Craig A Smith 史峻

Chinese Asianism examines Chinese intellectual discussions of East Asian solidarity, analyzing them in connection with Chinese nationalism and Sino–Japanese relations. Beginning with texts written after the first Sino–Japanese War of 1894 and concluding with Wang Jingwei’s failed government in World War II, Craig Smith engages with a period in which the Chinese empire had crumbled and intellectuals were struggling to adapt to imperialism, new and hegemonic forms of government, and radically different epistemes. He considers a wide range of writings that show the depth of the pre-war discourse on Asianism and the influence it had on the rise of nationalism in China.

Asianism was a “call” for Asian unity, Smith finds, but advocates of a united and connected Asia based on racial or civilizational commonalities also utilized the packaging of Asia for their own agendas, to the extent that efforts towards international regionalism spurred the construction of Chinese nationalism. Asianism shaped Chinese ideas of nation and region, often by translating and interpreting Japanese perspectives, and leaving behind a legacy in the concepts and terms that persist in the twenty-first century. As China plays a central role in regional East Asian development, Asianism is once again of great importance today.

From 1931 to 1945, as Japanese imperialism developed and spread throughout China, three regions experienced life under occupation: the puppet state of Manchukuo, East China, and North China. Each did so in a distinct manner, but making sense of experiences and decisions made during this crucial period has been an elusive goal for historians.

Despite the enduring importance of the occupation to world history and historical memory in East Asia, Translating the Occupation is the first English-language volume to provide such a diverse selection of important primary sources from this period for both scholars and students. Contributors from six different countries have translated sources from Chinese, Japanese, and Korean on a wide range of subjects, focusing on writers who have long been considered problematic or outright traitorous. Each text is accompanied by a short essay to contextualize the translation and explain its significance.

This volume offers a practical, accessible sourcebook from which to challenge standard narratives. The texts have been carefully selected to deepen our understanding of the myriad tensions, transformations, and continuities in Chinese wartime society. Translating the Occupation reasserts the centrality of the occupation to twentieth-century Chinese history and opens the door further to much-needed analysis.

This book will appeal to scholars, students, and general readers of East Asian history and the history of the Second World War, and will find use in undergraduate and graduate courses.

This article examines Zhang Wojun (1902–1955) and the memory of his ‘collaboration’ with Japan during the Second World War. A Taiwanese-born writer and educator who lived in Beijing for 25 years, his drifting identity was full of ambiguities. Although he was one of the key intellectuals behind Taiwan’s New-Old Literatures Debate and responsible for introducing many May Fourth ideas to Taiwan, he also played an important role in bringing Japanese literature and thought into Chinese discourse during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. During the war, he continued to teach in Beijing and travelled to Japan to attend the Greater East Asia Writers’ conferences. Some of his works from this period call for the Chinese people to support the empire and eradicate Western culture and literature from Asia, but many of his writings also indicate a strong sense of Chinese nationalism.

This article considers the memories of Zhang, his various intellectual contributions, and his oeuvre, arguing that his collaboration must be understood and contextualized within his intellectual landscape through a research methodology that examines continuities and change across decades of his life and work.

Coined in 2013, the year the Belt and Road Initiative was first announced, the slogan 'Amity, Sincerity, Mutual Benefit, and Inclusiveness' has become ever more present in the speeches of Chinese officials and diplomats. While the use of such phrases is often equated with earlier Japanese discourse to indicate China's alleged imperialist ambitions, this essay calls for nuance in such comparisons through a reconsideration of the history of 'Asianist' diplomatic slogans in twentiethcentury China.

At the twilight of the Qing Empire, China's nascent working class was concentrated in a handful of urban centres-first and foremost, Shanghai. Up to the end of the nineteenth century, Shanghai's waged labourers consisted mostly of two categories: handicraft workers and workers in transportation, with the latter generally seen as belonging to a 'floating population' that was frequently associated with vagabonds and rogues. 1 Things began to change quickly at the turn of the century with the opening of cotton mills, silk filatures, tobacco factories, and other manufacturing plants, and by 1911, the city's modern sector employed close to 100,000 workers. 2 Women and children-in most cases recruited into factory jobs by foremen from their own regions-constituted the majority of this burgeoning factory workforce and were subjected to horrible exploitation. The most extreme working conditions occurred under the baoshenzhi () system, under which parents signed contracts agreeing that their daughter's wages would go to the contractor for the duration of the contract-usually three years-in return for a small sum of money, and the contractor in return would provide housing, food, and clothing to the worker, thus gaining total control over her. 3 Three types of proto-labour organisations dominated the social landscape: guilds (), mutual help societies (), and secret societies (). 4 The guilds were hierarchically organised corporations of those who practised a particular craft or trade. These bodies, which often were internally divided between workers and employers, sought to regulate the market by fixing prices, but also undertook the collection of taxes, organisation of public works, and maintenance of public order. Mutual help societies, meanwhile, were groups of workers, often from the same region, who monopolised a particular sector. This led to a notable fragmentation of the working class-a situation of which employers did not hesitate to take advantage. In those dire circumstances, some began dreaming about a future when machines would replace human labour and lead to the emancipation of workers.

