The turn to Asianism in a time of nationalism

The Sinocentric worldview of Chinese culturalism did not simply give way to modern nationalism after the 1911 Revolution, but instead survived through a period of ambiguity and accommodation. This section introduces the term ‘Asianism’ and examines a process of appropriation as Chinese intellectuals re-imagined the possibilities for Asianism as print and elite nationalism began to take hold across urban China.

Various keywords to indicate Sino-Japanese cooperation or alliance had entered common usage before the revolution, and often through Japanese. These included popular phrases such as ‘same script, same race’ and the state-solidarity idiom ‘if the lips perish, the teeth will freeze’, as well as many others.Footnote ¹⁰ According to Sven Saaler and Christopher Szpilman, the term ‘Asianism’ first appeared in Japan in 1913 as ‘pan-Asianism’ (han-Ajiashugi 汎アジア主義) and ‘all-Asianism’ (zen-Ajiashugi 全アジア主義). Japanese newspaper editors used the terms in response to an article in The Times of London that questioned whether Japan wished to ‘present herself as aloof from other Asiatic races, or as the avowed champion of Pan-Asiatic ideals’.Footnote ¹¹

Outside of Japan, the term ‘Asianism’ had a longer history than this. It was occasionally employed as a term to indicate polar opposition with Europeanism or Americanism. Racist politicians and journalists used the term to defend anti-Asian policies, such as American senator John H. Mitchell's use of Asianism in a senate speech as early as 1886:

Through the use of opposing terms, Mitchell posits Asia and Asianism as the ultimate danger to the West, declaring his frustration that the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was not sufficient, as the Chinese immigrants continued ‘extending eastward like a cloud of wrath [as] the evil imperilled labor, prosperity, peace, even life itself’.Footnote ¹³ An article in The Guardian from 1901 that reviewed Meredith Townsend's (1831–1911) Asia and Europe—a racist and paranoid collection of essays on the relationship between Asia and Europe—indicated a similar usage across the Atlantic:

Although Townsend himself did not use the term in his book, the Asianism that The Guardian refers to is a united Asia, from the Mediterranean to the Pacific, standing in opposition to Europe. As will be seen below, this extension of the Yellow Peril that Westerners feared at the turn of the century was appropriated and inverted by East Asian intellectuals in the 1910s, partly in reaction to racist immigration policies.

In late 1912 and early 1913, the American government—as well as the governments of a number of individual states—were involved in very public discussion of restrictions to be imposed upon newly arrived foreigners that would bar them from owning land. The only foreigners to be affected by this new law were those deemed ineligible for citizenship, specifically Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Indian immigrants. According to a 9 February New York Times article, the reasons for the prolonged debate were partly due to fears that ‘it would give grave offense to China and Japan’. However, despite repeated appeals by the Japanese government, these discussions were finalized with the Alien Land Law of 1913, largely set in place to stop Chinese and Japanese from buying or cultivating land in California. As the discussion of these restrictions moved into the Japanese media in June of 1913, the term ‘Asianism’ entered the Japanese language through translation.Footnote ¹⁵ The term had been used to criticize Japan in the Western media and was not accepted in a positive manner by most Japanese newspapers, editors at the Asahi declaring ‘Considering the difficulties of falsely uniting under one nation, the idea of all-Asianism is a fantasy’.Footnote ¹⁶ However, these reactions were not only found in Japan. Chinese periodicals were also paying close attention to the discussions in Japan and the United States of America.

Between 1910 and 1914, Chinese journalists wrote or translated dozens of articles concerning anti-Asian immigration policies in South Africa, the United States of America, Canada, and New Zealand.Footnote ¹⁷ As in Japan, the policies in the United States of America garnered the most attention. In a particularly long January 1913 article, Xu Jiaqing 許家慶 detailed Japan's various efforts to engage with the United States of America's officials over these laws before explaining that the laws were also of grave concern to Chinese citizens, who were greatly discriminated against in California. He then chastised his compatriots: ‘However, our country has shown no interest in official involvement. Our country's citizens act as though they neither see nor hear anything until there is nothing at all to be done. Looking at Japan, they are so distant from us.’Footnote ¹⁸ It was while these discussions were underway that Chinese intellectuals first mentioned the concept of Asianism.

