Session 177: Reconciling the Self to Its History: Conservative and Revisionist Pasts in Modern China and Japan

Organizer: Axel Schneider, Leiden University

Chair: Kevin M. Doak, Georgetown University

Discussant: Frederic Wakeman, University of California, Berkeley

Marxist and liberal views of history that have long been dominant in China and Japan have recently begun to yield to "new" visions—some of them conservative and revisionist—emphasizing the specificities of Chinese and Japanese history that run counter to the universalizing narratives of modernity. Conflicts over the meaning of history in modern China and Japan thus have addressed problems of universal significance: How do general patterns of historical development relate to particular pasts and identities? Are modern concepts of progress the only framework for understanding history? What relationship is there between the histories of selves and that of collective entities? This panel looks at how modern Chinese and Japanese intellectuals have engaged with these questions, giving special attention to "conservative" or "revisionist" histories and their long neglected trajectory in the twentieth century. It addresses these questions within the larger problematic of the relationship between history and selfhood and the attempts to reconcile them.

Axel Schneider examines the group of Chinese historians and scholars associated with the journal Critical Review, a key intellectual alternative to the May Fourth Movement. Christian Uhl analyzes the wartime "Chûô Kôron" discussions of the Kyoto School as a project of cultural criticism through the philosophy of history. Rikki Kersten addresses the shifting meanings of "revisionism" in postwar Japan from its origins in Marxist historical analysis. Lewis Mayo approaches the modern scholarship on the history of Dunhuang as a story of selves and reconciliation involving the interplay of texts and social vision.

Revisionism and Historical Consciousness in Japan: The Case of Umemoto Katsumi

Rikki Kersten, Leiden University

This paper will address the under-theorized concept of revisionism, as part of a broader examination of historical consciousness in modern China and Japan. We will uncover the assumptions surrounding revisionism when it was first applied in postwar Japan, to the Marxist philosopher, Umemoto Katsumi. Umemoto is known as the first "revisionist" of the modern era in Japan, however to date scholars have concentrated on the context for his revisionism, namely the debates over shutaisei (autonomy) in the 1940s. Umemoto’s apparent "turn" can perhaps better be understood if we look at the shifts in his consciousness of history, that accompanied his critical rethink of historical materialism in the specific environment of postwar Japan. Likewise, the perception of revisionism that was applied to Umemoto by his Marxist peers was driven by a shared preoccupation with historical consciousness, and a reading of history that nonetheless drove these fellow travelers into different directions. In the process, we can glimpse the mechanisms of revisionism itself, and appreciate its contribution to the dynamism of historical consciousness, of which it is both an embodiment and a medium. Revisionism is revealed as a form of "loyal dissent," which preempts and influences the articulation and consolidation of orthodoxy. A comparison of Umemoto Katsumi with the first European revisionist, Eduard Bernstein, reveals several similarities in how revisionism was conceptualized and applied, and how this in turn affected the self-awareness of those purporting to represent the "true" version Marxist thought.

The One and the Many: A Classicist Reading of China’s Tradition and Its Role in the Modern World

Axel Schneider, Leiden University

The interpretation of modern Chinese history has recently undergone far-reaching changes. What was once orthodoxy is now being criticized, earlier leftists are now labeled ‘conservative,’ whereas groups previously criticized as ‘conservative’ are now seen in a positive light. In spite of these apparent changes, there is considerable continuity in conceptual frameworks. The term ‘conservatism’ is still used as vaguely as before. ‘Conservatism’ ranges from its literal meaning to various forms of cultural and political conservatism which are often defined negatively, if at all.

I argue that it is neither allegiance to a government or certain social structures, nor is it a commitment to ‘traditional culture’ that characterizes conservatism. Rather, conservatism covers intellectual positions which oscillate between the poles of a view of history emphasizing organic continuity and historically grown particularity, and a universalist view of ethics that allows for cultural differences only at the phenomenal level.

I will look at the view of history and the moral philosophy of the Critical Review Group, a significant group of conservative intellectuals from the Republican period. The divergent views of history and ethics articulated within this group mark it out as embodying in a paradigmatic way two principal types of modern Chinese conservatism. Both types combine in different ways a modern, yet conservative view of history with a vision of the moral self that allows them to conceptualize historical continuity and to claim philosophical relevance for tradition—in some cases for Chinese tradition only, in other cases for tradition in general.

Fragments, Selves, and Reconciliation in the History of Twentieth-Century Dunhuang Culture

Lewis Mayo, Leiden University

The collapse of the Qing state is seen by many as at once a fragmentation of imperial systems for managing documents, a fragmentation of unified territorial administration and a fragmentation of selves, particularly the selves of those in the scholarly and governing classes.

The modern Chinese revolutions appear as attempts to produce articulations of the self, territory and documentation to replace those bequeathed by empire. Modern historians sought to make sense out of the mass of writing surviving from the imperial past, without the institutional structures that had provided the key structure for writing history and for preserving documentary order. Rather than examining these processes as either ‘a modern break with the structures of tradition’ or as a ‘persistence of tradition in the face of change,’ this paper looks at the historical and documentary strategies deployed by scholars in relation to a body of imperial-era writings unknown to most Chinese historians before the twentieth century—the cache of medieval manuscripts discovered at the oasis of Dunhuang in 1900. It addresses the problematic of ‘fragments’ as something grounded in the idea of the reciprocal unifications of the self, territory and documents.

I examine this as a matter of ‘reconciliation’—a political practice entailing an idea of suffering which is ‘historical’ in form and character, associated with notions of breakage and fracturing. I approach the modern scholarship on Dunhuang as a series of attempts to reconcile selves, texts and territories which are in some sense ‘historical fragments.’

Reconstructing the "World-Historical Standpoint" of the Kyoto School

Christian Uhl, Leiden University

Did the philosophers of the Kyoto School really fire Japanese intellectuals’ enthusiasm for ‘Tenno-fascism’? Did these philosophers really have a responsibility for the Japanese aggression, as many postwar liberal and leftist critics asserted? In recent years scholars have begun to challenge this mainstream criticism of the Kyoto School and its roundtable discussions on the ‘World-Historical Standpoint and Japan.’ I would like to make an attempt to undercut the established discourse by returning to the text of the discussions themselves. My point of departure will be the opening line in the first round table discussion, which presents the history of Japanese philosophy of history as ‘a return to Hegel and Ranke.’ Why do the discussions begin with this statement? How can one return to Hegel and simultaneously to his opponent Ranke? What does this narrative, which moreover deconstructs the factual development of the modern philosophy of history, tell us about the intentions of the discussants? Reading the discussions in light of these questions, I will elucidate the underlying structure or order of arguments, which run counter to the initial statement on philosophical antecedents, and finally reveals the return to Hegel and Ranke as an advanced attempt to reconcile a disintegrated world, i.e., to overcome the actual ‘crisis of modernity.’ From there it might also be possible to re-evaluate the political responsibility of the discussants from beyond the simple dichotomy of ‘collaboration’ versus ‘subversion.’