao column "Hot Talk" called attention to the special condition of

the Taiwanese under Japanese occupation. The majority of Taiwanese

people, he argued, were under pressure to show their faces as loyal

Trials of the Taiwanese 305

Japanese subjects; failing to do so would have jeopardized their personal

as well as their family's safety. As a consequence, they should not be

condemned as either hanjian or imperial running gentry. Moreover, it

made the point that people who "voluntarily and actively helped the

Japanese oppress fellow Taiwanese" or who "solicited favors from the

Japanese and had no sense of national dignity" were imperial running

gentry, but not hanjian. If the Taiwanese under Japanese occupation

were not hanjian, then who were? The answer was that Taiwanese

hanjian were people who made a fortune by collaborating with the Japa-

nese after the retrocession.82

Underlying this change in public opinion was an awareness of a

collective Taiwanese identity shaped by half a century of communal

experience under Japanese colonial rule. Unlike the legal definition pro-

vided by the Nationalist government, a Taiwanese hanjian was defined in

terms of Taiwanese experiences, with particular emphasis placed on the

postwar period. Although Taiwanese stressed the importance of adminis-

tering justice to reward good and punish evil, they were apprehensive

about the strong reactions such moves might trigger, especially in view

of the fact that investigations were to be undertaken by the Taiwan

Garrison Command in which Taiwanese people had increasingly lost

confidence.83 In the January 22 Mingbao edition of the "Forum of Free

Speech," someone writing under the pen name of "mainlander" (neidi

ren) pointed out that Taiwan was not like any of the occupied territories

in Mainland China. Since the condemnation of hanjian was highly emo-

tional, he warned against driving a wedge between the Taiwanese and

mainlanders and causing social unrest.84 As of January 31, when the

official period for reporting on hanjian expired, the Taiwan Garrison

Command had received about three hundred accusations against hanjian

suspects.85

This change in public opinion, such as that demonstrated in Ming-

bao, has to be viewed in a larger context. As mentioned earlier, one of the

major controversies surrounding the trials of the Taiwanese hanjian

centered on whether allowances should be made for the Taiwanese

because of their experiences under Japanese rule. The Taiwan Garrison

Command's decision to go ahead with the trials suggested that it did not

think Taiwanese people deserved special consideration. Nor did it accept

the view put forward by the author of the "Hot Talk" column that the

hanjian charge should be applied only to war profiteers in postwar Tai-

wan. Rather, it tried to subject the Taiwanese to the same rules and

306

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

regulations as were applied to the Chinese. At the same time, the Taiwan-

ese were reminded of their differences from the mainlanders. Nowhere

was this contradiction more obvious than in the discussion of whether the

Taiwanese had a slave mentality after fifty years of Japanese occupation.

Almost from the beginning, the Chinese took it for granted that

after fifty years of foreign rule the Taiwanese must have been somewhat,

if not completely, assimilated. Few people, including the so-called half-

mainlanders, dared to underestimate the effect of Japan's forceful imple-

mentation of its assimilation policy, which had been introduced in 1931.

From the Chinese point of view, such assimilation was evidence that the

Taiwanese people had lost their national identity. The fact that the major-

ity of the Taiwanese were kept out of the center of political power

increased their sense of alienation. Moreover, the language barrier be-

tween the mainlanders and the Taiwanese added to the distress. It re-

minded the Taiwanese of the days when Japanese colonialists had tried

to force all Taiwanese to learn Japanese, arguing that those who "do not

know Japanese are not worthy to be Japanese citizens."86

Particularly irritating were the high profiles of mainlander officials

who dealt with the Taiwanese. Self-styled liberators, they tended to

picture life under Japanese occupation as one of tears and sorrow, thus

overemphasizing the debt Taiwan owed them.87 Once again, the Taiwan-

ese were asked to deny their past, just as they had been expected to do

by the Japanese decades before. Mainlanders for their part could not

understand why so many Taiwanese were constantly looking back, as if

they had not had enough of Japanese colonialism. As they saw it, this

clearly indicated that the Taiwanese were victims of the Japanese enslave-

ment policy and had no national awareness. Consequently, anyone who

criticized the Chen Yi administration by comparing it to that of the

Japanese ran the risk of being labeled a hanjian.

When Fan Shoukang, director of the Education Department, de-

clared in a speech to members of the Taiwan Administrative Cadres

Training Corps that the Taiwanese had been "completely enslaved" by

the Japanese, the general public was furious.88 Despite his denial after-

ward, two members of the Provincial Assembly conducted an inquiry

into the matter and confirmed the report.89 Although the Provincial

Assembly later accepted Fan's word that no such remark had been

made, the damage had been done.9 To say that the Taiwanese had been

slaves under the Japanese did little to help ease the mounting tensions

between the Taiwanese and mainlanders. On the other hand, because

Trials of the Taiwanese 307

the statement was made with reference to a time that all Taiwanese had

experienced, it helped bring about a collective Taiwanese consciousness.

The holistic implication underlying enslavement precluded any rational

approach to defusing the strain in the relationship between the Taiwan-

ese and mainlanders. It followed the same pattern as is found in the

Taiwanese change of attitude toward hanjian. As the Taiwanese became

more and more defensive, their initial open-mindedness gave way to

self-pity and resentment.91 Their response to the criticism of "slave men-

tality" was that the Taiwanese had not been enslaved. It was a sweeping

statement with no less of a holistic connotation than that of their counter-

parts.92 In a similar vein, the majority of the Taiwanese tended to see

mainlanders in Taiwan as a homogeneous entity comprised mainly of

social d6class6 and incompetent bureaucrats.93

What was missing in the midst of such a heightened militant and

emotional atmosphere was the recognition that the Taiwanese relation-

ship with the Japanese colonialists had been characterized by complex-

ity and ambivalence. How could Taiwanese people convince the Chi-

nese that "despite their donning Japanese clothing, eating Japanese

food, speaking Japanese, living in Japanese houses, and wearing Japa-

nese slippers, underneath they still carried a Chinese heart, which had

never been enslaved"?94 Facing an unsympathetic regime, defiant Tai-

wanese felt that they needed not to be apologetic for their past, nor

were they to be held responsible for what was the result of a historical

situation over which they had little or no control. As a result of this

realization, there emerged a redefinition of hanjian. While hanjian still

referred to Taiwanese who had made illicit gains either at the expense of

their compatriots or by conspiring with the Japanese, the time span for

perpetration of such misdeeds shifted to the period following retro-

cession. To be sure, Taiwanese still had reservations about the imperial

running gentry and opportunists. However, as these people faced un-

certainty in the postwar climate - some managed to edge into the new

elite circle, while others were incarcerated under war criminal charges -

the initial indignation gradually gave way to sarcasm and tolerance.95

Like other Taiwanese, the imperial running gentry were now perceived

as victims of Japanese colonialism under the "policy oppression" built

into the colonial system as well as the "personal insult" grown out of the

colonialists' prejudices and discrimination. No matter how despicable

these people were, it was maintained, all they did was make things

easier for themselves and their families. Under these circumstances, the

308

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

only "offense" they were guilty of was not having shared the suffering of

their compatriots.96 To some extent, this growing tolerance toward the

imperial running gentry reflected Taiwanese discontent under the new

regime. As Ye Rongzhong observed, the profits and privileges the impe-

rial running gentry had extracted under Japanese colonialism were sim-

ply not comparable to the rampant malfeasance and corruption experi-

enced under the Nationalists.97 Facing criticism as well as punishment

for their colonial experiences, many looked back with nostalgia and

developed more sympathy for people who shared the past with them

despite their unsavory conduct.

Concluding Remarks

Postwar trials of the Taiwanese as either hanjian or war criminals were

not isolated events; they must be put in the broader context of half a

century of Taiwanese colonial experiences as well as the chaotic postwar

political situation in China. As far as the trials of the collaborationists in

general were concerned, the judicial system, together with the political

climate under which the Nationalist government brought hanjian to

justice, were far from satisfactory. Public demands for justice and the

lack of a strong central government added to the difficulty of satisfying

all parties concerned. In bringing Taiwanese to trial as either hanjian or

war criminals, the government faced an even greater challenge than the

one pertaining to Chinese collaborationists. Since Taiwanese wartime

activities were inseparable from their colonial experiences under Japa-

nese rule, how to define a hanjian or war criminal against this particular

background became a highly controversial issue. The government ran

the risk of antagonizing the Taiwanese at a time when there was an

urgent need to develop a good rapport. As a result, these trials or

attempts to pass judgment had generated a strong and negative response

among the Taiwanese people in spite of the limited scope of the trials,

both in terms of the number of the people convicted and the punish-

ments imposed.

At the center of the problem was how the Taiwanese were to be

perceived and treated. Were they Taiwanese or Japanese? Should the law

have drawn a clear distinction between cultural/ethnic and legal/political

identity? Under which identity should the Taiwanese have been held

responsible for the offenses they committed during wartime? The Nation-

Trials of the Taiwanese 309

alist government's failure to come to grips with the ambivalence and

complexity of the Taiwanese relationship, entangled with the Japanese as

well as the Chinese in both legal and cultural terms, added to the confu-

sion regarding whether the Taiwanese should have been tried as hanjian

or war criminals. Such identification set the parameters of a new Taiwan-

ese consciousness in that China served as a point of reference to distin-

guish what being a Taiwanese meant, much as Japan did in colonial days.

This collective identity not only submerged other long-standing sub-

identities along the lines of regional and provincial differences, but it

redefined the Taiwanese relationship with Japanese colonialism. The

original demand for self-cleansing within the Taiwanese community was

toned down considerably. This made it possible for many Taiwanese to

express sympathy for those who were regarded as no less the victims of

political changes than ordinary people. As a result, social justice was

compromised and political opportunism condoned to make way for cir-

cumstantial arguments.

As far as the emergence of a Taiwanese identity in the modern period

is concerned, half a century of Japanese colonialism is no less important

than the postwar Nationalist rule. Putting Taiwanese on trial after the war

revealed the fluidity and flexibility of the Taiwanese identity in historical

terms. It involved an ongoing process of two forces interacting with each

other: one that was imposed from without and one that was generated

from within. Because the former usually had the support of state power,

Taiwanese identity was continuously being shaped and reshaped, inter-

preted and reinterpreted to accommodate political changes. To a certain

extent, this group identity was contingent upon how people were treated

by the ruling authorities. Ambivalence was built into the Taiwanese iden-

tity, for it involved a variety of survival strategies. As such, it was often

more circumstantially bound than ideologically oriented.

Before World War II, the same pattern of push and pull was operat-

ing in the Taiwanese relationship with China. For Taiwanese intellec-

tuals with a nationalist inclination, China represented the motherland to

which they could turn when Japanese oppression became unbearable; it

additionally provided a spiritual shelter, bracing them for the injustice

and arrogance of the colonialists. The pull force was the strongest, how-

ever, when this motherland remained distant and abstract in one's imagi-

nation.98 Many became disenchanted when they crossed the Taiwan

Strait and came face to face with reality. Even so, some chose to stay in

310

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

China and tied their destiny to that of the motherland, often because the

push was simply much stronger than the pull.

The majority of Taiwanese people were pragmatists for whom sur-

vival was perhaps more important than national affiliation and for

whom subidentity was stronger than national identity. They might not

have liked the forceful assimilation imposed upon them, nor would they

have relished the idea of becoming Japanese. However, they certainly

welcomed the economic prosperity, relative political liberalization, and

improved standard of living that came along with the Japanese military

confrontation with China. For example, the regional and pragmatic

character of this subidentity found full expression in the worship of the

righteous (yimin) by the Hakka people. As Wu Zhuoliu remembered it,

his grandfather had taken him to the ritual worship of the righteous at

Xinpu when he was a child, and people of fourteen neighboring villages

had gathered to prepare a feast for the spirits of the Temple of the

Righteous (yimin miao). To his surprise, Wu found that he, too, was one

of the descendants of the righteous. It is significant that the enemies

against whom these spirits fought and died in defense of the fourteen

villages included bandits, aborigines, and people from another tribe in

the same region as well as the Japanese, stretching over a long period of

time in local immigration history.99 Here subidentity on the village level

apparently took precedence over national identity. And anti-Japanese

resistance constituted only one aspect of the villagers' self-defense ef-

forts. While subidentities and national identity were not necessarily

mutually exclusive, in this case the latter was apparently overshadowed

by the former. If survival in the sense of defending one's immediate

family and community rather than the nation was considered a value in

itself, then compromise and reconciliation were no less viable alterna-

tives than resistance and confrontation once the latter proved to be

ineffectual.

Paradoxically, in trying to define the Taiwanese in national terms,

the postwar trials of hanjian and war criminals reinforced this emphasis

on self-preservation embedded in the indigenous culture. In an attempt

to distinguish itself from what was Chinese, the Taiwanese identity

eclipsed all other subidentities. However, it needs to be pointed out that

had it not been for other dubious policies and measures, the trials of the

Taiwanese as hanjian or war criminals would probably not have had such

an alienating effect on the Taiwanese at a time when once again they had

to adapt to a new political climate.

Trials of the Taiwanese 311

NOTES

The author would like to thank the National Science Council, Republic

of China, for funding the research for this chapter under project no. NSC85-

2411-H-001-005.

1. On April 7, 1895, the Qing government signed the Treaty of Shi-

monoseki, in which Taiwan and the Pescadores were ceded to Japan. Although

Japan surrendered to the Allies on August 15, 1945, the formal retrocession did

not take place until October 25.

2. The definitions of these terms will be discussed later.

3. In recent years, it has been maintained that this body had been pene-

trated by secret agents of the two major intelligence agencies: the Bureau of

Military Investigation and Statistics and the Bureau of Central Investigation and

Statistics. Resolution 32 was allegedly brought up to provide the authorities with

a pretext for military suppression, which subsequently led to the killing of tens of

thousands of Taiwanese. See Chen Cuilian, Paixi douzheng yu quanmou

zhengzhi: er er ba beju de lingyi mianxiang (Taipei: China Times, 1995), 258-68.

4. To see how language was associated with the question of political iden-

tity, see Xu Xueji, "Taiwan guangfu chuqi de yuwen wenti," Si yu yen 29, no. 4

(Dec. 1991): 155-84.

5. Views about the duration of anti-Japanese resistance vary depending on

how one defines resistance as well as the character of the Taiwan Republic. Yuzin

Chiautong Ng, A Study of the Republic of Formosa, 1895: A Chapter in the

History of the Taiwan Independence Movement (Tokyo: University of Tokyo

Press, 1970), 175-85.

6. Wang Yude, Taiwan-Kuman sslu sono lekishi (Tokyo: Kobundo,

1970), 69-72.

7. Ralph C. Crozier, Koxinga and Chinese Nationalism (Cambridge: Har-

vard University Press, 1977), 50-56.

8. Maurice Meisner, "The Development of Taiwanese Nationalism," in

Formosa Today, edited by Mark Mancall (New York: Praeger, 1964), 148.

9. Wang, Taiwan, 72-74.

10. In their analysis of the Taiwanese elite under Japanese occupation, Lai

Tse-han, Raymon Myers, and Wei Wou called attention to the complexity of co-

optation. See Lai Tze-han, Raymon Myers, and Wei Wou, A Tragic Beginning:

The Taiwan Uprising of February 28, 1947 (Stanford: Stanford University Press,

1991), 15-23.

11. The Assimilation Society was founded on December 20, 1914, and was

banned by the Taiwanese colonial government on January 23, 1915. See Gao

Riwen, "Taiwan yihu shezhi qingyuan yundong de shidai beijing," Taiwan

wenxian 15, no. 2 (1975): 24-46.

12. Special Law 63, enacted by the Japanese Diet in 1896, gave the Taiwan-

ese colonial governor the supreme power to impose laws on the island to main-

tain order and control.

13. The League for the Establishment of the Taiwan Parliament lasted from

1921 to 1934.

312 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

14. Wu Zhuoliu's friendship with Japanese journalists for Dalu xinbao in

Nanjing changed his opinions about Japanese intellectuals. It has to be pointed

out that apart from their intellectual power Wu was particularly impressed with

their open-mindedness, their international worldview, and their freedom from

racial prejudice, qualities he rarely found among Japanese in Taiwan. See Wu

Zhuoliu, Wuhua guo (Taipei: Qianwei, 1993), 129-131.

15. Ye Rongzhong, "Lin Xiantang yu Liang Qichao," in Taiwan renwu

qunxiang, 9-53 (Taipei: Pamier Bookstore, 1985).

16. Lin Zhongsheng, Chen Yisong huiyilu (Taipei: Qianwei chubanshe,

1994), 201-3.

17. Taiwanese Experiences in Mainland China during the Japanese Occupa-

tion, Oral Histories, no. 5 (Taipei: Institute of Modern History, 1994).

18. To show the insignificance of the Taiwanese draftees, the Japanese

military ranking system was reportedly in the order of (1) military servicemen,

(2) military dogs, (3) military horses, (4) military affiliates, and (5) military

laborers. See Lin, Chen Yisong huiyilu, 211-15. Also see Ye Rongzhong. "Tai-

wan guangfu qinahou de huiyi," in Taiwan renwu qunxianglu (Taipei: Pamier

shudian, 1985), 271-74.

19. Wu Zhuoliu, Taiwan lianqiao (Taipei: Qianwei, 1988), 189-97.

20. For instance, Li Jianxing's case involve more than five hundred of Li's

clan members and local miners in Ruifang. Only one hundred survived the war.

See Su Xin, Fennu de Taiwan (Taipei: China Times, 1994), 91-95.

21. Lai et al., Tragic Beginning, 38-41.

22. Wu, "Nanjing zagan."

23. Lan Bozhou, Huang mache zhi ge (Taipei: China Times, 1991).

24. Mr. Zhang, a classmate of Wu Zhuoliu who served in the Wang Jingwei

government, took care not to let his Chinese acquaintances know about his

Taiwanese origins (Wu, Wuhua guo, 124-25).

25. Mintai Guanxi Dangan Ziliao (Xiamen: Lujiang chubanshe, 1993),

106-7.

26. "Chonganxian zhengfu guan yu baosong taimin shourong jingguo ji

chuli gaikuang zhi Fujian sheng zhenji hui daidian" (March 13, 1939), in Fujian

Sheng Danganguan and Xiamen Shi Danganguan, eds., Mintai Guanxi Dangan

Ziliao (Xiamen: Lujiang chubanshe, 1993), 102-3.

27. The Taiwan Volunteers came into existence after more than forty other

Taiwanese anti-Japanese organizations in China under the title of the Taiwan

Revolutionary League. See Lu Fangshang, Taiwan geming tongmenghui yu Tai-

wan guangfu yuntong (1940-1945), Zhongguo xiandaishi zhuanti yejiu baodao,

vol. 3 (Taipei: Zhonghua minguo shiliao yanjiu zhongxin, 1973), 255-315. Also

see Zhang Yizhi and Zhang Bihuang, "Taiwan yiyongdui ji qi zaoqi gongzuo," in

Mintai Guanxi, 255. Zhang was a Communist serving as secretary to Taiwan

Volunteers' leader Li Youbang.

28. Of about five hundred members of the Taiwan Brigade, thirty-two fled

and were served court warrants. Ibid. 116-17.

29. Ibid., 116-18.

Trials of the Taiwanese 313

30. After their release, they stayed in the East Region Service Corps and

helped with the interrogation of Japanese prisoners of war. See Qiu Niantai,

Linghai weibiao, 2d ed. (Taibei: Zhonghua Daily News, 1976), 216-21.

31. Li Yichen, "Lun taiji de zhanfan yu hanjian," Falu zhi shi 1, no. 5

(1947): 2.

32. "Regulations for the Punishment of Hanjian," promulgated December

6, 1945.

33. "Shanghai gaodeng fayuan queding panjue yi ban hanjian yilanebiao"

(October 1945 to December 1947), File no. 013.11:2110, Archive of the Bureau

of History and Translation, National Defence Ministry, Republic of China.

34. Faling Zhoukan 9, no. 12 (1946).

35. Li Yichen, "Lun taiji de zhanfan yu hanjian," Falu zhishi 1, no. 5

(1947): 2-3.

36. "Xie Ni Luxi qisushu," Dagong bao (Tianjin), July 1947.

37. Li, "Lun taiji."

38. Ibid. According to Articles 2 and 3 of the Zhangzheng zuifan shepan

tiaoli, war criminals are personnel who "before the roundup of September 1945

had committed the following acts .. "

39. Ibid. Article 6 stipulated that "war criminals who recovered their Chi-

nese nationality before October 25, 1945, are still governed by this regulation."

The Taiwanese recovered Chinese nationality on October 25, 1945.

40. Interpretation 3,313 (from Judicial yuan to Executive yuan, December

7, 1946), Faling zhoukan 10, no. 4 (January 22, 1947).

41. Iwakawa Takashi, Kodo no zichi to naru domo -BC kyo sanban

sayiban (Tokyo: Kyotansha, 1995), 586-95.

42. See the letter by the National Assembly Taiwanese representative

Huang Guoshu pleading on behalf of the Taiwanese on trial in Mintai Guanxi,

143-46.

43. Qiu Niantai, 252.

44. "Charter Provisions of the Nuremberg Judgment," in Documents on the

Laws of War, edited by Adam Roberts and Richard Guelff (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1989), 153-55.

45. Iwakawa, Kodo no zichi, 41-45.

46. Ibid., 780-81.

47. Jiangsheng bao, June 6, 1946, June 25, 1946.

48. Dagong bao, January 19, 1946. The Taiwan Garrison Command spent

one week encouraging Taiwanese to expose the evildoings of hanjians under the

Japanese occupation. Archival files showed that among those exposed were

Chinese ex-collaborationists who came to Taiwan to hide.

49. Minzhu bao, September 16, 1945.

50. See news report on the execution of Huang Guanqun and Lin Peibin,

two Chinese collaborationists, by the Fuzhou Garrison Command (Minzhu bao,

January 29, 1946).

51. Minzhu bao, October 22, 1945.

52. Jiangsheng bao, June 19, 1947.

314 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

53. Xingguang ribao, May 17, 1946.

54. Xingguang ribao, May 29, 1946.

55. Jiangsheng bao, June 6, 1946.

56. Ibid., June 1, 1946.

57. Ibid., June 26, 1946.

58. Ibid., June 29, 1946.

59. Ibid., April 9, 1947.

60. Ibid., March 5, 1947.

61. This mentality was reflected in its handling of Taiwanese suspected of

involvement in the suppression of the Zhaohe depot in Golangsu, which caused

several deaths to the agents of the Bureau of Military Investigation and Statistics

in May 1940. See in verdict of Hong Wenzhong in Jiangsheng bao, October 8,

1946.

62. Taiwan minzu yundong changdaozhe -Lin Xiantang zhuan (Taipei:

Jinda zongguo, 1991), 112-20.

63. Lin Xiantang Riji, untitled, September 27, 1946, October 1, 1946,

manuscript.

64. Yang Zhaojia, Yang Zhaojia huiyilu (Taipei: Sanmin shuju, 1977).

65. Qiu Niantai, 246.

66. Ibid., 251-52. What Qiu meant must be that Taiwanese authorities had

stopped making new arrests. As late as November 1946, the newspaper was still

carrying reports about eleven Taiwanese war crimes suspects who were being

sent to Nanjing for trial. Another fourteen from Taiwan, their nationality un-

known, were said to be waiting in Shanghai for trial (Nanjingren bao, November

16, 1947).

67. See Xingguang ribao, May 17, 1946. Iwakawa Takashi wrote about how

Japanese war criminals had secured their release through bribery (Kodo no

zichi, 575-76).

68. Qiu Niantai, 252.

69. Mingbao, October 22, 1945.

70. Li Chunqin, "Taiwan de mimi he gongkai," Xinwen tiandi (Shanghai)

10 (February 20, 1946): 10.

71. "Chengfa zhanzheng lide zhe," Mingbao, December 10, 1945.

72. Ibid.

73. Similar views were expressed in another column, "Hot Talk," in Ming-

bao, November 25, 1945.

74. It will be remembered that, although Japan surrendered to the Allies

on August 15, 1945, formal retrocession of Taiwan to China did not take place

until October 25.

75. Mingbao, October 15, 1945.

76. Ibid.

77. Ibid., October 19, 1945.

78. Ibid., October 21, 1945.

79. Ibid., October 23, 1945.

80. Ibid., November 12, 1945.

81. "Reyan," Mingbao, November 25, 1945.

Trials of the Taiwanese 315

82. Ibid., January 18, 1946.

83. Ibid., January 20, 1946.

84. Neidiren, "Hedengyang ren cai shi hanjian," Mingbao, January 22,

1946.

85. Mingbao, February 1, 1946.

86. "Reyan," Mingbao, January 16, 1946.

87. Mingbao, December 2, 1945. "Xinzhuang de feibang" (Slander in a

new bottle), editorial, Mingbao, March 13, 1946. Shu xuan, "Yeman de

jingcha," Zhengqi yuekan 1, no. 4 (July 2, 1947).

88. Mingbao, May 1, 1946.

89. Ibid., May 3, 1946.

90. Ibid., May 8, 1946, May 9, 1946.

91. "Huanying Chen yi zhangguan tongshi shuxie xiwang," editorial, Ming-

bao, October 25, 1945.

92. "Tichang lianjie zuofeng - tairen weishou wu ran," editorial, Mingbao,

March 11, 1946; "Taiwan weichang 'nuhua,'" editorial, Mingbao, April 7, 1946.

93. "Zhengqi xinxiang," Zhengqi yuekan 1, no. 1 (October 1, 1946).

94. Juxian, "Nuhua jiaoyu yu minzu yishi," Mingbao, May 26, 1946.

95. "Reyan," Mingbao, June 4, 1946.

96. Ye Rongzhong, "Taiwan sheng guangfu qianhou de huiyi," in Taiwan

renwu qunxiang (Taipei: Pamier shudian, 1985), 293-95.

97. Ibid.

98. Wu Zhuoliu described such attachment to the imagined motherland as

a sentiment verging on "instinct" that could not be put into words. It "attracts

my heart like the gravity. Just as an orphan who misses the parents he has never

known, he does not care what kind of parents they are "Wu, Wuhua guo, 39-41.

99. Ibid., 45-47.



Chapter 10

The Sing-Song Girl and the Nation:

Music and Media Culture in

Republican Shanghai

Andrew E Jones

For contemporary listeners, one of the most surprising facts about the

Chinese popular music of the 1930s and 1940s is the conspicuous ab-

sence of male performers. Despite the fact that Mandarin popular mu-

sic (commonly known as "modern songs" or shidai qu), and the Shang-

hai entertainment cinema with which it was closely intertwined were

heavily influenced by imports from Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley,

China's "dream factory" never produced male singing stars on the order

of Maurice Chevalier, Bing Crosby, or Dick Powell.1 Instead, it was

dominated by a host of legendary chanteuses, including the "Golden

Voice" Zhou Xuan, the "Silver Voice" Yao Li, and the actress Wang

Renmei.