The term ‘Asianism’ (亞細亞主義 yaxiyazhuyi) was employed in Chinese political journals in 1912, shortly after the revolution—a momentous occasion for intellectuals in East Asia that brought about a plethora of new possibilities for East Asia's future. This term too brought about new possibilities for cooperation, as well as ambiguities in identity. The extent of the cooperation indicated by Asianism was often not clear. Although many used it to refer to the territory of the traditional cultural Sinosphere, some referred to all of Asia, as will be seen below.

The People's Journal (1910–13)—an official newspaper of the Tongmenghui and then the Guomindang—ran a series of articles on Asian unity and Sino-Japanese cooperation during the first year of the republic. The first mention that I have found of Great Asianism or Pan-Asianism (大亞細亞主義) was made by the Japanese diplomat and China hand Ibuka Hikosaburō in a special to The People's Journal. In this short article, he openly called for an Asian Monroe Doctrine, in which Japan would lead China. Citing race and religion as commonalities, and with humanitarianism (人道主義 rendaozhuyi) and republicanism as bases, he argued that all Asian nations should unite to stop encroachments from other continents. He asserted that Great Asianism was the only way for countries to maintain their independence and avoid the clash of the races.Footnote ¹⁹ But the nationalist editors at The People's Journal would not accept promotion of Japanese leadership in Asia. Only a few days later, in response to a translation of Japanese Prime Minister Ōkuma Shigenobu's call for a Japan-centred ‘Great Asian Empire 亞細亞大帝國 in order to oppose Euro-American civilization’, Xu Xue'er appended a short postscript: ‘The Chinese nation has 400 million people. We believe that an Asian Republic 亞細亞共和國 should be established with China as its centre.’Footnote ²⁰ Nor was this the end of discussion of Asianism in The People's Journal.

Asianism was used in various ways during this time. Therefore, I loosely define it as the belief in a united ‘East’ based upon racial and/or civilizational commonalities in contrast to a perceived ‘West’. Even in these early days, the term was ambiguous, as Ibuka used it to refer to Sino-Japanese cooperation in the face of Russian imperialism, while others, such as Ye Chucang, employed it to refer to the entirety of Asia, which he believed could peacefully unite based upon a shared victimization by the West.Footnote ²¹ Just as in the English usage explained above, these different Chinese invocations of the term accepted an essentialized Asia in opposition to the West. However, in the East Asian context, Asianism was conceived of as a tool to be employed against imperialism, and therefore had an overlapping and amplifying relationship with nationalism. Suisheng Zhao has explained that ‘Chinese nationalism was born in the wreckage of culturalism and nurtured on imperialism's threat to China's territorial, cultural, and, in the opinion of some, even racial survival’.Footnote ²² While state nationalism tilted towards support for a modern nation state in the Westphalian sense, Asianism tilted towards culturalism, the belief in and emphasis of a Sinocentric civilization.

This relationship between nationalism and Asianism became abundantly clear in 1913. The Xinhai Revolution of 1911 had been a muddled mix of Han nationalists fighting against the Manchu, as well as revolutionaries opposed to Western influence.Footnote ²³ It resulted in the rise of the Han Chinese as the modern leaders of a poorly defined union of five nations. A new political elite struggled to accommodate the pseudo-scientific concepts of nation and race with the newly created republic, which the government believed could extend much beyond a Han nation state to the entire territory of the former dynasty. This also overlapped with what Frank Dikötter has called ‘racial nationalism’. Dikötter argues that GMD political activists shared a worldview ‘dominated by the idea of a confrontation between the yellow and the white races’ in the early 1910s.Footnote ²⁴ While these new concepts of race and nation were gaining ground, political intellectuals briefly considered layered identity-based alliances that were reliant upon nation and race, but constructed upon a shared victim consciousness. As shown below, racist policies put in place by Western countries during this time contributed to the formation of this consciousness.

