Jihua v belt a 820 e

Sovereignty and Authenticity

State and Society in East Asia Series Elizabeth J. Perry, Series Editor

Of Camel Kings and Other Things: Rural Rebels Against Modernity in Late Imperial China

By Roxann Prazniak

Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern By Prasenjit Duara

Underground: The Shanghai Communist Party and the Politics of Survival, 1927-1937

By Patricia Stranahan

Webs of Smoke: Smugglers, Warlords, Spies, and the History of the International Drug Trade

By Kathryn Meyer and Terry Parssinen

Sovereignty and Authenticity Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern

Prasenjit Duara

ROWMAN & LIlTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Lanham • Boulder • New York· Oxford

ROWMAN & LITILEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.

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Copyright © 2003 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Duara, Prasenjit.

Sovereignty and authenticity : Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern I Prasenjit Duara.

p. cm. ISBN 0-7425-2577-5 I. Nationalism-East Asia. 2. Imperialism-East Asia. 3. Manchuria

(China)-Politics and government. 4. Manchuria (China)-Histoty-1931-1 945. I. Title. JOl l .083 2003 320.54/095�c2 1 2002 1 5 1 1 57

Printed in the United States of America

@ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSIINISO Z39.48-1 992.

To Juliette and Nisha, lamps in my life

Contents

Acknowledgments

A Note to the Reader

Introduction

Part I: Comparative and Historical Perspectives

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Imperialism and Nationalism in the Twentieth Century

Manchukuo: A Historical Overview

Part II: Civilization and Sovereignty

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Asianism and the New Discourse of Civilization

Embodying Civilization: Women and the Figure of Tradition within Modernity

Part III: The Authenticity of Spaces

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Imperial Nationalism and the Frontier

Local Worlds: The Poetics and Politics of the Native Place

Conclusion

Glossary of Chinese Terms

Glossary of Japanese Terms

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

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Acknowledgments

Given the unjustified obscurity ofManchukuo, I ought properly to begin by express­ ing gratitude to the celebrated Italian filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci for having made The Last Emperor. I learned to rapidly dispel the vacant looks that greeted my introduction of Manchukuo as the subject of my research by mentioning the film, and such factoids as fascist Italy and the Vatican having been among the thirteen states to recognize the Japanese puppet state. The experts on Manchukuo--or of the area that is universally recognized today as China's northeast-have of course been much more directly and substantially helpful for my project. I apologize in advance for the inescapably formal alphabetical listing of names that seems to be in the nature of acknowledgments. The work of Mark Elliot, Suk-jung Han, Rana Mitter, and Yasutomi Ayumu has shaped the project in significant ways, and their detailed comments on the manuscript have been invaluable. Others who read and com­ mented on the final manuscript are Dipesh Chakrabarty, John Fitzgerald, Takashi Fujitani, Sheldon Garon, Haiyan Lee, David Strand, Jung-min Seo, and Wen-hsin Yeh. My warmest thanks go to them for taking time out of their busy schedules to read about a subject distant from their own research interests. Elizabeth Perty, the editor of the series in which this book appears, and Susan McEachern, editor at Rowman & Littlefield, shepherded the book in its final stages. I am grateful to Liz for her enthusiasm, critical eye, and judicious direction, and to Susan for going beyond the duty of any editor, much less a busy executive editor.

More than ten years have passed between the conception and production of the book, and many institutions and people have helped it along the way. Among librar­ ies and archives, I wish to thank the directors and staff of the Libraty of Congress in Washington, D.C., and the East Asian Libraty at the University of Chicago. I acknowledge my gratitude to the staff of the municipal libraries in Changchun, Dal­ ian, and Shanghai; the libraty of Northeast Normal University in Changchun; the archives ofJilin and Liaoning provinces; and the Number Two National Archives in Nanjing for giving me such free access to their abundant resources. I am also grateful to the staff of the Toyo Bunko and the Toyo Bunka Kenkyujo in Tokyo, and to the

IX

x .-.. Acknowledgments

faculty and libraty of the Modern History Institute of Academia Sinica in Taiwan. T he leaders of the Wanguo Daodehui in Taiwan generously made their resources available to me, and I am most thankful to them. I wish to personally thank Mr. Okuizumi Eizaburo of the University of Chicago's East Asian Library and Dr. Liu Huijuan, director of the Changchun Libraty, for their special efforts.

T he list of other individuals who have helped and facilitated my research is very long, and I apologize to those whose names I may have missed. I recall well the assistance of professors Chang Cheng, Kong Jingwei, Lil Qinwen, Mao Jiaqi, Sun Zhongtian, Wang Kuixi, and Zhu Huan in China. In Japan, Professors Linda Grove, Hamashita Takeshi, Hirano Kenichiro, Igarashii Akio, Ishikawa Yoshihiro, Nakami Tatsuo, Nakao Katsumi, Nishimura Shigeo, Ozaki Fumiaki, Yamamoto Eishi, Yamamuro Shinichi, and Sasaki Toru were all most helpful. Professor Howard Goldblatt at the University of Colorado, Boulder, kindly gave me unlimited access to his personal collection of library materials from Manchukuo and made our stay in Boulder very pleasant. I would like to express my deep appreciation of all they have done for me.

Many good friends and colleagues have read and discussed different parts and early versions of the book's chapters. I acknowledge here my gratitude to Ann Anag­ nost, Leora Auslander, Bryna Goodman, Bruce Cumings, Joshua Fogel, Joan Judge, Linda Kerber, John Kelly, James Ketelaar, Philip Kuhn, T homas Lahusen, Claudio Lomnitz, Bruce Lincoln, Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Tetsuo Najita, Marshall Sahlins, James c. Scott, William Sewell, Shu-mei Shih, Ronald Suny, Mariko Tamanoi, Stig T hogersen, David Der-wei Wang, Mayfair Yang, and Dingxin Zhao. Whether as research assistants, discussants, or cautious critics, the help of students, as always, has been indispensable. Without the assistance of Richard Burden, Juliette Chung, Todd Hall, Taka Nishi, Viren Murthy, Shi-chi Lan, Scott Relyea, and Yi Wang, the book would have been very much longer in the making. My thanks to Phil Schwartzberg for the customized production of the maps, to Scott Relyea for his help with the maps and other technical matters, and to the University of Chicago Digital Media Laboratories. Over these many years, I have also presented lectures based on this work to well over a hundred institutions in several countries. Since it would be quite impractical to name them all, I wish to express my thanks to those who listened, questioned, criticized, and helped, and I hope they will read the book to see how it turned out.

