Finding Asia and the Concrete Universal:
A Review Essay

How Asia Found Herself, by Nile Green
Asia after Europe, by Sugata Bose

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Reviewed by Viren Murthy
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright September, 2024)

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In the past few years, there has been a renewed interest in the category of Asia. This might seem strange because, at least since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism and, more recently, Martin E. Lewis and Kären Wiggen’s The Myth of Continents,[1] “Asia” has been easy to deconstruct. Harry Harootunian puts the problem succinctly in his critique of area studies:

It has been one of the enduring ironies of the study of Asia that Asia itself, as an object, simply doesn’t exist. While geographers and mapmakers once confidently named a sector on maps, noting even its coordinates as if in fact it existed, this enmapped place has never been more than a simulacrum of a substanceless something. It refers only to itself in the expectation that something out there will eventually correspond to it or be made to align with it. The cartographers’ art has been produced by an age-old fantasy and then reinforced by requirements of World War II. Nonetheless we have in this country professional organizations devoted to the study of this simulacrum, and educational institutions pledged to disseminating knowledge of it, even as the object vanishes before our eyes once we seek to apprehend it.[2]

Given the above situation, one might ask why we not only have professional organizations devoted to this “non-existent” place but, more interestingly, in the past few years we have a growing interest in the study of “Asian” scholars own understanding of this continent. Extending Harootunian’s argument, we might say that Asia does not “exist” to the extent that we think of its existence as separate from political movements.[3] In other words, Asia is a substanceless “object” to the extent that we separate its substance from a form of subjectivity that involves resistance to imperialism. Two books published in the past two years tackle the problem of Asia as involving issues of awareness, knowledge, and political subjectivity. Nile Green’s How Asia Found Herself exemplifies a more empirical approach, which conceives of Asia as a possible object of knowledge. His book focuses on knowing the other, through an impressive study of writings about Asian nations in various languages and is one of the most erudite books on inter-Asian dialogue. As he examines how scholars in Asia acquired knowledge about one another, Asia as an object vanishes before our eyes. On this view, as scholars study it, Asia shows itself to be less than the sum of its parts. Sugata Bose’s Asia after Europe seeks to revive the spirit of nineteenth and twentieth century pan-Asianists and consequently describes the emergence of Asia as a political subjectivity that resists Western imperialism and attempts to posit an alternative. In short, he shifts the emphasis from Asia as object of knowledge to Asia as subject of action. These works together express a healthy new trend in the study of imagining Asia—namely, to examine South Asian and Western Asian perceptions of places in East and Southeast Asia. Each of these books adopts a different methodology and reading them together allows us to highlight some common themes and issues, including problems of capitalism and revolution in relation to the problem of Asia. Both books alert us to the problems entailed by a postrevolutionary ideology that rejects larger master narratives. Without attention to larger narratives of freedom and revolution in history, the political subjectivity of Asia will either be indeterminate or be easily incorporated into current political trends, such as anti-communist liberalism.[4]

Asia, Intercultural Studies, and Self-Discovery

Both books overlap with Kuan-hsing Chen’s influential Asia as Method. Published about ten years after Harootunian’s essay, Chen’s book calls for “de-imperialism,” which entails breaking away from Eurocentrism or taking Euro-America as the default reference point. Without explicitly theorizing it, Chen intimates that Asia exists as part of a self-conscious political project. To raise such self-consciousness, Chen calls for Asian studies in Asia, which turns the reference point from Europe to regions within Asia. In Chen’s words:

The emerging phenomenon of Asian Studies in Asia suggests that the reintegration of Asia requires a different sort of knowledge production. This is necessary to generate a self-understanding in relation to neighboring spaces as well as the region as a whole, while at the same time removing the imperative to understand ourselves through the imperialist eye. Interestingly, with the rise of Asia, we have suddenly found that we have been doing Asian studies in our own way, without using that name. The absence of a name, in fact, indicates our own lack of consciousness about Asia.[5]

Chen foregrounds the problem of knowledge production or self-understanding and affirms that “Asian studies” has been around before it was self-conscious. From this perspective, Green’s book examines an earlier version of Asian studies and uncovers the origins of inter-Asian research. Green notes that he too is concerned with the problem of Asia coming to self-consciousness. Like Chen, Green writes of self-discovery. However, it is not always clear what the scope of the various selves being discovered are. For example, when examining South Asian intellectuals’ understanding of Japan or Buddhism, it is unclear whether, in their view, this constituted “Asia’s self-discovery” (13-14).