Between the 1911 Revolution and the Second Revolution of 1913, there were very different discussions representing different directions for Asianism. Previous studies of Chinese Asianism have concentrated upon Li Dazhao's 李大釗 1919 ‘New Asianism’ and Sun Yat-sen's 1924 ‘Great Asianism’, both of which stress their opposition to Japanese militarism.Footnote ²⁵ However, these early 1913 texts show a more complicated picture that was not in opposition to Japan, but was tightly linked to expressions of Chinese nationalism.

The push for Sino-Japanese cooperation in practice and discourse

Suisheng Zhao follows Joseph Levenson's lead in defining this period by its ‘elite nationalism’, as GMD intellectual and political leaders defined Chinese nationalism and propagated it through publications under their control.Footnote ²⁶ In agreement with this analysis, this section concentrates upon official GMD efforts towards Sino-Japanese cooperation, as well as the discussions by Chinese intellectuals on the merits of further alliance or cooperation with Japan in 1913, as found in party journals and newspapers.

In February and March, leaders took practical steps towards Sino-Japanese cooperation. Also, Chinese journalists wrote articles and translated Japanese texts on Sino-Japanese cooperation. Articles explaining the necessity for the two countries to form an alliance of mutual assistance appeared almost immediately after the Japanese versions were published.Footnote ²⁷ Young intellectuals cautiously engaged with two ambiguous and overlapping concepts: Sino-Japanese mutual assistance Zhong-Ri tixie lun 中日提攜論 and a Sino-Japanese alliance Zhong-Ri lianmeng 中日聯盟. Although Chinese elite had raised the prospect of an alliance as early as the reforms of 1898, the idea was largely within the realm of political rhetoric with little action taken.

In early 1913, Chinese intellectuals began to consider Asia's future in response to Japanese calls for Asianism and the continued threat of Western imperialism. Throughout February, a number of articles discussing the importance of cooperation with Japan appeared in the newspaper: one of these was ‘Preparations for the China-Japan Association’ 中日協會之籌備 on a meeting in Nanjing to discuss a China-Japan alliance (中日同盟) that would bring together the people and the governments. The initial Chinese members of this association are listed as: Li Zhaofu 李肇甫, who had been Sun's secretary in 1912; Wang Yinchuan 王印川, politician and The People's Journal editor; Zhu Qi 朱淇, who had aided Sun in a number of early revolutionary activities; Lin Changmin 林長民, who held a great number of posts in the first republican government; and the journalist Huang Yuanyong 黃遠庸.Footnote ²⁸ In 1913, the China-Japan Association was greatly expanded and looked promising for the brief window that appeared before Yuan Shikai's Empire of China. In an opening speech for the association in Nanjing, Tang Hualong 湯化龍, the newly elected chairman of the legislative assembly, stated: ‘The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries may have been the time of the white peoples, but the twentieth century is the age of East Asians as China and Japan's friendship is a relationship between brothers.’Footnote ²⁹ As in the cases described above, these intellectuals saw working with Japan as the key to saving China.

Perhaps the largest organization to come out of this—the China-Japan Citizens’ Association 中日國民大會—was first assembled in Beijing just before the Second Revolution. Despite Song Jiaoren's death on 22 March, the association gathered on the afternoon of 23 March, with Chen Jiading (陳家鼎 1876–1928), a close friend of Song, giving the opening address.Footnote ³⁰ Chen discussed the history of Sino-Japanese relations, announcing that ‘from this day on we can forecast that this will be a period of Sino-Japanese Alliance 中日同盟’ to ‘thunderous applause’.Footnote ³¹ As the Chinese representatives were all GMD politicians, many of whom escaped to Japan after the Second Revolution, the association was short-lived. However, these associations were accompanied by numerous editorials discussing the merits of working with Japan, offering us an idea of non-GMD intellectuals’ opinions of an alliance during this window.