This gender imbalance stemmed in part from traditional biases.

Participation in the entertainment industry was often seen as tawdry,

shameful, and beneath the dignity of both men and well-heeled women

alike. In the popular imagination of Republican China, there was often

a very thin line between "selling songs" (mai chang) and selling sexual

services. These biases were reflected and reinforced by the genre's

roots in the seamy urban nightlife of the prerevolutionary era. Those

sing-song girls (geni) who lacked the good fortune or talent to move

out of the lower echelons of the entertainment world often "doubled as

hostesses and even prostitutes" in Shanghai's nightclubs, cabarets, and

jazz cafes.2 But those who succeeded in making it to the top were

transformed into stars through the combined efforts of the city's record

companies, film studios, radio stations, and the popular press.

317

318 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

These stars - often cast in the guise of an unfortunate sing-song girl

distinguished by her beauty, pathos, lower-class origins, and vulnerabil-

ity to exploitation at the hands of unscrupulous males - played a crucial

role in the development of Shanghai's media culture.3 In popular song,

leftist movies, "soft" entertainment films (ruanxing dianying), and the

popular press alike, sing-song girls and the stars who played them be-

came a privileged site for audience identification and consumption

throughout the 1930s and 1940s. At the same time, they were saddled

with a staggering load of discursive baggage, becoming one of the most

important means by which songwriters, filmmakers, and political po-

lemicists discussed many of the most pressing issues of the day: moder-

nity and antifeudal struggle, shifting gender roles, class inequality, and,

perhaps most significantly, the politics of national salvation.

In this chapter, I intend to cover two aspects of this phenomenon. I

begin by outlining the role of women performers in Shanghai's culture

industry. How and why did the sing-song girl become a crucial figure in

Shanghai's media culture? Part of the answer has to do with the emer-

gence of a (distinctly patriarchal) star system in Shanghai predicated

around the fetishization and mediatized consumption of female perform-

ers. Understanding the way in which this system functioned, in turn, is

crucial to an assessment of the place of the sing-song girl in the discursive

economy of the era. How did leftist musicians and filmmakers come to

appropriate the sing-song girl as a means of figuring national humiliation

and national salvation in the years directly preceding the Sino-Japanese

War? These questions, I argue, provide insight into the constitutive role of

gender in both Shanghai's media culture and the nationalist discourse

with which it came to be suffused in these years.

No discussion of the conjunction between nationalist struggle and

media culture (and particularly popular music) in Republican China

would be complete without a consideration of the career of Li Jinhui.

Li's musical and ideological trajectory - from an idealistic May Fourth

era educator and champion of children's music to the progenitor of a

new brand of urban popular music - is revealing in a number of ways. In

the popular imagination of the day, Li's music came to be inextricably

linked with the sing-song girl and her off-color urban milieu. Perhaps

more important, Li's career is emblematic of the professionalization and

mediatization of Shanghai's entertainment industry in the early 1930s.

The series of training institutes and song and dance troupes Li estab-

The Sing-Song Girl and the Nation 319

lished at the time were instrumental in the establishment of a star system

in Shanghai.4 The story of Li's role in Shanghai's emergent recording,

broadcasting, and film industries, moreover, is emblematic of the mass-

mediated culture of consumption that had begun to take shape by the

mid-1930s.

In the wake of the Japanese annexation of Manchuria in 1932, Li's

music (and the new media networks and stars that it had helped to forge)

inexorably came to be implicated in the political and ideological strife of

the period. In leftist attacks on Li's music as a vulgar, even "porno-

graphic," capitulation to commerce at the expense of the imperatives of

nationalist resistance, we see the formation of a dialectic that comes to

inform many of the ideological struggles fought in the realm of popular

culture in general, and popular music in particular, in the ensuing years.

For leftist musicians like Li's former student and nemesis Nie Er - fired

by a vision of a popular music serving as a weapon in the construction of

an enlightened, empowered community of citizens dedicated to the task

of "national salvation" from the twin specters of Western imperialism

and Japanese invasion - Li's brand of shidai qu came to represent a

culture of politically passive, culturally colonized, petit-bourgeois con-

sumers. The culture of consumption, finally, was associated with sexual-

ity and prostitution, with the "fragrant, eye-catching, and fleshy appeal"

(xiangyan rougan) of the sing-song girl.5

The work of leftist musicians like Nie Er and others like him in many

ways represented a frontal attack on this culture of consumption. Was

popular music about the individualized consumption of the mediatized

"body" of the sing-song girl or would it involve the mobilization of the

masses into a collective body singing in unison for national salvation?6 In

promoting a new brand of "mass music," these musicians endeavored to

displace the musical culture represented by Li Jinhui and his "sing-song

girls." But in the presence of a "progressive" discourse (as manifested in

musical and performance practice, leftist cinema, and printed polemics)

in which "woman" often served as a figure for "the nation" and China's

humiliation at the hands of foreign powers was consistently likened to

prostitution, appropriation of the pathos and popularity of the sing-song

girl ultimately proved irresistible to leftist cultural workers.7 This appro-

priation, I argue, often involved both the commercial exploitation of the

sing-song girl's "off-color" mystique and a concurrent recuperation of

that mystique by way of narratives of national resistance.

320

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

Li Jinhui and the Development of Urban Media Culture

The richness and complexity of Li Jinhui's legacy has often been ignored

by contemporary Chinese historians eager to deride and disavow the

"decadence" and "depravity" of the popular media culture he helped to

shape in Republican era Shanghai. Condemned by leftist (and later

socialist) critics as a purveyor of pornographic and politically passive

pop songs, Li nonetheless began his career as an ardent patriot and

educator.8 Born in 1891 in Hunan Province to a prominent gentry family,

Li (like many of his May Fourth era contemporaries) involved himself in

a number of republican political causes before migrating to Shanghai in

order to devote himself to teaching Chinese folk music, crafting stan-

dard Mandarin language-teaching curricula for the nation's schools, and

editing a hugely successful children's monthly magazine called Little

Friend (Xiao pengyou). Each of these activities was closely tied to the

larger nation-building project that had so galvanized Li's generation of

Chinese intellectuals, for they involved the promotion of national music,

a national language, and nationalized educational standards.

By the mid-1920s, he began to create a series of fresh, innovative,

musical dramas for children (ertong gewuju) intended to promote "aes-

thetic education" and the use of Mandarin as a national language.9

These dramas - meant to be performed by primary and middle school

students-were nothing if not eclectic, fusing Western musical instru-

ments and dance movements with Chinese folk melodies and simple

Mandarin lyrics singing the praises of beauty, morality, and the natural

world. First published in Li's own magazine, Little Friend, many of these

dramas achieved wide circulation throughout China throughout the

1920s and early 1930s, becoming a staple of arts education curricula in

cities nationwide.

Nor was the popularity of this new form limited to schools. The

promotion of national curricula naturally resulted in the development of

extremely lucrative national markets for Li's creations. Li's language

textbooks and collections of children's songs were widely distributed in

inexpensive paperback form by the same commercial publishing house

(Zhonghua shuju) that published Little Friend. Each of the scripts for

the children's operas, moreover, went through several printings. And by

1927 these paperback editions were matched by a set of accompanying

gramophone records (sung by Li's teenage daughter Minghui) available

from Great China Records (Da zhonghua changpian gongsi).

The Sing-Song Girl and the Nation 321

Li's combination of educational, artistic, and entrepreneurial ven-

tures was instrumental in the creation of a new figure in Chinese popular

culture: the modern, mass-mediated sing-song girl. In 1926, Li estab-

lished the China Song and Dance Institute (Zhonghua gewu zhuanmen

xuexiao) in Shanghai in order to train (primarily female) talent in the

techniques of drama, dance, and musical performance. The school was

originally intended as a purely educational, philanthropic venture. Li

charged no tuition, and many of his recruits were orphans and the chil-

dren of lower-class families. Performances given by Li's students (often

sponsored by schools and other civic associations) were almost always

benefits. In 1928, he set up a second training institute, the Beauty

School for Girls (Meimei ntixiao).10 In 1929, graduates of both these

institutions were incorporated into his China Song and Dance Troupe

(Zhonghua gewutuan) and Li embarked on a tour of Southeast Asia,

performing his children's operas (along with a handful of the jazzy love

songs he had composed in the preceding years) to receptive audiences in

Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore.

It is important to note that Li undertook this tour with nationalistic

(as well as commercial) objectives firmly in mind. One of these goals

was to promote the use of Mandarin in Chinese communities throughout

Southeast Asia; another was to proselytize the Nationalist cause in the

wake of the successful military campaigns of Chiang Kai-shek's "Revolu-

tionary Army."11 By all accounts (including those of Li Jinhui himself as

well as that of Wang Renmei, one of the young performers with the

troupe), these goals were achieved despite the interference of Dutch and

British colonial authorities throughout the region. Indeed, one of the

proudest moments of the tour was when British members of the audi-

ence in Hong Kong were compelled to stand up along with the rest of the

Chinese spectators as the troupe performed a musical tribute to Sun Yat-

sen and the "de facto national anthem" called "In Memory of the Prime

Minister."12

It was at the conclusion of this same tour, however, that Li first tried

his hand at the mass production of the sort of love songs for which he is

usually remembered. Stranded in Singapore because of a lack of funds,

he closed a deal with a Shanghai publisher to release a compilation of

one hundred Family Love Songs (Jiating aiqing gequ).13 The title of the

collection is somewhat deceptive, for most of these songs, inspired by

American jazz, the music of George Gershwin, and Chinese folk melo-

dies, had more to do with urbane romance than "family values." The

322

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

dissemination of this sheet music caused a craze for Li's music, and the

popularity of songs like "Drizzle" (Maomao yu), "Express Train" (Tebie

kuaiche), and "Peach Blossom River" (Taohua jiang) spread rapidly

throughout urban China.

Upon his return to Shanghai in 1930, he quickly organized a new

troupe, the Bright Moon, and embarked on a tour of North and North-

east China that was widely publicized in the national press.14 In 1931,

one hundred of Li's love songs were recorded by the troupe for Great

China Records.15 The popularity of these gramophone records inspired

a raft of imitators, and Li's brand of sinified jazz became a staple in

Shanghai dance halls, nightclubs, and cabarets.

At least part of the appeal for contemporary audiences of this hy-

brid form derived not from the music itself but from a prurient interest

in the bodies of Li's female performers. The Bright Moon troupe's

performances featured sixteen- and seventeen-year-old girls with bared

shoulders and exposed thighs dancing in chorus lines more than a little

reminiscent of the Hollywood musicals of the day. 16 This perception is

echoed by a 1936 commentary by Zhang Zhang on the effect of the

entrance of Li's music into wider commercial circulation:

Song and dance music began with the advent six or seven years ago

of Li Jinhui's musical dramas "The Grape Fairy," "Moonlit Night,"

and "The Magpie and the Child." These minidramas were originally

intended for children and elementary school students. They were

fairy tales, simple to act and sing and suitable for performance by

children. But later, when every school began to arrange shows and

use "big girls" of seventeen or eighteen to perform children's plays,

the result was forced, unnaturally flirtatious, and unbearably maud-

lin. Not a shred of the original innocence was left, and what replaced

it was a hair-raising and salacious vulgarity. Even later, when the

girls who had appeared in these school drama troupes graduated,

people began to organize professional "song and dance troupes,"

which performed for the public, filling their songs with lewd and

decadent words and showing their thighs in order to attract business.

They said they were promoting art, but what they really do is seduce

young people for profit.17

Ironically, Li's own justification for this exploitation of the female

form dovetailed with some of the grander humanist themes of the New

The Sing-Song Girl and the Nation 323

Culture Movement, the most prominent of which was the liberation of

the body beautiful from feudal shackles.18 Wang Renmei, a long-time

member of the troupe, asserts that

"in the Shanghai of the time, feudal power was deeply entrenched,

and young girls wore braids and long gowns and stockings. In the

eyes of these conservatives, it was shocking enough that women

should appear on screen. When Minghui [Li Jinhui's daughter and a

member of the original troupe] appeared on stage with a bob and

bare feet, dancing and singing like a free and unfettered little bird,

they must have thought the end of world had come."19

In an intellectual climate in which China's national weakness vis-h-

vis Japan and the West was often attributed in part to the perceived

physical weakness and poor hygiene of its citizens, these displays of

feminine youth and physicality fed rather neatly into a discourse of

national regeneration. In a 1926 introduction to his children's opera

Three Butterflies (San hudie), Li writes:

Everyone should understand that beautiful people represent the

cream of the human race; beautiful Chinese people, then, are the

pride of the Chinese nation. . . but our habit is to "look down on

outward beauty." This is the shame of the Chinese people, and it is

enough to cause our culture and all that is best about it to fall into

degeneracy.20

The relative strength of European nations, Li goes on to argue, derives

in part from their appreciation for (and open display in public perfor-

mance and the press of) physical beauty. As seemingly eccentric as these

views may seem, Li was not alone in invoking this sort of nationalistic

rhetoric. Writing five years later, in 1931, the prominent film director

Sun Yu echoes Li's sentiments in the course of praising the young

women of Li's troupe for embodying just such an ideal. Having attended

one of their performances, Sun is inspired to exclaim: "Let us rise to-

gether and loudly proclaim the rejuvenation (qingchun hua) of the Chi-

nese people!"21

Nationalism notwithstanding, Li's involvement with the culture in-

dustry drew the moralistic ire of contemporary critics and cleared the

way for the fetishization of women's bodies that was later to become so

324

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

much a part of the Shanghai star system. This was, in part, because his

growing popularity coincided with a period of explosive growth for

Shanghai's mass media industry. Between 1931 and 1932 alone, some

thirty new radio stations were established in the metropolitan Shanghai

area.22 As Zhang Zhang mentioned, a number of song and dance

troupes loosely modeled on Li's Bright Moon and made up of young,

female crooners backed (and managed) by male musicians quickly began

to cater to this new market. The most popular groups (the Rose Troupe,

Hibiscus Troupe, and Shanghai Society, among others) often performed

live at up to six different stations each day, helping to attract listeners

and fill airtime between advertisements.23

The Bright Moon troupe itself soon became a victim of this and

other new technologies and market forces. Presumably sensing the po-

tential of the new sound film technology just arriving on Chinese shores

from the United States, the United Photoplay Company (Lianhua

yingye gongsi) annexed the troupe (renaming it the Lianhua Song and

Dance Team) soon after the completion of a financially unsuccessful

tour in 1931.24 In the same year, Li wrote the musical numbers for one of

China's first musical "talkies," Romance at the Dance Hall (Wuchang

chunse).25 In a sense, the media loop had come full circle; the sort of

seamy milieu in which Li's music had first gained popularity became the

object of filmic representation in movies about the lives of sing-song

girls. The "screen songs" from the movie were certain to be published in

songbooks and film magazines, made into gramophone records, broad-

cast, and ultimately emulated by sing-song girls in the dance halls.

The Sing-Song Girl and the Star System

This media loop, in turn, was fundamental to the creation of the star

system. The growth of the broadcasting industry, the availability of

gramophone records, and the popularity of sound films all ensured that

popular music could move out of the male-dominated world of the night-

club and into a range of social spaces, both public and private: the

cinema, the street corner, and the home.26 These new spaces, of course,

allowed for the creation of new and more heterogeneous (in terms of

both class and gender) audiences.27 In order to keep these new consum-

ers informed, a host of movie magazines, celebrity pictorials, and daily

gossip tabloids known as "mosquito papers" began to be published as

guides to this new consumer culture.28 And, just as in Hollywood, part

The Sing-Song Girl and the Nation 325

of the business of these publications was to manufacture, organize, and

channel consumer desires through the creation of stars.

Just how these publications tend to channel desire toward fetishized

(and usually female) star images is a question I cannot answer here in

anything more than a piecemeal fashion. I will briefly mention one par-

ticularly illuminating example: a monthly magazine called Pop Star Picto-

rial (Gexing huabao) first published in 1935. Each of the three issues of

the magazine that I have been able to locate follow a similar format. The

face of an established star (Zhou Xuan, Bai Hong, and Xu Lai, respec-

tively, all graduates of Li's Bright Moon Song and Dance Troupe) adorns

the front cover. Sandwiched between pages of gossip, brief star profiles,

information on radio programming, and dance hall advertisements are

photographs of members of Shanghai's various song and dance troupes in

poses typical of the day: lounging in bathing suits at the municipal pool or

modeling stylish outfits in the park.29 As the editor makes clear in the

premier issue, these photos are meant to serve a specific purpose. All too

often, he laments, radio listeners are "unable to distinguish between the

stars. "30

The magazine, then, exists to fill this gap, to offer these (heretofore

invisible) women up to the gaze of the consumer.31 This process of

individualized consumption is furthered by means of articles in which

each singer's voice is characterized in terms of taste (sweet, sour, salty,

etc.) or she is rated in terms of looks. Readers are also invited to identify

uncaptioned photographs of their faces in order to test their knowledge

of the stars. This sort of fetishization, it should be pointed out, was

pervasive at the time. Even in Yisheng, a "serious" monthly devoted to

film and music and edited by leftist musicians Ren Guang, An E, and

Nie Er, we find a spread in which readers are shown cropped pictures of

various body parts (feet, legs, hands, and eyes) and asked to identify the

star to which they belong.32

By 1934, Li Jinhui's own star had been eclipsed by the extraordinary

growth of the star system he had helped to create. Although he contin-

ued to compose and record a staggering number of jazz tunes and

"screen songs," his efforts to put a new, reconstituted Bright Moon

Society on a firm financial footing fell victim to the exodus of his bright-

est stars to more lucrative positions in the broadcasting and motion

picture industries.33 Part of the reason for this, of course, is that the

emergence of mass media and the consolidation of the star system had

created a new sort of hierarchy among female performers. The greater

326 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

the degree of mass mediation, the larger the potential audience and

profits and the higher the performer's status. Li's brand of live perfor-

mance was no longer fashionable or profitable. Movie stars and record-

ing artists (often chosen from among the same select group of women)

sat atop the pyramid. Those who were able to join broadcasting troupes

or sing at high-class nightclubs were just below them. Cabaret dancers

and cafe singers came next. At the bottom of the pyramid were the

"fallen" women whose tragic stories and dreams of stardom were often

transformed into (touched-up) images on the silver screen: nightclub

hostesses, bar girls, and taxi dancers.

Despite their crucial role in the media industry - and this point will

become significant when we turn to consideration of nationalist dis-

course-most of these women were often regarded as little more than

prostitutes. He Luting's 1934 criticism of the influence of Li Jinhui's

music on urban society is a salient example of this sort of attitude:

[B]ut what [Li Jinhui] represents is the hoodlum proletariat. He

understands the psychology of the hooker and her patrons. He not

only has the power to condemn the proletariat to degeneracy -in a

China that is veering ever closer to complete economic bankruptcy,

even your average petit-bourgeois girl who has read a few books and

knows a few big words and has absorbed Li's influence thereby will

begin to dress up in outrageous outfits, paint her face, and go out to

sing for a living. These girls are euphemistically known as "social

flowers," but they're really just whores.34

Nor was this equation exclusively made by "progressive" critics of this

sort. It was, in fact, a rather common notion and one that had a real

impact on both the lives of those who worked in the business and

the innumerable musical and cinematic representations of those lives

churned out by the industry.35 Even a relatively established star like

Yao Li (who worked as a recording artist for Path6 Records, sang for a

number of broadcasters and had an exclusive engagement at a high-

class nightclub called Ciro's) was subject to sexual intimidation on the

job, as is made clear in a 1941 tabloid article about a dispute with a

patron at the club who demanded that she join him at his table upon

completion of her program for the evening.36

That this article - in which a wealthy bully preys on the vulnerability

of a sing-song girl-reads like a scenario from any number of musical

The Sing-Song Girl and the Nation 327

films from this period is testimony to the kind of intertextual looping

that was characteristic not only of the "sing-song girl" phenomenon in

particular but of the star-making machinery in general.37 This pathetic

vulnerability to oppression (compounded by implied sexual availability),

as Sam Ho points out, was essential to the mass-mediated image of the

sing-song girl.38 And to wake of the Japanese attack on Shanghai's

Zhabei District in 1932, this image became a privileged means of figur-

ing the plight of a nation suffering under the yoke of economic imperial-

ism and military invasion.

Popular Music and National Salvation

In the years of ever-deepening national crisis following the events of 1932,

Li Jinhui and the music he had come to represent underwent a series of

scathing attacks. These attacks came from both the left and the National-

ist center. They shared, however, a similar set of discursive strategies,

strategies that consistently made use of gendered tropes in order to por-

tray the music as a betrayal of nationalist ideals. Perhaps the most preva-

lent of these tropes - and one that has persisted to the present day on both

sides of the Taiwan Strait - was directly derived from Sima Qian's Han

dynasty text, The Records of the Historian. Indeed, the phrase mimi zhi

yin, or "decadent sounds," appears so frequently and insistently in these

attacks that the semantic field it evokes deserves further exploration. The

phrase appears in the Basic Annals of the Yin Dynasty, and is framed by a

cautionary tale about how the enormously cruel and extravagant Em-

peror Zhou allows the nation to fall to pieces as he carouses with courte-

sans and throws absurdly decadent orgies. His activities are, of course, set

to music: "Zhou ordered the music master Juan to write new lewd tunes

(xin yinsheng), northern district dances (beili zhi wu), and decadent

sounds (mimi zhi yin)." The character mi has several connotations, includ-

ing "waste," "extravagance," and "vulgar commerce" (shangsu mimi).39

The northern districts are where prostitutes plied their trade. Given these

connotations - and the link between music, prostitution, and national

dissolution provided by the surrounding cautionary narrative - it is unsur-

prising that the phrase was enthusiastically taken up by patriots of all

stripes in order to assert that Li's music was a figure for national humilia-

tion and its elimination a step toward national salvation.

Examples of this sort of discourse abound. They are a prominent

feature of the series of attacks on Li Jinhui's music penned by his student

328

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

Nie Er (using the pen name Black Angel) in 1932.40 They also pervade

the official Nationalist discourse of the period. In 1934, at the height of

Chiang Kai-shek's New Life campaign, a group of centrist musicians

associated with the journal Yinyue jiaoyu (Music education) began a for

the most part ineffectual campaign to ban the dissemination of Li

Jinhui's work. In 1932, Cheng Maoyun, a Guomindang (GMD) official

and the composer of the Nationalist Party anthem, established the

Jiangxi Committee for the Advancement of Musical Education (Jiangxi

tuixing yinyue jiaoyu weiyuan hui). This organization was run by the

Jiangxi Bureau of Education and funded by the GMD. On a local level,

the committee maintained its own orchestra and choir, organized con-

certs and recitals, and promoted the dissemination of patriotic school

songs. Its primary mission, however, lay in enforcing standards of musi-

cal quality and crusading for the elimination of "vulgar" folk and popu-

lar music. Indeed, one project undertaken by the committee involved

detaining blind, itinerant folksingers in order to teach them new, presum-

ably less objectionable material!41 The committee also exerted influence

on the national level through its monthly magazine, Music Education

(Yinyue jiaoyu). The manifesto for the campaign is divided into three

parts, each of which invokes nationalist imperatives - "To Improve the

Quality of the Nation's Citizens," "To Allow for the Elevation of our

National Culture" - and ends with the refrain "We Must Eliminate Popu-

lar Music."42 The music itself is linked with prostitution and moral degra-

dation from the very beginning of the essay:

As for the popular tunes and vulgar ditties that are popular in our

nation's cities, although there are a handful of good songs among

them, the majority describe the amorous relationships between

petty merchants and whores. Their sentiments are not as sincere and

pure as peasant songs, nor do they reflect the real conditions of

folklife, and in this sense they are not worthy of "National Airs" in

the Book of Odes, which create something beautiful out of their

observation of the common. These songs are thoroughly lewd and

obscene, in intention and in sentiment, in terms of their music and

lyrics. Li Jinhui and others like him often take their inspiration from

and even imitate these sorts of ditties. Although the original lyrics

have been replaced with decorative words, the tunes themselves still

lead the hearts of their listeners into degeneracy and cause un-

healthy imaginings. These songs first became popular in schools and

The Sing-Song Girl and the Nation 329

later spread broadly among the folk. Of late, records and movies are

full of this kind of song, and those who listen are intoxicated by

them and deluded into falling into a cheap sort of enjoyment with-

out any capacity for reflection. This is certainly not the sort of sound

that can Arouse the Nation toward prosperity and power (shu fei

xingguo zhi yin).43

The persistence of this sort of rhetoric is evidenced by a 1936 essay by

the leftist songwriter He Luting. Especially noteworthy in the following

passage is the seeming inevitability of the equation he draws between

the creators and singers of this music and (female) prostitutes. Accord-

ing to He:

There are two other types of people to which we should pay serious

attention: the first are those who write sexually lewd and obscene

(yindang) songs and who broadcast sexually lewd and obscene songs

over the wireless. They are prostitutes in disguise (bianxiang de

maiyinfu) whose only talent is for poisoning society. The second are

these shameless music merchants who talk a good line about promot-

ing music for the masses but actually take advantage of their special

position to sell as much vulgar and salacious music as they can in

order to poison the Chinese people. We must rise up together to

overthrow these kinds of people.44

Owing to the dual restraint of sporadic GMD censorship and market

pressures, leftists never succeeded in eliminating the culture of consump-

tion to which they were so adamantly opposed. Instead, they appropri-

ated many of its techniques and "infiltrated" some of the mass media

channels through which it was disseminated. The history of this infiltra-

tion, of course, has been exhaustively (if rather superficially) covered by

scholars on the mainland, and it is not my primary concern here.45

Instead, I would like to focus on some of the ways in which gender

(particularly in relation to the sing-song girl) plays itself out in the dis-

course of the left-wing music movement of the mid-1930s.

There is perhaps no better example of the way the Left harnesses

the pathos of the sing-song girl as a figure of oppression, national humil-

iation, and national resistance than Nie Er's song for the 1935 film

Children of the Storm (Fengyun ernu), "The Sing-Song Girl under the

Iron Hoof" (Tieti xia de genu).46 The film's scenario, written by Tian

330

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

Han, tells the story of a group of young people in Shanghai who, driven

by misfortune and oppression, gradually devote themselves to the anti-

Japanese war effort in the north of China. The film climaxes with a

stirring rendition of the song that was to become China's national an-

them, Nie Er's "March of the Volunteers" (Yiyong jun jinxing qu), set

to a symbolic montage of Chinese peasants marching toward the Great

Wall.47

The clear-cut attempt to mythologize (and thus mobilize) nationalist

sentiment is leavened with a subplot portraying the life of Ah Feng

(played by Wang Renmei), an orphaned child compelled by poverty to

undertake a career as a "sing-song girl."48 The film follows Ah Feng and

her song and dance troupe to Qingdao, where they are on tour. After

the troupe regales cinemagoers with a "Spanish"-inspired dance routine

(performed by two more graduates of Li Jinhui's own troupe, Zhou

Xuan and Bai Hong), Ah Feng's song inserts a note of patriotic urgency

into a scene that would otherwise have been indistinguishable from a

host of others in the "soft" Chinese musicals of the era. Indeed, the

juxtaposition of sing-song girl and the nation in Xu Xingzhi's lyrics (and

their saturation by the discourse of prostitution as national humiliation)

is transparent to the point of clumsiness:

Everywhere we sell our songs

We perform our dances all around

Who doesn't know that the nation's on the brink of disaster?