The introduction of Green’s book shows how, since the late nineteenth century, the concept of Asia came to be widely adopted by cultures that had different conceptions of geography. Green explains that, despite the title, his book is about what we would call, inter-Asian knowledge, rather than “Asia’s self-discovery.”

Having been adopted to varying degrees into the continent’s own languages, by 1900 this led to unintended consequences when “Asia” became a conceptual tool for anticolonial activism that aptly reached all the way from Tokyo to Istanbul. But ironically such declarations of unity were the least challenging part of Asia’s self-discovery…. [w]e will see just how difficult it was to fill the vast singular space on the map with accurate cultural knowledge, whether with or without European input. (13-4)

Green’s above remarks outline the approach of the book and also set the book apart from Bose’s and other more recent approaches to studying Asia, since Green highlights less anti-colonialism and more how Asian nations or regions came to understand one another. In the words of the subtitle, the book describes “A Story of Intercultural Understanding.” The book consists of six substantial chapters. Chapter 1, “Learning Through the Polemics of the Bay of Bengal,” deals with religious debates between Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists around the Bay of Bengal maritime public sphere during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The chapter also develops a theme that is key throughout the rest of the book—namely, how empire facilitated many of the intercultural exchanges in Asia. Green states a major insight of this chapter as follows: “As the expansion of European empire integrated different regions of Asia, it led to competing efforts to project the religion of the self over the belief systems of various other communities” (81). This theme carries over into the second chapter, “The Muslim Discovery of Buddhism,” which examines the missionary activities of Abd al-Khaliq, a North Indian Muslim, who published a book in Urdu describing the beliefs of the Burmese people. This chapter also focuses on Abd Al-Khaliq’s disputations with disenfranchised followers of the Buddha. As with many of the chapters, far from stressing Asian unity, the various protagonists of Green’s book highlight the tensions between various religions and philosophies in Asia. Chapter 3, “Lessons from Japan between India and Iran,” shifts our focus from Burma to Japan. Green notes that although it is well-known that the US naval expedition led by Commodore Mathew Perry in 1854 opened Japan up to the West, people often overlook that, after Perry’s visit, Asian nations also had increased interactions with Japan. The chapter shows how “Japan’s rapid reinvention from bullied Asian archipelago to industrialized imperial power fostered new Japanophilic interests that reached from Istanbul to Calcutta” (173). After Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War, numerous intellectuals and officials became greatly interested in various aspects of Japan’s culture and politics. Chapter 4, “The Constraints of a Muslim Japanology,” continues this theme of how people in the Muslim world learned about and at times misrecognized Japan. The chapter describes how an Indian named Muhammad Fazli went to Japan in 1930 and marked the start of a decade of intercultural knowledge that spread through both European and Japanese empires (183). The constraints mentioned in this chapter, including the lack of sufficient educational infrastructures, language sources, and indigenous informants, mark general limits to intercultural dialogue during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. The final two chapters of the book shift the focus from Japan to China. Chapter 5, “Interpreting China across Maritime Asia,” brings us back to the nineteenth century and examines texts about the Chinese language and also touches on Bengali translations of Chinese texts, including the Analects. As its title suggests, this chapter shows that, rather than the Silk Road, maritime networks created the conditions for intercultural exchange between China, India, and Central Asia. Some of the constraints governing such exchange were similar to those discussed above—namely, the lack of the ability to read Chinese sources and the absence of indigenous informants (262). Chapter 6, “China in the Mirrors of Buddhism and Islam,” returns to the twentieth century and discusses various intellectual exchanges between Chinese and Indian scholars. This chapter deals with certain well-known intellectuals such as Rabindranath Tagore, but also less famous writers, such as the Chinese Muslim Hai Weiliang, who travelled from Hunan to Calcutta and wrote a book about Chinese Muslims in Urdu. The chapter also incorporates Africa into this story as it shows that several Chinese, including Hai, went to Cairo to study Islam (266). Green underscores, in this chapter, a common theme of the book: how inter-Asian communication was often inextricably connected to conflicting views on religion and how various scholars propagated Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, Daoism, or Confucianism and at times combined these religions in unique and polemical ways.