As print media expanded at a dramatic pace during the first decades of the twentieth century, intellectuals working beyond the political centre entered into this discourse and commented on the possibility of China and Japan working together. Cautious optimism can be seen in the words of the Beijing artist Hu Peiheng 胡佩衡 (1892–1962):

In his article on Sino-Japanese alliance, Hu did not employ the realpolitik of contemporary politicians, but instead expressed the idealism of his generation. He saw the benefit of nations from the ‘same continent and of the same race’ working together, but only as a step towards political datong, the final unity of all nations. In a burst of idealist pacifism, he ended the article with the hope that Yuan Shikai could lead an alliance with the Taisho Emperor, and then another with Woodrow Wilson.Footnote ³³ An alliance with Japan was not the only option. Many intellectuals proposed cooperation with the United States of America, Germany, and Great Britain in 1913, indicating that, for many, any alliance was about politics and Asianism was often merely rhetoric towards that end.

Optimism towards Japan was largely limited to the years immediately following the 1911 Revolution and before Yuan Shikai's dominance of the media later in 1913. Even before Ōkuma Shigenobu ended his superficial support of China by issuing the Twenty-One Demands in January 1915, the rise of Japanese militarism was destroying any optimism towards an alliance. Dai Zhengcheng 戴正誠, a minor politician from Sichuan, dismissed the prospect of a racial alliance to defeat the ‘white peril’ in the Honest News 讜報 1914: ‘I fear that if we form an alliance with Japan to defend against the white peril, it will not be enough to stop the white peril and the Japanese peril will be that much greater.’Footnote ³⁴ This distrust of Japan grew rapidly in 1914 in reaction to Japanese assertions over Manchuria.Footnote ³⁵ However, these sentiments were not as prominent in official Guomindang publications.

The People's Journal also ran prominent Pan-Asianist Uchida's Ryōhei's critique of Japanese government policy in an article entitled ‘To Cut Up or to Protect’, in which he details his distrust of Russia and the need to support China. Uchida, who supported the GMD and the revolution with his organization, the Kokuryūkai 黑龍會, had just been hired by Sun Yat-sen as an adviser on foreign policy.Footnote ³⁶ In the pages of The People's Journal, he argued that ‘Asia is the territory of the Asians, so China should be the territory of the Chinese’.

At the end of the month, Xu Xue'er wrote a rather positive article arguing that the Japanese may be coming to their senses and, although the hawkish (yexin 野心) attitude still existed, China and Japan use the ‘same script’, are of the ‘same race’, and are just like ‘lips and teeth’.Footnote ³⁷ At the exact same time, Sun Yat-sen was visiting Japan as the Republic of China's Minister of Railways. His many speeches during this visit show a remarkably similar discourse and vocabulary to that found in The People's Journal.

Sun's Asianist speeches: alliance under Japanese leadership

Between the 1890s and his death in 1925, Sun Yat-sen made numerous calls for Sino-Japanese cooperation, and often made reference to what he called ‘Great Asianism’ 大亞洲主義. By 1924, Sun had a fully fleshed-out theory of Great Asianism expressed in a carefully prepared speech in Kobe, in which he detailed distinct civilizational differences between the East, based on benevolent rule (wangdao 王道), and the West, based on hegemonic rule (badao 霸道).Footnote ³⁸ Although Sun was highly critical of Japanese hegemony in 1924, his pro-Asian unity speeches of 1913 instead concentrated upon economic and strategic demands backed by a belief in racial solidarity.

