Summer, 2018—A Rising Sun, A Country Divided, And Red Revenge: Imperialism, Nationalism, And The Emergence Of Modern East Asia

In recent years, some geopolitical thinkers in the United States have begun thinking more seriously about East Asia as a region of the world where threats to and opportunities for America’s future peace, prosperity, and international dominance have been looming large. Beginning in late 2011 and early 2012, many began speaking of an American “pivot” or “rebalance” towards Asia in terms of the United States’ conscious assignment of priorities as well as the deployment of resources and diplomatic energies. At the time, I was perfectly willing to accept the premise that the East Asia-Pacific region of the world has always been and continues to be an important playing field for the United States to remain strong in and involved with. I still feel the same today, and I would even go so far as to say that sharing an emphasis on the importance of the Asia-Pacific region to the geo-strategic interests of the United States is the closest Christopher Peterson has ever come to agreeing with Hillary Clinton and the rest of the irresponsible foreign policy bumblers that populated the Barack Obama administration.

My disagreements with the Obama foreign policy establishment aside, I believe that understanding the modern history of East Asian countries like Japan, Korea, and China is essential to grasping the realities of the East Asia region moving forward. As a history student working on my master’s degree at Stan State last year, I wrote a paper detailing the history of the three (or should I say four?) major states of the East Asia region; in this paper, I sought to demonstrate how the modern histories of Japan, North and South Korea, and the People’s Republic of China were all heavily influenced by the forces of Western imperialism and nationalism.

The processes of modernization in the East Asia region have been profoundly influenced by the phenomenon of political nationalism, and yet the histories of nationalism have varied among the individual states within the region. In his book, Beyond Liberal Democracy: Political Thinking for an East Asian Context, Daniel A. Bell, a professor at Tsinghua University, explained that “nationalism can be used to promote liberal goals such as democratization and equality of opportunity, but it can also be used to promote illiberal goals such as chauvinism and unjust conquest.” It is clear that nationalism has been used throughout history in a number of different ways by various peoples and societies. In the East Asian region, the historical developments that created modern Japan, North and South Korea, and the People’s Republic of China are inextricably linked with Western imperialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well as with the nationalistic reactions of the Japanese, Korean, and Chinese states to that imperialism. Because of these differing formulations of imperialistic influence and nationalistic reaction, the twentieth-century modernization of Japan came to be characterized by a cultural embracement of imperialism, Korea’s by an ambiguous experience with imperialism, and China’s by an outright rejection of imperialism. These histories of modernization continue to influence the contemporary international and political statuses of these three countries.

In the Tokugawa period of its history (1600-1860s), Japan was little more than a collection of loosely-aligned fiefdoms, and before the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the Japanese emperors acted as spiritual figureheads with limited practical political power. However, because of increasingly frequent encounters with Western geopolitical powers—beginning with the notable arrival in Tokyo Bay of the American Commodore Matthew Perry’s fleet of warships in 1853—“the process of Japanese unification around a powerful centralized government” was greatly accelerated. In the last years of the nineteenth century, Japan’s ruling class used its newly-centralized political powers and the country’s newfound nationalism “as a means of developing Japan into a modern country and as a means of exerting power in competition with other states.” Thus began Japan’s journey into the twentieth century and the modern age.

The Meiji period (1868-1912) saw Japan come face-to-face with Western modernity. In reaction to this modernity, Japanese nationalism became, early on, infused with an obsessive need to renovate itself and keep up with the new international order of imperialism and global markets. This international order was, more often than not, defined and dominated by the United States and the great powers of Europe, making it all the more necessary for Japan “to reinvent itself and its nation in new, modern terms; it had to Westernize in order to survive.” As one academic described it, “Japan proved to be an assiduous acolyte of European political structures and technological innovations, which it self-consciously set out to imitate and acquire.” The ability to recreate the imperialistic successes of the West would prove vitally important to Japan’s efforts to modernize itself.