From this brief description, we can see the impressive research in numerous Asian languages that pervades various chapters of the book. The conclusion attempts to bring some of these points together, but perhaps because of the amount of information presented in the book, the points that bring the book together are not always clear. In the end, the self-discovery of Asia ends up dealing with an object that vanishes before our eyes. Green writes, “By treating the term ‘Asia’ with skepticism, the previous chapters have sketched a more complex pattern of intercultural understanding than the smooth but vague lines inscribed by the lofty pledges of unity. This responds to the warning by the historian of China Rebecca Karl about “the historical erasures on which reifications of ahistorical ‘Asian-ness’ rely” (318). In short, the self-knowledge of Asia is not really of Asia, but of specific people within what we call Asia. Green writes: “Rather than take Asian unity, or even, ‘Asianness,’ for granted as a starting position, we have instead examined how specific people from different corners of the space marked ‘Asia’ on modern maps came into direct or vicarious contact and then tried to understand one another” (319). One wonders whether the book could have been entitled, “how Asia found her non-self.” Green points out: “In sum, people from the different parts of the map marked ‘Asia’ often knew less about each other’s culture than has long been assumed” (321). While such points are unquestionable, the text does not say much about why such misrecognition took place. At an empirical level, as we have seen, Green explains the misrecognition by referring to lack of sufficient texts, language skills, and informants. This is of course a problem throughout the periods that the book describes. But such an approach avoids questions about the forces and structural causes behind the misrecognition in various periods.

Along with the general category of Asia, Green rejects most other overarching structural explanations that could have given more purpose to his various stories about intercultural exchange. Because the book focuses primarily on numerous individual cases, it is difficult to make sense of larger totalities that might structure individual acts of knowing. For example, Green explains: “we will see how knowledge about other regions of Asia was gathered for a range of distinct purposes. For this reason, the notion of Asia’s self-discovery carries a deliberately dual meaning, suggesting that at the same time that heightened inter-Asian interactions enabled deeper appreciations of the other, they also led to more strident projections of the self” (9). Although parts of the book speak of “the illusion of Asia” (10), the above passage suggests that “Asia’s self-discovery” occurs when two peoples or collective selves we now categorize as being in Asia understand each other. This could be confusing because the book deals with numerous researchers who probably did not themselves identify with Asia, such as Hai Weiliang, and others who did, such as Okakura Tenshin. Are both cases part of Asia’s dual self-discovery? Is Asia’s self-discovery merely the sum of the discovery of various Asian nation’s knowledge of one another, whether or not the knowers themselves thought of their objects of knowledge as Asian? If so, what unites these nations and acts of knowing besides being in the same enmapped space, which turns out to be substanceless?

Green dismisses the category of capitalism quickly as not particularly useful with respect to providing unity to the story of Asia’s self-discovery:

As a paradigm of the merchant-turned-public informant, Marco Polo is as false a friend as the Silk Road, setting up expectations that are rarely borne out by the historical record.

So, while the following chapters will lead us along what were some of the busiest trade routes on the planet from the nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, we will see that the spread of intercultural understanding cannot be collapsed into the story of capitalism, whether we cast the latter as the hero or the villain. Knowledge follows more tortuous routes and challenging pathways than commodities. On the balance sheet of history, neither the volume of trade nor the movement of traders has automatically generated corresponding intellectual profits; commercial connection does not automatically lead to cultural comprehension. (19)

The above point is persuasive to the extent that the “story of capitalism” merely implies trade. But capitalism encompasses much more than merely trade, which existed between pre-capitalist societies, along the Silk Road. Marco Polo was a trader, but did not live in what we would call a capitalist society. In addition to trade, capitalism involves larger structures, including historically specific forms of the state, culture, and imperialism. From this perspective, the historical expansion of capitalism formed the groundwork for many of the interactions we see in the book, especially once we move into the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Without using the term capitalism, Green effectively describes how the forcible opening of Japan allowed it join “the maritime trade networks at large” (133). Obviously, this did not in itself produce knowledge about Japan. However numerous authors from Asia began to focus on Japan, precisely because it became a capitalist military power.

Moreover, some of Green’s protagonists sought knowledge about Asia precisely to combat capitalism. The book begins with Okakura Tenshin, who provides a good example. He is well-known for saying that “Asia is one,” but people often forget that his characterization of the opposition between Asia and the West was intimately connected to his ideas on the contrast between capitalism and socialism.[6] The following passage from a text written in the early twentieth century is a case in point:

In spite of the vaunted freedom of the West, true individuality is destroyed in the competition for wealth, and happiness and contentment are sacrificed to an incessant craving for more. The West takes pride in its emancipation from mediaeval superstition, but what of that idolatrous worship of wealth that has taken its place? What sufferings and discontent lie hidden behind the gorgeous mask of the present? The voice of socialism is a wail over the agonies of Western economies—the tragedy of Capital and Labor.[7]

In this case, the problem of capitalism is not merely about trade, but about a larger system that includes forms of politics, culture, and freedom/unfreedom. The goal of resisting or overcoming both colonialism and capitalism makes Okakura’s concept of Asia different from many of the protagonists in this book. Green seems to overlook this difference in passages such as the following:

Though Okakura and Tagore became icons of Asian solidarity, the grittier groundwork of inter-Asian understanding was left to a series of lesser-known and often entirely forgotten figures from India, China, Iran, Afghanistan, Japan, Burma, and the Ottoman Empire, who travelled and translated, interpreted and misinterpreted, in their attempts to decipher the different societies and cultures of other regions of Asia. (6)

The above passage suggests that Okakura and Tagore were building on the groundwork of these earlier scholars, many of whom were writing in languages that Okakura could not read. However, it appears that the two projects are different. Indeed, it is unclear whether one can unify the various writers in the book under one project, since they learned about specific regions in Asia for different reasons, often related to religious ideologies. The idea of Asia was central to some of the writers and marginal to others. Okakura and Tagore were interested in religion, but this was part of a larger project related to providing an alternative to the West. Tagore, Okakura Tenshin, and Benoy Kumar Sarkar, despite their differences, were interested in unifying Asia to resist Western imperialism and, with different degrees of self-consciousness, capitalism. Green’s book presents readers with a challenging question: can we connect the pan-Asianist project of Okakura to the larger problem of inter-Asian cultural exchange? Today, Green’s book is especially important because the hostilities among nations in Asia, and, consequently, the lack of unity, is partially connected to mutual misrecognition.[8] From this perspective, at least as important as the study of Confucius, the Koran, or the Gita, are the legacies of previous visions of Asian solidarity against Western imperialism. This is precisely the subject of Sugata Bose’s Asia After Europe.

Asia, Post-Europe and Coloring Cosmopolitanism

Unlike Green’s, Bose’s book focuses almost exclusively on the political dimension of Asian unity and consequently the two books complement one another. Its chapters are an impassioned defense of pan-Asianism, and his book promises to outline a new universalism coming out of Asia. Like Green, Bose follows many South Asian intellectuals who travelled to China and Japan but not primarily in search of knowledge of classical texts; rather, they hoped to make alliances to resist imperialism. The book is chronologically organized and consists of seven chapters. The first chapter, “The Decline and Fall of a Continent,” outlines how Euro-America surpassed Asia economically and politically. This chapter intervenes in key debates in world history, such as notion of the “Great Divergence” and emphasizes the importance of colonialism. “The great divergence cannot be explained merely by reference to proximity of fossil fuel energy resources or the New World windfall for Europe. A connective history reveals the critical importance of the colonial conquest of India and the opium trail that led from India to China.” (22) People become self-conscious of Asia in relation to this experience of colonization and imperialism. As in Green’s book, capitalism lies in the background of Bose’s analysis but is not explicitly theorized. Chapters 2 and 4, “Intimations of an Asian Universalism” and “Multiple, Competing and Overlapping Universalisms,” respectively, each deal with how Asian intellectuals conjured new universalisms that went beyond those of their Western counterparts. Chapter 3, “In Search of Young Asia,” analyzes the works of the Bengali sociologist, Benoy Kumar Sarkar, who travelled to Japan in 1915 and met prominent intellectuals, including the well-known poet, Yone Noguchi. Bose takes issue with Green’s characterization of Sarkar as a Hindu nationalist. I am not qualified to enter this debate, but Bose contributes to the existing literature on Sarkar by examining his Bengali writings, such as his memoir, Nabin Asiar Janmadata Japan (The birth giver of young Asia, Japan). Chapter 5, “Asia in the Great Depression,” delves into inter-Asian communication from the time of the Great Depression to the 1940s. Chapter 6, “War, Famine and Freedom in Asia,” describes interactions between Asian scholars and politicians during the 1940s, which was precisely a period of war and famine. After underscoring that the Bengal famine of 1943 and the Henan famine of 1942 were both political, Bose analyzes the role of intellectuals, such as Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose (the author’s great uncle) in facilitating Asian unity during this period. Chapter 7, “Asian Solidarity and Animosity in the Postcolonial Era,” brings us closer to the present by examining how people revived the idea of Asian unity during the postwar period. Together the various chapters provide a vivid portrait of how numerous Indian and especially Bengali intellectuals interacted with their Chinese and Japanese counterparts throughout the long twentieth century. The book makes use of a wide range of sources, including memoirs written in Bengali, to provide concrete narratives of intercultural experience among Asian intellectuals and artists.[9] Given the breadth of this book, I do not delve into specific details but focus on a key promise of the book—namely, the effort to construct a new Asian universality based on what Bose calls “colorful cosmopolitanism” (3). We saw how Green’s book eventually deconstructs the universal and the concept of Asia disintegrates into different acts of knowledge and translation. Bose’s book tries to go beyond this by reconciling universality and particularity through the category of Asia. This is precisely the meaning of his category of “colorful cosmopolitanism.”

