Organizer: Yan Lu, University of New Hampshire
Chair and Discussant: Peter Duus, Stanford University
Were close neighbors such as the Chinese and the Japanese bound to clash? Had they ever tried other alternatives than conflict? Given the two wars between them in modern times, the conflictual aspect of their interaction is too obvious to be ignored. To register that reality, as Peter Duus has pointed out, past scholarship has been implicitly or explicitly shaped by a search for the origins of conflict between them. Yet considering the enormous number of people who traveled between the two shores and conducted daily activities for a variety of reasons and for sustained duration, conflict might well be the tip of a large iceberg whose major portion was submerged below the waterline.
This panel is organized with the hope of stimulating discussion on the human dimension of Sino-Japanese interaction, and it shifts focus from grand tendencies and dominant ideologies to the lived experiences of individuals who took various paths to China or Japan. What motivated their engagement with the other people and their culture? What were the alternatives they chose to pursue in times of peace and war? By looking closely at Chinese and Japanese in direct contact, the panel demonstrates the variety of conscious efforts made by both sides to activate cultural linkages as a basis for constructing their modern relations.
Douglas Reynolds, Georgia State University
This paper does two things. One, it offers an overview of Chinese in Japan and of Japanese in China in the period I call "before imperialism." And, two, it looks afresh at the experiences of several individuals in interaction, in order to illustrate and "humanize" this topic.
The period 1870 to 1905 I call "before imperialism" because the documentary record of the time does not indicate that Japan had embarked on a "policy" of imperialism. In fact, the record argues the opposite. As late as the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, it is impossible to argue on the basis of the full Japanese record that it had: (1) a clear intention; (2) the design; or (3) the capacity to embark on imperialist aggression against China.
The individuals examined include, but are not limited to the following. On the China side, I examine the Chinese legation officials in Japan, Huang Zunxian (also an important literary figure) and Yao Wendong (a spy for China, under orders to gather military intelligence for a possible Chinese invasion of Japan). On the Japan side, I examine Kishida Ginko (a successful businessman and promoter of Japanese interactions with China) and Arao Sei (a military spy turned promoter of Japanese business relations with China, and innovative educator).
Interactions between China and Japan in the late-Qing/Meiji periods were part of a process of both sides "feeling their way," and cannot be reduced or projected backward from the twentieth century as "imperialistic" on either the Chinese or Japanese side.
Paula Harrell, Independent Scholar
In the years after the first Sino-Japanese War, hundreds of Japanese went to China on contracts with the Chinese government to provide expertise in education, law, finance, and a variety of technical fields. For a decade and more, China and Japan enjoyed an unusual period of balanced, constructive relations based on mutual self-interest. The great puzzle is how to reconcile this period with the years of escalating tensions and violent conflict that followed. Why, in the final analysis, was there no effective Japanese opposition to expansionist policies in China?
This paper looks at what Doug Reynolds terms the "Golden Decade" and its aftermath through the career of Hattori Unokichi, noted Confucian scholar, Tokyo University professor, and founder of the university’s China studies institute. After an ill-fated year in China during the Boxer crisis, Hattori spent six years there as a government adviser hired to establish a teacher education division at China’s new Beijing University. From his long China experience, Hattori came to believe: (1) that China’s traditional culture in its present guise functioned as an intellectual straightjacket inhibiting the Chinese from developing a modern outlook; (2) that Japan was the exemplar of the best in modern Asian values; and, (3) that assistance from Japan, Asian yet cosmopolitan, was China’s best development option. The paper suggests that the work of Hattori and other advisers fixed in the Japanese public mind the notion that China needed guidance, making it an all too easy transition to acceptance of what Marius Jansen has called "guidance by force."
Christiane Reinhold, University of Texas, Austin
Although the Sino-Japanese relationship disintegrated in the 1930s into a protracted war, this time is also known to have stimulated the re-emergence of China’s Japan discourse Joshua Fogel likened to the birth of modern Chinese Japanology. This paper examines the attempts of a group of Chinese Japan experts, among them well-known figures like Jiang Baili, Dai Jitao, Wang Pengsheng and others, to account for the aggressive behavior the Japanese exhibited, by probing into the murky depths of the "Japanese national character."
In the course of mapping the Japanese psyche, the Chinese developed an image of the Japanese which was far more complex than anything their forbears had produced. Upon concluding their analysis, the Chinese observers were faced with a people of opposing, even mutually exclusive attributes, thus long preceding Ruth Benedict’s findings in her seminal study, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.
The complexity of the Japanese character engendered in several of the Chinese Japan experts the realization that the Japanese were more than the sum of the peculiar traits the Chinese had catalogued—that in fact such projects would fail to do justice to the individuality and complexity of a human being and thus distort more than enlighten. Only if the Chinese were ready to immerse themselves into Japanese culture, an understanding which could transcend stereotypical and oversimplified representations, were possible. This admission not only pointed Chinese Japanology into a new direction, but in turn suggested that the study of Japan served as a ready vehicle for the Chinese to demonstrate that they were working hard to retire the Chinese tradition of cultural chauvinism.
Yan Lu, University of New Hampshire
This paper challenges the political dichotomy of qin-ri-pai (pro-Japan faction) and fan-ri-pai (anti-Japan faction) by looking into the thought and action of Zhou Zuoren during the second Sino-Japanese War. The most celebrated and innovative essayist in twentieth-century China, Zhou had studied in Japan, married a Japanese, and promoted Chinese understanding of the Japanese and their culture all through his life. When the war came in 1937, he made the decision not to retreat to the rear area but to remain in occupied Beijing. In 1940, he entered the service of the puppet regime in north China and, after the war, was tried and imprisoned by the Nationalist government for treason.
What motivated Zhou’s action during the war? As a prolific writer and rigorous thinker, Zhou made consistent efforts, with traceable marks in his prewar and wartime writings, to comprehend the ever escalating conflict between China and Japan. The clash between the two countries, by his rationale, was shaped by forces larger than the politics on both sides. Looking beyond political and military conflict, Zhou sought to reexamine his earlier image of Japan, to redefine the shared cultural heritage of Confucianism, then appropriated by the Japanese militarists to justify aggression in Asia, and to rationalize the Sino-Japanese conflict in the broader context of Asian modernization and Asian interaction with Western civilization. By analyzing this complex but critical individual, the paper demonstrates the inadequacy of the conventional pro/anti dichotomy as an explanatory tool, on the one hand, and, on the other, the significance of the cultural interpretation in Chinese understanding of Japan.