Japanese nationalism originally arose from the desire of Japanese leaders to defy the Western powers by emulating their imperial successes. Japanese rulers “sense[d] the wind of change and mend[ed] their ways;” they envisioned a fearful geopolitical future in which Japan would be left excluded from the benefits of modernity unless they too worked to modernize along Western lines. “Nationalism had begun in Japan as a reaction to Western pressure and manifested itself in the imitation of Western institutions and modes of behavior,” and Japan’s imperial planners came to believe that “the Western powers that joined together to keep Japan from its rightful place in the world” had to be countered and defeated. Beginning in the late 1800s, Japan sought to unify, modernize, and Westernize itself with the intent of fending off the imperial powers of North America and Europe. They proceeded to build their “institutions of empire” within “the larger context of Western superiority and threat.”

The Japanese eagerly took to their twentieth-century identity as imperialists with relish. In response to the threat of European imperialism in the late nineteenth century, “Japanese culture was imbued with the features of a colonial and imperial power,” and every subject of the emperor was “expected to provide support for an imperialist state.” European experts were courted to help facilitate Japan’s naval expansion program, “key institutions such as the police and the military were designed to enhance the power of the Japanese state and allow it to emulate European colonial expansion,” and Japanese territorial expansion into Manchuria, mainland China, Korea, and Taiwan proceeded apace in the opening decades of the 1900s. What followed is a commonly-understood narrative: the Japanese alignment with the Axis alliance in World War II as a direct result of Japan’s imperial ambitions and quest for regional hegemony. Not until their catastrophic defeat in 1945 would the Japanese surrender their dreams of empire. Even then, it can be argued that their impressive economic recovery and aggressive capitalistic resurgence during the Cold War and beyond was heavily influenced by the self-aggrandizing cultural attitudes first established during the imperial era.

It has long been an acknowledged fact that Japan’s vast potential as a political and economic power in East Asia continues to be one of the chief characteristics of that region’s international power structure. During the Cold War, Japan reinvented itself as America’s close ally and modeled its postwar society after the U.S. As long as the Soviet Union existed in the international system as the communist enemy of the capitalistic United States, it was very easy for American and Japanese policymakers to view the island nation as the Asian bulwark of the Free World; Japan and its people filled that role quite capably and demonstrated through miraculous economic successes what capitalism could do when unleashed in a truly democratized nation-state. This great economic prosperity was, in large part, due to the patronage of the American-dominated international power system. After the Cold War, the Soviet Union and communism ceased to act as compelling adversaries, and serious questions arose concerning Japan’s new place in the world order.

With regards to capitalism and social democracy in the post-Cold War era, many Japanese saw very little need to change their formula for success, but in rising to the challenges of modernity, Japan will face crises in leadership and national willpower. Today, many Japanese citizens understand the seemingly limitless potential of their country while also appreciating the limits of their political leadership. In an interview with the author, a native-born Japanese woman named Junko expressed that she would like to see her country take on a more proactive role in the world’s affairs, but she definitely doubts Japan’s ability to do so because “the Japanese government can’t say what they want or feel because Japan does not have a strong leader.” Junko’s frustrations appear to be validated by recent developments. Today, many leaders in and out of the country are calling for Japan to take on a greater leadership role in world affairs, but the Japanese government consistently ignores or passes on opportunities to fill that role. Additionally, many analysts remain skeptical of Japanese leadership on the international stage because Japan rarely convinces other countries that its actions are motivated by anything other than its own economic well-being. There are serious doubts that the Japanese government will ever be able to successfully employ the elements of international leadership: unilateral decision-making, initiative, material power, clearly-stated goals and values, and an ability to respond rapidly to international political emergencies. Japan is unlikely to become an international leader because its consensus-oriented government structure works against action that is bold and decisive. Japan’s best strategy is to continue on as a US partner and ally, allowing the Americans to lead out.

Nationalism in Korea arose from a combination of historically-timed contingencies and contentions that helped shape the modern iterations of North and South Korean nationalisms. Conflicts with foreign interlopers have been especially important in the evolution of Korean nationalisms. This is because, as one scholar noted, “A dominant strand of Korean identity consists of a ‘master narrative’ depicting the Korean experience as ‘one of almost incessant foreign incursions.’” At least since the 1905 Japan–Korea Protectorate Treaty, “for early Korean nationalists, what seemed most crucial…was to…fight encroaching imperialism…they saw the greatest threat to their country coming from their ‘yellow’ neighbor, Japan, and not from the ‘white’ West.” In this way, Koreans initially rejected imperialism as a threat to their ethnic identity. However, this would change for some Koreans once the Japanese incorporated them into their empire.