In the first pages, Bose contends that Asian unity can go beyond the opposition between an abstract universality or a “colorless cosmopolitanism” and an irredentist nationalism, which sees the past as unchanging. In this way, Bose contends that pan-Asianists sought to rethink the universal rather than lapse into a particularist identity politics. He writes:

Their ambition included retaking the idea of Asia from European hegemony as a step toward influencing a global future. Their cosmopolitanism did not emanate from the stratosphere of abstract reason. It sprang from knowledge and learning in a variety of Asian languages. Asian universalism became one strand of looking beyond the nation in an age of anti-colonial nationalism, alongside Islamic and Buddhist universalism as well as Leninist and Wilsonian internationalism. It was an expression of a cosmopolitan aspiration that leavened patriotic zeal. (2)

This beautifully written passage highlights how pan-Asianists went beyond “abstract reason.”[10] However, one wonders how one is to understand the opposition between abstract reason and learning in a variety of Asian languages. The statement assumes that somehow Asian languages avoid the opposition between abstract and concrete. This opens the question of whether abstract reason is something limited to learning in Western languages. We find little in the book to substantiate the link between Asian languages or even Asian thought and something like a concrete universal. This assumption emerges again in a critique of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe, which is worth citing in full because it expresses the above rejection of Europe clearly:

My approach to provincializing Europe does not require canonical European theorists as pegs on which to hang a history of Asian negotiations with global capitalism and the nation-state as key signs of modernity. Asia After Europe presents a historical narrative that shows how a continental identity of, by and for Asians was and can still be fashioned in myriad ways based on exchanges among people belonging to multiple races and religions. These interactions span a whole spectrum of intimacies, affective bonds, solidarities, and alliances transcending boundaries of the nation. I am offering here an interpretation of the history of Asia not only after the European colonial presence but also a conceptual history of universalisms and cosmopolitanism that struggles to leave behind and move beyond European definitions of reason, national identity, and federation. (7)

The meaning of this passage, and specifically the term “canonical European theorists,” becomes clear in a footnote, which states: “[Dipesh] Chakrabarty organizes his text around the tension between Marx’s universal narrative on capital and Heidegger’s hermeneutic discourse on community” (228, fn. 20). But one wonders whether Chakrabarty’s opposition between History 1 and History 2 maps onto global capitalism and the nation-state.  In his well-known book Provincializing Europe, Chakrabarty invokes two concepts of history both to grasp the Marxist analysis of capitalist domination and to articulate that which escapes the logic of capital.[11] He calls History 1 “the universal and necessary history we associate with capital.”[12] He then associates the nation-state with this narrative of capital and the Enlightenment narrative of history more generally. From this perspective, capitalism, the nation-state, and the Enlightenment narrative of history are part of one totality. For example, he draws on E. P. Thompson to point out that nationalism would not have come to the developing world without time-discipline.[13]  In this way, he combines capitalism, nationalism, and a certain vision of time.  His goal is to rescue aspects of experience from the above-mentioned totality.  History 2 represents those spaces of experience that cannot completely be subsumed by History 1 or capital, modernity, and the nation-state. Bose gestures at something like History 2 in the above passage when he speaks of the “whole spectrum of intimacies, affective bonds, solidarities and alliances transcending the boundaries of the nation.” Unlike Chakrabarty, Bose sees such affective bonds as conducive to a specific political project: the new universality of pan-Asian anti-colonial resistance.[14]

We get a sense of universality in chapters 2 and 4, which directly deal with the topic. In chapter 2, Bose describes Okakura Tenshin in the following manner:

In an inversion of Hegel, Okakura sought to place Asia rather than Europe as the end of history. Assigning to Asia the ideals of “love for the Ultimate and Universal,” he was constructing a utopia at a time when Europe bore the marks of the anti-idealist reality of the present. Okakura’s Asia, therefore, came to function as “a cipher for utopian discontent with the present, therefore joining a globalized fin-de-siècle discourse beyond the particularism of the East/West binary.” (43-4)[15]

This would have been an excellent opportunity to explain how Asian universality goes beyond the abstract universality of the West; however, in the above passage, the West appears to be associated with materiality and opposed to idealism. Europe represented the anti-idealist reality of the present because it was associated with war and imperialism. From this perspective, one could perhaps conclude that the German idealist tradition was going against European particularity. Particularity seems to be understood as limited to the pursuit of individual/national/material interests.