The most blatant examples of Sun's calls for Asian unity were in the series of speeches he made in February and March of 1913 in various cities across Japan. Although Sun visited Japan for research in his role as minister of railways, it is evident that Sun had other plans for his travels across Japan. Sun stressed commonalities by peppering these speeches with popular slogans used by Japanese Asianists, including the race-solidarity slogan ‘same script, same race’, the Japanese Monroist slogan ‘Asia for the Asians’, and the classical state-solidarity idiom ‘If the lips perish, the teeth will freeze’.Footnote ³⁹

Sun was looking to gather widespread support from the Chinese in Japan as well as from high-ranking Japanese politicians and elite. When he spoke to a Chinese audience, he urged them to enhance relations with Japanese and work towards solidarity. He saw the Western powers as the danger to Chinese as well as Japanese interests:

In this speech to Chinese students assembled in Tokyo, Sun called for students to use brotherly love to correct Japanese false impressions of Chinese people. It was their responsibility to work towards China–Japan unity for China and the world. Sun repeatedly stressed that this unity was for China's national interests, but he then related his country's interests to those of Asia and of the ‘yellow’ race:

The redemptive power of Asia to right the world and achieve harmony was a concept frequently returned to by proponents of Asianism. Not unlike the traditional Sinosphere, concentric circles of nation and race—which indicated the 500 million people of China, Japan, and Korea—extended outwards to the entire world, which could look forward to the Confucian utopia of datong. Asia's ‘past glories of history’ referred to not merely economic power or world standing, but the righteousness of governance under traditional Confucian society. It is in his 1913 speeches, however, that the issue of Japanese leadership is made clear.

Unlike Liang Qichao, Li Dazhao, Ye Chucang, and many other Chinese intellectuals, Sun Yat-sen was quite clear in his calls for Japanese leadership. For Sun, Japanese leadership was certainly not meant as dominance, but as guidance: ‘Japan's restoration came long before China's revolution and the country has already experienced so much. The people of my country will still be looking to Japan for guidance for a long time.’Footnote ⁴² National autonomy was assumed. However, his speeches to Japanese Asianists at the Tōa Dōbunkai, Japan's foremost Asianist society, were surprisingly upfront in their demands for Japanese leadership—perhaps so much that some of the elite at these speeches wondered whether Sun was inviting empire:

In his speeches to Chinese citizens, he also made calls for Japanese leadership, remaining at odds with those who saw Japan as the greatest threat. Sun was always wary of Japanese imperialism, but he made it clear that the European empires were the greater threat. He occasionally mentioned the United States of America in a positive light but always made it clear that he believed the Western powers would not assist China if it was not in their own interests:

Yet Sun was not in opposition to the Monroe Doctrine, which the United States of America implemented as a policy demanding that Europeans no longer attempt to hold influence in the Americas. In fact, he was not at all opposed to such geographic-based paradigms of international domination. A few years later, he clarified his position on the Monroe Doctrine and hinted at the possibility of its application in East Asia in a short book in which he wrote: ‘Under the principle of Pan-Asianism, Japan and China can together develop the natural resources in the West of the Pacific, while under the Monroe Doctrine the United States can unify authority in the East of that ocean.’Footnote ⁴⁵

Although American politicians posited the Monroe Doctrine as an anti-imperialist doctrine, as Bruce Jentleson explains, ‘There was little altruism in this policy, or even straightforward good neighborliness; it represented much more the self-interest of a regional power seeking to preserve its dominant position against outside challenges’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Sun was aware of the imperialist reality of the Monroe Doctrine, but he continued to remain optimistic about the possibility of China's quick rise to power and Japan's benevolence.

Ostensibly, Sun's reasons for going to Japan in 1913 were related to his new position as minister of railways and to visit old friends. However, from his speeches, it is clear that he was spending much of his time garnering Japanese support, and his activities and speeches both expose a growing desperation. Marie-Claire Bergère notes that, between these Asianist speeches, Sun met with industrial tycoon Shibusawa Eichi (1840–1931) to discuss the creation of the Industrial Company of China in order to bring Japanese zaibatsu to China to help with development and resource exploitation.Footnote ⁴⁷ There were other meetings that are more revealing of Sun's work in 1913.