Parts of several chapters have appeared in various publications. Some of chapter 1 was published in History and Theory 37 (October 1998): 287-308, as "The Regime of Authenticity: T imelessness, Gender, and National History in Modern China." Parts of chapter 3 appeared in "The Discourse of Civilization and Pan­ Asianism," Journal o/World History 12 (March 2001): 99-130. A part of chapter 4 appeared as "Of Authenticity and Woman: Personal Narratives of Middle Class Women in Modern China," in Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond, ed. Wen-hsin Yeh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 342-64, and a

Acknowledgments r--..o xi

significant pan of chapter 6 appeared as "Local Worlds: The Politics and Poetics of Native Place," in South Atlantic Quarterly 99 (Winter 2000): 13-50.

I have also been fortunate to receive several fellowships and research grants to complete the project. In 1993-1994, the Committee on Scholarly Communications with the People's Republic of China gave me a fellowship to spend a year in north­ east China and facilitated the beginnings of my research. A short-term grant from the Modern History Institute of Academia Sinica and the Chinese University of Hong Kong allowed me and my family to get away from the bitter cold of the north­ east for a couple of winter months. In 1996-1997, I received a Guggenheim Fellow­ ship to write up some of the chapters, and I was also granted a short-term Social Science Research Council grant, permitting me to travel to Taiwan and Japan for further research. In 2000-2001, I received fellowships from the National Endow­ ment of the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies, which per� mitted me to extend my leave and complete the book. I am most grateful to these foundations and to my home institution, the Universiry of Chicago, for their sup­ port and flexibility.

Finally, I wish to express my thanks to my beloved family (and Kola) for cheer­ fully tolerating everything and giving balance to my life. This book is dedicated to them.

A Note to the Reader

Because sources in Manchukuo are in either Chinese or Japanese (and sometimes both), I identify sources in the language as I have found them. The pinyin system of transliteration is used for Chinese words and macrons are included on long Japanese vowels. In both languages exceptions are made for words and place names that are familiarly used in English (e.g., Tokyo, KMT).

xiii

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Introduction

Until recently, the subject of Manchukuo, the Japanese puppet state established in the Chinese northeast (Manchuria) between 1932 and 1945, has not seemed worthy of new exploration, since more details appeared only to confirm the well-known story of the cruelty and duplicity of the Japanese rulers and the victimization of its subjects. This story continues to be absolutely necessaty to grasp the history of Manchukuo, but it is no longer sufficient. As new work has reopened the subject in the last several years, 1 Manchukuo appears as a place of paradoxes, where it becomes difficult to disentangle imperialism from nationalism, modernity from tradition, frontier from heartland, and ideals of transcendence from ideologies of bounded­ ness. While these paradoxes are a product of the political project of Manchukuo, they are also symptomatic of the problematic conditions of modernity in the early twentieth century. This nexus between the particular and wider processes represents the point of departure of this book.

It is significant that no matter how imperialistic the intentions of its builders, Manchukuo was not developed as a colony, but as a nation-state. The Manchukuo state urgently sought international and domestic recognition of its sovereignty even after the League of Nations, following its first, most extensive investigation, deter­ mined against Manchukuo's claim. This book is centrally concerned with how its claim to sovereignty derived in large part from its claim to represent the authentic culture of the land and peoples. Manchukuo was a product of the post-World War I era, when imperialism became increasingly illegitimate and political and economic competition among states was expressed through the forms of nationalism. As such, Manchukuo reflects the persistent and complex relationship that existed between nationalism, imperialism, and modernity at least through the end of World War II.

During the inter-war period, older colonial relationships in many parts of the world came to be shaped by experiments in limited political or electoral representa­ tion, nationalist forms, and developmental agendas. But if imperialism had to adjust to the new ideological conditions, nationalism too had to adapt to the territorial imperative that historically drove the competitive and expansionist modern state by

2 r--J Introduction

devising new political forms. Among these were forms embodying the promise of emancipation and development, of identity representation and supranational broth­ erhood. Each was opposed to traditional imperialist forms, but each also held the potential of developing into new modes of domination. Pan-Asianism, kominka (imperial citizenship), and the multinationalism of Manchukuo were some Japanese expressions of these political forms. New nation-states, such as the Soviet Union, India, or China, which sought to expand their sovereignty claims upon regions and groups with fragile links to the core, also developed parallel political forms to accom­ modate these claims.

Because it was such a transparently constructed entity in a contested region, Manchukuo provides a window into the modern processes of nation making, state building, and identity formation. As a national idea, Manchukuo was predictably weak, because the commitment of its makers to independence from Japan was weak and variable. The national idea was, however, contained within the framework of Asian civilization, a framework of identity for a multinational state that was continu­ ous with nationalism and generated strategies for representing sovereignty similar to those of nation-states.2 The blueprints, materials, technologies, techniques, and problems encountered in the construction of Manchukuo reveal the ways nation­ makers sought to found the sovereignty of the nation-state in a discourse of cultural authenticity.

Given that these resources and techniques were mostly drawn from the historical experiences of China and Japan, nation making in Manchukuo discloses a great deal about what it took to become a modern nation in East Asia. As the site of Sino­ Japanese interactions and discursive convergence, the cultural representations and identity-building projects in Manchukuo illuminate certain obscured ways in which they were constructed and naturalized in the successful nation-states of China and Japan. The distinctive ways of demarcating and representing the spheres of moder­ nity and tradition, state and society, nation and self in Manchukuo not only reflected processes in the rwo societies, but drew from cultural resources circulating berween them.