Chapter 4 comes closer to clarifying this new Asian universality, when Bose discusses Tagore. Taking issue with Gal Gvili’s emphasis on Tagore’s spiritualism,[16] Bose underscores his poetry and cites the following passage where Tagore explains to a Chinese audience the importance of his poems and the Bengali language:

I am gratified to hear from you that you are convinced that I am a poet because I have a beautiful grey beard. But my vanity will remain unsatisfied until you know me in my own voice that is in my poems. I hope that this may make you want to learn Bengali some day. I hope yonder rival poet, taking notes opposite me, will consider this seriously. I will admit him into my class and help him so far as I am able.[17] (101)

Although this passage does not discuss universality directly, Bose seems to suggest that Tagore’s poetry affirms an affective dimension that goes beyond spiritualism and could become a concrete universality. The materiality of language and the sound of Bengali poetry beyond various translations here represent affectivity, which color the universal conveyed through meaning. But this concrete universal, which could become a colorful cosmopolitanism, is still abstract to the extent that it is posited as an ideal against a reality that is separate from it. In short, Bose’s version of concrete universality remains abstract because it does not delve into the problem of realizing such an ideal or making it concrete.

Bose wrestles briefly with one way of making the ideals of anti-imperialist pan-Asianism concrete: the Chinese revolution. He criticizes the Chinese new leftist Wang Hui’s views on China and the revolution. “What Wang underplays is the extent to which the socialist utopia has fallen victim to the more authoritarian strands of nation-statism. The Beijing-based critic of Japanese ‘Greater East Asianism’ skirts around the dragon in the room—the role of a resurgent China in reimagining Asia” (218). There are two issues here: the authoritarian strands of nation-statism emerging from the Chinese vision of the socialist utopia and the potentially domineering role of a resurgent China in reimagining Asia or the possibility of Chinese imperialism. Numerous questions remain. For example, what does authoritarian mean and when did the socialist utopia in China fall into this form of government? Because Bose does not clarify such basic terms, his criticism of Wang Hui and of China appear to overlap with mainstream treatments of the Chinese revolution and of the communist movement more generally—namely, that they tend to be authoritarian to the extent that they curtail individual human rights. From this perspective, Bose’s use of the term overlaps with that of a recent New York Times article, which makes the following comment: “Mr. Xi has declared a ‘no limits’ relationship with Mr. Putin and pledged ‘unswerving’ support for North Korea — linking arms with two like-minded authoritarian countries to push back against what they regard as American bullying around the world.”[18] In the above passage, North Korea, China, and Russia are all considered authoritarian, but this political form is not directly connected to imperial endeavors. It would be possible for China or North Korea to be authoritarian without being expansive or globally hegemonic. The term authoritarian seems to be easily applied to those regimes that have some connection to communism and anti-American politics. From this perspective, a book that promotes Asian unity against Western imperialism should be especially sensitive to the uses and abuses of such terms, such as when “authoritarianism” is used to discredit communist movements, which, despite their faults, institutionally embodied an alternative to Western capitalist regimes.

Bose uses the term authoritarian to launch an attack on the Chinese revolution and by extension Indian Maoism:

The 1962 War had enabled the regime of Mao Zedong to retrieve a modicum of international prestige after the domestic catastrophe of the Great Leap Forward. The authoritarian party state seemed to have learned few lessons from that disaster as Mao proclaimed the Cultural Revolution in 1966. A perceptive Pakistani visitor, Hamid Jalal, could see that not all was well in China in the throes of this new tumult. A left-wing fringe on India’s political spectrum by contrast, was enthused by China’s chairman. This blinkered view of China hampered the prospect of a much broader Asian, and by now “third world” solidarity fomented by the Vietnamese war of resistance against the onslaught of the United States. (202)

The above passage suggests that the authoritarian nation-state is synonymous with the Chinese party-state, which converges with mainstream visions of China. Bose is correct to point out that Wang Hui underplays the problem of the party state and authoritarianism in the essay he cites. If authoritarianism refers to the nation-state monopolizing politics, Wang deals with this in other essays, especially in “Depoliticized Politics: From East to West.”[19] This essay is especially relevant in thinking about the connection between the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, and we cannot reduce these movements to different expressions of an authoritarian state. Wang underscores that the condition of unfreedom in China is a pervasive tendency in a global capitalist world, where the modern state precludes real political participation by the masses. People may elect officials, but they cannot make decisions about most of the conditions that govern their lives, especially concerning those that are delineated as economic or the laws of the market. Here Wang echoes a common criticism of the modern state and economy at least since Rousseau. Against this condition of political alienation, the Chinese revolution attempted various experiments to encourage political participation. Wang argues that the Cultural Revolution undermined many of the party structures because people voiced criticisms of their superiors through unofficial channels. One might argue that it was precisely because the party was ineffective that there were so many acts of violence. In the 1970s, Mao realized that this experiment had failed, and he helped re-establish the party-state and a more depoliticized politics. Wang explains:

The second characteristic of the depoliticization process has been to set economic reform at the center of all party work. Formally speaking, this has involved the substitution of “construction” for the former “two-line” goal of “revolution and construction.” These political choices— understandably—met with wide approval at the end of the Seventies, appearing as a response to the factional struggles and chaotic character of politics during the latter years of the Cultural Revolution. Yet, by this stage, the tension between party and politics that had characterized the early years of the Cultural Revolution had been thoroughly eliminated. The unification of politics and the state—the party-state system— diminished the earlier political culture.[20]

Although there were aspects of the Cultural Revolution that were tragic, it is misleading to argue that it was a result of failing to learn from the authoritarianism of the Great Leap; rather, the Cultural Revolution attacked some of the undemocratic elements that led to the famines. It was not just the Indian Maoists who found inspirations from such socialist experiments in China in the 1960s but leftists around Asia and beyond.[21] During the 1950s, pan-Asianists connected their goals to socialist revolutions, which combined particular struggles for social justice to world historical movements, thus coloring revolutionary cosmopolitanism.

The above issue of Chinese authoritarianism during the Maoist period is different from that of “the dragon in the room” today, which Wang does not sufficiently address in the essay that Bose cites. Indeed, Wang has not discussed the Belt-and-Road Initiative and other such policies in detail in most English language publications. However, he has made some suggestive remarks in Chinese language publications that speak directly to Bose’s fears. Wang argues that we should not be too quick to equate China’s foreign policy with “nationalist imperialism.” The following point might be relevant to Bose’s book and returns us to the problem of capitalism:

“One Belt One Road” is bound to be a long process of reforming the capitalist economic model, and it is necessarily a process of connecting historical civilizations and socialism. The reason for talking about historical civilization is that the four key concepts of this new plan—namely, roads, belts, corridors, and bridges—are the bonds of the trans-systemic social systems or historical civilizations of Asia. I say that this project must have socialist characteristics because if it cannot overcome the logic of capitalism’s control of this broad and complicated network, the plan will inevitably lead to failure and retaliation.[22]

The above passage brings us back to how pan-Asianism should be thought of as confronting capitalism and imperialism. Some might ask whether such a project still has meaning for us today. Green’s and Bose’s respective books suggests that at some level the struggle against imperialism continues among major figures in Asian studies. Green’s book does not delve into the intricacies of the political struggles around “Asian” identity but makes a major contribution by clearly outlining the details of inter-Asian cultural exchange. Bose’s book, by contrast, highlights the political goals of pan-Asianism but prematurely indicts the Chinese revolution using standard labels such as “authoritarianism.” His goal of concrete universality is extremely timely; however, such a goal cannot be fully realized without overcoming capitalism because the oppositions between abstract universality and concrete particularity are not merely products of Western ideology or the Enlightenment but embedded in structures and institutions that govern our lives today. Anti-imperialism is clearly desideratum in what is still an age of American empire; however, an anti-imperialism that does not have a larger political goal connected to global transformation risks being indeterminate and supporting existing forms of domination. It is precisely for this reason that pan-Asianism must continue to grapple with the legacy of revolutions that attempted to create a world beyond capitalist imperialism and thereby create a globally concrete universal.

Viren Murthy
University of Wisconsin–Madison

NOTES:

[1] Matine E. Lewis and Kären Wiggens, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

[2] Harry Harootunian, History’s Disquiet (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 25.

[3] This was the position of Takeuchi Yoshimi. For a discussion see, Viren Murthy, Pan-Asianism and the Legacy of the Chinese Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023), chapter 5.

[4] The Japanese example also makes clear that fascism is another alternative for pan-Asianism.

[5] Kuan-hsing Chen, Asia as Method: Towards De-imperialization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 2-3.

[6] For a further attempt to connect pan-Asianism with anti-capitalism see Viren Murthy, Pan-Asianism and the Legacy of the Chinese Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024).

[7] Okakura Tenshin, “The Awakening of Japan,” in Okakura Tenshin Collected English Writings (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1984), 215.

[8] This is complex topic, but one could begin to understand this misrecognition by examining media perceptions of China in various Asian nations. In many cases, such images are heavily mediated by US agencies, such as CNN.

[9] For example, chapter 7 begins by describing how Debabrata Biswas arrived in China in 1953 as part of a twenty-nine-member cultural delegation of the Indian Peace Committee that contained twenty-five renowned musicians and dancers including the famous sitar maestro Vilayat Khan. Tagore’s songs were a major part of such musical events (88-90).