So why have we been taken for courtesans?

Because of hunger and cold

We sing our sad songs everywhere

We've tasted all of life's cares

Dancing girls are condemned always to drift

Who's willing to be someone's slave?

Who wants to let our homeland fall into enemy hands?

The sing-song girl under the iron hoof is pitiful

Whipped until her whole body is torn and bleeding49

Obviously, the lyric signifies a rejection of consumer culture, a disrup-

tion of the circuit of pleasure in which the sing-song girl serves as a

medium for commercial exchange as one who "sells songs" (or, via her

The Sing-Song Girl and the Nation 331

mass-mediated voice, radio advertising and cinema tickets) and by

extension her own body. Implicit here as well is the notion of recupera-

tion, the implication that the oppressed sing-song girl is ready and

willing to be enlisted in the cause of national salvation. This recupera-

tion, though, is equivocal at best. In an industry that functioned by way

of a gendered division of labor in which men wrote lyrics and women

sang them, Xu Xingzhi's lyrics represent just as much of an appropria-

tion (and in a sense a silencing) of the "sing-song girl" as a song in

which the words put in her mouth are nothing more than a titillating

salve to male fantasies or an invitation to commercial exchange.50

Just as significant is Nie Er's musical language. In describing music

in any other terms than the strictly musicological, of course, we con-

demn ourselves to the realm of the merely "adjectival," as Roland

Barthes would have it.51 But these adjectives - and the musical facts to

which they refer - are in a very real sense gendered. Wong Kee-chee has

noted a distinct transformation wrought on the singing styles of the day

by the advent of leftist "mass music" into the urban media market.52

Essentially, Nie and his compatriots in the left-wing music movement

replaced the rather high-pitched, nasal, and melismatic style characteris-

tic of Li Jinhui's more popular tunes - sometimes mocked in contempo-

rary writings as the "little sister style" (meimei qiang) - with a deeper,

open-throated approach to vocal production imported from Western

operatic, martial, and folk music traditions. This shift in vocal produc-

tion, of course, was accompanied by analogous changes in the melodic

and rhythmic profiles of the form.

The ideological implications of this change cannot be overestimated.

To contemporary critics, the former style implied tradition (and specifi-

cally the tradition of the courtesan-cum-sing-song girl in her urban set-

ting), vulgarity, sexuality, vulnerability, and exaggerated femininity. The

latter was implicated with qualities of nobility, grandeur, aggression, and

masculinity. In this light, it is not surprising that a majority of the film

songs produced by Nie Er, He Luting, Ren Guang, and Xian Xinghai

throughout the 1930s were written not for women - as was overwhelm-

ingly the case with the commercial pop music of the period - but for

men.53 Nor is their experimentation with rousing martial choral effects (as

in "The March of the Volunteers" and Ren Guang's adaptation of the

"Song of the Volga Boatmen" for the film The Great Road) insignificant in

terms of gender and ideology.54 Instead, it represented a musical figure

332 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

for collectivity and nationhood, a figure in which the voice of the sing-

song girl was submerged and assimilated into the larger group.

Another crucial determinant of musical meaning is its performative

context and the "metamusical aspects" of performance (or its cinematic

representations).55 This, in fact, strikes me as one of the most important

aspects of leftist efforts in the mid-1930s to shift the locale of music

making away from the nightclub and into the stadiums and parks in

which mass "national salvation song meets" were sporadically held. In

nightclubs and cabarets (and the musical cinema, which often took these

locales as their primary settings) the very setup of the performance space

was redolent of the notion of music as consumption. The sing-song girl

stands isolated on stage behind a microphone, exposed to the gaze of the

audience. The orchestra is hidden toward the back of the stage or in an

orchestra pit in front of her. As Richard Middleton points out, this sort

of spatial interrelationship - in which the mechanics of musical perfor-

mance are elided in order to focus attention on the singer - is one of the

best indicators that we are in the presence of "the star syndrome."56 A

filmic equivalent of this syndrome is evoked in many of the Mandarin

musicals of the late 1930s and 1940s when, as Sam Ho notes, the star

sings out in the open air to the accompaniment of an invisible, off-screen

orchestra!57

The semiotics of performance in the mass singing meetings with

which leftist musicians sought to stir up patriotic fervor in the years

between 1934 and 1937 could not have been more different. Here the

most appropriate metaphor is martial. In one such meeting held in

Shanghai Stadium in 1936, one thousand singers of the People's Anthem

Society (Minzhong geyonghui) were serried into ranks, facing a (male)

conductor who led them in singing what had come to be known as

National Defense Music (Guofang yinyue).58 The fetishized female star

is subsumed by the collective, commercial exchange is replaced with

ideological solidarity and voluntarism, and the (gendered) consumer

becomes a desexed citizen participating in a ritual enactment of national

solidarity.

Even so, the leftist cinema on the eve of the Japanese invasion could

not altogether dispense with the sing-song girl. Part of the reason for

this, of course, was box-office appeal. Filmmaking is capital intensive;

stars like Zhou Xuan and Wang Renmei brought patrons into the

theater. Indeed, much of the appeal to contemporary audiences of a film

like Street Angel (Malu tianshi, dir. Yuan Muzhi, 1937) lay in its skillful

The Sing-Song Girl and the Nation 333

(re)deployment of a sing-song girl singing tunes that were more than a

little reminiscent of Li Jinhui's "Drizzle" in terms of musical style and

melodic contours if not lyrical content.59 Indeed, Zhou Xuan's two musi-

cal sequences in the film, "Song of the Seasons" (Siji ge) and "Sing-Song

Girl at the Ends of the Earth" (Tianya genu) by He Luting and Tian

Han, are still celebrated today as classics in the evolution of Mandarin

pop and are distinctive for the manner in which they invoke not the

turgid strains of Western (and specifically Soviet) martial music, as in

Nie Er's work, but the mellifluous (and to leftist and more conservative

highbrow critics alike, "decadent") melodic material of traditional urban

folk song forms (often referred to as xiaodiao).

I want to briefly focus on one particularly revealing musical se-

quence from Street Angel, a justly famous film. Zhou Xuan, playing a

sing-song girl modeled so closely on her own life that she shares her real

(as opposed to stage) name, Xiao Hong, is called by the proprietor of

the teahouse where she works to sing a song for a gangster to whom he is

trying to sell her as a concubine. The performance context duplicates in

almost every particular the "classic" situation of the sing-song girl. The

singer faces the client; the client gazes appraisingly back at her. The

sing-song girl is on display. She is the fetishized object of a commercial

transaction that is to take place between the gangster and the proprietor,

and the song itself is supposed to be the sales pitch that closes the deal.

As in other commercial films of the era, the camera lingers lovingly

over Zhou Xuan's body (clad in the form-fitting qipao so characteristic of

women's fashions of the 1930s) and facial expressions, emphasizing her

"star quality." At the same time, however, her vulnerability and reluc-

tance to be forced into the role to which she has been assigned are clearly

marked by her refusal to meet the gaze of the gangster and the fidgety

way she braids her hair as she sings. Suddenly, the context of the perfor-

mance is disrupted (and more important, enlarged), for rather than dwell-

ing exclusively on the trio in the teahouse we are shown a visual montage

keyed to Tian Han's song lyrics, which scroll across the bottom of the

screen pursued by a bouncing white ball:

Spring comes, and the window fills with green

A maiden sits by the window embroidering a pair of Mandarin

ducks

Suddenly, a heartless blow

Splits the ducks in two

334

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

Summer comes, and the willow fronds grow long

The maiden has been blown south of the Yangzi River

The scenery's lovely all over the land

Bow how can it compare to the green sorghum fields at home?

Autumn comes, and the lotus flowers are sweet

The maiden dreams of home night after night

When she wakes she doesn't see the faces of mom and dad

Just the moonlight shining at the foot of the bed

Winter comes, and snow flurries down

When winter clothes are ready I'll send them to my man

The Great Wall built of blood and flesh is long

Would that I could be the ancient Meng Jiang

The heartless blow that separates Xiao Hong from her lover (Mandarin

ducks being a traditional symbol of conjugal bliss) is cinematically visual-

ized as a barrage of Japanese artillery fire. Xiao Hong's difficulties, we

realize, are a consequence of Japanese territorial encroachment; the war

in Japanese-occupied Manchuria has made her a refugee from northern

China and forced her into thralldom as a sing-song girl in Shanghai.

Almost inevitably, the sequence ends with an image that deftly con-

veys both the ancient glory of the Chinese nation and the necessity for

national defense: the Great Wall. And Xiao Hong, in invoking the

legend of Meng Jiang (a legendary heroine who died during the construc-

tion of the wall), offers herself as a martyr to the nationalist cause.

Through montage, then, the pathos of the sing-song girl becomes an

analogue for China's national crisis. Xiao Hong's oppression at the

hands of the patriarchy is welded to - and ultimately displaced by - a

larger narrative of national salvation. And the filmmakers have had

their cake and eaten it, too: the fetishized star appeal of Zhou Xuan the

sing-song girl is exploited at the same time as it is defused and recuper-

ated by way of the presence of a "larger" discourse.

Street Angel, of course, was not the only Chinese leftist film in which

commercial popular culture (and its modes of signification) are rewritten

by way of nationalist narratives. Indeed, popular songs and the women

who sing them become perhaps the primary vehicle for the articula-

tion of a discourse of national salvation in the leftist cinema of the 1930s.

Examples are legion, ranging from Cai Chusheng's 1935 drama New

The Sing-Song Girl and the Nation 335

Woman (Xin nuxing) to Xia Yan and Zhang Shichuan's 1937 production

A New Year's Coin (Yasuiqian). In the former, Li Jinhui's jazzy dance

hall ditty "Peach Blossom River" is quite literally appropriated and

rewritten by a proletarian woman in the form of a nationalist anthem

about foreign imperialism in Shanghai called "Huangpu River."60 A

similar technique is utilized in the former: a song called "The Song of the

Dance Hall" (Wuxie zhi ge) that is performed in a number of contexts by

a sing-song girl throughout the film is transformed at the end of the

movie into a "Song of National Salvation" (Jiuguo zhi ge) stridently

performed over the wireless by a patriotic school choir (thus displacing

the original sing-song girl, who has fallen into a life of taxi dancing and

streetwalking).61

This process of rewriting lends these examples of leftist cinematic

and musical production a curious doubleness precisely because they

cannot erase the physical traces of earlier inscriptions--those of the

star system and the female bodies around which its political and discur-

sive economies pivot. We have already examined how, in Children of

the Storm as much as Street Angel, voyeurism and nationalism go hand

in hand.62 The pathos of the fallen sing-song girl is appropriated by the

discourse of nationalism; her humiliation and salvation figure that of

the nation. Foregrounding the gendered traces of commercial media

culture in these songs and films, and thus deepening our understanding

of the history and mechanisms of nationalist discourse, is one of the

goals of this preliminary study.

A second, and perhaps less obvious agenda, has to do with the

work of Li Jinhui. Just as Nie Er appropriates and rewrites Li's music in

New Woman, leftist critics of the 1930s, as well as historians in the post-

1949 period, rewrite (and in my view radically impoverish) our under-

standing of the career of this pivotal figure. Strangely enough, conven-

tional accounts of Li's trajectory read something like the tales of fallen

sing-song girls: the original innocence of his early nationalistic efforts to

promote children's education is besmirched by his later descent into the

tawdry world of commercial media culture. These accounts obscure the

fact that Li's contributions to Chinese media culture are just as complex

and ambivalent as those of his leftist critics. The sing-song girl was as

much a product of May Fourth era discourses of nation building as of

anything else. The brand of mass-mediated voyeurism that Li helped to

forge, in other words, is as much informed by nationalism as leftist

cinema is informed by voyeurism. The task of the historian, then, is to

336 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

uncover the traces of each in the other and in doing so complicate our

understanding of both.

NOTES

1. The only male singers who recorded consistently for Path6 Records

(Shanghai Baidai changpian gongsi), the premier record label of the day, were

Yan Hua (Zhou Xuan's first husband) and Yao Min (an accomplished songwriter

and the older brother of one of the most popular singers of the late 1930s and

1940s, Yao Li). A glance through the Path6 catalog compiled by the Shanghai

branch of the China Records Corporation reveals that a majority of their records

were duets recorded with popular female singers of the era. Significantly, both

Yan and Yao were more extensively involved in songwriting, management, and

production (all roles from which their female counterparts were largely ex-

cluded) than performance.

2. Sam Ho, "The Songstress, the Farmer's Daughter, the Mambo Girl,

and the Songstress Again," in Law Kar, ed., Mandarin Films and Popular Songs,

40's-60's: Catalog of the 17th Hong Kong International Film Festival (Hong

Kong: Urban Council, 1993), 59.

3. I translate the Chinese genii as "sing-song girl" advisedly. As Gail

Hershatter notes, high-class Shanghainese courtesans skilled in the arts of song

and storytelling were respectfully referred to by their clients as xiansheng (liter-

ally, master or firstborn). The term sing-song girl is thus a clever English-

language malapropism based on the Shanghainese pronunciation of xiansheng.

Because of the constant slippage between the notion of singing and selling sexual

services, however, I have elected to retain the English word in this context,

despite the more limited denotative scope of the original Chinese term. See Gail

Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-

Century China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 41.

4. Indeed, as has often been pointed out, the list of "graduates" from Li's

troupes (which includes Zhou Xuan, Bai Hong, and Wang Renmei) reads like a

litany of Shanghai's brightest stars. As I discuss later in this chapter, the troupe

also produced a leftist musician, Nie Er, who was to become one of the most

vocal critics of Shanghai's entertainment scene as well as the author of the song

"The March of the Volunteers" (Yiyongjun jinxing qu), which was later adopted

as China's national anthem. For an account of Nie's participation in and later

disaffection from the troupe, see Wang Yizhi, Nie Er zhuan [A biography of Nie

Er] (Shanghai: Shanghai yinyue chubanshe, 1992).

5. Wang Yuhe, Zhongguo jinxiandai yinyue shi (A history of modern

Chinese music) (Beijing: Beijing renmin chubanshe, 1984), 118.

6. One of the most interesting, and certainly the most frightening, vision

of this sort of musical culture was formulated by a prominent music educator and

nationalist intellectual, Xiao Youmei, in a 1934 radio address entitled "The

Power of Music." In the address, which was reprinted in a number of scholarly

The Sing-Song Girl and the Nation 337

and popular journals in the mid-1930s, Xiao claims that "The last and most

readily apparent power is that musical rhythm is capable of conducting the

greatest masses, capable of synchronizing the movements of the entire [Chinese]

nation." The necessary corollary to this sort of argument, of course, is that forms

of music that do not achieve nationalist aims must be eliminated or suppressed.

See Xiao Youmei, "Yinyue de shili" (The power of music), Yinyue jiaoyu 3

(March 1934): pp. 9-13. The article was reprinted in Yisheng 5 (October 1935).

7. Gail Hershatter provides a revealing study of the origins of this dis-

course on prostitution in her "Modernizing Sex, Sexing Modernity: Prostitution

in Early Twentieth-Century Shanghai," in Christina K. Gilmartin, Gail Her-

shatter, Lisa Rofel, and Tyrene White, eds., Engendering China: Woman, Cul-

ture, and the State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 147-74.

8. For a critical biography of Li Jinhui's life and music, see Sun Ji'nan, Li

Jinhui pingzhuan (Li Jinhui: A critical biography) (Beijing: Renmin yinyue

chubanshe, 1993).

9. The most famous of these "children's operas" include The Grape Fairy

(Putao xianzi, 1923), Three Butterflies (San hudie, 1926), and The Magpie and

the Little Child (Maque yu xiaohai, 1927). Many of Li's children songs continue

to circulate today. For a contemporary critical assessment of these works, see

Sun Ji'nan, 34-62.

10. This was not, of course, a cosmetic institute. Instead, the name of the

school reflected Li's belief that "just as butterflies are the glory of the insect

world, beautiful people are the cream of humanity." See Wang Yuhe, 92.

11. Li Jinhui, "Wo he Mingyue gewu she" (The Bright Moon Society and

myself), Wenhua shiliao 4 (January 1983): 210. Interestingly, the tour was en-

dorsed by the prominent leftists Tian Han and Zheng Zhenduo, both of whom

heartily endorsed Li's nationalist agenda.

12. Ibid., 211. For Wang Renmei's account of the incident, see Xie Bo, ed.,

Wode chengming yu buxing: Wang Renmei huiyi lu (My success and misfortune:

The reminiscences of Wang Renmei) (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe,

1985), 75.

13. Li Jinhui, Jiating aiqing gequ (Twenty five family love songs) (Shang-

hai: Shanghai wenming shudian, 1929).

14. For a review of their performance in Tianjin, see Qiu Chen, "Mingyue

gewu yu kaiming" (Ming Yeoh Musikverein at the Kaiming), Beiyang huabao 19

(August 1930): 2.

15. Interestingly, this company was established by no less a personage as

Chiang Kai-shek, and it claimed the distinction of being the sole Chinese-owned

record company in Shanghai in a market dominated by Path6 (owned by the

English multinational Electrical and Musical Industries or EMI). For an account

of the early development of the Chinese record industry, see Li Qing et al.,

Guangbo dianshi qiye shi (neibu shiliao) (Internal documents on the history of

the broadcasting and television enterprise) (Shanghai: Zhongguo changpian

gongsi, 1994). For a history of the global diffusion of the recording industry, see

Pekka Gronow, "The Record Industry Comes to the Orient," Ethnomusicology

2, no. 25 (1981): 251-84.

338

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

16. Li repudiated his use of "American thigh dancing" in a post-1949 self-

criticism. See Sun Ji'nan, 118.

17. Zhang Zhang, "Yinyue yishu wang na'er qu?" (Quo vadis, musical

art?) Yinyue jiaoyu 8 (August 1936): 84.

18. Ibid., 80.

19. Xie Bo, 145. For an extremely illuminating look at the issue of gender

and performance in the May Fourth era, see Catherine Chow Hui-ling, "Nii

yanyuan, xieshi zhuyi, 'xin ntixing' lunshu: wanqing dao wusi shiqi Zhongguo

xiandai juchang zhong de xingbie biaoyan" (Actresses, realism, and the dis-

course of the "new woman": The performance of gender in China's modern

theater from the late Qing to the May Fourth period), Jindai Zhongguo fund, shi

yanjiu (Research in modern Chinese women's history) 4 (August 1996): 87-133.

20. Li Jinhui, "Juantou yu" (Introduction), in San hudie: dumu gewu juben

(Three butterflies: Script for a one-act musical drama) (Shanghai: Zonghua

shuju, 1926), 4-5.

21. Sun Yu, "Qingchun de biaoxian" (Manifestation of youth). Yingxi

zazhi 1 (July 1931): 42.

22. See the Shanghai tong she (Shanghai Experts Society), eds., Shanghai

yanjiu ziliao xuji (Shanghai research materials), vol. 2 (Shanghai: Shanghai

shudian, 1984), 717.

23. Interview with Yao Li, Hong Kong, October 20, 1995. See also the

broadcasting column in Yule (Variety weekly), 2, no. 1 (January 1, 1936): 5.

24. For commentary on this development, see Sun Yu and Si Kong,

"Zhongguo de gewu" (Chinese musical drama), Yingxi zazhi 1 (July 1931):

39-40.

25. According to Sun Ji'nan, the film was produced by the Tianyi Studio in

1931; Li provided three songs for the soundtrack. It is, like so many other films

of its era and genre, no longer extant. The first Chinese talkie, Genii Hong

Mudan (Sing-song girl Red Peony), produced in 1930 by Mingxing, told the

story of a traditional-style courtesan and featured several Peking opera arias.

26. Shui Jing notes that in the 1940s almost every "corner store" in Shang-

hai's residential districts was equipped with a radio and a gramophone and that

such spaces became a prime site for popular music consumption. See his Liuxing

gequ cangsangji (Record of the odyssey of pop music) (Taipei: Dadi chubanshe,

1981), 8. As the 1930 ad copy in a record trade journal indicates, the expansion

of the media into private space was essential to the growth of the industry: "IN

THE HOME. . . New Moon Records are the most elegant and proper sort of

leisure product." See Xinyue ji (New Moon collection) 1 (August 1930): 39.

27. It comes as no surprise, for instance, that one frequently finds advertise-

ments for gramophone records and radio equipment in the women's magazines

of the period. See, for example, the string of RCA/Victor print ads that ran in

the popular wartime journal Niisheng (Women's voice).

28. The magazine Yule is perhaps the best example of this phenomenon

because it was expressly formulated as a journalistic guide to a variety of modish

urban leisure activities (filmgoing, dancing, listening to the wireless, dog racing,

and more).

The Sing-Song Girl and the Nation 339

29. Another important aspect of the star-making machinery and pop

fandom in Shanghai was the practice of collecting photographs of various per-

formers. Movie magazines often ran advertisements for photo studios that were

selling shots of the stars.

30. "Chuangkan ci" (Editor's introduction), Gexinghuabao 1 (March 1935).

31. It should be noted that there are precedents for this kind of "consumer

guide" approach in earlier urban tabloids that catered to the prostitution trade.

Also, many of the formats and representative strategies adopted by film maga-

zines and tabloids in China were, I suspect, adapted from American magazines

and Hollywood celebrity tabloids.

32. See Yisheng 2 (July 1935): 13.

33. Li recorded almost fifty sides for the American RCA/Victor label in

1934 alone, according to Liang Maochun in his article "Dui woguo liuxing yinyue

lishi de sikao" (Thoughts on the history of Chinese popular music), Renmin

yinyue 7 (1988): 33. The exodus of talent to the cinema is strikingly illustrated by

a two-page photo spread published in Yingmi zhoubao (Film fan weekly) in 1934

and entitled "From the Musical Stage to the Movies." The spread features

several of Li's female proteges, including Zhou Xuan, Bai Hong, Li Lihua, and

Jiang Manjie. See "Cong getai dao yinmu" (From the musical stage to the silver

screen), Yingmi zhoubao 8 (November 14, 1934).

34. Luo Ting, "Guanyu Li Jinhui" (On Li Jinhui), Yinyue jiaoyu 2 (Decem-

ber 1934): 34.

35. The first months of 1934 alone brought several musicals, including

Renjian xianzi (Heavenly girl on earth) and Jianmei yundong (Sports move-

ment). The trend, of course, was in part a reaction to a spate of Hollywood

musicals inundating the Shanghai market at the time, the most notable of which

were a string of Warner Brothers productions choreographed by Busby Berkeley

(42nd Street, Gold-Diggers of 1933, and Footlight Parade, among others). For a

contemporary critique of this trend, see Wu Duanfeng, "Zhongguo dianying

zuijin zhi xin de qingxiang" (The latest trends in Chinese movies), Yingmi

zhoubao 8 (November 14, 1934): 130.

36. "Jingren xiaoxi" (Shocking news), Shanghai yingxun, August 23,

1941, 31.

37. The most obvious example is Zhou Xuan. An orphan, she faced the

threat of being sold into prostitution several times before making it big in the

music business. And in many of her films she plays a character who is in all

essential respects Zhou Xuan. An example of classic postwar productions that

embody this sort of plot structure and media looping is Zhou's The Song of the

Sing-Song Girl (Genii zhi ge, 1948). Prewar examples also exist, although they

are often difficult to find due to the ravages of time, war, and (at least on the

mainland) historians and archivists who have tended to exclude nonleftist films

from the cinematic canon. One interesting example of the motif is Song of

Everlasting Regret (Changhen zhi ge, 1936), a commercial melodrama directed

by Shi Dongshan and starring Wang Renmei as a divorced housewife who tries a

new career in the music business, becoming an exploited sing-song girl at a radio

station and eventually a murderess.

340

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

38. Sam Ho, 56.

39. This is as defined in the Ciyuan (Etymological dictionary) (Hong Kong:

Shangwu yinshuguan, 1980).

40. For an exhaustive account of the Black Angel debate, see Wang Yizhi,

181-201.

41. See Ma Hiao-Ts'iun, 47.

42. Cheng Maoyun, "Li Jinhui yiliu juqu heyi bixu quti" (Why the music of

Li Jinhui and his ilk must be eliminated), Yinyue jiaoyu 1 (January 1934): 71-3.

Cheng is best known for having written the tune for the GMD's party anthem.

43. Ibid., 71. Given the crypto-fascist bent of the GMD's New Life cam-

paign, it is interesting to note Cheng's use of discursive strategies common to

other fascist movements of the era: an apotheosis of the rural "folk," an idealized

national past coupled with a disdain for "degeneracy," and a concomitant drive for

tight government restrictions on "unorthodox" forms of cultural expression.

44. He Luting, "Zhongguo yinyue jie xianzhuang ji women dui yinyue

yishu yingyou de renshi" (The present state of China's music world and the

attitude we should take toward musical art), Mingxing banyuekan 5, no. 6

(1936).

45. For the left-wing "new music" movement, see Wang Yuhe. For left-

wing involvement in the cinema of the 1930s, see Cheng Jihua.

46. The film was directed by Xu Xingzhi for the leftist-dominated Diantong

[Denton] Studio. For the film's scenario, see Chen Bo, ed., Zhongguo zuoyi

dianying yundong (The Chinese left-wing film movement) (Beijing: Zhongguo

dianying chubanshe, 1995), 283-84.

47. For an account of the genesis of the film and the national anthem, see

Tian Han, "Fengyun ernii he yiyong jun jinxingqu" ("Children of the Storm"

and "The March of the Vounteers"), in ibid., 366-67.

48. Again this is an example of intertextual looping: Wang was herself

orphaned as a teenager.

49. Music by Nie Er, words by Xu Xingzhi. See Qingnian yinyue yanjiu she

(Youth Music Research Society), eds., Xin Shanghai mingge sanbai qu (Three

hundred popular songs of new Shanghai) (Shanghai: Shanghai gequ she, 1935),

86.

50. In all fairness, however, it is interesting to note that the singer Wang

Renmei saw the song as "a true-to-life picture of the life of the girls in the Bright

Moon Society." See Xie Bo, 161.

51. Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977).

52. Wong Kee-chee, personal interview, Hong Kong, October 20, 1995.

53. Examples abound in the classic leftist films of the period, including the

1937 films Song at Midnight (Yeban gesheng) and Crossroads (Shizi jietou).