Nation-makers deployed Confucian civilizing processes (jiaohua, kyoka) , redemp­ tive religion (jiushi, kyuset) , the model of the self-sacrificing woman (xianqi liangmu, ryosai kenbo) , and the vernacular tradition of the knight-errant (liilin haohan), among other strategies. Japanese ideas of authentic Eastern civilization were shaped considerably in response to the widespread presence of Chinese redemptive societies, whereas Japanese efforts to incorporate "primitive" peoples within narratives of belonging in Manchuria influenced Chinese reformulations of these peoples as part of the nation-space. Manchukuo reveals the lineaments of a regional understanding of how older formations are culturally constructed as sovereign nations in East Asia.

What I call the East Asian modern is a regional mediation of the global circula­ tion of the practices and discourses of the modern.3 I am particularly concerned with how the impetus, assumptions, categories, norms, schemata, and methods from an emergent world culture are "translated" to constitute and legitimate nations and

Introduction .--., 3

states as morally authentic sovereigns. The process of dissemination hardly develops on a level or open field, but through historically specific expressions of power, namely imperialism and a system of unequal states.4 This inequality in the flow of global culture from West to East was also expressed within East Asia in the early twentieth centuty in the hegemonic dominance ofJapanese neologisms and re-signi­ fications of classical Chinese terms in the modern Chinese and Korean vocabulary. Recent studies exploring cultural translation reveal a justified anxiety about losing sight of the ways in which the translating society adapts the imported meanings according to its own understandings and needs. Lydia Liu outlines an approach to grasping the changed meaning in her idea of "translingual practice."5 At the same time, we cannot afford to lose sight of how globally circulating categories function to make nations homologous, if not equal.

I will consider how historical, local, and regional practices and conceptions, vocabulary and symbols, translate and mediate global ideas to constitute nations. Of course, these mediations also do much more, including constituting the region itself anew. For instance, in order to understand certain modern cultural and economic practices that constitute the urban experience, a map joining major East Asian cities such as Shanghai, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Harbin may be more relevant than the national one. Another regional network is formed by the lexicon of modernity. When re-signified words from the classical Chinese returned to China, by way of Japan, they appeared to establish a transparent relationship of the present to the Chinese past. Terms such as nationality (minzu, minzoku), culture (wenhua, bunka), religion (zongjiao, shyukyo), or native place (xiangtu, kyodi5), widely considered to represent ancient continuities, were either invented or returned to China with new significations requisite for a modern nation. In practice, this "lexical effect," made possible by historical regional relationships, actually inserted Chinese intellectuals into a new regional discourse of the modern, causing a closer discursive resemblance to their Korean and Japanese counterparts than, for instance, to their peasants. In such ways we may see how the global was remade regionally into the national.6

The concept of the modern that I explore in this book (see chapter 1 in particular) is a temporal structure centered upon a historical self-consciousness. The ineluctable novelty of historical progression in this consciousness-I am not speaking only of East Asia-is premised not on a simple rejection of the past, but upon a complex encompassing or supercession of it. The "East Asian modern" occupies this labile interface between novelty and the past in the region. As such, it addresses problems of identity, change, and authenticity that politically powerfUl forces seek to appro­ priate for their particular projects. The term East Asian modern represents both an analytical categoty, where the past is repeatedly re-signified and mobilized to serve future projects, and a substantive categoty, referring to the circulation of practices and signifiers evoking historical authenticity in the region. People in the period­ notably Japanese state-builders in Manchukuo---may have been quite aware of what they were circulating and appropriating. My task is to explore the ways in which the

4 r--J Introduction

region's past was being re-signified, often in the name of the eternal or authentic, to speak to a range of different needs and goals.

Thus, the East Asia I am proposing here is not an essential category, but a histori­ cal and changing one. For instance, in the Chinese imperium, the old tribute area including Burma and Nepal was the relevant sphere, whereas the Japanese in the inter-war era increasingly saw Siberia and Central Asia as part of this region. Further, the integrity of the space diminished considerably during the early Cold War, when China became more meaningfully part of the socialist bloc and Japan more inte­ grated with the United States; and today it has once again emerged with different contours. In the period from 1900 to 1945, the conditions of Sino-Japanese interac­ tion in this region included Japanese strategic, military, economic, and cultural proj­ ects in China; Chinese students, businessmen, professionals, and political exiles in Japan, and their return; and the circulation of the regional lexicon of modernity. Many works in English, Chinese, and Japanese have studied these interactions, including those by Tam Yue-him, SanetO Keishii, Akira Iriye, Ramon Myers, Joshua Fogel, Douglas Reynolds, Douglas Howland, and Lincoln Li. This work is an indis­ pensable foundation for my understanding of the history of the Sino-Japanese encounter. At the same time, I want to show how this very history and the idea of the regional modern was itself utilized as a resource in the construction of nations.

It should be clear by now that I am not arguing that China and Japan came to look the same. Rather, the modernity of each was forged in a complex regional matrix. Models and practices frequently emerging from powerful nation-states were mediated by this regional matrix, and perceived as authentically national or civiliza­ tional. Perhaps one of the most politically significant paradoxes of nationalism, elab­ orated in chapter 1, is the transnational origins of its claim to historical and contemporary distinctiveness. The modern state produces both the reality and the reification of the territorial nation. However, the local, regional, and global sources of its construction have always produced, and continue to generate, the most funda­ mental tensions in the national form.