Until recent decades, historians of modern East Asia generally considered Asianism to be an imperialistic ideology of militant Japan. Although Japanese expansionists certainly used the term and its concept in this way in the 1930s and 1940s, earlier proponents of Asianism looked upon it as a very real strategy of uniting Asian nations to defend against Western imperialism. Showing that Chinese intellectuals considered different forms of Asianism as viable
alternatives in the early days of the Republic of China, this article examines a number of discussions of Asianism immediately following the 1911 Revolution. Concentrating on newspaper articles and speeches by intellectuals Ye Chucang and Sun Yat-sen, I show the international aspirations of the Guomindang elite at this crucial point in the
construction of the Chinese nation. Despite the dominance of discourse on the nation state, these intellectuals advocated different Asianist programmes for strategic purposes within the first two years of the
Republic, dependent on their very different relationships with Japan.

Frustrated with the " white imperialism " of the League of Nations and the " red imperialism " of the Third Communist International, a number of Chinese intellectuals began discussing possibilities for a third option during the interwar years. Turning away from liberalism and Marxism, they examined Sun Yat-sen's Three Principles of the People and began working to promote his Principle of Nationalism as a concept that focused on the ruoxiao (weak and small nations) and could liberate people around the world that were suffering under imperialism. This discourse often centered on the possibility of creating a new form of " International, " the International of Nations, which would unite the oppressed nations of the world in opposition to the imperialist nations, rather than divide nations along class lines, as Chinese critics perceived the Comintern to do. This article examines Chinese intellectual discussions of a China-centered " International " by a variety of writers, including Dai Jitao and Hu Hanmin, from 1925 to 1937. The author shows that, although this discourse on a China-centered " International of Nations " influenced intellectuals' perceptions of China's position and responsibility in the world, it was consumed and invalidated by Japanese imperialism, as the Japanese Empire employed a similar discourse of pan-Asianism to justify militarism in the 1930s and 1940s.

The Chinese reformers who fled their country following the 1898 reforms turned to a number of new transnational strategies of education and propaganda once they arrived in Japan. This article analyzes the Datong Schools, a system of institutions created by Chinese reformers as the first step in a planned international network for education, and shows that early Asianist cooperation among the educated elites of China and Japan played an important role in this segment of China’s modernization
just a few years after the First Sino-Japanese War. In a time of intense competition,
these elites engaged in cooperation for nationalist, regionalist, religious, and strategic
reasons, exerting within a short historical window a nonetheless enduring influence
on China’s revolution and modernization.

In February 1952, the Kuomintang government of the Republic of China executed six Taiwanese aboriginal leaders for supposed collaboration with communists. Although this is just one of numerous terrible incidents during this period of Taiwan’s history, the Tang Shouren case is of particular interest as these executions effectively silenced the voices of a generation of aboriginal leaders, some of whom had recently formulated plans for aboriginal autonomy. These executions silenced all discussion of aboriginal autonomy for the next forty years. Beginning in the 1980s, but accelerating in the 1990s, Taiwanese scholars and writers returned to these victims to write about the lives and deeds of these aboriginal elites. These elites were then written into the trauma narrative that takes a special place in Taiwan’s troubled struggle with identity, the narrative of the February 28th Incident and the White Terror.

This essay examines the inclusion of aboriginal voices in the rewriting of this trauma. Of particular interest is the relation of these voices to the struggle for aboriginal autonomy today. This inclusion is of crucial significance to both the economic and political rights of aboriginals today, but must be mediated by those elites who accept strategies of cultural hybridity to engage with hegemony and efforts towards assimilation in postcolonial Taiwan. The essay focuses on the early autonomy pioneer Uyongu Yatauyungana, but also considers texts by Pasuya Poiconu, Chen Suzhen, and Walis Norgan, examining this writing in relation to the construction of Taiwan’s national narrative to reveal how aboriginal elites have both appropriated and been appropriated by this trauma narrative.

Li Ang is one of the best-known women writers from Taiwan. Her first novel, The Butcher’s Wife (殺夫Sha Fu 1983), shocked and enthralled with its ground-breaking style and strong feminist theme. “Rouged Sacrifice” (彩妝血祭 “Cai Zhuang Xie Ji”), first published in the collection Everybody Puts Their Joss Sticks in the Beigang Incense Burner (北港香爐人人插 Beigang Xiang Lu Ren Ren Cha 1997), continues with the aggressive style and message that Li Ang has established in her earlier writing. However, in this story Li Ang utilizes the gravity of the trauma related to Taiwan’s 228 Incident to examine the repression of marginalized groups in Taiwan.

In recent years the 228 Incident has become more than the initial 1947 uprising and subsequent massacre. It has attached itself to the identity of Taiwanese as a trauma residing in everyone’s consciousness. However, victimhood has traditionally been possessed by male Taiwanese, just as the narratives that remember it have been written by men. In “Rouged Sacrifice” Li Ang examines the repression of women and marginalized groups and redistributes possession of the 228 trauma across society. Through the employment of postmodernist narrative techniques, specifically in relation to Bertolt Brecht, Li presents this repression in a dialectical form, enabling the reader to critically consider the themes presented in the text, as well as contemplate the process of presenting an event such as the 228 Incident amid the distortions that continue to cloud our understanding of the past. Doing so, she contributes to the construction of Taiwan’s national trauma, while questioning this very construction and its connection to society.

On February 28, 1947, an uprising began and was followed by the massacre of thousands of ethnic Taiwanese. Although the memory of this massacre was suppressed by forty years of martial law, it has recently become an important socio-political symbol in modern Taiwan. The construction of the symbolic mythology of the 228 Incident has remade the massacre as an important historical event and a divisive tool in the political and ethnic turmoil of Taiwan. This paper examines the event of the 228 Incident and determines how the incident has been mythologized in modern political discourses due to its recently acquired symbolic status in Taiwan’s history. The paper pays particular attention to interpretations and reactions of Taiwan’s two major political parties.