54. The Great Road (Dalu), also made in 1935, was directed by Sun Yu and

produced by Lianhua (United Photoplay).

55. See Richard Middleton, Studying Popular Music (Milton Keynes, En-

gland: Open University Press, 1990), 242.

56. Ibid., 242.

57. Ho, 59.

The Sing-Song Girl and the Nation 341

58. Wang Yuhe, 146. This martial metaphor, of course, is given concrete

expression in the concluding montage of Children of the Storm. For a photo-

graph of this particular meeting, see the Zhongguo yinyue cidian (Dictionary of

Chinese music) (Beijing: Renmin yinyue chubanshe, 1984), 471.

59. Zhi Er, "Cong 'Malu tianshi' de gequ shuoqi" (On the songs of Street

Angel), Xinhua huabao 7 (1937).

60. In fact, the film's music (including this adaptation of Li's original tune

to leftist purposes) was composed by Nie Er.

61. In a final case of media looping, the sing-song girl in question is played

by Gong Qiuxia and named (nearly eponymously) Jiang Xiuxia.

62. Rey Chow has noted a similar tendency in the literary discourse of the

era in her Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading between East

and West (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). See also Chow, 86.



Chapter 11

Narratives of Exile and the Search for

Homeland in Contemporary Korean

Japanese Writings

John Lie

Korean Japanese constitute a group that is at once visible and invisible,

homogeneous and heterogeneous. Their visibility is exemplified by the

traditional Korean costume that schoolgirls commuting to ethnic Korean

schools wear (at least those schools affiliated with Soren, the pro-North

Korean organization in Japan). But the vast majority of perhaps a million

Koreans in Japan "pass" as Japanese, as they are physically indistinguish-

able and culturally assimilated into Japanese society. Virtually all of them

speak Japanese fluently and, especially for later generations, very few

aspects of their lives render them distinct from their Japanese counter-

parts. Even eating kimch'i (a paradigmatic Korean food)- long a telltale

sign of Koreanness - has become popular among urban Japanese.1

Korean Japanese - constituting less than 1 percent of the total Japa-

nese population - seem to be a relatively homogeneous group. Nearly all

of them are colonial-period migrants and their descendants. However,

besides their divergent contemporary fortunes - whether measured as

academic attainment or income inequality - another profound rift di-

vides them: the cold war division between North and South Korea. The

geopolitical division was refracted among Korean Japanese in the form of

two organizations, Soren and Mindan, which are allied with North and

South Korea, respectively. Divided loyalties to the two nation-states have

impeded the solidarity of Korean Japanese. Indeed, their heterogeneity

is exemplified by a lack of consensus on what to call them.

What united those in the Korean diaspora in Japan until very recently

was their intention to return to Korea. But the Korean War, continuing

tensions on the peninsula, the poverty of Korea, and the sheer gravity of

343

344

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

everyday life have bound many Koreans to Japan. Reflecting their desire

to return to their homeland one day, many of them continued to identify

themselves as Koreans, whether as "overseas nationals of North Korea"

or "resident Koreans in Japan." Korean Japanese are, in this sense, exiles,

"someone who inhabits one place and remembers or projects the reality

of another."2 This is especially true for Korean Japanese intellectuals,

who have written eloquently about their exiled conditions in Japan and

their longing to return to their homeland.3

In this chapter, I explore three distinct resolutions of the problem-

atic of exile by considering the recent writings of Kim Sok-pom, Yi

Yang-ji, and Yi Hoe-song - three well-known writers of Korean descent

in Japan. In particular, I focus on the writings - fictional and nonfic-

tional- that depict experiences of actual return to Korea, their pre-

sumed homeland. By exploring their disparate ways of coming to terms

with their return and their conditions of exile, I want to draw attention

not only to the diversity of the Korean diaspora in Japan but to different

modes of exilic and diasporic identity.

Kim Sok-pom's Utopia

Kokoku kO (To the ancestral land) is an account of Kim Sok-pom's trip

to South Korea and in particular to Cheju-do.4 Cheju-do is an island off

the southwestern coast of South Korea and is the locale of Kim's best-

known novel, Kazanto (Volcano Island). The multivolume novel re-

counts the 1947 uprising in which many insurgents sympathetic to com-

munism were killed. Although Kim was born in Osaka, Cheju-do is not

only an important locus of his fiction but a place he calls his ancestral

land (kokoku) as well.

Although Kim had not been to Korea in more than forty years, he

had repeatedly sought, but failed, to visit South Korea. Like many other

Koreans in Japan, his intention to return to Korea was dashed by the

political turbulence that culminated in the Korean War. Several planned

trips were stymied either by the South Korean government's refusal to

grant a visa or by other unfortunate occurrences.

Kim had, however, spurned an earlier opportunity to travel to South

Korea for political reasons: "The reason I could not return to my coun-

try for over forty years is, in a word, the political one of the division

between North and South Korea" (Kokoku kO, 6). In 1981, his fellow

editors at the journal Kikan Sanzenri traveled to South Korea. The

Narratives of Exile and the Search for Homeland 345

journal was founded by former members-turned-critics of Soren; Kim

himself had left the organization in 1968 because of his opposition to its

rigid hierarchy. Kim, however, refused to join his coeditors in their 1981

trip because he wished to protest the South Korean military dictatorship

that had just massacred civilians in the 1980 Kwangju Uprising. Kim also

resigned from the journal. Therefore, he was in opposition to both the

North and South Korean regimes, their respective organizations (Soren

and Mindan) in Japan, and close allies who had left Soren with him in

the late 1960s.5

Thus, Kim's insistently independent position precludes his loyalty to

ready-made identities: North Korea, South Korea, Soren, or Mindan.

Furthermore, his chosen language of writing - Japanese - and his break

with Kikan Sanzenri led him to write for the Japanese reading public.

Indeed, his magnum opus, KazantO, was published by Bungei Shunji,

one of the leading Japanese publishers, and his stories and essays repeat-

edly appear in quality papers and leading journals.

Because of his long absence, moreover, Kim's relationship to Korea

exists almost solely in the realm of memory and imagination. There are

only two tangible connections to Korea that he mentions. First, he has a

stone that he received from a Japanese friend who had visited Cheju-do.

He would "occasionally smell the faint aroma of the ocean," which he

detected in the stone. Second, Asahi Shinbun - the leading Japanese

daily - chartered a small plane to fly him near Cheju-do in 1984 in order

to see the "Volcano Island" about which he had been writing.6

Kim's 1988 trip is, then, an effort "to bury forty years of time in two

hours [the flight time from Tokyo to Seoul]" (Kokoku kO, 21). The

much-anticipated return is, however, anticlimactic. Kim recognizes very

little of Seoul or Cheju-do. "As I walked, I looked for the shape of the

past. . . Cheju-do was utterly transformed. . . The shape of the past

was virtually absent" (Kokoku kO, 90). The site of a massacre, for

example, has become a tourist site. Memory serves him poorly; in fact,

the photographs he had seen prior to his trip afford him the few glimpses

of recognition that he experiences. The South Koreans he encounters

outside of his admirers confound - in fact, shock - him: the daredevil

taxi drivers, the rude waitresses, the arrogant subway station attendants,

and so on (Kokoku kO, 50). He refuses to recognize that the rhythm and

the resonance of his everyday life are fundamentally Japanese. The disso-

nance he senses in South Korean life is an accurate measure of his forty-

year residence in Japan.

346

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

Given that Kim's adult experiences have been inescapably Japanese,

it should not be surprising that he should recognize so little of the South

Korea that he revisits after forty years. To be sure, the massive transfor-

mation of South Korea ensures that very little of it would remain the

same after nearly half a century. But there is more: despite his emotional

attachment to Cheju-do, Kim was in fact born in Osaka and the most

extended period of his stay on the island was only for half a year when he

was thirteen (Kokoku kO, 37).

Kim ends his narrative by announcing that a "united Korea. . . is

my country (sokoku)" (Kokoku ko, 138). The remembered past is prob-

lematic, however, because Korea was colonized by Japan; hence, the

desire for a return cannot be to the past but to a future ideal. Recogniz-

ing, moreover, that Korea is not the place of his birth, he acknowledges

that his "ancestral land" (kokoku) is a place of conscious construction

shaped at once by his ethnic or national consciousness (minzokuteki

jikaku) and his anti-Japanese thought (shisO) (Kokoku kO, 113). Kim's

ancestral country or homeland is a projection of his desires for a reuni-

fied Korea.

By posing a utopia, Kim rejects identification with all the actually

existing Korean nation-states and Korean Japanese organizations. Confi-

dent in his identification as a Korean (albeit exiled in Japan), he lives in

fact as a Japanese and writes for the Japanese public. Although com-

pletely dependent on the Japanese intellectual establishment (his Japa-

nese publisher defrayed his travel expenses and even sent "bodyguards"

for him), he nonetheless castigates Japan (anti-Japanese sentiment is one

of the two pillars of his thought).

Kim's exile, in other words, is sustained by his denial of his diasporic

status. Kim's fictional focus is a Korean past that he barely remembers;

his imagined community of a unified Korea exists in the undefined fu-

ture, while his concrete community remains the Japanese public. Long-

ing for a return to an imaginary homeland, the exile remains beholden to

an actually existing host country that he castigates. It is a private and

comfortable exile, devoid of danger or desperation. Worst of all, by

averting his gaze from his diasporic status, Kim elides all the concrete

problems that exist for Korean Japanese.7

Yi Yang-ji and the Irreconcilable Gulf

Toward the end of Kokoku ko, Kim mentions a meeting with another

Korean-Japanese writer, Yi Yang-ji. Over a drink at an open-air stall, he

Narratives of Exile and the Search for Homeland 347

is surprised to learn that Yi, who had been studying traditional Korean

dance in Seoul, is relieved to be speaking Japanese with him (Kokoku

kO, 133). Although Yi considers Yamanashi Prefecture (where she can

see Mount Fuji) to be her home (furusato), Kim reflects that Cheju-do is

his home even as he acknowledges that he was born in Osaka. He

conjectures that the difference between them is generational (Kokoku

kO, 133).

The relief that Yi expresses is a central tension in her novella

"Yuhi," which takes place on the day when Yuhi, a Korean Japanese

woman studying at S (Seoul National) University, leaves South Korea

for Japan.8 The anonymous narrator, who works at a small publishing

company, begins by reflecting on her misgivings about not seeing Yuhi

off at the airport. The story intertwines the narrator's recollections of

Yuhi and her conversations with her aunt, with whom she lives in a

house in an old, quiet neighborhood of Seoul.

Yuhi's return to her homeland - the constant refrain of uri nara (our

country in Korean) marks the story - was, we learn toward the end of

the story, motivated by her desire "to defend her own country against

her father" (Yi Yang-ji zensha, 440). Because of unsavory business deal-

ings with deceitful fellow Koreans in Japan, her father had repeatedly

expressed his dislike for Korea and Koreans during her childhood. Grow-

ing up among Japanese, she learned little about Korea except through

her father's lamentations, while she did not experience discrimination by

Japanese people. "Yes, I was surprised to hear about [discrimination

against Koreans in Japan] in the past, but I have never been directly

discriminated against or bullied" (Yi Yang-ji zensha, 410). She has com-

plex feelings about Yi Kwang-su, the early-twentieth-century author

notorious for his pro-Japanese, collaborationist writings.9 She decided to

study abroad (ryagaku) in South Korea because she was attracted to the

music of the Korean flute (taegtim).

The narrator's depiction of Yuhi is predominantly linguistic; the

narrative reveals Yuhi's problems with Korean and her continuing at-

tachment to the Japanese language. Despite majoring in linguistics at a

prestigious university, Yuhi commits simple solecisms and, like native

Japanese speakers, cannot properly pronounce Korean words (Yi Yang-

ji zenshi, 413). The narrator is surprised and exasperated by Yuhi's

inability to make Korean her own. Yuhi's mode of language acquisition

is to memorize and regurgitate; it is fundamentally textual and a rec-

ognizably Japanese mode of language learning. She reads her large

Korean-language dictionary cover to cover (she underlines the word for

348

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

"torture"). Her writing skills, not surprisingly, far surpass her oral abili-

ties. At the same time, Yuhi refuses to watch television and rarely goes

out. Indeed, the narrator's first outing with Yuhi turns into a disaster,

as Yuhi grows increasingly ill while mingling with the crowd in the

bustling city.

The flip side of Yuhi's inability to master Korean is her attachment

to the Japanese language. The narrator is troubled to find more than ten

boxes of Japanese books in Yuhi's room and relates how she has heard

Yuhi speak Japanese when she enters the house or late at night when

Yuhi is alone in her room. Most striking, the narrator finds what turns

out to be Yuhi's keepsake for her - a brown envelope containing 448

pages of writing in Japanese, a language the narrator cannot read.

Language is not the only thing that separates the narrator from

Yuhi. The narrator realizes that she does not understand Yuhi and feels

ambivalent about her and her diasporic, non-Korean status.10 The narra-

tor is angry that Yuhi was able to enter S University, the most prestigious

school in South Korea, because of special provisions for overseas Kore-

ans. She is troubled that Yuhi finds fault with her country. Yuhi accuses

the South Koreans of taking advantage of foreigners, of not apologizing

when they step on others' feet, and of other sorts of rude behavior such

as spitting in restaurants. The violence and the aggression that Yuhi

experiences in Seoul is exemplified by her discovery that there is a

dearth of passive-voice expressions in the Korean language. The narra-

tor retorts: "Yuhi, you are a cheapskate. Koreans in Japan (zainichi

dOhO) are Japanese. No, they look down on Koreans more than Japa-

nese and resent (urandeiru) Koreans" (Yi Yang-ji zenshu, 426). The

narrator insists that Yuhi has "only seen one side of South Korea. You

just don't know South Korea" (Yi Yang-ji zensha, 436).

The narrator is, of course, correct, for Yuhi's experience of South

Korea is textual and passive. Although she loves the view of the rocky

mountain visible from the neighborhood, she refuses to hike there. Al-

though she idolizes the sounds of the Korean flute, she will not take

lessons. Yuhi's quest for uri nara (our country) is, like Kim's search for

the "ancestral land," idealistic. The narrator's aunt, who remains

empathetic throughout, observes that Yuhi "probably came just with

ideals, without knowing anything about South Korea" (Yi Yang-ji

zensha, 436). In part because of the school tie - her husband had gradu-

ated from the prestigious S University - the aunt sees a parallel between

her deceased husband and Yuhi. Because he hated Japan as a colonizer,

Narratives of Exile and the Search for Homeland 349

he could never master Japanese or even watch Japanese television, even

when his business took him to Japan repeatedly.

For Yuhi, the difference between the Korea of her ideals and the

reality of Seoul is irreconcilable. Recounting the moment when she could

not continue to write during an examination, Yuhi says that she could not

form the four letters of the Korean alphabet (han'gal) for uri nara

(Yi Yang-ji zensha, 437). Although she "believes in King Sejong [the

fifteenth-century monarch who oversaw the creation of the Korean alpha-

bet], [she doesn't] like the han'gal of today" (Yi Yang-ji zensha, 437). She

finds it hypocritical that other students are writing uri nara. The disso-

nance of the Korean she hears outside she finds ugly and intolerable; it is

like "tear gas" (Yi Yang-ji zenshu, 437).

In contrast, Yuhi loves the neighborhood of the narrator and her

aunt because it is peaceful; the Korean they speak is not ugly. Yuhi's ties

to contemporary South Korea, which she otherwise finds so repugnant,

are to her tape of Korean flute music and written texts. The two people

she likes - the narrator and her aunt - are themselves alienated. The

narrator is on the verge of depression when Yuhi arrives and deals with

texts at her work (not unlike Yuhi). The widowed aunt refuses to move

to an apartment in Kangnam, which represents Seoul's modern face,

and stays in a traditional Korean-style house in an older neighborhood.

The gulf between the ideal and the reality of homeland that Yuhi

expresses in a Korean that she has not mastered is but an instance of her

profound ambivalence about South Korea.1 After all, her father, not

her Japanese friends and neighbors, despised Korea, and it was her

intention to redeem Korea against her father's charges. Finding Yuhi

drunk one night, the narrator notes that she writes in Korean "I am a

fraud. I am a liar" (Yi Yang-ji zensha, 429). Soon thereafter Yuhi writes

"I cannot love" - in effect, she cannot love the actual uri nara she

finds - but goes on to note that she loves the sound of the Korean flute,

the sound of the ideal uri nara (Yi Yang-ji zensha, 430).

The story ends with the narrator saying "ah," a common letter in

both the Japanese and Korean alphabets, but she is unable to follow it

with another sound. The ambiguity of the sound - it is impossible to

decipher whether it's Japanese or Korean - marks the two worlds of

Japan and Korea as incompatible.

It would be simple to depict Yi Yang-ji's Yuhi as a Korea hater, just

as it would be easy to celebrate Kim Sok-pom as a Korea lover. Kim is

surprised that Yi Yang-ji is relieved to be speaking Japanese, while Yuhi

350 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

cannot adequately speak Korean. But the similarities are telling. Both

of them - as we will see also for Yi Hoe-song's narrator - are troubled

by the rude public behavior of South Koreans; South Koreans, for exam-

ple, bump into people without apologizing. The labyrinthine roads and

the congested public spaces, although to superficial observers no differ-

ent in Tokyo than in Seoul, baffle them. The Korea they imagine is

rooted in the past: the imaginary reconstruction of Cheju-do for Kim,

and the mythical past of King Sejong for Yuhi.

Most important, however, for all the ostensible differences, both

return to Japan. Kim, despite his discussions of ancestral land and home-

land, treats the return to Japan as unproblematic, as something obvious.

Ironically, it is Yuhi, who belongs more unquestionably in Japan, whose

return (she has, after all, spent much more time in South Korea) is seen

as problematic, a sign of defeat. But Yuhi herself experiences none of

the problems that confront her coethnics in Japan.

What I wish to suggest here is that Japan is for all intents and

purposes a home for both Kim and Yuhi. It is the country in which their

everyday lives are embedded, from the ability to navigate urban crowds

and familiarity with landscapes and the built environment to language

(written for Kim, oral for Yuhi). The return to a homeland (kokoku for

Kim, uri nara for Yuhi) is impossible. Hence, homeland is idealized by

both - the future utopia of a unified Korea for Kim, the distant past of

King Sejong and the Korean flute for Yuhi. Trapped between the ideal-

ized homeland and its alien reality, both find themselves snugly, if ines-

capably, at home in Japan.

Between the Living and the Dead

Yi Hoe-song's Shisha to seisha no ichi (The market of the living and the

dead) is another narrative of return.12 The thinly veiled work of fiction

recounts the Korean Japanese writer Munsok's trip to South Korea.

What differentiates his narrative from the other two is that, rather than

seeking a return to an idealized past or an imagined future, he resolves

to ground himself in the worldwide Korean diaspora, which transcends

existing national divisions.

The novel recounts a Korean Japanese author in his sixties who

returns to South Korea for the first time in twenty-three years. Like

Kim, Munsok - who is based closely on Yi Hoe-song himself - has left

the North Korea-affiliated organization in Japan, regards South Korea

Narratives of Exile and the Search for Homeland 351

as the southern ancestral land (sokoku), and has been denied a visa to

enter South Korea. Furthermore, Munsok feels elated to be in South

Korea (his impulse is to kiss the floor after he passes through customs

at the Kimpo Airport in Seoul), but everyday life there confounds him.

He fears the "unknown world" (Shisha to seija no ichi, 6) and repeat-

edly remarks on the rudeness of people who bump into him on the

street. Like Kim and Yuhi, then, Munsok realizes that the tempo and

texture of life in Seoul are far from that in Japan. His discomfort in

South Korea is due in part, like that of Yuhi, to his inadequate com-

mand of Korean.

Munsok's narrative is interspersed with accounts of visiting and re-

visiting peoples and sites important to him and reflections on his past

that focus on Korean and diaspora politics. The reflections articulate his

misgivings about the politics of both North and South Korean regimes.

For example, he drives down to Kwangju with a famous dissident poet

and several others to pay homage to those who died during the Kwangju

Uprising. In the process, however, he also thinks back on his encounters

with Korean expatriates in Germany, particularly those sympathetic to

the North Korean regime. On another occasion, he meets a friend from

his college days with whom he had worked in an effort to return Korean

Japanese to North Korea. "It was almost sad that the dream of returning

to the 'North' had become a nightmare" (Shisha to seija no ichi, 186). He

muses on the powerful rhetoric of the North Korea-affiliated organiza-

tion and how its followers reproduce it.13 For example, the owner of a

"soap land" (a bathhouse that often doubles as brothel) remains loyal to

the North Korea-affiliated organization and donates his earnings to the

North Korean regime.

Munsok also feels distant from South Korea and South Koreans.

Although he is glad to be in South Korea, he continually senses some

distance. He is angry with a publisher who has not properly paid him his

royalties. This is not because of the money but because he feels that the

publisher has treated him like a "foreigner," not a brethren (dOhO).

Although Munsok favors reunification - "What's bad is the division be-

tween North and South" (Shisha to seija no ichi, 208) - his identification

with his homeland, unified or not, is far from complete.

Rather, Munsok is concerned about the fate of the Korean diaspora:

"What the Korean people expect is. . . not rapprochement based on

the benefits and costs of the divided nation-state, but pan-ethnic soli-

darity (hanminzokuteki dOhOai)." Munsok's concern about the Korean

352

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

diaspora leads him to insist on his diasporic identity as a Korean Japanese.

He claims an "appreciation" (kanmei) - even "pleasure" (keraku) - of

being and continuing to be a resident Korean in Japan (zainichi) (Shisha

to seija no ichi, 210). His diasporic and pan-ethnic vision is, moreover,

nonracial. As he states early on: "In our clan, Japanese blood, Ainu

blood, and Russian blood are all mixed and melted" (Shisha to seija no

ichi, 59). He came to this realization after visiting Korean ethnics in

Sakhalin, Central America, and elsewhere; in each of these places, Kore-

ans have intermarried with different ethnic groups.14 Hence, for Munsok

there is no simple return to the imagined homeland that is Korea, unified

or not.

What concerns Munsok is rather that "the living should pay homage

to the dead" (Shisha to seija no ichi, 213). It is in this spirit that he seeks

to honor the memory of Kim San, the Korean revolutionary who fasci-

nated Helen Foster Snow and led her to write - indeed, coauthor - a

book on his life, Song of Ariran.15 "In my youth, I read Song of Ariran

as my Bible" (Shisha to seija no ichi, 114). He encourages South Kore-

ans to lobby the South Korean government to honor Snow, who is living

in a home for the elderly.

In praising the dead, Munsok hopes not only to carry on their spirit,

as it were, but also to live as a diasporic Korean. He notes the remark of

a Korean expatriate in Germany, who says that Koreans who live in

Germany act like Germans, while those who live in France act like the

French. His resolution to reside in Japan as a resident Korean affiliated

with neither Korea is grounded in his belief that this will be a reminder,

"a cause of conscience," for both Japan and Korea (Shisha to seija no

ichi, 210). In grounding himself in the Korean diaspora, Munsok avoids

the trap of glorifying the mythical past or the utopian future.

From Exile to Diaspora

Exile is a condition that yearns for a simple remedy: a return to a home

or a situation ex ante. Whether Adam and Eve's expulsion from the

Garden of Eden or Ovid's banishment from Rome, Western literature is

rife and replete with the theme of exile and the concomitant longing for

return.16 Indeed, the pathos of exile resonates widely across disparate

cultures and historical periods, from the elegiac poetry of the T'ang

dynasty to the contemporary lamentations of African intellectuals.

Lewis Nkosi, for example, writes: "If for no other reason than nostalgia,

Narratives of Exile and the Search for Homeland 353

a desire to refresh childhood memories, exiles always hope for a return

to their roots, to the graves of their ancestors."17

In posttraditional societies, the rapid tempo of change leads to a

pervasive sense of displacement that potentially renders everyone an

exile, even those who experience no spatial movement. In this regard,

W. C. Spengemann writes: "Nostalgia - literally 'homesickness' - ranks

high among the motives of modern historians. The genre we call history

has evolved over the last four centuries as the antidote to an epidemic

of homesickness in Western society, a growing feeling that radical and

unprecedented changes in the shape and meaning of life were severing

the present from the remembered past."18 We moderns are, in this

sense, all exiles; exile is a condition endemic to modernity.

In temporal displacement, the search for home (the remembered

past) is inextricable from the condition of exile (the lived, and ever

changing, present). The very passage of time makes return impossible.

This is true for time travelers or historians, exiles or migrants. John

Berger writes: "Every migrant knows in his heart of hearts that it is

impossible to return. Even if he is physically able to return, he does not

truly return, because he himself has been so deeply changed by his

emigration. It is equally impossible to return to that historical state in

which every village was the center of the world."19 The impossibility of

return to the remembered past precludes, to be sure, neither the inces-

sant search for the past nor a searing critique of the present.

My concern is, however, with the social and the spatial and the more

common meaning of exile. A ubiquitous ideology of modernity in this

regard is nationalism, which in Ernest Gellner's definition is "a theory of

political legitimacy, which requires that ethnic boundaries should not cut

across political ones."20 In the age of nationalism and the nation-state,

every instance of banishment or displacement outside of one's own na-

tional borders is an instance of exile. Every migrant, under the reign of

nationalist ideology, is an alien, an exile. Hence, it is not surprising that

a constant yearning for a return to homeland, the only place where one

can truly belong, has become endemic in the era of nation-states.

Intellectuals are-by their very ability to articulate their griev-

ances - the loudest voices to call for, and even demand, a return to their

homelands. Their presumed privilege as intellectuals, however, often

enmeshes them in their condition of exile. As Rob Nixon writes of V. S.

Naipaul: "The irony here ought not to be missed: Naipaul, secure, es-

teemed, and integrated into the high culture of metropolitan England,

354 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

asserting his homelessness, while considerable numbers of genuinely

disowned people battle to be acknowledged as legitimate members of the

society he is at liberty to reject rhetorically, although he depends on it in

every way."21 Here the supposed agony of an intellectual exile is but an

expression of bad faith: a cosmopolitan writer laments his displacement

and impugns his host country, all the while benefiting from his exiled but

exalted status. The two ostensibly contradictory positions - exiles' inces-

sant longing for return and their entrapment in their host country - are

in fact part and parcel of the very condition of an exile who longs for a

mythical past or a utopian future. Because a return to the original condi-

tion is impossible, there is a temptation to idealize the remembered and

imagined homeland and denigrate the host country. This is all the more

striking when one is basically a denizen of the host country.