During their occupation of Korea, the Japanese racially classified Koreans as inferior beings to justify the need for Japan to introduce and maintain an allegedly enlightened and civilizing colonial government over the conquered people. This use of colonial racism and a militarized bureaucracy helped shape Korean nationalist thought, which has always had a close relationship with homegrown Korean anti-colonialism. In the early decades of the 1900s, many Koreans realized that imperial aggression was not limited to the Western powers; countries like China and especially Japan presented imperial threats as well. In a world saturated with imperialist theories of international relations inspired by social Darwinist thought, Koreans chose the nation and nationalism for their shared identity. Curiously, while some Koreans ultimately used nationalism to denounce imperialism, others chose to mix their nationalism with the authoritarian legacy left behind by the Japanese.

With liberation from Japan at the conclusion of World War II, conflict arose with the introduction into Korea of the Cold War rivalries between the United States and the Soviet Union. For Koreans, these ideological rivalries hearkened back to their own experiences with Japanese imperialism. Korean nationalists had always had ambiguous understandings of both communism and colonialism. For some, Japanese colonialists were allies in the fight against communism’s threat to Korean culture and national unity. On the other hand, many Korean nationalists saw communism as a great way to oppose the fascism of occupying Japanese forces. These unique and shifting ideological cleavages would continue into the North-South division of the country during the Korean War of the early 1950s, but one fact remains clear: for both communistic nationalists living in North Korea and right-wing nationalists living in South Korea, ethnic nationalism was a central feature of their respective ideologies. Both North and South Korea used nationalism in their politics and appropriated transnational forces for nationalist agendas. The North Koreans used anti-imperialism to justify their nationalism; the South Koreans, on the other hand, used anti-communism to do the same. After 1945, the socialism that took root in North Korea was “more in line with fervent nationalism than with the pure transnational vision of international socialism as imagined by Karl Marx.” For North Korean communists like Kim Il Sung, communism was a convenient tool for furthering nationalistic ends. In South Korea, the government used ethnic nationalism to legitimate its rule, push for national reunification, modernize the country, and integrate South Korea into the world capitalist system. “By establishing their respective political bases for building a new Korea,” North and South Korea’s leaders “contended that they alone must represent the entire Korean nation. They branded each other as ‘national traitors’…Both considered territorial division to be temporary and unnatural.”

In both North and South Korea today, Koreans have an exceptionally well-distinguished sense of ethnic national unity. Modern Koreans tend to view their nation through a highly exclusive racial lens that emphasizes collectivism and in-group unity; this ethnic nationalism is a cultural construct of historical processes of social and political significance. It is important to realize that these processes demonstrate the ambiguity of Korean perceptions of imperialism. With the opening of the twentieth century and the imposition of Japanese colonial rule, many Koreans on both sides of the 38^th parallel initially rejected imperialism. However, as the century wore on and the Korean nation was split, North Koreans continued to reject imperialism in the name of nationalistic communism. Meanwhile, South Koreans used nationalism to maintain the imperial structures of state left in place by their former Japanese overlords, and until the late 1980s, South Korean governments and politics were increasingly prone to authoritarian characteristics reminiscent of 1930s Japan.

In the modern world of the two Koreas, the standoff continues between nationalistic communists in the North and nationalistic authoritarians in the South. The North Korean regime has proven remarkably resilient and has survived the death of its supreme leaders, drought, famine, and other economic hardships. The resilience of the Kim regime most likely derives from the mystical and nationalistic hold that the family’s personality cult holds over their people, whom they refer to as their “children.” While North Korea’s “self-sufficiency” doctrine and status as a “hermit kingdom” has allowed the ruling regime to survive all kinds of difficulties, it has also isolated the country from world markets and international investment and economic development. In this way, many of North Korea’s most challenging problems are self-inflicted wounds. In South Korea, the regimes of both Rhee Synman and Park Chung Hee, the first two leaders of independent South Korea, used ethnic nationalism to legitimate their rule, push for national reunification, modernize the country, and integrate South Korea into the world capitalist system. After 1945, South Korea continued ethnic nationalism as official policy and used it to justify its own brand of Japanese-influenced authoritarianism. “It was no historical coincidence that political leaders of both Koreas exploited organic, collectivist notions of nation to legitimize their respective authoritarian politics.” The legacy of Japanese rule and the centralized bureaucratic state it left behind passed on many of imperialism’s ideological tenets and practices; the North and South Koreans simply chose to engage with imperialism in slightly different ways.