For example, John C. H. Wu argues that the most important event during the 1913 tour of Japan was Sun's meeting with Katsura Tarō 桂太郎, who had just fallen from power and lost his position of prime minister through a no-confidence vote earlier that month.Footnote ⁴⁸ Katsura was frustrated with the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, which he himself had been instrumental in establishing years before, and was now interested in establishing a Sino-Japanese alliance. Sun was excited about the prospects of furthering relations with Japan, but he was openly critical of Japan's actions in Korea. He purportedly said to Katusura:

Due to the construction of these sources years after the event, whether Sun actually used the term ‘Asianism’ at this point cannot be confirmed. In the above translation of Sun's conversation with Katsura, John Wu worked with the Guofu Nianpu, which was based upon an article by Hu Hanmin published in 1936.Footnote ⁵⁰ Assuming Hu may not have been writing this article from notes of their conversation, he based his writing on memory of an event 23 years prior. In 1936, Great Asianism was already a common phrase and there is certainly the possibility that Hu, either purposefully or unintentionally, made an alteration to the original conversation between Katsura and Sun to support his own belief in Asianism.

However, Sun certainly did mention Da-Yazhou zhi zhuyi 大亞洲之主義, a term similar to ‘Asianism’ at a speech in Shanghai a few weeks later, and this speech was immediately published in The People's Journal on 29 March 1913.Footnote ⁵¹ Whether or not Sun also used such a term in his meeting with Katsura, the spirit of their conversation is most likely accurately portrayed by Hu Hanmin. According to Hu, Katsura promised Sun he would work towards righting these wrongs and won his support. However, Katsura passed away a few months later in October of 1913, and these plans for a Sino-Japanese alliance disappeared. Hu Hanmin would later remark that there were few Japanese like Katsura remaining, and that the principles of Asianism had therefore become skewed.Footnote ⁵² However, based on Sun's other actions in 1913, it is clear that Asianism had not yet become skewed towards militarism.

A few days after this meeting, Sun Yat-sen had to hurry back to China due to the assassination of GMD prime minister-designate Song Jiaoren 宋教仁. The Guomindang was in crisis. On 29 March 1913, Sun's speech at the GMD Transportation Ministry was published in The People's Journal, expressing his great hope for China–Japan cooperation. In the speech, he refers to Japan's goodwill towards the Asian continent as a kind of ‘Doctrine for Greater Asia’ or a ‘Great Asian-ism’ (大亞洲之主義). Although slightly different from the standard expression, this is Sun Yat-sen's first recorded use of the term ‘Great Asianism’.

Back in China, he immediately began to work towards opening up the Chinese economy to Japanese capital, offering Japanese banks control over Chinese mines and railways, and preparing to sell Manchuria for currency and military supplies.Footnote ⁵³ Sun's goal was to overthrow Yuan with Japanese power, but Yuan was already far too powerful and Sun could gain neither Japanese nor Chinese support. The rebellion was crushed in a few short weeks and Sun returned to Japan, where he would remain until Yuan's death. Back in Japan, Sun's desperation led him to make even more extreme offers to the Japanese government, going as far as to write to Prime Minister Ōkuma that Japan could use China for profit much like Great Britain used India.Footnote ⁵⁴

As Dai Jitao would remark later: ‘He naturally believed that the rise or fall of the nation and the survival of the country was greatly related to the possibility of alliance (lianmeng 聯盟) with Japan.’Footnote ⁵⁵ Sun certainly believed in the cooperation of China and Japan but, even at this early stage, capitalist desires appropriated anti-imperialist Asianist ambitions, and Sun's words and actions contributed to these desires, possibly even influencing Ōkuma's drafting of the Twenty-One Demands one year later with the above-mentioned letter.

There were, however, other Chinese voices calling for Asianism in 1913, but without the emphasis upon Japan as leader. As mentioned above, The People's Journal ran numerous articles on Asianism. The most detailed of these was a short series of articles that offered an Asianism in stark contrast to the pro-Japanese trend that Sun Yat-sen and others were considering at the time. Ye Chucang took an approach that widely disregarded Japan and utilized the term ‘Great Asianism’ to discuss a plan for a militarily and economically united Asia that would stretch across the entire continent. These 1913 discussions of Asianism in China both contextualize Sun's talks in Japan and show an alternative internationalist possibility. They show that his internationalist regional thinking was as much a part of the historical zeitgeist as it was of his individual perspective, and also further complicates the surprising consideration given to possibilities for international cooperation in conjunction with the rise of nationalism in China.