Living as a Korean Japanese and dependent on Japan in nearly every

way, Kim can nonetheless state that anti-Japanese thought is a major

pillar of his philosophy in part because he has an idealized vision of

homeland. Yuhi's homeland is similarly mythical, albeit projected into a

distant past. Like Kim, she cannot abide by the reality of everyday life in

contemporary South Korea. Unable to denigrate Japan as Kim does, she

takes refuge in the Korean texts and flute, on the one hand, and Japa-

nese books on the other. Neither Kim nor Yuhi can ground their lives in

any existing group or place. In their line of reasoning, the condition of

exile, the desire for return, and the impossibility of return are one and

the same state of mind or process. Furthermore, by drawing a sharp

boundary between homeland and host country, national boundaries are

reified.

There is, however, another resolution to the dialectic of idealization

and disappointment: to seek a homeland in the very condition of exile, as

solidarity among diasporic people. This is, as we have seen, the path that

Yi Hoe-song suggests. In an era when nation-states are hegemonic, one

must in fact belong to one or another. Displacement in this context is

inevitably exile. When nation-states are increasingly in eclipse, an alterna-

tive to exile, or diasporic identity, emerges. Instead of belonging to a

nation-state, there is a new, dispersed sense of peoplehood. By grounding

oneself in the transnational diaspora, one avoids the contradictory posi-

tion between an impossible return and an idealized homeland.

A diasporic identity offers a deterritorialized and deracialized no-

tion of solidarity.22 Recognizing the transnational diaspora makes pos-

sible a postnational source of identity. In the transition from the national

Narratives of Exile and the Search for Homeland 355

to the postnational, or from exile to diaspora, the dialectic of exile and

complicity is transcended as well as the idealization of the homeland or

the denigration of the host country. Simultaneously, the diasporic stand-

point challenges and destabilizes fixed national boundaries. No longer

divided into "us" and "them" within national borders, the transition

from exile to diaspora locates homeland in the global dispersion of

people. To quote John Berger again: "The one hope of recreating a

center now is to make it the entire earth. Only worldwide solidarity can

transcend modern homelessness. Fraternity is too easy a term; forget-

ting Cain and Abel, it somehow promises that all problems can be

soluble. In reality many are insoluble - hence the never-ending need for

solidarity."23

Conclusion

In the very late twentieth century, we continue to experience rumblings

of nationalist sentiments that result in human tragedies. The desire for

return among diasporic peoples is in many ways part and parcel of the

dominant ideology of nationalism, which offers little room for ethnic

heterogeneity within a nation-state. As class politics wane among rich

nation-state, another politics-that waged between those inside and

those outside or between those who belong and those who do not - has

come to the fore: the battle over migration, the reassertion of a national

identity, and other struggles over belonging are some of the manifesta-

tions of the politics of inside and outside or of belonging and exclusion.

In this context, the identity of diasporic peoples, especially postcolo-

nial peoples in their former colonizer countries, faces a crossroads: to

return to a country of "origin" or to "de-exile" themselves and carve out

a place as a diasporic people. Korean-Japanese narratives of exile are in

this regard concrete instances of a wider phenomenon, and their distinct

resolutions of the problematic of exile and identity will, for Korean

Japanese as well as all other diasporic peoples, have profound signifi-

cance on the shape of the twenty-first century.

NOTES

1. On Korean Japanese in general, see, for example, Harajiri Hideki,

Nihon teiju Korian no nichijo to seikatsu (Tokyo: Akashi Shoten, 1997). They

356 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

face fundamental challenges to their existence in many aspects of their lives.

Here, let me just consider one: name. Many resident Koreans in Japan attend

school or work using a Japanese alias. Even for those who use their Korean

names there are ambiguities about whether to use Japanese or Korean readings

of their Chinese character-based names. Needless to say, an individual may very

well shift position over time. For example, Yi Hoe-song has only recently begun

to use the Korean reading of his name; previously, he used the Japanese rendi-

tion, Ri Kaisei. The problem, to be sure, is not resolved so easily. Yi in fact uses

Lee - a common Chinese reading of the surname that Koreans pronounce as Yi.

For the sake of consistency, I have opted to render all names in their Korean

form, using the McCune-Reischauer system. In general, I use Korean Japanese,

Koreans in Japan, and the Korean diaspora in Japan interchangeably.

2. Michael Seidel, Exile and the Narrative Imagination (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1986), ix.

3. Needless to say, the same cannot be said unequivocally about the Ko-

rean diaspora in the United States. The notion of exile as "a form of disposses-

sion that retained - imaginatively - the claim ot possession" (Seamus Deane,

Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790 [Oxford:

Clarendon, 1997], 94) is weakly held among Korean Americans. Indeed, for

Asian American writers in general "home" has been a contested concept. See,

for example, Dorinne Kondo, "The Narrative Production of 'Home,' Commu-

nity and Political Identity in Asian American Theater," in Smadar Lavie and Ted

Swedenburg, eds., Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of ldentity, 97-117

(Durham: Duke University Press, 1996).

4. Kim Sok-pom, Kokoku kO (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1990).

5. See Kim Sok-pom, "Zainichi" no shiso (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1981).

6. Cf. Rob Nixon, London Calling: V. S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 174: "Counseling despair is the

traveler's prerogative, a luxury available to all for whom withdrawal by boat or

air provides a personal solution, relieving them of the pressure to act."

7. See Takeda Seiji, "Zainichi" to iu konkyo (Tokyo: Kokubunsha, 1983),

118-19.

8. The story first appeared in the literary journal GunzO in 1988 and was

collected in Yuhi, published by Kodansha, the following year. The pagination is

from Yi Yang-ji, Yi Yang-ji zensha (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1993). Norma Field offers

an insightful but withering reading of "Yuhi"-"reactionary," "distasteful"-

which I find insufficiently empathetic about Yuhi's, and by extension Yi Yang-

ji's, struggle for a viable identity ("Texts of Childhood in Inter-Nationalizing

Japan," in Laura Garcia-Moreno and Peter C. Pfeiffer, eds., Text and Nation:

Cross-Disciplinary Essays on Cultural and National Identities, 143-72. [Colum-

bia, SC: Camden House, 1996]).

9. The narrator is puzzled by Yuhi's literary taste, which values both Yi

Kwang-su and Yi Sang. Although dissimilar in many ways, a striking unity

between the two is the profound influence of and interest in Japan.

10. The story expresses two common stereotypes that South Koreans hold

for Korean Japanese - possible entanglements with the North Korean regime

Narratives of Exile and the Search for Homeland 357

(particular to Korean Japanese) and the propensity to play around (general to

diasporic Koreans). This is a major theme of Yi Yang-ji's earlier story, "Kazu-

kime." It is possible to detect the narrator's jealousy of diasporic Koreans in the

affection her aunt shows for Yuhi (Korean Japanese) as a substitute for the

aunt's daughter (now Korean American). The narrator's aunt, for instance, calls

her daughter in the United States after she reminisces about Yuhi with the

narrator.

11. The distinction she draws between the reality of contemporary South

Korea and the serene ideal of uri nara is redolent of the distinction that Hannah

Arendt drew between "pariah" and "parvenu" Jews: "It is the tradition of a

minority of Jews who have not wanted to become upstarts, who preferred the

status of 'conscious pariah.' All vaunted Jewish qualities - the 'Jewish heart,'

humanity, humor, disinterested intelligence - are pariah qualities. All Jewish

shortcomings - tactlessness, political stupidity, inferiority complexes and money-

grubbing - are characteristics of upstarts" (The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and

Politics in the Modern Age [New York: Grove, 1978], 66).

12. Yi Hoe-song, Shisha to seija no ichi (Tokyo: Bungei Shunjl, 1996).

13. See Sonia Ryang, North Koreans in Japan (Boulder: Westview, 1997),

esp. chap. 2.

14. See Yi Hoe-song, Sakhalin e no tabi (Tokyo, Kodansha, 1983).

15. Nym Wales [Helen Foster Snow] and Kim San, Song of Ariran (San

Francisco: Ramparts, 1941).

16. See, for example, Paul Tabori, The Anatomy of Exile: A Semantic and

Historical Study (London: Harrap, 1972); John Glad, ed., Literature in Exile

(Durham: Duke University Press, 1990); and Marc Robinson, ed., Altogether

Elsewhere: Writers on Exile (Winchester, MA: Faber and Faber, 1994).

17. Lewis Nkosi, "Ironies of Exile," Times Literary Supplement, April 1,

1994, 5.

18. W. C. Spengemann, "Old America," London Review of Books, Janu-

ary 7, 1988, 20.

19. John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos (London:

Writers and Readers, 1984), 67.

20. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University

Press, 1983), 1.

21. Nixon, 43. Irony inflects the exile literature. Although an exiled writer

may bemoan the loss of artistic powers, the work of art may in fact belie the

deleterious impact of exile. Gareth D. Williams argues: "Ovid remains firmly in

control of the abilities which are misleadingly portrayed as all but destroyed by

exile" (Banished Voices: Readings in Ovid's Exile Poetry [Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press, 1994], 99). I should add, however, that the most recent

works of V. S. Naipaul suggest an acceptance of his new homeland, England

(The Enigma of Arrival [New York: Knopf, 1987]), and his partial solidarity with

other diasporic peoples (A Way in the World [New York: Knopf, 1994]). See also

Michael Gorra, After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1997), chap. 2.

22. See inter alia Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, "Beyond 'Culture':

358

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference," Cultural Anthropology 7 (1992):

6-23; James Clifford, "Diasporas," Cultural Anthropology 9 (1994): 302-38;

John Lie, "From International Migration to Transnational Diaspora," Contempo-

rary Sociology 24 (1995): 303-6; and R. Radhakrishnan, Diasporic Mediations:

Between Home and Location (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

1996).

23. Berger, 67.

Chapter 12

The Regime of Authenticity:

Timelessness, Gender, and National

History in Modern China

Prasenjit Duara

The Spartan song -"We are what you were, we will be what you

are" -is, in its simplicity, the abridged hymn of every patrie.

- Ernest Renan, "What Is a Nation?"

... what I have tried to maintain for many years, is the effort to

isolate some of the elements that might be useful for a history of truth.

Not a history that would be concerned with what might be true in the

fields of learning, but an analysis of the "games of truth," the games

of truth and error through which being is historically constituted as

experience.

- Michel Foucault, "The Use of Pleasure:

The History of Sexuality"

The nation is the guardian of an unchanging truth it believes itself to

embody. This self-conception of the nation's timelessness has been little

understood in the scholarship of nationalism that has, at least since

Benedict Anderson, better understood the nation as the agent or subject

of linear history.' I want here to probe the relationship between the

concepts of time and timelessness in national histories through what I

call the "regime of authenticity." In the second part of the chapter, I

examine the effects of this regime by focusing on the example of women

as embodiments of authenticity in twentieth-century China.

Nation and History

The modern territorial nation and linear history have an intimate rela-

tionship. Indeed, one might say that they coproduce each other as the

359

360 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

principal mode of belonging in the twentieth century. Individuals learn

to identify with nation-states that have supposedly evolved over a long

history to reach the self-conscious unity of the two and are thus poised to

acquire mastery over the future. The linear history of modern nation-

states projects a territorial entity (the nation) backward in time as the

subject (or actor or agent) that evolves or progresses to the present and

future. In projecting the presently constituted or claimed territorial

nation - the "geobody" in Thongchai Winichakul's apt neologism2 -

into the past, national Histories seek to appropriate for the present

nation-state the peoples, cultures, and territories that actually had scant

relations with the old empires. The Chinese Republic (1912-49) was no

exception and claimed sovereignty over peoples in lands where the mod-

ern notion of sovereignty was irrelevant to the historical relationship

between the Chinese imperial center and these local polities.3

To be sure, even with national history there is much contestation over

the nature of the national people. Whether one constitutes the people

according to theories of the primordiality of race, language, culture, or

even class or religion embedded in different narratives produces a signifi-

cantly different profile of the nation and the geobody (e.g., compare early

Guomindang (GMD) and Chinese Communist Party maps). But each of

these contesting narratives makes its claim in the same linear historical

mode. In the late Qing (1644-1911), revolutionary nationalists depicted

the evolving nation in terms of the history of the awakening of a race in its

opposition to other races. The constitutional reformers sought to create a

wider nation by invoking the evolution of a common culture from the

seeds of Confucianism and thus incorporate the Manchus and other mi-

norities, whereas the National Essence school emphasized recovering the

originary unity of the linguistic community. In these narratives, the nation

as a preexisting unity, like a species, is shown to have evolved since

ancient times, overcome strife and obstacles - whether in the form of

barbarism or superstition - in the middle period, and be poised in its self-

awareness to gain mastery in the competition among nations. Even the

Chinese Communist Party, which sought to repudiate all older narratives

of community as bogus and establish the sovereignty of the working

classes or "the people," strove to depict the consciousness of the working

masses in the same historical mode.

Why did this mode became so necessary to depicting the nation from

at least the end of the nineteenth century? There are several convergent

reasons. Central among them is that the nation-state staked its sover-

The Regime of Authenticity 361

eignty on the notion of the oneness of the territorial state and a self-

conscious people (awakened to their primal unity). As Hegel strove to

demonstrate, self-consciousness emerged only in societies with states that

recorded and recognized their progress in history.4 Indeed, it was only

territorial nations with historical self-consciousness that, in the world of

competitive capitalist imperialism in the late nineteenth and early twenti-

eth centuries, claimed rights in the international system of sovereign

states. Such nation-states claimed the freedom, even the right, to destroy

nonnations such as tribal polities and empires. This is how we can under-

stand Hegel's belief that the British defeat of China was not only in-

evitable but necessary.5 This observation also alerts us to another factor

necessitating the historical mode for nation-states: its linear directionality

made it future oriented and performative. It is only through the evolution

of self-consciousness that the nation will be positioned to move competi-

tively into modernity. In other words, this mode of history is necessary for

the nation-state because it is performative: its conception of the past will

enable it to propel the nation in a desired future direction.

But history is not only about linear evolution; it is also about time-

lessness.6 To be recognizable as the subject of history, the core of the

nation has to be unaffected by the passage of time. This core often

refers to the unity of a people and its territory. In the nation's evolution,

there are historical vicissitudes during which a people may be driven out

of its territory or enslaved or become separated and lose consciousness

of its original unity. But the historical destiny of the nation lies in the

fulfillment or restoration of this unity and sovereignty of a people.

National history is fully teleological in that its ends are to be found in its

beginnings.

Yet even the evidentiary pyrotechnics of nationalist history are in-

adequate to sustain the irony of "unity within change." This should

come as no surprise given that historically people did not think in terms

of their unity for future nationalisms or in terms of territorial sover-

eignty. Thus, the unchanging unity of the nation over time, its timeless-

ness, has to be marked by signs of its authenticity. The truth of this

originary unity is simulated and sublimated by the values of the pure, the

honorable, the good, and the spiritual. It is their immateriality, after all,

that renders them insusceptible to historical corrosion.

Ernest Renan who confronted the problem of the nation's history as

early as 1882, decisively rejected the idea of a materialistic determina-

tion of a nation whether by language, race, or geography. He stressed

362

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

the role of "human will" in its formation. "Man is everything in the

formation of this sacred thing which is called a people. Nothing [purely]

material suffices for it.'7 What he calls the soul or the spiritual principle

of the nation is none other than the "will to perpetuate the value of the

heritage that one has received in an undivided form. Man, Gentleman,

does not improvise. The nation, like the individual, is the culmination of

a long past of endeavours, sacrifice and devotion. . . The Spartan

song-'We are what you were, we will be what you are'-is, in its

simplicity, the abridged hymn of every patrie."8 It is significant that the

spiritual principle enabling this continuity is the will to live together in

the present, the will that mandates the necessary forgetting of the mixed

and bloody origins of nations.9 Here it is none other than human will-

the will of the present projected unchanged into the past and future -

that constitutes the telos of history.

The Aporias of Time and the Order of Authenticity

The split or aporia in linear history (especially but not only of the na-

tion) between evolution and progressive mastery of the future, on the

one hand, and the unchanging essence of the past, on the other, is a

problem that is structurally distinctive to it. Linear history embeds a

notion of time in which all is in flux, but it also locates an unchanging

core at the heart of change. Many analysts of nationalism have observed

this split in the time of the nation, but since few have viewed it as a

problem rooted in the phenomenology of linear time they have only a

partial understanding of it.

Thus, for instance, Partha Chatterjee has discussed it as a dual

tendency among nation-states, particularly in the colonial world: the

forward march to modernity expresses the aspiration to join the ranks of

global capitalist nations, and the emphasis on distinctive traditions re-

flects a desire to defy this order.10 He has also shown how Indian nation-

alists developed the notion of a realm of inner sovereignty incorporating

the core traditions of the nation. Within this inner realm, Indian nation-

alists were unchallengeable, unlike their situation in the public realm of

political and economic nationalism, where they faced unequal competi-

tion with their British colonial masters.11 Chatterjee, however, does not

seek to provide an explanation of how and why this aporia emerges.

Joseph Levenson, who made a similar distinction between history

and value among Chinese nationalists, did provide an explanation that is

The Regime of Authenticity 363

psychologically particularistic.12 Levenson's interpretation of the mod-

ern construction of "eternal tradition" in China was that it was psycho-

logically comforting to modern Chinese intellectuals who needed to as-

sert the particularity of Chinese history in the face of the overwhelming

superiority of scientific civilization and values. While this may have been

true for some intellectuals at some time and place, the reconstruction of

tradition had other meanings and functions not reducible to salving the

inferiority complex of Chinese intellectuals. All nations and societies

that see themselves as subjects progressing or evolving through linear

time need to constitute an "unchanging core" in order to recognize them-

selves in their ever-changing circumstances, hence the role of sacred

national symbols or core values in Britain or France or America as

embodied in the royalty, the Constitution, or simply tradition.

Modern linear history is distinguished from traditional histories prin-

cipally in that the meaning that the latter almost always seek in history

refers to an earlier, presumed existent ideal or to a transcendent time of

god. Traditional historiography mostly has a cyclical structure whereby

time will reproduce, return to, or approximate a "known certainty." Lin-

ear history often dispenses with god and replaces it with the model of a

unified actor - the subject, the nation - moving forward in time and con-

quering uncharted territories. The historical transition from the transcen-

dent time of god to the secular, linear history of modern society is the

subject of a masterly treatment of J. G. A. Pocock in The Machiavellian

Moment.13 Simply put, the "Machiavellian moment" refers to the relation-

ship of virtue to history. Both Christian and Renaissance humanist concep-

tions of time gave true meaning to the divine or rational virtue that existed

outside time - to the secular or temporal time of history. Pocock argues

that, while such humanists as Machiavelli believed that the citizen ful-

filled himself through civic virtue rather than ecclesiastical sacraments,

they were still unable to develop a theory of history or what Pocock calls

historicism. Natural law was rational, unchanging, and true; history was

irrational, fickle, and corrupting. The "moment" consists of the deferral

of the inevitable collapse or corruption of virtue in mundane time.

In Puritan America, this deferral was sustained by various strategies

such as imperialism and the spread of yeoman property ownership,

which would continue to extend civic virtue. The Puritan extension of

timeless grace into this temporal world ultimately had the effect of devel-

oping a secular history through the search for the kingdom of god on

earth - the city on the hill. But, although it transmutes into a modern

364 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

history, Pocock argues that right through the nineteenth century this Old

World preoccupation with virtue as a sacred, rational, and timeless value

persisted in America and the vision of history as dynamic and creative in

its "linear capacity to bring about incessant qualitative transformations

of human life" took a long time to make its appearance.14

Pocock gives us a historical perspective from which to try to under-

stand the transformation of the relationship between the timeless as

virtuous or sacred and the temporal as ultimately corrosive, even though

I do not concur with this rather panglossian vision of linear history.

Certainly, the Chinese conception of the dynastic cycle embeds some-

thing very like the Machiavellian moment in the cycle of virtue and

corruption, and the Tongzhi Restoration (1861) has been interpreted

precisely as an effort to extend the regime of virtue in the face of impend-

ing collapse. Where he leaves us without much help, however, is with

regard to the question of what happens to timeless virtue when linear

histories become hegemonic in the era of capitalism and nation-states.

As we have seen, the meaning of History is not wholly or simply ac-

cepted as the "incessant qualitative transformations of human life"; the

unchanging may not have the dominant role it once played in traditional

histories, but it has not disappeared.'5

Born amid the loss of a known, if hard to attain, certainty, linear

history is posited upon a linear, preexisting conception of time into

which it can be seen to fall or unfold.16 As such, it cannot rid itself of

the anxieties of a linear conception of time. According to Paul Ricoeur,

the concept of linear time is a series of nows, of unrelated instants. The

anxiety - sorrow for the fleeting past, dread of the future - (distentio in

St. Augustine, inauthenticity in Heidegger) associated with this linear

representation of time cannot be fully overcome by the phenomenologi-

cal philosophy of time nor by narratives of continuity. The aporias of

time, between the deadness of the past and the contemporary experi-

ence of it and between mortal time and cosmological time, persist.'7

Linear history has to develop an artifice that will allow historians to

narrate over the succession of "nows" to negotiate or conceal this

aporia. We may think of this artifice as none other than the subject of

history - the nation, race, or class. The subject enables history as the

living essence of the past but also simultaneously as being free from the

hold of the past: that which evolves is that which remains even as it

changes.'8 Thus, the subject is a figure that is necessary for linear history

from both a phenomenological and a political point of view.

The Regime of Authenticity 365

We have seen that the unchanging essence of the past is often en-

dowed with a special aura of sanctity, purity, and authenticity at the

heart of a modern discourse of progressive change that is otherwise

entirely synchronous with the quickening pace of change - the transfor-

mative drive - of global capitalism. It is possible to think of the aporia of

linear history as demarcating two regimes, that of capitalism and that of

(national or transnational) authenticity, which institute two poles of au-

thority. Certainly linear, measurable time is necessary for capitalism,

where time is money, but the corrosive effects of capitalism (where all

that is solid melts into air) is also made visible by this very conception of

time. It is not simply the disruption caused by rapid material change that

necessitates the production of an abiding truth. It is ultimately the domi-

nant temporal conception that exposes this change as having no goal or

meaning - a "series of nows" - which necessitates a continuous subject

of History to shore up certitudes, particularly for the claim to national

sovereignty embedded in this subject.

The opposition between authenticity and capitalism is an old one,

and I need to outline the specificity of my argument. The tradition of

modern writing on "authenticity" tends to locate it as the positive (both

ethically and ontologically), if fleeting or evanescent, term in the opposi-

tion between the self and the market or modernity. Alessandro Ferrara

argues that it derives from Rousseau's notion of authenticity as "man in

the state of nature." The tradition develops through the thought of

Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger and in such contempo-

rary thinkers as Daniel Bell and Christopher Lasch, who deplore the

corrosion of authenticity and the reduction of self to pure exteriority.19

Notably, this tradition focuses on the authenticity of the self or per-

sonhood. Ferrara also identifies an assumption of authenticity in the

thought of social thinkers like Marx and Durkheim whether located in

the concept of the worker, or the "species being," or in ideas of commu-

nity or "gemeinschaft." Here the role of such concepts as Marx's "alien-

ation," Weber's "rationalization," or Durkheim's "anomie" seem to indi-

cate that authenticity is under constant threat of erasure. Most of all, for

all of these thinkers the loss of authenticity spells the destruction of

social identity. 20

The authentic that I want to explore here refers primarily neither to

Selfhood nor for that matter to any ontological category. Authenticity in

my formulation refers primarily to an order or regime simulated by

representations of authoritative inviolability. It derives this authority

366

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

from "being good for all times," which is tantamount to being beyond

the reach of time. My understanding of the regime differs fundamentally

from the modern conception of authenticity as an attribute of some

endangered being; rather, the regime is a power that repeatedly consti-

tutes itself as the locus of authenticity - akin to Foucault's "games of

truth." The hegemony of linear time accompanying the transforming

drive of capitalism necessitates the repeated constitution of the unchang-

ing subject of history precisely because it is this very combination of

capital and linear time that erodes it and simultaneously exposes the

spectacle of erosion.

So far, I have deliberately spoken of the regime of authenticity

without human actors - as if it had an automaticity. I do believe that the

predominance of linear time internalized by nation-states necessitated

the production of the authentic across different societies. The fundamen-

tal aporia of linear time is expressed in the nation-state's need to recon-

cile the demands of an unchanging unity of nationhood with a changing

modern future. Thus, the agents most interested in constituting and

policing the regime of authenticity are representatives of the national

community (such as nationalist intellectuals) or the state. We should not

see these agents as simply balancing or policing the boundaries between

the regimes of authenticity and the market, although they do both.

Rather, attention to constitution and reconstitution allows us to see a

complex relationship between the two orders. To be sure, there is no

shortage of instances in which authenticity is mobilized to oppose capital-

ism and modernity, as fundamentalist and nativist movements the world

over (whether the Taliban or Showa restorationists) have shown. On a

more everyday level, however, the regime of authenticity authorizes a

range of representational practices that are in constant traffic with the

practices of the capitalist order, a traffic that produces an elaborate

economy of authorization and delegitimation that the nation-state would

like to control.

Nation-State, Authenticity, and Gender

The question of the nation's historical unity is, of course, inseparable

from the problem of its contemporary diversity. The idea of a collective

actor or subject - the self-conscious, sovereign nation-people - that a

national history ultimately presupposes is actually always being chal-

lenged, whether through counterhistories or political opposition by dif-

The Regime of Authenticity 367

ferent ethnicities, races, classes, or other expressions of difference. The

demand of the nation-state that we exist first and foremost as national

subjects turns out to be a demand that is mostly hortatory. The nation-

state exhorts its citizens to "ask not what the nation can do for you but

what you can do for the nation." In reminding us that we exist first and

foremost for the nation, the nation-state strives every day to produce the

idea that the nation is prior to us. The regime of authenticity contributes

significantly to this production through representations that simulate the

priority of the nation. Because of its inviolability, this representation is

able to preempt challenges to the nation.

The subject of history is identified by the simulacra of authenticity

and purity and of associated notions of honor, morality, and spirituality.

It is the order of the sacred within the secular, the essence of the past in

the present. Perhaps the best-known signifier that simulates the authen-

ticity of the primordial nation is the national flag; and there is perhaps

no other symbol whose desecration incites such strong feelings of dis-

honor. In China, some of the more familiar representational practices

that sustain the order of authenticity include the movement in politics

and culture to identify essences and search for roots. Some of these are

the early-twentieth-century search for "national essence" associated

with Zhang Taiyan, the National Culture of Hu Shi, the New Life essen-

tialism of the GMD, the folkloric or people's culture movement among

communists and noncommunists, the "native place" or "search for

roots" literature of more recent times, and what Rey Chow has called

the "primitive passions" in contemporary Chinese cinema.21

What kinds of beings or objects are selected to represent the authen-

tic? To be sure, the authentic tends to be differently represented by

different powers, whether it be the nation-state or nationalist intellec-

tuals or militarists, and at different moments in time, depending, say,

upon whether the women's movement has flowered or the aboriginal has

been domesticated by state making. But at the outset there appear to be

two desiderata for the role: that the representation, or perhaps represen-

tative, be productive of deep affect; and that it be denied agency in the

public realm. While the requirement that agency be denied should lead

obviously to objects and institutions, such as the American Constitution

or the memorialization of martyrs, the living embodiment of authentic-

ity appears to be able to move people more. Thus it is that woman, the

child, the rustic, the aboriginal, and royalty often embody the simulated

authenticity of the nation. Each has been associated with deep, although

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Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

different, symbolic effects in various historical cultures, including the

invocation of motherhood or virginity among women, innocence and

naturalness among children and the primitive, rootedness among peas-

ants, and timelessness in the royalty. Each has also had a dependent

status. The problem arises, of course, not only from the question of their

agency, which might challenge the representation of their timelessness,

but simply in the fact that their lives will change in time.