The book is organized methodologically to reflect its major substantive concern: the manner in which the history of a place-Manchukuo-presents a space of con­ version and transformation of global discourses into discourses of national or civili­ zational authenticity. My effort is to track the interactions of certain practices across three spatial levels: within Manchukuo, in the East Asian regional context, and in the global system of nation-states. It is a spatial (or perhaps hyperlinked) mode of historical writing that presents a challenge to linear histories based mainly upon a causal and evolutionary method. Nonetheless, it is also clear that we cannot sustain any concept, whether of system, institution, or space-such as capitalism, national­ ism, the state, or region-without engaging some kind of causal or linear analysis. My goal is to avoid the teleology and determinism that arise with the generalization of this method.

I have divided the book into three parts. The first part consists of two chapters introducing the basic concepts of the study and providing a historical overview of

Introduction r--.> 5

Manchuria. These chapters call for a more causal and linear approach. The remain­ ing four chapters (parts II and III) are more synchronic, reflecting upon the interac­ tions of global, regional, and local forces in the making and unmaking of Manchukuo.

Chapter 1 seeks to grasp nationalism in a comparative and systemic framework, as the new global ideology of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and examines its relationship with imperialism, expansionism, and militarism. I argue that in the epoch-defining nexus between nationalism and global capitalism, the problem of authenticity and identity becomes central to the definition and struggles over sovereignty. Incidentally, readers eager to get to the story of Manchukuo may skip the last two theoretical sections on authenticity and return to them later. Chap­ ter 2 narrates the history of Manchuria since the late nineteenth century in the light of its contested historiography, and with a view to grasping the problem of sover­ eignty in the region. This problem is examined from the different perspectives of the League of Nations, the Japanese military, expansionists and settlers, Chinese nationalists, local warlords, landowners, and popular society. I hope to provide a complex but coherent historical background for readers to contextualize and judge the behavior of different actors.

Part II explores the advent of a new discourse of civilization in the post-World War I period. How did the Manchukuo regime draw upon this new global discourse in the conceptualization of the nation-state? What were the old social and cultural formations in East Asia that it was able-or unable-to mobilize in order to realize these conceptions? In chapter 3, I focus on popular Chinese redemptive societies that during this period also developed links with other-Japanese and global­ societies, and on the efforts of Manchukuo pan-Asianist ideologists to co-opt them into their political projects. In chapter 4, I examine the ways in which this civiliza­ tional authenticity came to be embodied in women, who were, in the process, brought out of the home and into the projects of governmentality. Through a set of personal narratives, I am able to probe the tensions and ambivalences of this kind of modern subject formation.

Finally, part III considers the ways in which the new spatial formations and repre­ sentations of the nation were expressed in Manchukuo. How were regions, localities, and frontiers historically perceived in the old empires, and how were they trans­ formed by modern states? As a contested borderland in East Asia, Manchukuo was a unique space, simultaneously represented as frontier and nation, and as periphery and heartland. Chapter 5 examines how different forms of modern knowledge, par­ ticularly ethnography, produced the frontier and the indigenous inhabitants­ focusing initially on Japanese studies of the Oroqen (Elunchun in Chinese, and Oronjon or Orochon in Japanese)-as the authentic repository of the frontier nation. This ethnographic activity in the Chinese peripheries triggered a new ethnographic and historical understanding in China itself, which sought to assimilate the indige­ nous peoples and the lands of the periphery anew into the national imaginary. Chap­ ter 6 studies the nostalgic reflection and formal knowledge of the native place in the

6 .--.. Introduction

modern representation of the local or the homeland. Perceived globally as the locus of timeless traditions or of "the pastoral" threatened by the market, urbanization, and reform, it is a deeply sentimentalized space of authenticity. I analyze the Chinese native-place novel, written in Manchukuo by Liang Shanding, called Green Valley (Liisede gu). The only Chinese novel writren in and about the region after 1934, it became involved in a complicated political battle that remains meaningfUl to this day. By examining historically the reception and appropriation of the novel among different political forces, I track the role of affect and identity in the production of the space that has now come to be known as the northeast, or dongbei.

Notes

1 . See Han Suk-jung, "Puppet Sovereignty: The State Effect of Manchukuo, from 1 932 to 1 936" (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1995); Rana Mitter, The Manchurian Myth: Nationalism, Resistance, and Collaboration in Modern China (Berkeley: University of Califor­ nia Press, 2000); and Louise Young, Japan s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture ofWar­ time Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1 998).

2. As we shall see later, the line between the multinational state and the multicultural nation is difficult to distinguish.

3. For global circulation in this period see John Boli and George M. Thomas, eds., Con­ structing World Culture: International Nongovernmental Organizations since 1875 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1 999).

4. Lydia Liu, ed., Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1 999).

5 . Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity, China 1900-1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).

6. The "East Asian modern" is not something that I study exhaustively or precisely. Trained principally as a scholar of China, I have a more limited knowledge of Japan, and still more so of Korea-to which there are only occasional references. Nonetheless, as a recogniz­ able collection of circulating ideas and practices, the concept of the East Asian modern enables me to situate a historical perspective that is not hopelessly limited by nationalist ideology; see my Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Na"atives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1 995). My goal is to engage some of the more important features of "the modern" embedded in Sino-Japanese interactions and provoke other strategies of transnational historical understanding. By using the term modern in the title as a noun rather than an adjective I seek to highlight the idea of the modern as a set of temporal practices and discourses that is imposed or instituted by modernizers. As such it is a hegemonic project among other temporal practices, rather than a preconstituted period or a given condition.

PART ONE

COMPARATIVE AND

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES

CHAPTER ONE

Imperialism and Nationalism in the Twentieth Century

Throughout the nineteenth century, imperialist conquest, annexation, assimilation, and colonialism were closely associated with nation-states. Perhaps the most distinc­ tive feature of nationalist ideology in the twentieth century is the peeling away of imperialism from nationalism-an ideological divergence obviously prominent in anti-imperialist nationalism. It has shaped our view of nationalism and imperialism as two very different phenomena. Nationalism is characterized by citizenship, equal­ iry, and development, whereas imperialism has historically produced domination, exploitation, and the reproduction of difference between ruler and ruled in the colo­ nies. A goal of this chapter is to show that nationalism was not able to easily over­ come the long practical history of the nation-state's association with imperialism in the competition for dominance of the capitalist world. Moreover, the evolving rela­ tionship between the two in the inter-war years meant that imperialism too came to be penetrated by nationalist rhetoric, forms, and practices. I

The difficult relationship between twentieth-century nationalism's ideology and history necessitates a methodology capable of joining the history of modern national­ ism with the understanding of nationalism as the producer of history-both in its material effects and, especially, in its enormous ideological capacity to code history as national. I examine the relationship between nationalism and imperialism in the historical context of the expanding system of competitive nation-states and a global culture.

