For a long time, scholarly interest in Asianism (also known as Pan-Asianism) focused on Japan and its role in justifying Japan's empire in East and South-East Asia. In recent years, however, several published studies of Asianism have focused on countries other than Japan or have taken a transnational approach. This has led to an interpretational pluralization of what Asianism was and is: ideology, philosophy, movement, political agenda, propaganda. Craig A. Smith's Chinese Asianism is the first English-language monograph focusing on Asianist conceptions held by Chinese thinkers, writers and politicians. Smith skilfully demonstrates that understanding the Chinese political and intellectual contexts within which different conceptions of Asianism were articulated is key to grasping why so many Chinese participated in Asianist discourse, often “in dialogue with Japanese Asianism” (p. 16).
Smith proposes a typology of key intellectual and political ingredients of Chinese Asianism (Confucianism, race, civilization, Socialism, anti-colonialism, nationalism) but organizes his study chronologically since these categories are neither mutually exclusive nor temporally defined. He offers a nuanced reading of the best-known Chinese proponents of Asianism but goes far beyond Sun Yat-sen, Li Dazhao and Wang Jingwei. His study is based on a wide range of sources, mostly from popular journals and newspapers, including the Dongfang Zazhi and Shenbao, as well as specialized Asianist publications such as the Xin Yaxiya, Da Ya zazhi, or Dongya lianmeng yuekan. Many of the latter have never been studied systematically before.
Chapter one (“Lips and teeth”) takes up the prominent theme in Asianist rhetoric of China–Japan interdependence and focuses on the Chinese reception of early Japanese Asianist thought. Smith pays particular attention to the Japanese organizations that closely interacted with Chinese officials and intellectuals, and he analyses articles published in translation in Huang Zunxian's Shiwu Bao and Tarui Tōkichi's famous treatise On the Great Eastern Federation (1891), “probably the first major text on Asian unity that was widely available in Chinese” (p. 40).
Chapter two focuses on the Datong Schools as sites of Japan–China educational cooperation. Although parts of their curricula may have been “Chinese lip service to Japanese hosts” (p. 53), Smith explains that Chinese and Japanese elites jointly “imagined a future that was both Asian and modern” (p. 53). They shared the notion of victimization by Western imperialism and white racism.
The theme of racism features more prominently in chapter three, which takes up another prominent Asianist theme, “same script, same race.” Smith outlines the diverse responses to “Yellow Peril” rhetoric, including positive and constructive receptions. They linked racialist concepts to nation-building and civilizational self-affirmation, mostly directly against the Manchu or “the West.”
Chapter four (“Asia for the Asians”) looks at the First World War as “a pivotal time for the discourse of Asianism in China” (p. 130). Exchange between Japanese and Chinese Asianists mainly relied on translations, many of which appeared in the Dongfang Zazhi, led by Du Yaquan. His journal published translations from influential Japanese journals and newspapers on the war as a racial or civilizational clash, and on the necessity of declaring an Asian Monroe Doctrine. Asianism was now frequently called Da Yazhou zhuyi or Da Yaxiya zhuyi in Chinese, often with explicit reference to Pan-Americanism or Pan-Germanism.
The following two chapters study the two most prominent proponents of Chinese Asianism – Li Dazhao and Sun Yat-sen. They demonstrate how from the late 1910s the Chinese started to pro-actively advocate their own versions of Asianism that relied less on Japanese models. Chapter five analyses Li Dazhao's appropriation of Asianism as a concept that could both represent national self-determination and a united world, called datong. Chapter six re-examines Sun's well-known Asianist writings and speeches, including his famous Kobe speech of 1924. Like previous studies, Smith sees Sun's as Sinocentric Asianism, based on Confucian political concepts, such as wangdao (“the kingly way”).
Chapter seven turns to more practical attempts at organizing Asian unity through Asianist groups (Asian Nations’ Alliance, Asiatic Society) and conferences (Asian Nations Conferences) in the 1920s. Smith sees this period as “crucial in the construction of Chinese Asianism, as we see the popularization of the discourse and its seamless integration into Chinese understandings of nationalism and internationalism” (p. 185).
Chapter eight focuses on Kuomintang (KMT) officials’ perceptions of Asianism, which were heavily influenced by Sun's, and analyses the New Asia Research Association's journal New Asia in detail. As a KMT mouthpiece, the journal promoted Chinese nationalism and leadership on the Asian continent as political implementations of Sun's Asianism and his Three Principles of the People. Smith demonstrates how “anti-imperialist discourse can be appropriated and subverted to imperialist ends in the hands of able propagandists” (p. 228).
Chinese Asianism as propaganda is also the theme of the concluding chapter. Most prominently, Wang Jingwei and his allies used Sun's Asianism to legitimate their pro-Japanese regime in the early 1940s. The history of Chinese collaboration with Japan is well studied and Smith agrees with scholarship that has emphasized the value of studying the rich sources left behind by the regime – despite their obvious function as propaganda. Curiously, Japan's “puppet-state” Manchukuo is largely absent from Smith's study. It could have provided an interesting comparative case study to understand how Asianist conceptions were negotiated between the different political actors there and how Asianism as propaganda worked beyond the limits of KMT control.
The book's short conclusion links the study's findings to China's present-day ambitions to become the “centre of neoliberal Asia” (p. 249). There is no shortage of remarks by Beijing's officials and academics who use wangdao rhetoric to challenge the US-led world order and to promote Chinese counter policies, such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the Belt and Road Initiative. Extending on Smith's assertion that tensions “between hierarchical and egalitarian visions of Asian regionalization” (p. 253) remain, we may go as far as to say that these tensions also pose obstacles in the way of any organization – micro or macro, family or global. In the end, Asianism discourse was an example of a contest for hegemony, historically mostly between Japan and China, but also between different groups within both countries and elsewhere. This contest continues as long as people continue to strive for hegemony, be it in the name of the nation, race, civilization or something else. Smith's study shows that Chinese Asianism, once emancipated from Japanese versions, mirrored everything that we find in Japanese Asianism too: imperialism and anti-imperialism; nationalism and supra-nationalism; war and peace; egoism and altruism.
Based on an in-depth reading of many volumes of historical sources in Chinese, Japanese and English, Smith's book makes an important contribution to our understanding of how Asianism influenced China–Japan relations in the first half of the 20th century. Chinese Asianism is highly recommended to everyone interested in Chinese intellectual and political history, China–Japan and China–Asia relations.