To be sure, such a problem also arises with representative objects

such as a constitution, a monument, or a flag. Here it is that their

changing meaning or interpretation must be discounted, as can be seen

in the effort to restore the original intent of the U.S. Constitution. With

certain social practices or traditions, like annual festivals, their his-

toricity is concealed by their pace of change, which is not synchronous

with change in other spheres. But the most powerful embodiments, the

human ones, are also the most ephemeral, since the risk of them not

living up to the unchanging ideal in time is considerable. These symbolic

figures must be encased or contained within representational and often

physical or spatial apparatuses that conceal their lived reality: the home,

the reservation, or the castle. Even so, when, for instance, the women's

movement seeks to blur the line between the domestic and the public,

the embodiment of authenticity must be found in someone other than

women.

In the remainder of this chapter I will focus on the representation of

women - in body and spirit - as a very significant site upon which re-

gimes and elites in China responsible for charting the destiny of the

nation have sought to locate the unchanging essence and moral purity of

the nation. I want to show how and why women became this privileged

site in China and to probe a few instances of how the representation of

authenticity may have affected the subjectivity of women and shaped the

social understanding of gender roles.

Recent studies of gender histories in the West (especially in Latin

America22) have shown how women and their bodies, systematically

excluded from the public sphere during much of the modern period,23

have served as a crucial medium for the inscription and naturalization of

power. "Explored, mapped, conquered, and raped, the female body and

its metaphorical extension, the home, become the symbols of honor,

loyalty, and purity, to be guarded by men."24 In Japan, the historical

model of the self-sacrificing and frugal samurai woman became general-

ized as the model of feminine virtue in the Meiji era for the entire

The Regime of Authenticity 369

nation; here national authenticity came to serve economic growth.25 By

the 1920s, the Modern Girl, active in the public sphere of work and

politics, came to threaten "the patriarchal family and its ideological

support, the deferring woman who was presented in state ideology as the

'Good Wife and Wise Mother.' "26 According to Miriam Silverberg, she

became the symbol of all that was non-Japanese and modern in contrast

to the Meiji image of the woman who served as "'the repository of the

past,' standing for tradition when men were encouraged to change their

way of politics and culture in all ways."27 The Modern Girl of the 1920s

became the target of conservatives appalled by rapid change all around

them, but she became so only because she, no less than the Meiji

woman, occupied a special place within the order of authenticity, a place

she was beginning defiantly to transgress.

In China, the representation of woman as the essence of national

virtue was dramatized most clearly during wartime when the imagery

of the raped woman came to represent the defiled purity of the invaded

nation. Wartime literature during the Japanese invasion (1931-45) was

full of this motif- to the extent that the woman writer Xiao Hong

even sought to subvert this by having her protagonist raped by a Chi-

nese soldier.28 Moreover, as work on wartime popular culture reveals,

the resistance, no matter how modernist in ideology, tended to revert to

traditional dramatic motifs of the fallen, heroic, or sacrificed heroine to

represent the invaded nation. But the motif is by no means restricted

to wartime.29

Nationalist Patriarchy

Early nationalists and reformers in the first decades of twentieth-century

China were committed to the liberation of women. But they were also

committed to a vision of abiding national virtue, which they tended to

locate in women more often than in men. The principal reason for this

was that most of these nationalists and reformers emerged from the

habitus of the gentry and inherited the patriarchal traditions of this

society and its ideals of womanly virtue. Contemporary research on late

imperial China shows the pervasiveness of the rhetoric of female virtue

and sacrifice, exemplified most particularly in the cult of chaste widows

and virtuous wives.30 This patriarchal legacy was witnessed and sus-

tained in the heightened concern with preserving female virtues during

the early twentieth century when the increasing integration of China into

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Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

global capitalism produced rapid change in gender relations among ur-

ban families. "Virtuous and chaste girls' schools" (zhennh yixue; baonh

yixueyuan) sprouted everywhere during this period, and the journals

about women, such as the Funh Zazhi of the early 1920s, were filled

with anxious essays about the problem of gender mixing.31 Female virtue

became a metonym for Chinese civilizational truths.

This legacy can also be seen in the efforts of nationalists to improve

the status of women under the higher goal of national strengthening. The

abolition of footbinding, women's education, and the need for prenatal

care, became major issues in the reform movement of the late nineteenth

century led by Kang Youwei and his colleagues because, as Kazuko Ono

writes, these issues became "linked to the nation's survival or demise,

its strength or weakness, through the education of children."32 While

there were some notable efforts by women writers themselves to dissoci-

ate women's liberation from the national cause,33 throughout most of the

twentieth century the legitimacy of the former continued to remain depen-

dent on the latter. Like many other early-twentieth-century patriarchal

nationalisms, women were to be liberated for and by the nation; they

were to embody the nation, not to be active agents shaping it.

Even as this nationalism was authenticated, or rather authenticized,

by appropriating certain ideals of womanly virtue from historical patriar-

chy, this rhetoric was simultaneously infused with values from the pro-

gressive discourses of modern nationalism. Women were to participate

as modern citizens in the public sphere of the nation, but they were also

expected to personify the essence of the national tradition. I use the

expression "nationalist patriarchy" to specify this depiction of woman as

the soul of tradition within modernity. 34 Nationalist patriarchy is domi-

nated by the tension between the desire to modernize (the lives of

women as well) and to conserve the truth of their regime in the bodies of

women.

Consider a lecture by the leading GMD nationalist Wang Jingwei in

a girls' school in 1924, which addresses the contemporary discussion of

feminine purity and civilizational truth as much as questions of social

reform. Wang observes that the conflict between the old and the new in

society can be seen as the clash between the school, which is the nucleus

of the new thought, and the family, which preserves the old ways. He

urges that in order for China to progress in this competitive world of

nation-states it will be important for students to take control of society

and reform its evil customs. He recognizes that it will be easy for them to

The Regime of Authenticity 371

succumb to the control of the family and be assimilated into society, but

he implores them not to take this path. He suggests that it is particularly

important for girls' schools to nourish a spirit of social reform among

their students since in their present state they stand as obstacles to

national progress.35

Having framed his talk within the evolutionary discourse of moder-

nity, Wang's second theme concerns the importance of choosing the right

kind of education. He suggests that although Chinese tradition includes a

lot that is bad it has one strength, the cultivation of a long tradition of self-

sacrifice (xisheng) among females, whether in their natal homes, where

they willingly sacrifice their happiness for the sake of their parents, or

later, when they sacrifice for their husbands or their sons in old age.

Doubtless, the old society often used this blind self-sacrifice to bury

women's freedom. But women should know that the responsibility of the

individual is heavy and should not be exploited (liyong) by society. If they

then sacrifice themselves out of true conviction (zhenzhende qinggan),

then such conduct is proper and indeed highly admirable. This spirit of

self-sacrifice actually forms the indispensable basis of all morality -

Confucian, Buddhist, and Christian. "Chinese women are rich in the

spirit of self-sacrifice. If we can properly direct this spirit toward . . . [the

collectivity] and use it, then we can, on the one hand, perhaps preserve a

little of the essence (jingsui) of the teachings of several thousand years

and, on the other, still plants the roots of modern liberatory thought. In

seeking education for girls, I hope we can uphold our mission to inherit

the past to enlighten posterity (chengxian qihou)."36 The Chinese woman

for Wang is both modern citizen and locus of unchanging authenticity.

Nationalist patriarchy demands a self-sacrificing woman as the symbol of

national essence.

Note, however, the different representational strategies for contain-

ing or framing woman's authenticity in Chinese and Indian nationalist

patriarchies. In India, according to Chatterjee, the realm of inner sover-

eignty constructed by the nationalists became located in the home and

woman became idealized as the bearer of the most sacred values of this

inner space. Thus, from our point of view, Indian national patriarchy

evolved a spatial representation that contained women's authenticity

within the domestic space so that its corrosion in real life could not be

scrutinized in the public sphere. In contrast, the authenticity of women

in Wang's patriarchal model does not use a spatial strategy but rather

depends upon historical representations. Thus, while twentieth-century

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Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

women were not necessarily discouraged from involvement in the public

sphere, nationalist patriarchy in China sought to mobilize the weight of

these historical representations to discipline women's bodies within the

public sphere as figures of self-sacrifice. We shall see this in several

examples shortly.

The tension within nationalist patriarchy inherent in the notion of

woman as the soul of tradition within modernity was most visible in

conservative Chinese nationalism, but it was also present, albeit more

subtly, among other nationalists in China. The May Fourth representa-

tion of the radically anti-Confucian, indeed, antifamilial, nationalist

woman, would on first glance appear to repudiate "nationalist patriar-

chy." Indeed, these two conflicting representations of women yielded a

great deal of violence in the 1920s and 1930s - especially after the split

between the GMD and the Communist Party in 1927- when thousands

of "modern" women were killed by the GMD forces because they were

accused of "free love" or sometimes simply because they had bobbed

hair, unbound feet, or a local reputation for opposing familial author-

ity.37 While they were surely killed because they were marked by these

signs as Communist (whether or not they were), the causal logic worked

in both directions. Communism itself was illegitimate, significantly, be-

cause such women and their behavior despoiled the innermost purity of

Chinese culture.

One might thus expect the inheritors of the radical tradition of May

Fourth, the Chinese Communist Party, to have dispensed with this tradi-

tional image of the self-sacrificing woman, especially given their commit-

ment to progressive work among women. Yet they too found the figure

of woman to be a most amenable site at which to locate a Communist or

Nationalist essence in the march toward progress (change). While the

Communists were opposed to capitalism, their conception of progress

necessarily entailed a "continuous revolution" in society. Even more, as

extreme proponents of linear history, they ironically risked producing

still greater anxiety by exposing the spectacle of erosion that more mod-

erate versions concealed. Thus, despite the Communist will to repudiate

the entire past, to forge ahead and master the future, they still needed to

identify an abiding Communist-Nationalist essence and anchor it within

the individual self. The feminist Meng Yue argues that in the literature

of the People's Republic before 1980 the triumph of class struggle was

secured through the figure of the desexed, unbodied woman - the figure

of purity. Ideally, both men and women gained their sense of the authen-

The Regime of Authenticity 373

tic Communist self (the Self that realizes the abiding, if latent, collectiv-

ism and selflessness of the propertyless) through the model of the self-

denying, sacrificing, sexless woman. Meng writes, "On the one hand,

the state's political discourse translated itself through women into the

private context of desire, love, marriage, divorce and familial relations,

and on the other, it turned woman into an agent politicizing desire, love,

and family relations by delimiting and repressing sexuality, self and all

private emotions."38

Meng Yue's analysis is not directly concerned with the problem of

timeless authenticity, but we can see that not only did such a woman

enshrine all that was pure and true in Communist discourse but she also

symbolized that unchanging core - the stillness of the true - whereby

communism could recognize itself in the march of change. Thus, her

study shows us that the project of authenticity cannot be equated with

tradition, nor is its advocacy limited only to conservatives. It is a prob-

lem of societies living under the hegemony of linear time. The tendency

for women to play this role in socialist China as much as in the early

Nationalist patriarchies has, I believe, to do with the abiding power of

historical discourses of women (subterranean in the Communist case)

and, second, with the absence of any political agency among women as

specifically women.39 In both societies, it is their passivity, their being

spoken for, that represents the political meaning of their gender.

The Social Life of Embodied Authenticity

How is woman as a figure of authenticity received in society? While a

comprehensive response to this question is impossible in this chapter, I

select three cases to suggest how the question might be more meaning-

fully specified according to differences of gender and social circum-

stances. Further, where this figure does affect real women these cases

suggest how the tension between citizenship and authenticity, so impor-

tant in Nationalist patriarchy, is played out in their lives.

Lu Xun's story "Soap" (1924) uses fiction to present a dense social

and psychological analysis of the figure of woman as the soul of "tradi-

tion within modernity" and especially of the different meanings this

figure might have had for men and women in Republican China. Simin

has bought a cake of foreign, scented soap for his wife. His wife is

pleased but also embarrassed by the coded message that she should

make herself cleaner and more alluring. When Simin had wanted to

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Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

open the soap package at the store to check its quality, he was taunted by

some schoolgirls with bobbed hair with a foreign word he does not

understand (it turns out to be old fool). Highly agitated, he now orders

his school-going son to check its meaning and begins to rave and rant

about the moral havoc that the new schools are playing on China, espe-

cially the schools for girls. He says, "Just think it is already in very poor

taste the way women wander up and down the streets, and now they

want to cut their hair as well. Nothing disgusts me as much as these

short-haired schoolgirls. What I say is: There is some excuse for soldiers

and bandits, but these girls are the ones who turn everything upside

down. They ought to be very severely dealt with indeed."40

Simin then goes on to contrast this behavior with that of a filial girl

of eighteen or nineteen begging outside a store, who turned over all

the money she had received to her blind grandmother. The crowds that

gathered to watch the two not only did not give much money but made

jeering remarks about how she would not look bad at all if someone

scrubbed her with two cakes of soap. Simin sees this as evidence of

the catastrophic decline of morality in modern China. Later, at dinner,

when Simin's wife can no longer take his irritability, she hints that he

secretly harbors sexual longing for the beggar girl, which he tries to

cover up by exalting her filial and self-sacrificing conduct. In utter frus-

tration, she exclaims: "If you buy her another cake and give her a good

scrubbing, then worship her, the whole world will be at peace."41 Later,

she adds, "We women are much better than you men. If you men are not

cursing eighteen or nineteen-year-old girl students, you are praising

eighteen or nineteen-year-old girl beggars: such dirty minds you have."42

At this moment, Simin is rescued from this tirade by the arrival of

some friends who have come to remind him about the urgent need to

publicize the title of the essay and poetry contest for their Moral Reform

Literary Society (Yifeng Wenshe). The title of the essay had been

drafted as "To Beg the President to Issue an Order for the Promotion of

the Confucian Classics and the Worship of the Mother of Mencius, in

Order to Revive this Moribund World and Preserve our National Char-

acter." Thinking about the beggar woman, Simin suggests that the poem

should be entitled "Filial Daughter" to eulogize her and criticize society.

In the following exchange, one of his friends laughs uproariously upon

hearing the jeering comments about giving her a good scrubbing. Simin

is acutely pained by his friend's laughter because, as Lu Xun hints, it

suggests to him the truth of his wife's words, which he has repressed.

The Regime of Authenticity 375

Lu Xun sets up the duality between Chinese and foreign, East and

East, and old and new as the basic framework of the story. The foreign

and new - schoolgirls, bobbed hair, modern education, English words,

the heavy sound of the leather shoes worn by Simin's son - are an intru-

sive and disruptive presence for Simin. Lu focuses our attention on the

power of a new (if mere) commodity, soap, to disturb his protagonist

with its capacity to arouse desire and throw his world out of kilter. It is

clear that what Simin finds most disturbing is the unmooring of gender

and sexual norms by the changes he sees around him. He responds not

only with vituperative rhetoric against the need for girls to go to school

(thus keeping them within the domestic sphere) but by valorizing the

conduct of the pure and filial beggar woman. For Simin, she represents

everything that is eternal and pure in Chinese tradition, and he wants

the poetry contest to immortalize her purity. This effort to restore the

moral authenticity of the nation via the beggar woman thus has to exalt

her poverty (filial even in desperate need) and desexualize her as the

object of men's (especially his) desire.

As Carolyn Brown has pointed out, the one person in "Soap" who is

able to see through this trope of woman is none other than the only

woman unrepresented by the male characters - Simin's wife. Brown

writes, "with the character Mrs Sumin, he [Lu] empowers a semi-

traditional woman with speech and the capacity to 're-read the male

text,' making her the locus of his own value."43 Thus, with characteristic

irony Lu Xun suggests a robust skepticism toward the project of authen-

ticity among those like Mrs. Simin, who could well have been objectified

by this project. The reader will not miss the final irony of Mrs. Simin

being given voice by Lu Xun, the man.

My second instance is of a woman, a nationalist, writing about the

future of Chinese women in 1903. Calling herself only a "certain south-

ern woman," this nationalist accepts all the historical pieties and clich6s

about women. She declares that there are three special qualities of

Chinese women that will allow them to surpass the women of Europe

and America. Women have the heart of steadfastness (jianzhi xin) and

the heart of benevolence (ciai xin) but also the heart of vengefulness

(baofu xin). As in Wang's speech, she recounts the constancy with

which women give their love as filial daughters and chaste wives despite

the severe restraints of a patriarchal ideology. If only women were

enlightened about the value of the nation, they could transfer this stead-

fast love and undying loyalty to the nation. Similarly, if with their heart

376

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

of benevolence and compassion women could achieve education and

participate equally in public affairs, then the nation would certainly have

equality, public harmony, and love of the race, which China so utterly

lacks. Finally, the label of women as vengeful is turned to national advan-

tage. Although it is said that a woman's heart is most poisonous, the

southern woman regards it as women's exceptional virtue (te meixing).

The Chinese people lack a sense of hatred for, and can even collaborate

with, their conquerors. But once women learn about the brutality of the

alien Manchus, their thirst for revenge will strengthen their hatred and

cause them to devise plans to oppose them.44

On a first reading, the text does all that we have suggested. National-

ist patriarchy appears to have succeeded not only in instilling or preserv-

ing historical patriarchy's stereotypes of essential female values in the

self-representation of this woman but to have also elicited her desire to

contribute these timeless qualities to the national cause. However, a

closer reading reveals that the southern woman is engaging in a strategic

rereading of nationalism in order to empower women. Each of the catego-

ries she discusses has been a means of subjecting women, not only in the

sense of subordinating them but also by giving them the categories with

which to think about their subjectivity. But nationalism's progressive side

gives her a new context in which to revalue these categories. By investing

them with unexpected power, both constructive and destructive, she not

only seeks to empower women but potentially gives them far greater

agency in the nation-building project than men, who are neither stead-

fast, compassionate, public minded, nor patriotic. Second, running

through the text is the plea that these conditions can only be achieved if

women receive education. The southern woman recognizes that this is an

age of opportunity for women that must not be missed. There are even

enlightened men who advocate the education of women. "Although they

may not truly mean what they say, our generation can seize their words

(jie bi koutouchan zhi li) and implement our agenda."45 The tension

between citizenship and authenticity in the southern woman's narrative

yields a covert agency that seeks to undermine the dependency of women

by using the language of timeless authenticity.

My third instance comes from a group of women in Manchukuo.

The Japanese-sponsored regime of Manchukuo in Northeast China

(1932-45) was perhaps the East Asian regime most committed to con-

serving "tradition within modernity." While the Manchukuo regime ad-

vocated one of the most comprehensive modernization programs in Asia

The Regime of Authenticity 377

outside of Japan, it sought its legitimation in the "spiritual civilization"

of East Asia. In this context, the regime supported and promoted a large

number of Chinese societies and organizations that had emerged in the

early part of the twentieth century committed to the conservation of

Eastern and Chinese civilizational traditions in the modernizing process.

Through them, the regime promoted the representation of the new fam-

ily: pure, selfless, and committed to the moral regeneration of the

world. As we might expect, women became the principal vehicles of the

new morality. Repositories of all that was good and timeless in East

Asian traditions, women's bodies and minds became the site for a dis-

course of self-sacrifice, righteousness, and moral regeneration.46

Oral histories of Chinese women from the mid-1930s are available

for one such organization, the Morality Society (Daodehui), which was

founded in 1918 and continues its activities to this day in Taiwan. This

was a modern, Confucian, philanthropic society also engaged in the

moral education of the public. It employed a large number of women

lecturers, mostly from middle-class backgrounds, who frequently joined

the society to find meaning in their mundane lives. Many had experi-

enced considerable suffering as second wives or concubines or in un-

happy marriages. The personal narratives of these women reveal the

ways in which their lives and behavior enunciated their expected role as

moral paragons sacrificing themselves in order to serve their families

and the nation.47 Much like the "southern woman," while interpreting

their behavior as consonant with the pedagogy of virtue and self-

sacrifice, they frequently deployed this pedagogy to grant themselves

some agency. This operation typically involved their detaching the self

from one kind of pedagogical value but continuing to derive meaning

from the constitutive representation by emphasizing another of its val-

ues. Thus, Grandmother Cai confesses her unfilial behavior as a youth

when she defied the wishes of the elders and went off to study. Now she

has devoted herself to vegetarianism, spiritual discipline, and the educa-

tion of her children and grandchildren. She thus finesses filiality not only

with the new, superior card of universal education but with the end play

of devotion to spiritual virtues.48 Mrs. Sun cites the words of a leader:

"In devoting herself, the woman must not weary the husband; rather,

she should be able to help the husband obtain virtue." She thus insists

that it is appropriate for her to set up a business and become financially

independent in order to fulfill her familial duties to her sick husband and

impoverished brother.49

378 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

A Mrs. Chen reported, "I was once sent to Beijing to lecture on

morality, but my husband followed me and insisted that I return home.

Why is it that men can bully women so? I asked the teacher if I should

return. He replied, 'You may return. What do you have to fear? All you

have to know is whether or not you have the will.' I returned. In Tianjin

I was asked whether I had returned of my own free will. I nearly wept. I

had resolved to return because I remembered that I could not violate my

parents' command (ming). The next time I left, I went away for four

years. And so I am what I am today. The important thing is to know your

own will (zhi). It is how and why people make up their minds that is

important, not the decision itself."50 Mrs. Chen performs two speech

acts that make her narrative both moving and complex. She appeals to

moral service itself as a higher form of self-sacrifice, transcending family

and filiality, and subtly reinterprets the Confucian notion of resolve/will

or zhi. Lizhi (to establish resolve) had been part of a set of injunctions

often used to constrain the behavior of women. By reinterpreting it,

Mrs. Chen could not only supersede filiality and family but she was able

to be true to her subjectivity, inscribed by the Morality Society, while

recovering some agency as an enunciating subject.

I have presented these three instances to probe the ways in which

the patriarchal representation of woman as the embodiment of eternal

truths had a social effectivity. The figure of woman was so embodied not

for some arbitrary reason but because in the early twentieth century the

impact of capitalist and urbanizing forces and the accompanying tempo-

ral conception threatened the Confucian image of the family and gender

roles as the bedrock of society and culture. Lu Xun perceived the social

basis of this representation with characteristic clarity. Although "Soap"

is fictional, its descriptive component is consistent with his understand-

ing of the subject as a social phenomenon. In his 1918 essay "My Views

on Chastity,"51 Lu identifies and indicts modern gentry patriarchs, in-

cluding Kang Youwei (the leader of the 1898 reform movement who

became president of the Morality Society in the 1920s), who employed

the language of traditional essences to ultimately exploit women. To be

sure, as a radical thinker Lu's critique does not necessarily represent the

wider view of woman as embodied authenticity. The self-understandings

of the southern woman and the women of the Morality Society as embod-

ied authenticity show that, while the two types of women were widely

separated in time and political ideology, in both cases women sought to

deploy the tensions between citizenship and authenticity to their advan-

The Regime of Authenticity 379

tage. The women of the Morality Society sought to express some agency

within the constraints of an organization, a regime, and, most of all, a

faith to which they subscribed. As for the case of the southern woman, I

turn to it in the conclusion to reveal how the events of her life may help

us grasp her text in its world.

Conclusion

This chapter has explored two dimensions of the regime of authenticity:

its constitution in relation to linear time, capitalism, and the nation-state

system; and the role of gendered authenticity in society and women's

subjectivity. How the notion of authentic female virtue was internalized

is of course directly relevant to the role and even the efficacy of the

timeless in containing the spectacle of corrosion wrought by linear, capi-

talist time. To what extent did individual Chinese develop their sense of

identity from, or in relation to, this essentialized image of the authentic

Chinese?

From Lu Xun's point of view, there would appear to be a healthy

skepticism among people about these representations. Certainly, the

three cases suggest that even when the subject appears to be in-

terpellated by these representations they are often enunciated differ-

ently by different social groups - women, men, the radical, and the

religious - and can sometimes even subvert the pedagogy. But the ac-

counts of the women also reveal that the self is formed with reference to

the codes of authenticity. In Mrs. Chen's case, we saw how she produced

agency in the very act of reproducing the ideal of the self-sacrificing

woman. With the southern woman, the self emerges from a traffic be-

tween this prescriptive code and the ideals of the Enlightenment. In-

deed, these codes may have been so much a part of her self that they also

caused her much anguish.

The southern woman turns out to be Chen Xiefen, founder of the

first woman's journal, Nhxuebao, and the daughter of Chen Fan, the pub-

lisher of the radical journal Subao in Tokyo in the early 1900s. While in

Japan, her father promised her as a concubine to a Macao merchant. A

storm of protest raised by progressive and famous revolutionary women

like Qiu Jin succeeded, in the end, in calling off the union.52 But in the

midst of this protest Xiefen consented, saying, "I cannot but obey my

father (shichu fuming, bude bucong)." We have seen how she had been

able to subtly subvert the rhetoric of women's timeless qualities by

380

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

invoking its power, but perhaps this invocation also revealed the power

of this language - which continued to call for her self-sacrifice - over

her. A women's movement subordinated to state nationalism meant that

women would continue, even in the People's Republic, to embody the

authentic virtue of self-sacrifice.53 Self-sacrifice as the abiding truth of

communist nationalism was needed by the state not only to demand such

sacrifice from others but to contain the spectacle of corrosion, which

would in time erode the founding reason for its power.

Thus, no matter how the popular appropriation of the images of

authenticity may support, inflect, subvert, or parody this nationalism,

for ruling regimes the representations remain of the most solemn signifi-

cance. Regimes stake their legitimacy to a great extent on their role as

custodians of the authenticity of the "body cultural," and, as the hege-

mony of linear time exposes its corrosion, they repeatedly have to recon-

stitute it. The inviolability that pervades and issues from these images of

authenticity is a unique and potent source of authority that regimes hope

to monopolize in the face of opposition from within. But of course this

source of authority can also be turned against the state, as, for instance,

in the case of fundamentalism in Iran, in the American militia move-

ments, or in the Cultural Revolution. These are instances of how a

referential traffic between the regime's ideals of authenticity and their

popular appropriations actually sustains the regime of authenticity. Just

as often, nation-states require the inviolability to counter the critique of

its institutions and policies made by other nation-states or by the domi-

nant ideology (capitalist modernity) of the system of nation-states as a

whole. An example is the argument made in the People's Republic today

that resorts to the authority of socialist authenticity in the face of criti-

cism of its human rights record ("We believe that feeding our people is

more important than the rights of a few"). Consider also the example of

Lee Kuan-yew or Mahathir Mohammed, who, like the Japanese champi-

ons of the unique Asiatic culture of an earlier period, contest the right of

Western nations to impose the standards of democracy precisely by re-

sorting to the inviolability and superiority of a Confucian or Islamic

essence as the foundation of their societies.