In this period, nationalism becomes the driving force of expansionism. It draws its authority, or moral sovereignry, from an immanent conception of history and what I call "the symbolic regime of authenticity." Ironically, these morally drenched conceptions emerge even as nations are being practically shaped by circulating dis­ courses of the global system. This chapter explores the comparative historical and theoretical context in order to grasp the relevance of the imperialism-nationalism problem for Manchukuo. Later chapters, especially in parts II and III, exemplifY

9

10 ........, Chapter 1

how the symbolic regime of authenticity is formed and operates in Manchukuo and more widely in East Asia.

Nationalism and Imperialism

The ideological divergence between nationalism and imperialism became most visi­ ble at the end of World War I, when a major constellation of forces produced the political and discursive conditions for anti-imperialist nationalism. Wartime mobili­ zation of both European nations and the colonies, the loosening of imperialist con­ trol of the economy in large countries like China and India, and the concomitant strengthening of urban nationalism in these places were part of these conditions. Moreover, the balance of global power was beginning to move away from Europe and toward the Soviet Union and the United States. Under Lenin and Woodrow Wilson, "prophets of a new international order," these powers were not only com­ mitted to national self-determination, but competed with each other to champion the cause of national independence, and, we might add in hindsight, nationality formation itself.2 This environment facilitated an unprecedented global outpouring of criticism against centuries of imperialism and the horrors of imperialist wars-in particular the most recent war, the scale of which portended the end of the world. We will turn to the new moral authority generated by the critique of Western civili­ zation in chapter 3; let us note here that this novel understanding of nationalism was accompanied by the simultaneous emergence of the idea of the nation-state as a universal political form and of nationalism as a natural condition of humanity.

It is sometimes easy to forget how recently the idea emerged that the globe was divided into nations-awakened or unawakened-even among the colonized and semicolonized. According to Eric Hobsbawm, although the nation-state was the dominant political entity in Europe through much of the nineteenth century, nationalism, as we understand it from the last twenty years of that century, did not exist. Only "advanced" or "civilized" societies, in the evolutionary discourse of the period, qualified as nation-states; the rest would either disappear through extinction or assimilation, or, we may add, become colonized. We can infer from Hobsbawm's observation that conquest, assimilation, and colonization-in a word, imperial­ ism-was the privilege of the nation-state in the period. The corollary to this was that nationality was not a birthright or an ascriptive status. Patriotism in the eigh­ teenth-century revolutions of America and France was seen to be a largely voluntary affair. To be sure, the territorial nation-state did produce the cultural homogeniza­ tion that was a condition for nationalism. But ethnicity, language, and other markers of collectivity were not to become the natural basis of claims to sovereignty until the last decades of the century. Hobsbawm may be criticized for ignoring earlier, indi­ vidual manifestations of these phenomena, but we can hardly deny that the idea of nationalism as a universal condition emerged only in the later period and became gradually realized in the aftermath of World War I.

I accept Ernest Gellner's definition of modern nationalism as the congruence of

Imperialism and Nationalism in the Twentieth Century .-..J 1 1

the political and the cultural, but find it of limited value. Such a definition requires distinguishing between a homogenized, politicized Self and Other, an identification based upon a historicist conception of community. To anticipate a later discussion in this chapter, it is precisely because the self-conception of a community is over­ whelmingly a temporal or historical one that the problem of change and identity is central to it. The problem of identity is not simply a question of how we can be what we were, but is fatefully entangled with the politics of who we are in relation to contemporary interests, needs, and visions of the future. Thus, who we are not, and how to define and treat those who are not us, are constitutive questions of nationalist ideology.

Reflecting to some degree the needs or the political entanglement of the time, the Other can be constructed flexibly, through either a sharp or a graded demarcation, including the production of "the internal frontiers of the nation" or the "truest" core of the national community.3 Nonetheless, the possibility of sharp demarcation or the hardened boundary is intrinsic to the nationalist form. When this hardened community is simultaneously moralized and valorized, it is not difficult to see how it might develop into imperialism, authorizing the annexation or colonization of the Other. Although the nation's imperative for territorial control contributes signifi­ cantly to the tendency toward exclusiveness, if we foreground the problem of time and identity in the ideology of the national form, the territorial state is theoretically not essential. Indeed, if cyber-technology enables decision making and resources to flow through the power nodes of a de-territorialized "nation" (linking homelands and diasporas, for instance), we may still be left with the nationalist form and its intrinsic capacity for closure.

