Session 23: Empires and Nations: East Asia in Transition

Organizer and Chair: Margherita Zanasi, University of Texas, Austin

Discussant: Prasenjit Duara, University of Chicago

This panel explores the transition from empire to nation in East Asian countries from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. It thus takes into consideration different kinds of nation-building efforts and how they attempted to find a new voice that could be considered genuinely "national" and "modern." The empire, however, still loomed large in the new nation. The empire was, in fact, inscribed in the political administration, in political tropes difficult to eradicate, or in the national landscape. The passage from empire to nation was, therefore, slow and uncertain marked by a continuous dialogue between the two notions. At the same time the construction of notions of modern nationhood in East Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century went beyond the national borders and, especially in the case of Korea, was integrated in a larger regional dynamic.

In this context, the papers in this panel explore the difficulty encountered by the Chinese leaders in re-creating tropes of political legitimacy (Zanasi) and re-shaping political and administrative institutions (Carroll) in the 1930s. At the same time, the creation of the modern nation-state altered the relationship of center and periphery, upsetting the hierarchy of major Japanese cities (Hanes). In the case of Korea, the establishment of a modern nation had an even more complicated relationship with the notion of empire, since symbolic equality between nation-states was introduced locally via dynastic narratives and rituals and the concepts of sovereignty and independence facilitated Korea’s eventual colonization by Japan (Em).

Between Empire and Nation: The City as Republic

Peter J. Carroll, Northwestern University

This paper analyzes the transformation of ideals of urban citizenship from the late Qing to the Republican period. Specifically, the paper focuses on efforts by Suzhou city government. and local elites to define and popularize a more activist, normatively Republican civic life through the reconstruction of the built environment. Both late Qing and Republican state political discourses cast cities as centers of national economic and political transformation, and characterized civic activism as an auxiliary to national identification and consciousness. By the early 1920s, however, the confident identification between the city and national progress had become imperiled in Suzhou and other historic cities. City planners and citizens alike lamented that the overwhelmingly antique built environment hindered the development of commerce and barred the fomentation of Republican political consciousness among the populace. Suzhou municipal officials and civic leaders responded by rehabilitating imperial state buildings and other historic structures as public milieux for use in daily life and political activism. The paper particularly examines two cultural reconstruction projects, the building of Romanesque-style gates in the ancient city wall and the construction of a Roman-style temple next to the venerable Canglangting (Surging Waves Pavilion) literati garden. Both efforts attempted to symbolize that Suzhou, like the Republic itself, had augmented the bequest of the imperial past by incorporating Guomindang ideology, as well as the political heritage of European Classical and Renaissance city-states, into the city’s contemporary physical and social fabric.

Imperial Capital versus Industrial Capital: Spatial Projections of Empire and Nation in Tokyo and Osaka

Jeffrey E. Hanes, University of Oregon

The storied urban rivalry between Tokyo and Osaka is typically portrayed as a traditional expression of regional competition between the Kanto and Kansai regions. This paper re-casts it as a manifestation of the modern struggle to define the new Japan. In the process of establishing Edo/Tokyo as the capital city for the Meiji nation-state, the Restorationist leadership also initiated an urban hierarchy. As the former economic entrepôt of the Tokugawa shogunate, Osaka chafed against its new status as "second city." Its steady emergence in Meiji as Japan’s modern commercial and industrial epicenter prompted Osakans to call for "transfer of the capital." This blatant challenge to the hegemony of Tokyo, which placed Japan’s first and second cities in a binary urban rivalry, was symptomatic of competing definitions of empire and nation-statehood. Through the 1930s, the rivalry between Japan’s "imperial capital" (teito) and its "commercial-industrial capital" (shôkôto) was (in)famously played out in political debates, newspaper editorials, cartoons, etc. Tellingly, it also found iconic expression in planning and architecture. While national leaders constructed monuments to Tokyo’s hegemony over Osaka—commissioning baroque architectural expressions of their imperial reach such as the Prefectural Office and the Mint—local leaders drafted cosmopolitan civic designs for City Hall and the Central Public Hall; and while Tokyo maneuvered for formalistic imperial planning in Osaka, local leaders championed functionalism and livability. This paper explores the production of modern urban space and architecture in modern Osaka as a projection of rival political, social, and cultural values.

Imperialism and the Semantics of Sovereignty in Late Nineteenth-Century Korea

Henry Em, University of Michigan

On the seventh of January, 1895, performing the grand sacrificial rite at the royal ancestral temple, King Kojong swore to preserve the dynasty that his ancestors had founded and sustained for five hundred and three years. Reading the Oath in front of the seventeen spirit chambers of Yi dynasty kings and queens, King Kojong vowed that "We will no longer lean upon another state [China] . . . [Instead,] We will secure Our independence (chaju tongnip)." Considering the history of imperialism in late-nineteenth-century East Asia, and the uses of sovereignty in international law, it should not be surprising that it was Inoue Kaoru, Japan’s Minister Plenipotentiary to Korea, who had compelled King Kojong to make this "Oath of Independence." In examining the historical relationship between imperialism and the semantics of sovereignty, this paper will look at Japanese efforts to interject Western (post-Westphalian) concepts of sovereignty into Chosŏn’s dynastic rituals, and the effect such acts of "translation" might have had on early-twentieth-century narratives of Korean nationhood and selfhood. That is to say, this paper will explore the historical connections between imperialism, the ideology of state sovereignty (positing an indivisible/individualized national identity), and the ideology of the self-constituting subject (the sovereign, independent individual) in early-twentieth-century Korea.

From Empire to Nation: Images of Political Legitimacy in Twentieth-Century China

Margherita Zanasi, University of Texas, Austin

This paper explores the transformation of the Chinese discourse on political legitimacy from late Qing to the Republican period. Specifically, this paper focuses on the political platform (The Three People’s Principles) devised by the founder and leader of the Nationalist Party, Sun Yat-sen. Sun wanted the Three Principles to form the blueprint for a new Chinese nation, moving away from China’s imperial political tradition. A close reading of Sun’s writings, however, reveals that the passage from empire to nation was slow and uncertain. Even if Sun was determined to reject the empire, his early formulations of the Three Principles were inevitably influenced by late-Qing tropes. It was only in their 1924 final version, that Sun fully departed from the Qing discourse and expounded on themes central to China’s modern (post-imperial) politics.

Even in 1924, however, the Empire still cast its shadow over the Three Principles. Refusing to embrace Western political ideas tout court, Sun consciously rescued some aspects of China’s political life under the empire, identified them as part of China’s essence (and not simply a manifestation of its imperial "feudal" system), and combined them with Western trends in the attempt to create an original model of modern nationhood. Throughout his life, Sun’s relationship with the empire remained complex and ambiguous, reflecting the difficulty of coining a new "national" political vocabulary out of the ashes of the empire.