As we look outward from the last decade of the twentieth century, at

a time of accelerating globalization and the transformation of customary

notions of sovereignty, there appears to be an increasing commodifica-

tion of the symbols of authenticity. This would appear to breach the

demarcation of the two spheres of the market and authenticity, and in

The Regime of Authenticity 381

some cases it is possible that such a commodification, as with the British

royalty, has already eroded its symbolic capacity to represent the identifi-

able core of an evolving nation. But we also see a paradoxical develop-

ment in which the discourse of cultural authenticity intensifies with the

commodification of its symbols. Thus, in China today, where the tor-

nado of global capitalism has whipped up an unprecedented pace of

change, we are also witnessing a wave of nationalism not seen in a long

time. The nationalist rhetoric resorts to arguments about national invio-

lability based upon old and new images of authenticity. More novel is the

relationship between authenticity and the market. Nowadays in Beijing,

popular theme restaurants known as the yiku fandian (recalling "eat

bitterness") have appeared. Many of those youth who were sent down to

the rural areas to serve the people during the Cultural Revolution now

spend lavishly to relive the experience and eat the unappetizing food of

those days. For many, this is not merely nostalgia but a reaching back to

the most important experience of "Redness," or communist authentic-

ity, that they ever had, one that testifies to communism as a continuing

source of this nation's regime of authenticity. What this commodified

authenticity means for the new nationalism, subject formation, and

women may be well worth exploring.

NOTES

This essay first appeared, with minor differences, in History and

Theory 37, no. 3 (1998): 287-308. I would like to thank the participants of the

conference Narratives, Arts, and Ritual: Imagining and Constructing Nation-

hood in Modern East Asia at Urbana for their comments. Thanks are also due to

Homi Bhabha, John Davidann, Joan Judge, Claudio Lominitz, Viren Murthy,

Brian Porter, Shu-mei Shih, Aram Yengoyan, and especially Haiyan Lee for

their help.

1. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins

and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1991) I use the capital H to designate this

mode of writing the progressive, linear History of the Enlightenment associated

with nation-states.

2. Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a

Nation (Honolulu, 1994).

3. Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narra-

tives of Modern China (Chicago, 1995), chap. 1.

4. Georg W. E Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New

York, 1956), 2.

5. One might say that it is this three-way relationship between a people, a

382

Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

territory and a History that distinguishes contemporary nationalism from other

types of identitarian movements that preceded nationalism. Historically, commu-

nities, and not necessarily religious ones, have often had a strong sense of Self

versus Other and had developed hard boundaries in relation to outsiders

(Duara, Rescuing History, chap. 2). What these movements lacked was not self-

consciousness or identity per se (contra Anderson, Imagined Communities;

Roger Rouse, "Questions of Identity: Personhood and Collectivity in Trans-

national Migration to the United States," Critique of Anthropology 15, no. 4

[1995], 351-80; and others) but the historical claim arising from the idea of a

sovereign people within a delimited territory. Thus, Brian Porter has advised me

that European nationalisms before the late nineteenth century - such as the

Polish one - often identified the nation with a spirit, of, say, "freedom," and not

with a territorially bounded people. This appears to resemble Hegel's spirit,

which manifests itself over a variety of spaces and times, but of course Hegel's

teleology assures its ultimate realization in the spacetime of Prussia. Is this final

moment in Hegel the point at which the relationship between spirit and space-

time gets reversed? When does the geobody begin to limit the scope of spirit of a

people and become its only legitimate vehicle?

6. The unchanging subject is not timeless in the strict sense of being

outside of time but rather in the sense of being unaffected by time.

7. Ernest Renan, "What Is a Nation?" in Nation and Narration, edited by

Homi Bhabha (London, 1990), 18.

8. Ibid., 19.

9. Ibid., 11, 15.

10. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A De-

rivative Discourse (London, 1986).

11. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postco-

lonial Histories (Princeton, 1993).

12. Joseph Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate: A Trilogy

(Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1965).

13. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Thought and

the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975).

14. Ibid., 551.

15. Johannes Fabian sees much greater continuity between modern linear

time and sacred time. In linear time, Judeo-Christian time is secularized, general-

ized, and universalized, but it is the message that is transformed, not the ele-

ments of its code. The code consists of faith in a "covenant between Divinity and

one people, trust in divine providence as it unfolds in a history of salvation

centered on one Savior. . . . They stress the specificity of Time, its realization in

a given cultural ecology" (Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its

Object [New York, 1983], 2). Fabian's concern is with anthropology's concept of

time, which, having absorbed the Judeo-Christian conception, remains a knowl-

edge that is superior to and different from the time of the savage (10, 26-27).

Here timelessness is displaced from the self and becomes a property of the

savage; secular time becomes "a means to occupy space, a title conferring on its

holders the right to "save" the expanse of the world for history" (146).

The Regime of Authenticity 383

16. Moishe Postone has usefully clarified the differences between capitalist

and precapitalist conceptions of time as the difference between time as an inde-

pendent variable in capitalism and a dependent variable in the latter. As an

independent variable, capitalist time is conceived as a preexisting and abstract

measure of events and processes (such as labor) whereas the "concrete" time of

precapitalist societies is dependent upon and shaped by events. The former is

linear in direction, whereas the latter is characterized less by direction than by its

dependent status (Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of

Marx's Critical Theory [Cambridge, UK, 1993], 200-201).

17. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3. (Chicago, 1988), 138-41; vol.

1 (Chicago, 1984), 1-30. Jacques Derrida has called the elusive "now," which is

always being-past or being-future, the "intemporal kernel of time. . . ." Jacques

Derrida, "Ousia and Gramme: Note on a Note from Being and Time," in

Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 1992) 40.

18. Note that because the Historical subject cannot fully overcome the

aporias of time, it is an aporetic subject, embodying, on the one hand, progres-

sive change, and, on the other, timelessness, of concern to us here.

19. Alessandro Ferrara, Modernity and Authenticity: A Study of the Social

and Ethical Thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Albany, 1993), 30, 148-50.

20. Ibid., 47-50, 86-90.

21. Rey Chow, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and

Contemporary Chinese Cinema (New York, 1995), 21-23. There is a growing

literature about nostalgia in modern nationalism, embodied in such genres as

"homeland" literature, which is related to but differs from my analysis. See, for

instance, Marilyn Ivy's lucid and representative Freudian analysis of the "dis-

courses of the vanishing" in modern Japan (Discourses of the Vanishing: Moder-

nity, Phantasm, Japan [Chicago, 1995]). Simply put, the logic of nostalgia fol-

lows that of the fetish and is an effort to make a whole by means of a substitute

representation of the lost object, even as the representation signifies that the

lack perdures. Note that unless there is a recognition of actual loss one cannot

have nostalgia. The attitude that underpins authenticity in my understanding is

not necessarily one of nostalgia or mourning but a range of feelings about the

possible erosion of the true. These include fear, militancy, heightened devotion,

discipline, self-abnegation, dutifulness, and vigilance. Moreover, loss is not only

existential but may be experienced as dishonor, desacralization, and defilement

(by way of commodification or sexualization). To the extent that the objects of

nostalgia are essentialized as the truth of the nation - as, for instance, with the

"native place" - the logic of nostalgia described by Ivy and others presents a

particular mode within the regime of authenticity.

22. Anna Maria Alonso, "Gender, Power, and Historical Memory: Dis-

courses of Serrano Resistance," in Feminists Theorize the Political, edited by

Judith Butler and Joan Scott (New York, 1992); Jennifer Schirmer, "The Claim-

ing of Space and the Body Politic within National-Security States: The Plaza de

Mayo Madres and the Greenham Common Women," in Remapping Memory:

The Politics of Timespace, edited by Jonathan Boyarin (Minneapolis, 1994).

384 Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia

23. Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French

Revolution (Ithaca, NY, 1988).

24. Schirmer, "Claiming of Space," 196.

25. Sharon H. Nolte and Sally Ann Hastings, "The Meiji State's Policy

toward Women, 1890-1910," in Recreating Japanese Women, 1600-1945, edited

by Gail Lee Bernstein (Berkeley, 1991), 171-72.

26. Miriam Silverberg, "The Modern Girl as Militant," in Bernstein, Recre-

ating Japanese Women, 263.

27. Ibid., 264. My chapter is also a response to a question that has followed

me since childhood, namely, why did modern Indian women wear the sari, while

men dressed in Western clothes.

28. Lydia Liu, "The Female Body and Nationalist Discourse: The Field of

Life and Death Revisited," in Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Trans-

national Feminist Practices, edited by Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (Min-

neapolis, 1995).

29. Chang-tai Hung, War and Popular Culture: Resistance in Modern

China, 1937-1945 (Berkeley, 1994); Poshek Fu, Passivity, Resistance, and Col-

laboration: Intellectual Choices in Occupied Shanghai, 1937-1945 (Stanford,

1993).

30. See Katherine Carlitz, "Desire, Danger, and the Body: Stories of

Women's Virtue in Late Ming China," in Engendering China: Women, Culture,

and the State, edited by Christina Gilmartin et al. (Cambridge, 1994); Susan

Mann, "Widows in the Kinship, Class, and Community Structures of Qing Dy-

nasty China," Journal of Asian Studies 46, no. 1 (1987); 37-56; and Mark Elvin,

"Female Virtue and the State in China," Past and Present 104 (1984): 111-52.

31. See, for example, Yan Shi, "Nannu tongxue yu lian'ai shang de zhidao"

(Coeducation and guidance on amorous relationships), Funh zazhi 9, no. 10

(1923); and Wang Zhuomin, "Lun wuguo daxue shang buyi nannh tongxiao"

(On the inappropriateness of coeducation in our universities), Funh zazhi 4, no.

5 (1918).

32. Kazuko Ono, Chinese Women in a Century of Revolution, 1850-1950,

ed. and trans. Joshua Fogel (Stanford, 1989), 27.

33. See Jindai Zhongguo nuquan yundong shiliao, 1842-1911 (Documents

on feminist movements in modern China, 1842-1911), vols. 1-2, edited by Li

Youning and Zhang Yufa (Taipei, 1975), 463-67.

34. The expression "nationalist patriarchy" is taken from Chatterjee, Na-

tion, 1993.

35. Wang Jingwei, "Duiyu nhjiede ganxiang" (Reflections on women's

world), Funh zazhi 10, no. 1 (1924): 106-7.

36. Ibid., 108. The notion of self-sacrifice, of course, pervades this entire

topic and deserves more discussion. Several scholars have argued that self-

sacrifice is critical to establishing the claim to nationhood. See Renan, "What Is

a Nation?"; Liisa H. Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National

Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago, 1995), 216-18; and

John D. Kelly, "Diaspora and World War: Blood and Nation in Fijii and Hawai'i"

Public Culture 7, no. 3 (1995): 489. Martyrdom is the root sacrificial form that

The Regime of Authenticity 385

sanctions and sanctifies rights for the wronged. Historically, the sacrifice of the

pure and authentic often redeemed the desire for wealth, lust, and power (Rich-

ard Von Glahn "The Enchantment of Wealth: The God Wutong in the Social

History of Jiangnan," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 51, no. 2 [1991]). The

same mechanism may perhaps be at work in the national martyr, but the sacrifi-

cial action here also produces the authentic.

37. Norma Diamond, "Women under Kuomintang Rule: Variations on the

Feminine Mystique," Modern China 1, no. 1 (1975): 6-7.

38. Meng Yue, "Female Images and National Myth," in Gender Politics in

Modern China, edited by Tani E. Barlow (Durham, 1991), 118.

39. See Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, "From Gender Erasure to Gender Differ-

ence: State Feminism, Consumer Sexuality, and a Feminist Public Sphere in

China," manuscript, 17.

40. Lu Xun, "Feizao" (Soap), in Lu Xun Quanji (Complete works of Lu

Xun) (N.p., 1924), 2:193. The English translation is in Lu Hsun, Selected Stories

of Lu Hsun, trans. Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang (New York, 1960), 167.

41. Lu, "Feizao," 199; Lu, Stories, 171.

42. Lu, "Feizao," 200; Lu, Stories, 171.

43. Carolyn T. Brown, "Woman as Trope: Gender and Power in Lu Xun's

"Soap," in Barlow, Gender Politics, 77. I would like to acknowledge my debt to

Carolyn Brown's reading of "Soap," which inspired my own analysis.

44. Chu'nan nuzi (A certain southern woman), "Zhongguo nhzide qiantu"

(The future of Chinese women), in Jindai Zhongguo nhquan yundong shiliao,

1842-1911, edited by Li Youning and Zhang Yufa ([1903] 1975), 394-95.

45. Ibid., 395.

46. Prasenjit Duara, "Of Authenticity and Woman: Personal Narratives of

Middle-Class Women in China," 1995, manuscript.

47. These narratives are taken from the Oral Records of Morality Seminars

of the Third Manzhouguo Morality Society held in 1936 in Xinjing (Changchun).

Participants in the seminar made presentations about how their lives were

guided by the appropriate morality organized around five categories drawn from

the classical Confucian tradition.

48. Ibid., 137.

49. Ibid.

50. Ibid., 181-82.

51. Lu Xun, "Wozhi jielieguan" (My views on chastity), in Lu Xun Quanji,

vol. 1 (Taipei, [1918] 1989), 101-13.

52. Lh Meiyi and Zheng Yongfu, Zhongguo Funh Yundong, 1840-1921

(The Chinese women's movement, 1840-1921) (Zhengzhou, 1990), 210-13; see

also Charlotte L. Beahan, "Feminism and Nationalism in the Chinese Women's

Press, 1902-1911," Modern China 1, no. 4 (1975): 389, 394.

53. See Yang, "Gender Erasure," for the "state feminism" of the People's

Republic.



Contributors

Kai-wing Chow, Associate Professor, Department of East Asian

Languages and Cultures and Department of History, University of

Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Kevin M. Doak, Associate Professor, Department of East Asian

Languages and Cultures and Department of History, University of

Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Prasenjit Duara, Professor, Department of History, University of

Chicago.

Poshek Fu, Associate Professor, Department of History, University of

Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

JaHyun Kim Haboush, Professor, Department of East Asian

Languages and Cultures, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Hung-yok Ip, Associate Professor, Department of History, State

University.

Andrew E Jones, Assistant Professor, Department of East Asian

Languages and Cultures, University of California, Berkeley.

John Lie, Professor and Chair, Department of Sociology, University

of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Jiu-jung Lo, Associate Researcher, Institute of Modern History,

Academia Sinica, Taiwan.

Stefan Tanaka, Associate Professor, Department of History,

University of California, San Diego.

Ronald P. Toby, Professor and Chair, Department of East Asian

Languages and Cultures, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Peter Zarrow, Senior Lecturer in Chinese History, University of New

South Wales, Sydney, Australia.

387



Index

Ahmad, Aijaz, 66

Altar of Soil and Grain, sacrifice at,

169

Altar to Heaven, 160, 171, 172

Ama (Nd), 41n. 31

Amoy Action Troops, 296

Anderson, Benedict, 15-16, 65, 153,

359

Architecture: Chinese, 167; Japanese,

135, 137-40, 141

Arendt, Hannah, 357n. 11

Ariga Nagao, 177

Art, 93-94; Japan as curator of, 133

Art, Japanese, 129, 141, 146n. 41; aes-

thetics of, 125-26, 127-28; architec-

ture, 135, 137-40, 141; comparison

to Greek, 128, 130-31, 136-37;

paintings, 22, 24, 40n. 24, 41n. 32,

43n. 45. See also Iconography, Japa-

nese

Asahi Shinbun (newspaper), 345

Asia: modern, 92; naming of, 6, 68-

69; racism toward, 218-19

Assimilation Society, 282

Association for Elevating Yazhou, 68

Authenticity: and the Modern Girl,

369; and struggle with capitalism,

365-66; symbols of, 367-68, 380-

81; of women, 12, 370-72

Awakening Bell (Jingshi zhong;

Chen), 55, 56

Bagehot, Walter, 187n. 73

Bagua Hui, 282

Bai Yan. See Bak Yin

Bak Yin (Bai Yan), 259, 264, 266

Ban Chao, 94

Bankoku jinbutsu-zu (Shdho;

panopticon), 26-27, 29, 30, 38n. 11

Bankoku sOkai zu (Ishikawa;

panopticon), 31

Bankoku sozu (panopticon), 26, 30,

38n. 11

Bankoku-zu byObu (panopticon), 29

Baoshan in Bloodshed (Xuejian

Baoshan cheng; film), 262

Barthes, Roland, 197, 331

"Basic Policy for Assimilating the Ko-

rean Ethnic Nation" (Nakayama),

99

Battle Front Troupe, 233-34

Battle of Changsha (Changsha

huizhan; film), 266

Beauty School for Girls (Meimei

niixiao), 321, 337n. 10

Behind the Shanghai Front (Shanghai

huoxian hou; film), 265-66

Bell, Catherine, 182

Benjamin, Walter, 118

Bercovitch, Sacvan, 191

Berger, John, 353, 355

Bitter Flower (Kucai hua; Feng), 229

Black Angel. See Nie Er

Blau, Willem, 25-26

Bodhisenna (Indian priest), 38n. 13

Boehm, M. H., 105-6

Bolshevization, 223, 224

Bourdieu, Pierre, 157-58

Boxer Uprising (1900), 64, 171

Bo Zhuyi, 22, 23-24

390 Index

Buddhism, 18-19; in Japan, 7, 119-

20, 137, 144n. 7

Bulletin (Institute for Research on the

Ethnic Nation), 105

Bungei Shunji (publishing company),

345

Bureau of Central Investigation and

Statistics, 297

Bureau of Investigation and Statistics

of the Military Affairs Committee,

296, 297

Cai Chusheng, 254-55, 258, 259, 260

Calendar, Chinese, 63-65, 165

Cantonese: films in, 253-54, 256-57,

260-62, 264-66, 267-70

Caron, Francois, 37n. 5

Cartography, 19, 25-26, 30, 38n. 11,

43n. 42, 49

Catholicism, 37n. 7, 40n. 23, 203; Je-

suits, 20, 21, 49; in Korea, 197,

199, 200, 201-2, 213n. 35

CCP. See Chinese Communist Party

Central Censorship Bureau, 257

Central China syndrome. See Central

Plains syndrome

Central Flower ethnic nation

(zhongghua minzu), 93

Central Kingdom People (zhongguo

ren), 93

Central Plains syndrome, 9-10, 248,

257, 262, 270-71. See also Da

zhongyuan xintai

Chang Hao, 70

Changing Chinese (Ross), 96

Chao, King Wu-ling, 61

"Charter Provisions of the Nurem-

berg Judgment" (Guelff and Rob-

erts), 292-93

Chatterjee, Partha, 199, 362, 371

Chen Duxiu, 217-18,219-20,223,224

Chen Fan, 379

Cheng Jihua, 248

Cheng Maoyun, 328

Chen Huanzhang, 172

Chen Jie, 297

Chen Tianhua, 55, 56

Chen Xiefen, 375-76, 379-80

Chen Yi, 279, 280, 288, 300, 306

Chiang Kai-shek, 321, 337n. 15

Chihaya (priest), 136

Chihaya JOcho, 126

Children of the Storm (Fengyun ernu;

film), 329-30

China, 47-76, 85-107, 215-38, 359-

81; and absence of nationhood, 50-

53, 97-98; calendar of, 63-65; and

Communist Revolution, 8-9, 223-

29, 230; Confucianism in, 63, 64,

168, 172-73; and cosmopolitanism-

internationalism, 9, 215-17; and de-

mocracy, 154-55; ethnic nations

within, 90, 93-97, 110n. 38; influ-

ence of West on, 48, 60-61, 65-66,

236; intelligentsia of, 233-34, 238,

239n. 4, 258, 265; and Japan, 67-

68, 75, 85-86, 132, 139, 219, 249;

and militarism, 175; Mongols, 60,

94-95; nationalism in, 178, 179,

224-26; origin of name, 4, 5-6, 93;

Index

391

Chinese Communist Party (CCP),

217; and Marxism-Leninism, 224-

25; propaganda of, 227-29, 232,

241n. 42, 258-59

Chineseness, defined, 178

Chi no gihO (Kobayashi and

Funabiki), 39n. 20

Chiu Shutai (Zhao Shutai), 266, 267

Ch'oe Namson, 98-99

Chongan Plantation Farm, 288

Chong Hasang, 200-201

Ch6ngjo, 197, 200, 210; death of,

204, 205, 206

Ch6ng Yagyong. See Tasan

Ch6ng Yakch6n, 200

Ch6ng Yakchong, 200

Ch6n Tuhwan (Chun Doo Hwan),

192, 208-9

Chosenjin (government pamphlet), 99

Chos6n dynasty, 193, 194

Chow, Kai-wing, 4-5, 6, 216

Chow, Rey, 367

Christian Century in Japan (Boxer),

40n. 23

Chun Doo Hwan (Chon Tuhwan),

192, 208-9

Cinema: Hong Kong, 9-10, 247-71,

271n. 2; in Cantonese, 253-54,

256-57, 260-62, 264-66, 267-70;

censorship of, 266-67; comparison

of Cantonese and Mandarin, 268-

69; criticism of, 247, 254-58, 264;

growth of, 250; hybridism of, 267-

71; impact of war on, 248-49, 252-

54, 262-63; in Mandarin, 256, 259-

62, 268-69; symbolism of women

in, 260-61

Collected Regulations of the Qing, 150

Collingwood, R. G., 51

Colonialism. See Imperialism

Committee for the Unified Interpreta-

tion of Rules and Regulations, 289,

291

Communism, 100; and cosmopolitan-

ism, 216-17, 222-23, 234-35; and

cosmopolitanism-internationalism,

215-17, 224, 237; and imperialism,

217

Communist Revolution (China), 8-9,

223-29; comparison to May Fourth

movement, 230

Comprehensive Rites of the Qing, 150

Confucianism, 153, 194; in China, 63,

64, 168, 172-73; in Japan, 98, 177;

in Korea, 193-94, 199, 202-3; and

Yuan Shikai, 168, 169, 172-73,

177-78

Confucian Society (Kongjiaohui),

168, 172, 186n. 45

Confucius, sacrifices to, 172-73

Control Yuan, 297, 300

Cosmopolitanism, 239n. 5; and the

arts, 229-34; and communism,

216-17, 222-23, 234-35; and the

ideal image, 235-36; of May Fourth

Era, 217-23; Western influence on,

221-22. See also Internationalism

Cosmopolitanism-internationalism,

239n. 5, 239-40n. 11; and commu-

392 Index

Dajokan, historical preservation by,

120-21, 122

Datong Translation Bureau, 65

Da Zhongyuan xintai, 256, 275n. 44.

See also Central Plains syndrome

Decree 64, 297

Democracy: in China, 154-55; in Ko-

rea, 189-90, 201-2; and national-

ism, 219-20; and struggle against

Pan. . . ism, 218-19; in Taiwan,

283

Deng Zhongxia, 223-24

Deus Destroyed (Elison), 40n. 23

Diaspora: Chinese, 9-10; Korean, 11,

356n. 3

Dirlik, Arif, 216

Doak, Kevin M., 4, 5-6, 216

Double Ten celebrations, 151,158-

61, 163-65, 172, 175, 181

Duara, Prasenjit, 11-12, 153, 215

Du Yuesheng, 250

East Asia, 85-86, 194; influence of

West on, 216; nationalism within, 1,

87-92, 102, 103-7; New Order in,

100-107; representation of women

in, 368-69

East Asia League (Toa remmei),

101

Edo meisho-zu byobu (painting), 24

Edo-zu byobu (painting), 24

Eiei (monk), 22

Eiko Ikegami, 108n. 15

Eitoku (painter), 41n. 32

Ekotoba, 22-23

Enchin (monk), 40n. 27

Encounter (Mannam; Hahn), 191,

196, 198-202, 211n. 7, 211n. 8

Encyclopedism, 32-36, 45n. 56

English Constitution (Bagehot), 187n.

73

Enlightenment Society (Qifa She),

283

Esperanto (universal language), 73

"Essay on the Destruction of the

Country" (Guomin bao), 54

Eternal Empire (Yongwonhan cheguk;

Yi), 191, 196, 205-8

Etsuko Inagaki Sugimoto, 43n. 46

Exile, 352-54; defined, 353; literature

of, 352-54, 357n. 21

Ezo (Japan), 43n. 42

Fabian, Johannes, 382n. 15

Family Love Songs (Jiating aiqing

gequ; Li), 321

Fan Shoukang, 306

Far East: defined, 88-89; ethnic na-

tions of, 92

Far East (Little), 89

Fascism: in China, 159; in Japan, 105

February 28 Incident (1947), 279,

280, 297

Federation of Chinese Film Educa-

tion (Zhongguo dianying jiaoyu

xiehui Xianggang fenghui), 259

Fei Mu, 260

Fenollosa, Ernest E, 118, 127-28,

142

Ferrara, Alessandro, 365

Fetishization: of sing-song girls, 333;

Index

393

Gellner, Ernest, 153, 353

"General Discourse on the Geogra-

phy of Asia" (Liang), 68-69, 74

Gombrich, E. H., 27, 29

Gone Was the Love (Hu Bu gui; film),

266

Goodnow, Frank, 177

Gorbachev, Mikhail, 196

Grantham, Sir Alexander, 251

Great Britain, 49; imperialism of,

249, 263; narratives of, on China,

49-50; racism of, 265

Great China Records (Da zhonghua

changpian gongsi), 320, 322, 337n.