However, from its earliest appearances in Europe, the territorial state has been historically necessary to the realization and existence of nationalism. In the under­ standing of world systems analysts such as Immanuel Wallerstein and Giovanni Arrighi, nationalism is to some extent a by-product of the relationship between state building, modern capitalism, and global domination. According to Arrighi, the cre­ ation and maintenance of global capitalism was made possible by the fusion of "two logics," territorial and capitalist: the capture of mobile capital for territorial and pop­ ulation control, and the control of territories and people for the purposes of mobile capital. From the seventeenth century, the territorial state-possessing absolute jurisdiction within its boundaries and growing military and organizational capabili­ ties-became necessary to control the social and political environment of capital accumulation on a world scale. In Arrighi's scheme, the hegemonic power in the competitive system of European states, such as the Dutch in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the British in the nineteenth century, was successively chal­ lenged by latecomer territorial states. These latecomers, in their drive to become globally competitive, sought to mobilize the economic and human resources first within their jurisdictions, thus producing some aspects of nationalism.4 Wallerstein is more explicit, declaring that nationalism became the very means whereby a state

1 2 <---' Chapter 1

or social formation sought to leverage itself out of the periphery of the world system into the core. 5

Although Arrighi's pattern suggests that nationalism was part of the state strategy in the British and French challenges to Dutch hegemony in the eighteenth century, in general it is agreed that full blown nationalism as we understand it emerged in the late nineteenth century, when Germany, the United States, and Japan sought to challenge British economic domination of the world. They took the lead in develop­ ing nationalism and forging a closer relationship between this nationalism and the state.6 Political and capitalist elites in these newly industrialized societies, which later also included Italy and Russia, gradually undermined the classical liberal principles of free trade-enabling and enabled by British hegemony-by adopting neomercan­ tilist policies toward securing a state-protected national economy.? Leaders deliber­ ately fashioned nationalist, neomercantilist, developmental, and regulatory regimes, and states came to play an important role both for national development and to enhance global economic competitiveness. Economic nationalism also appeared in societies such as China and India, where early-twentieth-century nationalist move­ ments were built around campaigns to boycott imperialist products and promote nationally made goods.

To be sure, competition for global economic domination was not the only condi­ tion for the rapid spread of nationalism in Europe and the world from the late nine­ teenth century. Nationalism, as we shall see, was linked to the politics of mass mobilization that emerged with the increasing democratization of European polities after 1880. Gellner associates nationalism with industrial society's need for mass lit­ eracy and interchangeable skills, which in turn necessitated the state-culture congru­ ence. Karl Deutsch first saw the importance of the mass media for nation-building projects, and Benedict Anderson emphasized the connection between media and capitalism in "print capitalism" capable of producing the imagined community of the nation.s Certainly, some of these conditions-such as the mobilization of certain identities or a form of "print capitalism"--<::ould be found in imperial China and elsewhere. Nonetheless, it was the simultaneous development of all or most of these conditions within an evolving system of inter-state competition that produced the national form by the end of the nineteenth century. That form embedded many different aspirations, but it was also seen to be the most effective means to achieve global dominance or imperialism.

War provides the perfect optic to view the relationship between competitive imperialism and nationalism. World War I and World War II were Germany's response, not simply to the structure of power in Europe, but to the British empire and the developing world empires of the United States and Russia.9 Nationalism was functionally important in mobilizing the population and resources for war prep­ aration and the war itself. The call for national autarky, which preceded World War I but was especially developed during the war and inter-war crises, presupposed the nationalism that it was producing, and mandated state mobilization of human and material resources in the name of the nation. The German planned war economy

Imperialism and Nationalism in the Twentieth Century ,--... 1 3

of 1914-1917 was a n important model for much autarkic national development, including that of the Soviet socialist economy and China and Manchukuo.10 World War I, the first long, mass war for global dominance, marked the height of national­ ist mobilization. In what was for many societies the first episode of mass production, appeals to maximize production and rein in consumption were pitched to national 10yalty.1l Indeed, as Gregory Kasza has shown, administered mass organizations, allegedly representing the will of the people, began with the experience of insuffi­ cient civilian support for World War I. They first emerged in countries like Japan, which were not directly involved in the war but saw the need to mobilize for its future eventuality. Later these mass organizations became everyday fixtures of the nation-state. 12

Imperialist nationalism turned out to be a significant means of integrating and subordinating the different classes and groups in these nation-states. Although, as noted by Lenin and Marxist scholars, the imperialist payoff was clearly an important part of the subordination of these classes, this payoff was not only economic, and perhaps even more symbolic (witness defeated inter-war Germany). In a move that appears somewhat dated today, Hannah Arendt sometimes attributed the great appeal of imperialism to the "mob" or the lumpenproletariat. But she also com­ mented that imperialists appeared as the best nationalists, because they claimed to stand above the reality of national divisiveness and represent the glory and authentic­ iry of the nation.13 As we will see, the discourse of civilization also played a role in creating not only nationalist identification but a transnational identity of world­ conquering nations with high moral purpose.

Note, however, in Arendt's observation, how imperialism actually comes to be authorized by nationalism, which has become the primary force. If in an earlier period nationalism was a response to imperialist competition, it had now become the ground reality. The symbolic power of nationalism to subordinate and discipline all manner of difference to a greater cause is, of course, important not only for impe­ rialism but for domestic projects as well. From the 1880s until the end of World War I, nationalism revealed a strong communal and conservative character, violently opposed to ideas of class struggle and the labor movement.14 Nonetheless, there may be little better to focus the national mind than dominance and glory at another's expense.

So far we have seen how imperialism, while necessary to nationalism, is still something external to it-applied to people outside its imagined community. How­ ever, nationalist principles were also extended or deployed for imperialist ends or with imperialist consequences. Ideals of assimilation or brotherhood often ended up in a brutal imperialism. During the French revolutionary imperialism, several French thinkers saw colonialism as a way to integrate the colonies into the universal project of the Enlightenment; yet the civilizing mission entailed and reinforced "the right to intervene."15 In what she called "continental imperialism," Arendt described latecomer nationalists who sought to develop their empires through the pan-Ger­ man and pan-Slav racist movements. 16 They pursued a nationalism that saw itself as

14 r--J Chapter 1

authorized to imperialistically annex territories belonging to other states. The fate of those who were identified as not belonging to the community is well known. Japa­ nese pan-Asianism, based on the purported solidarity of a common civilization (and sometimes common race), was deployed to build an empire. Twentieth-century nation-states have exercised imperialism in the name of common civilization, social­ ist brotherhood, and democracy.