In the immediate future, prospects for Korean reunification appear to be quite dim given the intransigence of both the North and South Korean regimes. Both the North and South continue to acknowledge their own respective rights to rule over the entire worldwide Korean ethnic community, a racial group that very few Koreans consider to be divided despite the border tensions along the 38^th parallel. Today, with the Korean conflict remaining as volatile as ever, nationalism is “a key resource in the politics of postwar Korea… despite contrasting political ideologies and incorporation into competing world systems (communist and capitalist).” In contemporary North and South Korea, the conflicting legacies of nationalism, imperialism, and modernity still play out in the political drama of the Korean War, a conflict many still consider to be technically ongoing.

North Koreans were not the only East Asian ethnic group to reject imperialism by embracing communism. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the earliest leaders of communist China expressed profound anxiety concerning their country’s inability to defend itself from foreign influences and intrusions, and the adoption of nationalism by Chinese communists became “a major factor in their success in defeating [Western and Japanese] imperialism.” Mao Zedong, the leader of the Chinese communist revolutionary movement, was greatly concerned about “China’s ability to resist foreign encroachments in the critical early decades of the twentieth century.” Expelling Western and Japanese imperial influences from mainland China would become a twentieth-century obsession for Mao and his communist successors.

China’s evolution into a modern state that uses nationalism to pursue its foreign policy goals was born of the Chinese drive to modernize their country and military in response to Western (and later, Japanese) aggressions. These aggressions intended to support “colonial and other economic objectives, which paid scant attention to supposed principles of [Chinese] sovereignty.” Beginning with the Opium Wars in the 1840s and lasting through the 1940s, China experienced a Century of National Humiliation in which foreign powers dominated and subjugated vast sections of Chinese territory and manipulated Chinese societal development. However, rather than embracing imperialism according to the Japanese example, the Chinese communists deployed their ideology in a wholesale rejection of imperialism as a viable model for international power relations. After all, “Marxism-Leninism was a thought system that promised to empower those who were not of the West to resist those who were.” After eventually seizing all of mainland China for themselves in 1949, the Chinese communists imposed their own version of nationalistic Marxism-Leninism on the rest of the country; the communist dictatorship endures in China to this very day.

The ruling elites of China’s communist party have proven fearful of their own people’s understanding of nationalism as a tool for mobilizing popular political sentiment. These leaders often employ a version of nationalism underpinned by authoritarian statism and the centralization of political authority into the hands of the party elite. According to the model, this is necessary to ensure the survival of China’s national security and sovereignty. “At present, the dominant Chinese narrative is one of defensiveness and insecurity with regards to Japan and the West,” and this narrative “emphasizes China’s weakness, humiliations from the past, and eagerness to reclaim the country’s ‘rightful place in the world.’” This rising tide of Chinese nationalism has become a dominant feature of the modern geopolitical landscape, especially since the opening of China to Western notions of the free market during the 1980s.

China’s communist leaders often deploy a brand of “Confucian” nationalism in their rhetoric; this Chinese nationalism is allegedly harmonious, peaceful, and morally and culturally superior to the ideals set forth by the otherwise exploitative and imperialistic West. This increasingly high-minded approach to China’s place in the international order on the part of communist party leadership has, in recent years, become a cause of great concern among analysts in the West. As one expert noted, “the rise of nationalism in the People’s Republic of China” is one of the most important events in the twentieth century’s history of international relations. “This new nationalism coincides with China’s rapid economic growth, an increase in military budget, military modernization, growing anti-West sentiment, and assertiveness in its foreign behavior.” Although a new cold war between China and the West is unlikely given the unprecedented levels of economic interdependence that exist between them, the fact remains that China’s ultimate geostrategic intentions are unclear to many in the Western world, and this uncertainty is capable of breeding mistrust on both sides.