15

Great Wall of China, 94

Great War, 89-90, 110n. 43

Griffin, Roger, 105

Guan Di, 173-74

Guanhua. See Mandarin

Guan Wenqing, 264

Guomin bao (magazine), 64

Guomindang All-Nation Spiritual Mo-

bilization Campaign, 258

Guomin riri bao (newspaper), 62, 64

Guo Xiuzong, 287

Guze Kannon (Goddess of Mercy

sculpture), 128, 131, 134, 142

Hahn Moo-Sook (Han Musuk), 191

Hakurakuten (NO), 22, 23

Han, nation of, 94-96

Han'gul (Korean alphabet), 349

Hanjian,279-310; defined, 289, 302,

304-5, 307; government policy on,

294-301; vs. war criminals, 288-94;

military influence on, 295-98,

314n. 61; and Mingbao, 302-6; Tai-

wanese attitude toward, 301-8. See

also War criminals

Han Musuk (Hahn Moo-Sook), 191

Hanren, 79n. 35

Hanwen (writing system), 71, 73, 76

Hanyu. See Mandarin

Hanzi. See Hanwen

Harrison, Ernest John, 88-89

Hattori Unokichi, 98

Heartfelt Treatise on Shepherding the

People (Mokmin simso; Hwang),

190-91, 196, 202-5

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 50-

51, 78n. 15, 361, 382n. 5

Hegemony, political ritual and, 156

He Luting, 326, 329

Hemstead, David, 262

Hibutsu (sacred objects of worship),

146n. 39

Hirako Takurei, 141

Hirth, Friedrich, 93

History: and nation-state, 121-22,

124-25, 126, 129, 215, 359-62; and

political ritual, 152; struggle be-

tween capitalism and authenticity

within, 365-66; and timelessness,

362-64

History of Ancient Korea (Choson

sanggosa; Sin), 192-93

History of the Yellow (Huang shi;

Huang), 59

Hobsbawm, Eric, 47, 187n. 73, 215

394 Index

Hou Yiu (Hou Yao), 266-67

Huangdi, 58-61, 62; and Chinese cal-

endar, 63-65

Huang Jie, 59-61, 70

"Huangpu River" (song), 335

Huang zhong ren (Social Darwinism

category), 59

Huang Zunxian, 72

Huashang Bao (newspaper), 259

Hu Dieying (Wu Dip-Ying), 267

Hundred Days Reform (1898), 66

Hu Shi, 220, 221

Ichimura Yiji, 40n. 24

Iconography: European, 25; Japa-

nese, 21-22, 24, 26-32, 40n. 24,

41n. 32, 43n. 45

Icons, Buddhist, 125, 129-30

Ideals of the East (Okakura), 131-32

Identity: cultural ties of, 1-2, 3, 93-

94; defined, 15-16; and gender poli-

tics, 215; and the media, 2, 3-6;

and nostalgia, 6-9

Identity, Chinese, 9-10, 236-38; and

family, 153-54; and gender politics,

11-12, 260-61; influence of West

on, 216; and political ritual, 165,

180. See also China; Identity,

Hanzu

Identity, diasporic, 9-10, 11, 354-55,

356n. 3

Identity, East Asian, 87-92, 103-7

Identity, Hanzu, 5, 47-76, 92, 190,

216; defined, 48-49; Han nation,

94-96; historical revisionism of,

61-65; and Huangdi, 58-61, 62,

63-65; influence of Japan on, 69-

71; influence of West on, 74-75;

language of, 71-74; Manchu exclu-

sion from, 54-56, 75, 76; and me-

dia, 65-66; and race, 53, 54, 56-58;

and Social Darwinism, 53-56; in

Taiwan, 281

Identity, Hong Kong, 248-49, 265.

See also Cinema, Hong Kong

Identity, Korean, 11, 98-100, 190-91,

192-96. See also Korea

Identity, Taiwanese, 10, 279-310; du-

ality of, 280-81, 285-88, 290, 308-

10; history of, 281-84. See also

Hanjian; Taiwan

Identity of France (Braudel), 15

Ikoku jinbutsu zukan (Kohara), 40n.

24

Illustrated Gazetteers of Maritime

Countries (Haigo tuzhi; Wei), 67

Imperialism, 96-97; British, 249, 263;

Chinese, 282; and communism,

217; in Hong Kong, 263

Imperialism, Japanese: in China, 97-

100, 219, 252; in Hong Kong, 270;

in Korea, 202; in Taiwan, 279, 281,

282-83

Imperial Japan. See Japan

Inagaki Koro, 30-31

In Defense of South China (Baowei

Huanan; film), 264

India, 371. See also Tenjiku

Institute for Common East Asian Cul-

ture (TOa dObun shoin), 101

Index

395

Interpretation 3078, 289, 296

Ip, Hung-yok, 8-9

Ise (shrine), 146n. 58

Ishikawa Toshiyuki, 31

Ishiwara Kanji, 101

Isozaki Arata, 146n. 58

Itagaki Taisuke, Count, 283

Ito Chuta, 118, 135-40

Japan, 15-36, 86, 89, 133, 177, 287;

and assimilation of Taiwan, 282-83,

286-87, 289-90, 306; and Bud-

dhism, 7, 119-20, 144n. 7; cartogra-

phy of, 19, 30, 38n. 11, 43n. 42;

and China, 5-6, 67-68, 75, 85-86,

132, 139; and Christianity, 37n. 7,

40n. 23; and classification of for-

eigners, 26-32, 34-35, 42n. 39,

43n. 43, 43n. 45; Confucianism in,

98, 177; cosmological theory of,

18-19; and East Asia, 85-86; and

East Asian identity, 103-7;

encyclopedism in, 32-36; end of

sangoku, 20-21, 35-36; ethnic na-

tionalism of, 101; historical skepti-

cism within, 134, 140-41; iconogra-

phy of, 21-22, 26-32, 40n. 24, 41n.

32, 43n. 45; influence of West on,

16, 17, 19, 20-21, 25, 65-66; and

Korea, 110-11n. 49, 146n. 46, 190,

202, 209, 210; and reevaluation of

the past, 127-34; representation of

women in, 368-69; Shintoism in, 7,

177; tribal diffusion of, 92; and

view of Otherness, 4; World order

of, 104-5. See also Art, Japanese;

Literature, Japanese; Culture,

Japanese; Horyiji; Imperialism,

Japanese

Jesuits (Society of Jesus), 20, 21, 49.

See also Boxer Uprising; Catholi-

cism

Jiang Jieshi, 298, 299

Jiangsu (magazine), 64

Jiangxi Committee for the Advance-

ment of Musical Education (Jiangxi

tuixing yinyue weiyuan hui), 328

Jinno shOtO ki (Kitabatake), 19

Jinrin KinmOzu (encyclopedia), 45n.

56

Jinrui (description of peoples), 25, 26

Jinshu (race), 90, 91

Jin-xia Committee for the Handling

of Hanjian (Jinxia hanjian chuli

weiyuanhui), 296, 297

JOgo Shotoku Tashi-den Hoketsuki (bi-

ography of Shotoku Taishi), 141

Jones, Andrew E, 11

Junguo min jiayou hui (student organi-

zation), 59

Jushu bolan (encyclopedia), 32

Kamei Kan'ichiro, 103-5, 112-13n.

66

Kang Youwei, 54, 65, 67,370,378; and

Confucianism, 64, 169, 172,177

Kano Tessai, 127

Kara, 18, 38n. 12

Kazuko Ono, 370

Ketou (kowtow), 160, 172-73

Kibi Daijin nittO ekotoba (legend of

396 Index

Koma shaku (unit of measure), 141

Komtasu Kentar0, 112n. 57

Konoe Fuminaro, 101

Korea, 18, 189-210, 343-55; Ameri-

can influence on, 192, 194, 210,

211n. 3; Catholicism in, 197, 199,

200, 201-2, 213n. 35; Confucianism

in, 193-94,199, 202-3; cultural con-

tainment of, 98-99; and Japan,

110-11n. 49, 146n. 46, 190, 202,

209, 210; of Kim SOk-pom, 344-46;

and longing for world stage, 209,

214n. 65; militarism of, 192; and

modernity, 190, 197, 198, 203, 204;

practical learning in, 202-3; spiritu-

ality in, 198-99; transition to de-

mocracy, 189-90; of Yi Hoe-song,

350-51; of Yi Yang-ji, 347-50. See

also Identity, Korean; Literature,

Japanese; Literature, Korean

Kropotkin, Petr, 219

Kuroda Hideo, 41n. 32

Kusuha Sainin (Tenjiku merchant),

38n. 13

Kwangju Uprising (1980), 209, 345,

351

Kwan Man-ching (Guan Wenqing),

264

Lacouperie, Terrien de, 59

Lai, Chi-kong, 216

Language: in China, 51, 71-74; and

conflict between Japan and China,

6, 70-71. See also Cantonese; Man-

darin

Lau Kuai-hong (Liu Guikang), 267

League for the Establishment of the

Taiwan Parliament, 283

Lee Fa (Li Hua), 264

Lefebvre, Henri, 117-18, 125-26

Left-wing music movement: and gen-

der, 329-33; and sing-song girls,

332-35

Lenin, Vladimir I., 100

Letter to the State Council (Sang

Chaesang so; Chong), 200

Leung Sum (Liang Shen), 267

Levenson, Joseph, 194, 362-63

Liang Bin (Lueng Bun), 267

Liang Qichao, 65, 67, 68-69, 155,

168; advice to Taiwanese, 283-84;

and Chinese calendar, 63-64; and

Confucianism, 64; on ethnic nation-

alism, 178; on history, 51, 52; on

language, 71-72, 174; on race, 53,

54, 55, 56

Liang Shen (Leung Sum), 267

Liang Shiyi, 172

Liao Chengzhi, 275n. 50

Liberation Daily (Jiefang ribao; news-

paper), 226

Li Bozhao, 232-33

Li Da, 224

Li Dazhao, 218-19, 220, 223

Lie, John, 11

"Life's Journey" (Lutu; Zhang), 220,

235

Li Hua (Lee Fa), 264

Li Jinhui, 318-19, 323, 325-26, 327-

29, 335-36; and development of ur-

Index

397

Little Cantonese (Xiao Guandong;

film), 262

Little Friend (Xiao pengyou; maga-

zine), 320

Liu Bannong, 222

Liu Guikang, 267

Liu Shipei, 63-64

Liu Yongfu, 281

Li Yichen, 289, 290

Li Youbang, 287, 288

Li Yuanhong, 159

Li Zhuozhuo, 260

Lo, Jiu-jung, 10

Lo Man-kam, Sir, 273n. 29

Long Live My Youth (Qingchun

wansui; Wang), 236

Lo Tun (Lu Dun), 259, 264

Lou Shiyi, 255

Lu Dun (Lo Tun), 259, 264

Lueng Bun (Liang Bin), 267

Luk, Michael, 219-20, 224, 225

Lukacs, Gyorgy, 196

Luo Mingyou, 258, 259

Luo Zhuoying, 300

Lu Xun, 218, 373-75, 378

Lu Xun Arts Academy, 231

Macartney, George, 49

Machiavellian Moment (Pocock), 363

Machida Hisanari, 121, 126

Madame Butterfly (Hudie furen;

film), 266

Manchu, 4-5, 150, 178-79; foreign-

ness of, 154, 281-82; relationship

to Han, 54-56, 68, 75-76, 95-96;

and Zhang Binglin, 54-55, 57-58.

See also Qing dynasty

Manchukuo (1932-1945), 106, 376-77

Manchuria, 193

Mandarin, 72, 74, 76, 320; films in,

256, 259-62, 268-69

Mao Renfeng, 296

Mao Zedong, 216, 219, 226, 230-31,

242n. 66

March of the Guerilla (Youji

jingxinqu; film), 260-62, 266

"March of the Volunteers" (Yiyong

jun jinxing qu; national anthem),

330

Marco Polo Bridge Incident (1937),

10, 249, 264

Market of the Living and the Dead (Shi-

sha to seisha ni ichi; Yi), 350-52

Martyrs, sacrifices to, 173-74

Marxism: in China, 224-25, 227; and

Korea, 192; and Mao Zedong,

242n. 66

Ma Shih-tsan (Ma Shizheng), 259

Matsuda Osama, 35

Matsuoka YOsuke, 102

Maut t'aeja, 207

May, Henry, 191

May Fourth movement, 217-23, 230

"Measures on the Management of the

Taiwanese" (Ttaiwanren guanli

banfa), 295

Media, 3-6, 81n. 88; and Hanzu iden-

tity, 65-66; and history, 191; and

identity, 2, 3-6; in Shanghai, 318,

324

398 Index

Minzoku (ethnic nation), 6, 95, 101-

3, 105-6, 112n. 57; compared to

kokumin, 90-91, 95, 109n. 17

Minzoku jiketsu (ethnic national self-

determination), 98

Minzoku to bunka (Komtasu), 112n.

57

Mitchell, W. J. T., 133

Modern Girl, 369

Modernity, 121, 144n. 15, 190, 217-

18, 353; and Confucianism, 193-94;

in Korean literature, 197, 198, 203,

204; and separation from past, 117-

18, 122, 126

MOko Shitrai ekotoba (painting), 22

Monarchy: in Japan, 177; modern

function of, 176, 187n. 73

Mongols, 60, 94-95

Montesquieu, 78n. 11

Morality Society (Daodehui), 377-79

Motoori Norinaga, 134

Muir, Ramsay, 108n. 16

Mu Shiying, 247

Music Education (Yinyue jioayou;

magazine), 328

My Fathers (Wo di sige fuchin; Dai),

236

Myongdong Cathedral, 201

"My Views on Chastity" (Wozhi

jielieguan; Lu), 378

Nagasaki, 21

Naipaul, V. S., 353-54, 357n. 21

Nakamura Kyushiro, 99, 107-8n. 5;

on ethnicity of China, 93-97; on

Far East, 87-92. See also

Nakayama Kei

Nakamura Tekisai, 4, 33-34

Nakano Seiichi, 105-6

Nakayama Kei, 99, 100, 107-8n. 5.

See also Nakamura Kyushiro

Name of the Rose (Eco), 205-6

Namin faction, 206-7

Nanban bijutsu (Nishimura), 43n. 43

Nanyang Productions, 252

Nanyue Studio, 252

Nara Exhibition, 124-25, 130

Nara period, 141, 146n. 41

Narratives, Chinese, 49-50, 61-63,

65-67, 70, 375-80; by Kamei

Kan'ichiro, 103-5; by Uchida

Ryohei, 97-98. See also Nakamura

Kyashiro

Nation, elements of, 108-9n. 16

Nation, ethnic: concept of, 106; and

race, 91-92; and relationship to

state, 101-2, 106

National Day celebrations, 157, 165

National Defense Music (Guofang

yinyue), 332

National Essence Journal (Guocui

xuebao), 70

Nationalism, 1-2, 383n. 21; in China,

178, 179, 224-26; and democracy,

219-20; in East Asia, 1, 87-92,

102-7; ethnic vs. state, 178; Indian,

362; models of, 90, 108n. 12; nation

vs. state, 86

Nationalism, ethnic: as critique of im-

perialism, 96-97, 100-101, 102-4;

Index

399

Ng Chor-fan, 253, 259, 264, 265, 267

Nhxuebao (journal), 379

Nie Er, 319, 328, 329-30, 336n. 4

Nihon shoki (Taro et al.), 19, 129,

134, 141

Ninagawa Noritane, 121-26

Nineteenth Century, a History: The

Times of Queen Victoria (Mac-

kenzie), 51

Nishikawa Joken, 31-32

Nishimura Tei, 43n. 43

Nixon, Rob, 353-54

Nkosi, Lewis, 352-53

Noron faction, 206-7

North Korea, 351

Nostalgia: role of, in formation of

identity, 6-9

No T'aewu (Roh Tae Woo), 208-9

Office of the Eighth Route Army,

258, 259, 275n. 50

Okakura Tenshin (KakuzO), 118, 127,

129-32, 141

Okinawa Prefecture, 37n. 6

Omura Sumitada, 21

On Evolution (Darwin), 53

On the People's Democratic Dictator-

ship (Mao), 226

Opium War, 49, 263

Orientalism: Japanese, 65-66, 70;

Western, 66-67

Orientalism (Said), 66

Osborne, Peter, 118, 144n. 15

Otherness, 2-3, 4

Ozaki Hotsumi, 101

Pageantry, 156-57

Pak Ch6nghui (Park Chung Hee), 192

Paolo (Catholic convert), 37n. 7

Paradise of the Solitary Island (Gudao

tiantang; film), 260

Park Chung Hee (Pak Ch6nghui), 192

Path6 Records (Shanghai Baidai

changpian gongsi), 336n. 1

Patriarchy: in China, 12, 318, 369-73;

in India, 371

Patriotic Mobilization Office (Komin

hoko undo), 285

Patriotic Youth Corps, 266

Peace or War East of Baikal (Harri-

son), 89

"Peach Blossom River" (Taohua

jiang; song), 322, 335

Peng Pai, 227

Peng Yannong, 257-58, 259

People's Anthem Society (Minzhong

geyonghui), 332

Pocock, J. G. A., 363-64

Pop Star Pictorial (Gexing huabao;

magazine), 325

Postone, Moishe, 383n. 16

Power: and political ritual, 152, 156,

176

Practical learning, 194, 202-3

"Prosecution Yamen" (Mingbao),

303-4

"Punishing War Profiteers" (Chenga

zhangzheng lide she; Mingbao),

302-3

Pye, Lucian, 238

Qian Zhuanfei, 232

400

Index

Records of the Historian (Sima Qian),

327

Rectification of history movement

(Yoksa paro chapki), 208-9

"Regulations for the Punishment of

Hanjian" (Hanjian shenpan tiaoli;

Chinese Army), 289, 295, 296

"Regulations for the Punishment of

War Criminals" (Zhangzheng

zuifan shepan tiaoli; Chinese

Army), 291

Reinsch, Paul, 166-67, 171

Renan, Ernest, 108-9n. 16, 196, 359,

361-62

Renxue (Tan), 54

Resolution 32, 279, 311n. 3

Resolution Committee, 279

Return to the Homeland (Hui Zuguo

qu; film), 264

Revolutionary Army (Geming jun;

Zhou), 53, 55

Revolution of 1911, 8, 79-80n. 46,

150-51; political rituals of, 158-65.

See also Wuchang Uprising

Ricci, Matteo, 26

Richard, Timothy, 78n. 16

Ricoeur, Paul, 63, 364

Ri Kaisei. See Yi Hoe-song

Rituals, political (China), 149-82,

183n. 1; and identity, 165, 180; in-

ternational context of, 175-76; and

officialization, 157-58; pageantry

of, 156-57; and power, 152, 156,

176; purposes of, 155-57, 177, 180-

82; of the Revolution of 1911, 158-

65; and worship of war martyrs,

173-74; of Yuan Shikai, 151-52.

See also Double Ten celebrations

Roaring Metropolis (play), 228

Roh Tae Woo (No T'aewu), 208-9

Romance at the Dance Hall (Wuchang

chunse; film), 324

Romance of the Opera Stars (Genu

qingcao; film), 267

Ronnins, 284

Ross, Edward Alsworth, 96, 109-

10n. 37

Ruifang forces, 286

Rulership, models of, 150

Russo-Japanese War, 86

Ryukyu, 43n. 42

Saito Makoto, 98

Sam Ho, 327, 332

Sancai tuhui (encyclopedia), 32-33

Sangoku (three realms), 18-20

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 249

Sekai chizu byObu (panopticon),

29-30

Sekino Tadashi, 141

Self-sacrifice, 371, 384-85n. 36

"Semantic hybridity," 48

Senkaku Island, 37n. 6

Shanghai, 249, 250, 255

Shanjaijing (archaic Chinese text), 27,

29

Shen Xue, 72

Shen Yuwen, 64

Shina, 66. See also Zhongguo

Shinkoku (Divine Land), 19

Index

401

332; symbolism of, 11, 319, 327,

329, 330-31; vulnerability of, 326-

27, 329

"Sing-Song Girl under the Iron Hoof"

(Tieti xia de genu; song), 329

Sino-Japanese War, 65, 86, 100

Sit Gok-sin (Xue Juexiang), 253, 259,

266

Situ Huimin, 258, 260

Six Classics, 206

Six Dynasties, 132

Smith, Anthony D., 90

Snow, Helen Foster, 352

"Soap" (Lu), 373-75, 378

Social Darwinism, 50, 53-56

Society for the Diffusion of Useful

Knowledge, 50

Society for the Promotion of Learning

(Guangxue hui), 51, 65

Society of Jesus. See Jesuits

Song Jiaoren, 62

Song of Ariran (Kim and Snow), 352

Song of Everlasting Regret (Changhen

zhi ge; film), 339n. 37

Song of Exile (Liuwang zhe zhi ge;

film), 266

"Song of National Salvation" (Jiuguo

zhi ge; song), 335

Song of righteousness (Chenqi ge;

film). See March of the Guerilla

"Song of the Dance Hall" (Wuxie zhi

ge; song), 335

"Song of the Seasons" (Siji ge; song),

333

Song of Youth (Mo), 235

Song period, 94

Soren (Korean organization), 343,

345

Sorge, Richard, 101

Soviet Union, 100, 101, 104, 196,

227-28

Special Law 63, 283, 284, 311n. 12

Spengemann, W. C., 353

Spirituality, and rationality, 199-200

Stalin, I. V., 108n. 16, 196

State, Identity, and the National Ques-

tion in China and Japan (Hoston),

216

Steele, M. William, 37n. 9

Story of the Romans (Shiono), 209,

214n. 64

Street Angel (Malu tianshi; film),

332-34

"Structures of feeling," 191-92

Struggle Troupe of He Long's army,

233

Subao (journal), 379

Subao case, 69

Suga Masatomo, 141

Suiko period (552-645), 129, 139-40,

141

Sumiyoshi Daimyojin (god), 22,

23-24

Sun Yat-sen, 67, 100, 151, 158, 161

Sun Yu, 323

"Sweet Osmanthus of August"

(song), 228

Tachibana Shiraki, 102

Taiwan, 279-310; anti-Japanese senti-

402 Index

Talks at the Ya'an Forum on Litera-

ture and Art (Mao), 230-31

Tanaka, Stefan, 7, 66, 98

Tang Caichang, 67

Tang Hualong, 172

Tang Jingsong, 281

Tang period, 94

Tanjong aesa, 207

Tan Sitong, 54

Tasan (Ch6ng Yagyong), 191, 197,

198; fictional portrayal of, 202-5;

symbolism of, 199-200, 201

Temple and Altar of Heaven, 160,

171, 172

Temple of the Righteous (yimin

miao), 310

Tenjiku, 18, 38n. 12, 38n. 13

Terashima Ryoan, 34

Thief Prince (Zei wangzi; film), 266

Thousand Character Classic (Ch'ien

Tzu Wen; Chou), 23

Tiandi Hui, 282

Tian Han, 329-30

Tianxia (realm under heaven), 49-50,

52

Time, concepts of, 364, 382n. 15,

383n. 16

Toby, Ronald P., 4

Todorov, Tzvetan, 40n. 25

To Expand the Red Army (opera),

233

T'ojong pigyol, 209

Tokugawa Ieyasu, 119

Tokutomo Soho, 96

Tonga Ilbo (newspaper), 207

Tongui pogam, 209

Tongzhi Restoration (1861), 364

TOsei eden (painting), 22

To the Ancestral Land (Kokoku kO;

Kim), 344-47

Toyo, 6, 68

Toyotomi Hideyoshi, 19, 21, 119

Traitor Extermination Corps, 302

Treaty of Shimonoseki, 311n. 1

Trinh Minh-ha, 270

Tuveson, Ernest, 191

Twelve Sickles (Yangee juxuan; op-

era), 229

Twenty-four Dynastic Histories, 52,

61

Two Lovers in a Silver World (Yinhai

yaunyang; film), 265

Two Southern Sisters (Nanguo Jiemei

hua; film), 267-70

Uchida Masao, 121, 123, 124

Uchida Ryihei, 97-98

United China Photoplay (Lianhua

yingye gongsi), 324

"Universal Principle of Dating"

(Jinian gongli; Liang), 63

Voice of Labor (magazine), 223-24

Volcano Island (KazantO; Kim), 344,

345

Wagacho, 38n. 12. See also Japan

Wakagusadera (temple), 141

Wakan sansai zue (encyclopedia), 34

Wang Jingwei, 55, 56, 95, 287, 370-71

Wang Qiming, 237

Wang Renmei, 317, 323, 332-33

Index

403

sentation of, 368-69; and symbol-

ism in film, 260-61; and symbols of

tradition within modernity, 373-79

Wong Kee-chee, 331

World, 63, 67; Eurocentric scheme of,

49-50

World Bank, 210-11n. 2

World order, 104-5

World Revolution, Leninist concept

of, 225

World War I, 89-90, 110n. 43

World War II, 249, 284-88

Worship of Heaven, 169-72, 175

Worship of the Righteous (yimin),

310

Wuchang Uprising (1911), 96, 151,

159, 161. See also Revolution of

1911

Wu Chufang, 253, 259, 264, 265, 267

Wu Dip-ying (Hu Dieying), 267

Wu Tingfang, 161

Wu Yu, 218

Wu Zhihui, 73

Wu Zhuoliu, 287, 310, 315n. 98,

321n. 14

Xavier, Francisco, 20, 37n. 7

Xianggang Zhongguo dianying bihui

(Chinese cinema award), 259

Xiao Hong, 369

Xiao Youmei, 336-37n. 6

Xilai Temple revolt (1915), 282

Xinmin congbao (journal), 54, 61-62

Xinsheng Film Company, 260

Xuefu chuanbian (encyclopedia),

32-33

Xue Juexiang, 253, 259, 266

Xu Hao, 258-59, 264, 266

Xu Xingzhi, 330-31

Yahiro (Catholic convert), 37n. 7

Yakushi nyOrai (Horyiji icon), 125

Yan Fu, 53-54

Yangee movement, 231

Yang Lianggong, 297

Yang Mo, 223

Yang Zhaojia, 298

Yan Hua, 336n. 1

Yan Meng, 255-56, 258

Yao Li, 317, 326

Yao Min, 336n. 1

Yazhou, 6, 67-69

Ye Rongzhong, 308

Yi Hoe-song, 11, 350-52

Yi Inmong (fictional character), 206

Yi Kwang-su, 99, 347

Yilin (magazine), 257, 259

Yisheng (magazine), 325

Yi Yang-ji, 346-50

Yongjo, King, 206

Yoshino Sakuzo, 96

Young Newcomer in the Organization

Department (Wang), 235-36

Your Unfilial Son is Weeping (Pulhoya

nun upnida), 209-10

Yuan dynasty, 95

Yuan Shikai, 8, 166, 179, 183n. 5;

birthday ritual of, 166; combining

tradition and modernity in rituals,

169-70, 174-75; and Confucianism,

168, 169, 172-73, 177-78; and Dou-

404

Index

Zhang Fakui, 300-301

Zhang Jian, 58-59

Zhang Shenwei, 296, 297, 300

Zhang Wentian, 220, 222

Zhang Zhang, 322, 324

Zhao Shutai (Chiu Shutai), 266, 267

Zhao Suisheng, 216, 238

Zheng Chenggong (Coxinga), 95, 282

Zheng Guanying, 68

Zheng Lie, 298

Zhongguo, 6, 50, 55, 66, 74

Zhongxing (race), 57-58

Zhou Li, 237

Zhou Rong, 53, 69

Zhou Xuan, 317, 332, 339n. 37

Zhou Yang, 231, 233

Zhuang Sichuan, 290-91

Zhu Xi, 203

Zhu Yuanzhang, 95

Zito, Angela, 183n. 1