The world system perspective has enabled us to see the function of modern politi­ cal forms in relation to the imperative of global competition in the dual logic of territory and capital. Nationalist and imperialist practices were combined and often fused to gain competitive advantage. If nationalism had imperialist consequences in the pursuit of interests or the national "will," some imperialist states also recognized the importance of autonomy or formal independence in mobilizing or motivating the colonized or semicolonized population in pursuit of its competitive interests. As Manchukuo shows, zones of imperialist domination could be re-territorialized as part of "regional economic blocs" where patterns of investment and economic mod­ ernization resembled those of nation-statesY This pattern would become clearer in the post-World War II era, when hegemonic powers controlled many formally inde­ pendent nations. But the rapid spread of the legitimacy of nationalist discourse underlying these formations cannot be understood only through world-systems the­ ory. Nationalist ideology came to have an autonomous power capable of generating nationalist rights as well as the symbolic power to exclude.

Citizenship, National Rights, and Imperialism

The greatest adversary of the rights of nationaliry is the modern theory of nationaliry.

-Lord Acton, Essays in the Liberal Interpretation of History

Since the French revolution, the nation-state, nationalism, and national mobiliza­ tion have been accompanied by the doctrine of "rights," which has been an impor­ tant component of their appeal and promise. While the historical relationship between rights and nations continues to be a subject of considerable disagreement, 18

we can, without going into this history, make a few observations that are relevant to twentieth-century nationalism. It has been pointed out that the French Revolution combined the declaration of the Rights of Man with the demand for national sover­ eignty. Thus human rights were only protected and enforced as national rights. 19 Moreover, as quickly became evident with the emergence of French revolutionary imperialism, these rights applied only to some nations; and, whether in France, Brit­ ain, or the United States, they applied only to some groups within the nation.20 Nonetheless, in these nations, citizenship rights evolved before the period of high nationalism of the late nineteenth century, and the tension between these rights and national rights were yet to be fully articulated.

Imperialism and Nationalism in the Twentieth Century r--> 1 5

By the end of the nineteenth century, the liberal ideal of the individual citizen's rights was frequently ignored or subordinated to the rights of the collective nation in many nationalisms of the period.21 Whereas it is certainly true that those societies with developed democratic institutions were better able to protect the rights of indi­ vidual citizens, the tension between national rights and citizenship rights cannot be reduced to another version of the duality between Western, civic nationalism and Eastern, ethnic nationalism. Classical liberal philosophers such as John Locke pre­ supposed the common cultural framework of an identifiable people for the operation of citizenship rights,22 and J. S. Mill was convinced that "free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities."23 Alexis de Tocqueville understood national pride as one of the prerequisites of democracy, since it incul­ cated the republican spirit that would promote civic virtue. Tocqueville even declared that colonialism was necessary for reinforcing the nationalist sentiment that was the sole way to transcend individual interests.24 The "freedoms" of many minor­ ities or underprivileged groups in democratic societies were premised upon assimila­ tion, often forced, into the dominant culture of the civic nation until at least the middle of the twentieth century.25

The tension between individual and national rights continues into the post­ World War II era. The charters of the United Nations-founded by democratic sponsors-reveal the tension between these two sets of rights. Article 1 of the Uni­ versal Declaration of Human Rights states that "everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives." But the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights declare that all "peoples have the right to self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development. "26

Thus, as Clarke and Jones point out, liberalism holds that political authority derives from the consent of the governed; but this is in tension with the "givenness" of national affiliation, to which the question of consent does not arise.27 While nation­ alism has no necessary need for liberalism, liberalism cannot do without the author­ ity of the nation, if only because it cannot have people opt out of the nation-state.2B

On the other hand, nondemocratic nations were and are still bound to a concep­ tion of rights as the informal contractual basis of the legitimacy of the national regime. These rights are not associated with ideas of liberal individualism or political freedoms but typically with rights to livelihood and economic betterment, or what T. H. Marshall called "social rights."29 How and why such rights should have devel­ oped and disseminated around the world by the first half of the twentieth century is far too vast a problem to enter here. At the very least, we can say that they are associated with the participation of states in the widening system of nation-states (discussed below), which disseminated ideas of governmentality, sovereignty, and nationality. Although in the early twentieth century competition was a very impor­ tant threat to the system, nonconformance to the discursive conditions of national­ ity-and even worse, nonrecognition by the superior powers-entailed significant

16 r--.> Chapter 1

risks and losses that could weaken a state at home and abroad. However these ideas were disseminated, they were usually justified through the discourse of the rights of nations, as for instance in China, where Republican regimes in the twentieth century deferred democratic rights in the name of the collective national interest, economic securiry, and tutelage necessary to produce proper citizens. In Manchukuo, rights were conceived as the rights of nationalities within a purported Asian civilization.

Thus we can see that rights are indeed closely related with nationalism, but the relationship is not simply an emancipatory one. On the one hand, nation-states are expected to guarantee certain rights to their citizens, whether these be individual rights or rights to economic and material improvement. We shall see later how this expectation must be related to the phenomenon Foucault has called "governmental­ ity."30 On the other hand, the bearer of rights is not only, nor even primarily, the individual, but the nation. As the bearer of rights, the nation has sovereign power over its individual citizens and in dealings with the outside world. Until the end of World War 1, and in a problematic and confusing way beyond that date, the logic of rights facilitated the transformation of the nation into the imperialist nation. The racialist ideas of social Darwinism further enabled this transformation and the quest for global domination.

Several authors have observed how a virtual blurring between races and nations occurred in the last third of the nineteenth century.3 ' Nations were perceived as unique and homogenized products of biological and cultural factors. However these "civilized" nations functioned domestically, externally they functioned in a natural­ ized world "red in tooth and claw," where one was equipped, biologically, environ­ mentally, and culturally, to dominate-or else be dominated. Nations as self­ conscious civilized bodies had the right to dominate and colonize those who were not: the primitive and the heathen. For many of the dominated, social Darwinism was also the discursive path to survival. The writings of Chinese and Japanese think­ ers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries closely reflected these assumptions, if only to transform themselves into civilized nations. There was, how­ ever, no line separating survival from domination. At the same time, the logic of rights continued to unfold, as nationalism was also subject to claims of national rights made by others, particularly if they succeeded in claiming systemic recogni­ tion.