Despite communist China’s historical aversion to Western influences, there are signs that forward-thinking segments of Chinese society are beginning to change their minds about what it means to be truly modern. The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989—in which college students in Beijing demonstrated for democracy, greater accountability from the state, freedom of the press, and freedom of speech in the context of China’s rapidly-developing market economy—stand among the more notable pieces of evidence proving that many Chinse citizens are ready for their country to take a more cosmopolitan approach to politics-as-usual. Unfortunately, the ruling communist party elites have, thus far, quickly crushed any such impulses towards Western idealism primarily because they fear a repeat in their country of what happened to the Soviet Union in 1991. Consequently, “the Chinese political class…has been able to exploit the mystique of patriotism” in the service of communist-sponsored statism. This statism stifles modernization because the political power of state nationalism and modernization “have been essentially antagonistic forces.”

Mainland China continues to believe “that the only real revolution was the one in 1949,” and while there are many different iterations of Chinese nationalism, the state-centric viewpoint remains dominant over other allegedly illegitimate revolutions like that represented by events in Tiananmen Square in 1989. As long as China’s authoritarian rulers continue to insist on rejecting—or, at the very least, discounting and undermining—the current Western- and US-dominated world order, it is unlikely that China will ever realize its full potential. At the same time, Chinese citizens yearning for liberal reforms will continue to chafe under the restrictions of a state-sponsored nationalism underpinned by centralized decision-making. Still, some have come to the conclusion that as “the children of the Cultural Revolution…come into power and money,” it is possible that they will seek revenge for “the real and imagined slights that they and their nation have suffered in the past.” It remains to be seen which legacy—that of the Opium Wars or Tiananmen Square—will inspire the future political direction of China.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese were all forced by the circumstances of an increasingly globalized and interconnected world to respond to Western incursions into their respective national affairs. At the start of the Meiji Period and on into its imperial era, Japan used nationalism as a reason to embrace imperialism as a model for consolidating its power on the international stage. Japanese leaders did this with the goal of beating the Americans and Europeans at their own game, and they eagerly embraced Western values to turn their country into an East Asian imperial giant, a geopolitical force to be reckoned with by even the most advanced of the Western powers. The yoke of Japanese imperialism molded the process of modernization in Korea in two separate and distinct directions: one that used nationalism to decry imperialism and one that used nationalism to maintain an authoritarian government heavily influenced by imperial Japanese models. In the northern half of Korea, communists embraced nationalism to oppose not only the colonial policies of the occupying Japanese, but also the post-World War II government in South Korea. As for the South Koreans themselves, they also used nationalism, but to achieve a slightly different goal: to maintain their own authoritarian regime that, while nominally aligned with the capitalist and democratic West, actually maintained many of the imperial trappings of the old Japanese colonial government. Western and Japanese imperialism also influence the modernization of China. From the earliest days of Mao Zedong’s crusade to come to power in the mainland, the communist leaders of the People’s Republic of China completely rejected imperialism as a viable model for international power relations; instead, they opted for their country to travel the road of communism in order to enter the modern age. In reaction to the historical defeats and humiliations “suffered at the hands of Western imperialism,” China’s leaders “aimed to achieve an independent national sovereignty, to protect national self-respect, and enhance China’s international position.”

East Asian responses to Western imperialism varied in the three countries under consideration in this study, but all were couched in the rhetoric and theory of nationalism, and all figured prominently in the stories of modernization in Japan, North and South Korea, and China. It is not unreasonable to say that East Asian modernization has, in large part, unfolded according to the interplay between the forces of imperialism and nationalism, the ideology and rhetoric deployed by East Asians to confront, embrace, and engage with those two historical forces, and the real-life practicality and applicability of imperialism and nationalism to the individual situations of Japan, Korea, and China. Daniel Bell was correct: nationalism can be used to promote a wide variety of goals. In East Asia, it is to be hoped that nationalism, in any and all of its iterations, will only ever be used to craft a more peaceful and prosperous future, one in which the needs of all individuals, communities, and nations will be considered and respected.

--Christopher Peterson, July 16th, 2018