[10] Yasser Nasser has recently pointed out that the concept of Asia, for pan-Asianists, must be abstract. See Yasser Nasser, “‘to defend the peace of Asia’ The Chinese Peace Committee and Chinese Visions of Asian History 1949-1960,” Cold War History (May 2023): 1-23. The essay does not deal with abstraction directly but shows how Asia had to go beyond any regional specificity and become associated with the idea of anti-imperialism.

[11] For a discussion of Chakrabarty’s theory in relation to Marxist critics see Viren Murthy, “Looking for Resistance in All the Wrong Places: Chibber, Chakrabarty and a Tale of Two Histories.” Critical Historical Studies 2, 1 (2015): 113-153.

[12] Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 63.

[13] Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 48. In the preceding chapter, he also notes that the dream of space free from Eurocentrism will continue as long as history is dominated by the nation-state because “these dreams are what the modern represses in order to be.” Ibid. 46.

[14] Chakrabarty might contend that by mobilizing History 2 for a political purpose, one does violence to it.

[15] Citing “Blowing up a Double Portrait in Black and White: The Concept of Asia in the Writings of Fukuzawa Yukichi and Okakura Tenshin.” positions: asia critique 15, 2 (2007), 345-368, 362.

[16] See Gal Gvili, “Pan-Asian Poetics: Tagore and the Inter-Personal May Fourth New Poetry.” Journal of Asian Studies 77, 1 (Feb. 2018): 181-203.

[17] Citing from Talks in China (Calcutta: Viswa Barati 1924), 23.

[18] David Pierson and Cho Sang-hun, “Russia and North Korea’s Defense Pact is a New Headache for China.” New York Times (June 21, 2024).

[19] Wang Hui, “Depoliticized Politics: From East to West,” in The End of the Revolution: China and the Limits of Modernity (London: Verso, 2009), 3-19.

[20] Ibid, 8.

[21] Bose misses opportunities to examine the ideals and experiences of Maoists in South Asia, many of them who also wrote in Bengali. See Yue Qiu, “Anti-colonial Translation Prior to Decoloniality: New China [naya cina] from the travelogue of Ali Nawaz in the 1960s” paper under review at History of the Present. Qiu is especially interested in placing Bengali and Bangladeshi Maoism in a global context, which provides an important supplement to Bose’s perspective.

[22] Wang Hui 汪辉, “Ershi shiji yichan yu yidai yilu” 二十世纪遗产与一带一路 (The legacy of the twentieth century and the Belt-Road Initiative). Wenhua zongheng (Feb. 2015), http://www.m4.cn/opinion/2015-02/1263367.shtml.

WORKS CITED:

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Chen, Kuan-hsing. Asia as Method: Towards De-imperialization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.

Gvili, Gal. “Pan-Asian Poetics: Tagore and the Inter-Personal May Fourth New Poetry.” Journal of Asian Studies 77, no. 1 (Feb. 2018): 181-203.

Lewis, Matine E. and Wiggens, Kären. The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Murthy, Viren. Pan-Asianism and the Legacy of the Chinese Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023.

—–. “Looking for Resistance in All the Wrong Places:  Chibber, Chakrabarty and a Tale of Two Histories,” Critical Historical Studies 2, 1 (2015): 113-153.

Nasser, Yasser. “‘To defend the peace of Asia’: The Chinese Peace Committee and Chinese Visions of Asian History 1949-1960.” Cold War History (May 2023): 1-23.

Okakura Tenshin. “The Awakening of Japan,” in Okakura Tenshin Collected English Writings. Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1984, 177-239.

Pierson, David and Cho Sang-hun. “Russia and North Korea’s Defense Pact is a New Headache for China.” New York Times (June 21, 2024).

Qiu Yue. “Anti-colonial Translation Prior to Decoloniality: New China [naya cina] from the travelogue of Ali Nawaz in the 1960s” unpublished manuscript, 2024.

Wang Hui [汪辉]. The End of the Revolution: China and the Limits of Modernity. London: Verso, 2009.

—–. “Ershi shiji yichan yu yidai yilu” 二十世纪遗产与一带一路 (The legacy of the twentieth century and the Belt-Road Initiative). Wenhua zongheng (Feb. 2015), http://www.m4.cn/opinion/2015-02/1263367.shtml.

Zachman, Urs Matthias. “Blowing up a Double Portrait in Black and White: The Concept of Asia in the Writings of Fukuzawa Yukichi and Okakura Tenshin.” positions: asia critique 15, 2 (2007): 345-368.