Imperialism and Anti-imperialist Nationalism

Anti-imperialist nationalism of the post-World War I period shared most of the characteristics of its late-nineteenth-century predecessor, including the mode of pro­ ducing national identity and rights. These ideas were sustained in the international system of states, which sought to shape these new forces, though not without enor­ mous tensions and conflicts. Participation in the international system entailed vary­ ing degrees of commitment to a regime of rights, whether national or individual, socioeconomic or political. On the other hand, what distinguished this expression

Imperialism and Nationalism in the Twentieth Century <--' 1 7

of nationalism was the renunciation of imperialism and the social Darwinist charac­ terization of nations, including to some degree the underlying theories of race. In its place-or sometimes as a supplement-nationalists in many countries, including ones in East Asia, developed or gave a new salience to ideas of "culture" or cultural unity in the narrative of national integration.

We shall explore this notion of culture at various places in the book; suffice it to say here that it played an important role in the new nationalism in several ways. First, it was a means of dis-embedding the project of national homogenization from race and its association with imperialism. Ideas of culture underlay the new discourse of civilization, which authorized nationalism and forged narratives of brotherhood, often contradicted in practice. Second, culture introduced a paradigm of volunta­ rism (at least in theoty) for the process of assimilation and homogenization, particu­ larly in the face of growing awareness of nationality rights among various people within the claimed territory of the new nation-state. This factor made the "national question" considerably more problematic for the new nations than for the older nation-states, where assimilation had largely-although, as we know, not wholly or irreversibly-taken place before the generalization of such nationalist-rights con­ sciousness. In some ways, this cultural nation was exemplified by the American mechanism of the "melting pot," but unlike the exceptional case of America, most of the relevant groups did not volunteer to come into the new nation. Culture, as produced in the new nationalism, represented an important and novel form of knowledge to address problems generated by the divergence of imperialism and nationalism.32

How should we grasp the relationship between this novel system, with its anti­ imperialist liberatory rhetoric, and the powerful historical imperatives that had made the imperialist nation-state such a compelling model of power in the world? Since the dynamic of national strengthening was inseparable from the expansion of capitalism, these nations were subject to a set of imperatives . that also obtained for all nation-states in the twentieth century seeking to survive and compete in the capi­ talist world-or, as in the case of socialist states, to be economically competitive with capitalism. These include the maximization of the territorial control of the state in order to command resources and markets; the building of military and security systems that had difficulty maintaining a stable line differentiating defense from aggression; and nationalist claims upon territories and people that amounted to imperialism.

The nineteenth-century nation-state, which wore its imperialism with pride, was imperialist in more than the usual sense of possessing colonies abroad. The process of nation formation, it will be remembered, was simultaneously a process of state formation that entailed conquest, pulverization, and homogenization of relatively autonomous communities, whether in the heartlands, peripheries, or neighboring regions of these states. The extraordinarily violent and imperialistic means by which the national territory of the United States of America was created in the nineteenth century is a case in point. It was also an uneven process and regions annexed to the

18 ,--... Chapter 1

nation-state at a later date frequently retained their peripheral, semicolonial status well into the rwentieth century. The homogeneous nation was more frequently an ideal than a realiry.

In East Asia, the case of Okinawa (like Hokkaido) in the Japanese nation reflects the problematic ways in which nations were imperialistically constructed. With the incorporation of Okinawa-an autonomous kingdom with multiple political affili­ ations-in 1879, the Japanese nation-state determined the national territorial limit of Japan and sought to differentiate it from the "outer territories" that were later to become its colonies. Yet, as Tomiyama !chiro says, Okinawa problematizes the idea of a colony as having to be outside the nation, since Okinawa was historically closer to the "outer territories" and economically, too, it was incorporated much like a colony. However, since it was geographically and administratively part of the nation, it could not be dealt with rhetorically and politically as a colony. As neither colony nor quite of the nation, Okinawa became a place in need of welfare and relief admin­ istered by the benevolent national center in Tokyo.

Perhaps one of the most problematic and enduring manifestations of the imperi­ alism-nationalism continuum for the anti-imperialist nation may be found in the transition from empire to nation. Nationalists of the dominant ethnicity or group made claims upon regions or territories of the old empire through the doctrine of uti possidetis (the principle of inheriting imperial boundaries). But it was practically difficult for Indian, Russian, or Chinese nationalists, for instance, to extend or sus­ tain the principle of nationality among several groups within the empires of the Brit­ ish, the Romanovs, or the Manchus. The peripheral regions of these empires had multiple and flexible political affiliations (such as Okinawa or the Liu Qiu islands, which sent tribute both to China and the Satsuma domain in Japan). Moreover, incorporation into an empire may have been based on patronage of common reli­ gious or other cultural symbols, rather than the modern conception of absolute belonging to a territorial nation.

In other words, the principle of belonging to a national territory was incommen­ surate with the historical principle of multiple affiliations and flexible incorporation into empire. This was the basis, for instance, of the rejection by Muslims of the British Indian empire to join with the Republic of India, the Tibetan and Mongol refusal to participate in a Chinese nation, and so on. The Japanese claims to Man­ chukuo were made with an opportunistic grasp of this incommensurabiliry. More­ over, dominant nationalists were often making their claims precisely at a time when elites of these regions or communities, such as the Mongols or British Indian Mus­ lims, were also developing a national consciousness. Dominant nationalist claims on these regions-made with the belief in anti-imperialist brotherhood, common cul­ ture, or history, but often resulting in "internal colonialism"-produced acute ten­ sions and political innovations that are important to this study.33

Finally, an aspect of nationalism not rypically regarded as imperialistic is the mode whereby nationalists seek to transform identities. If, however, we accept the broad definition of imperialism as "the extension of rule or influence by one govern-