Ye Chucang's strategic Asianism

Although he would become Chief of Propaganda for a short period in the 1920s, Guomindang revolutionary, veteran journalist and newspaper editor Ye Chucang was a relatively minor intellectual in the GMD when he wrote about Asianism in 1913.Footnote ⁵⁶ However, as an editor for The People's Journal, as well as other GMD publications, he was acutely aware of party developments and his infrequent writings display significant insight into GMD thought in this period. His articles, simply entitled ‘Great Asianism’ (Da Yaxiyazhuyi), were serialized in the 15, 16 and 21 March editions of The People's Journal. These articles limn a thoughtful, if simplistic, regional system with details on both the internal machinations and the relationship between a regionalized Asia and the outside world. Although the articles were leading editorials and widely read by GMD supporters at the time, they have been ignored or gone unnoticed by scholars in both Chinese and English scholarship until now.

Ye's articles were very different from the pro-Japanese speeches made by Sun in March of 1913. While Sun's speeches were made to a Japanese audience, and were the work of a politician with a good command of realpolitik rhetoric, Ye wrote to a domestic audience and appeared to be presenting a plan based upon his honest ideals for China's future. Ye rarely made direct mention of Japan in his articles and instead concentrated on all of Asia, describing his theory in terms of its application to world peace. Unlike the ‘cultural Asianism’ of Zhang Taiyan that Duara has written about, the spatial production of Ye's Asia was defined by the political and economic, rather than the religious and cultural.Footnote ⁵⁷ Ye believed that world peace had to be based upon ‘the equitable distribution of food services, as well as the harmony and happiness of citizens’, which could only be achieved through the integration of allied states across a region.Footnote ⁵⁸ In the first article, Ye outlined four rather general goals for his Asianism:

1. 1. Protect and further the common interests of Asia through integration by treaty.

2. 2. Support the independence of all Asian states through morality and justice.

3. 3. Cooperate on Asia's necessary overseas development.

4. 4. Intervene in or mediate international conflicts outside of Asia.Footnote ⁵⁹

These four goals do not clearly describe what path Ye's Asianism might take, but they do make it evident that he envisioned an alliance of independent states that would cooperate based on treaties. This was a very different plan than the dreams of a consolidated East Asia that arose in the late nineteenth century and is the first time that a Chinese intellectual proposed the uniting of all the states of Asia, from Turkey to Japan.

Ye's first article made these general arguments and declared that Asianism was a movement for world peace and should not bring about Western fears of the ‘Yellow Peril’. However, his second and third articles took much more specific approaches, and examined the need for military cooperation and economic integration, respectively.

Despite The People's Journal’s distrust of militarism, Ye argued that military strength was a necessity. Although he conceded that a united Asia would still not have the power to attack Europe, he believed military cooperation and integration would result in a situation in which Asia was able to defend itself from foreign attacks and ensure the independence of all Asian states. In another short list, Ye Chucang noted four points or goals that explained the importance that integrated military strength would have in the implementation of Asianism:

1. 1. We will mutually implement and plan the stability of Asianism through the military power of all the states.

2. 2. Through the same method, we shall guarantee the safety of Asia's internal stability militarily.

3. 3. We only wish to protect ourselves with this military force and have no desire to interfere in the peace and stability of the world's people.

4. 4. We shall establish strong military defenses at the borders of Asian states and territories.Footnote ⁶⁰

Ye reiterated his assertions that ‘this is not a plan to bring about conflict with the world powers through our military might’, but is rather to defend Asia from the powers and maintain the independence of each country inside Asia.Footnote ⁶¹ Ye outlined an integrated Asian military, or what can be called the centrifugal force of Asian unity in his theory, the force of which would repel outsiders and keep Asia safe. In his third article, he turned to the internal advantages of Asian unity, and concentrated upon the economic manifestations of Asianism: ‘For Great Asianism to prosper, the first step must be the integration of the international system on the Asian mainland. And before this integration is complete, there must be a more rudimentary integration . . . a trade alliance.’Footnote ⁶²

This idea of a trade alliance was Ye's vision for the first step on the path to a more integrated Asia free from European imperialism. Ignoring the issues of leadership and intra-Asian competition or hegemony, Ye saw Asian nations cooperating with each other to build modern and integrated economies. His frequent use of the term ‘Asian mainland’ (亞陸 yalu) and his rare mention of Japan almost may lead one to believe that his Asianism excluded Japan. Yet this was not the case at all. Ye simply saw all Asian nations integrating into this system on an equal basis. Unlike Asianists from the nineteenth century, Ye completely assumed the validity of the Westphalian system of nation states, and envisioned these states integrating under what he called the ‘international system’ (國際制度 guoji zhidu). The independence of each state was clearly stressed and led Ye to his conclusion that only states that were independent should enter into these unions in their initial stage:

Ye's Asianism revolved around two concepts: for the external issues related to internationalism, the relationships that the region had to create with other regions and states, Ye described the military integration of Asia; for the internal issues related to internationalism, the relationships between regionalized states, Ye described economic possibilities and specifically recommended market integration. In this purely materialist description, no effort was made to consider culture or other aspects of the region and no explanation was offered for why such historically and culturally disparate states as Turkey and Japan should integrate, other than the fact that they both reside in the imagined continent of Asia. But Ye's theorizing of Asianism was left unfinished. He published his third and last article on Asianism while Sun Yat-sen was returning from Japan, where he had been discussing his own form of Asianism with Chinese living in Japan as well as his Japanese supporters. Ye Chucang ended his third article with the words ‘to be continued’, but a fourth article never appeared, leaving readers with no idea of what Ye might have planned for the other countries of Asia, or how the very different and distant countries of China, Japan, Turkey (then the Ottoman empire), and Thailand (then Siam) could possibly hope to establish and maintain any form of market integration.

Over these few months, two very different Asianist discourses were put forth by GMD intellectuals. Ye Chucang's idea was for an all-Asia alliance based on economic and military integration that could hold back imperialism from outside of Asia. Sun Yat-sen, however, favoured a closer relationship with Japan, utilizing Japan's military and economic might to protect China from Western imperialists, as well as from Yuan Shikai. The primary difference between these two ideas was the belief in the need for leadership. While Sun supported Japanese leadership, Ye was opposed to any leadership.

Yet, before either vision could be brought closer to implementation, two threats internal to Asia took precedence for China—neither related to the Western powers that Asianism was designed to protect China from. The first was Yuan Shikai's consolidation of power, and the second the increasingly imperialistic words and actions from Japan. In the short term, it was Yuan's seizing of power and specifically the assassination of Song Jiaoren that disrupted both Sun's pro-Japan efforts and Ye's Asianist writings. Song was shot on 20 March, the day before publication of Ye's third article. Beginning on 22 March, the day of Song's death in hospital, The People's Journal was inundated with photographs, reports, and eulogies related to Song Jiaoren, stretching from corner to corner on most pages. Ye himself took to compiling these reports, as well as those from other major newspapers, and published them in an edited volume.Footnote ⁶⁴ Sun Yat-sen ended his trip to Japan and hurried back to China to help relieve party chaos after the assassination and to embark on a mission to promote integration with Japan. Yet the GMD conflict with Yuan Shikai would soon dominate Sun's time, even as the 1915 Twenty-One Demands unequivocally displayed Japan's imperialist desire. For both of these reasons, neither Sun's nor Ye's plans were advanced, yet the fact that two nationalist Guomindang leaders were advocating these proposals in early 1913 shows that the elite harboured yearnings for international integration immediately after the nationalist revolution.