Narrative Report

Title of Activity:
Topic: Intellectual Revolution that defined society
Scope: Asian

Objective:

To elaborate the science and technology transformed the society and its intellect
in Asian.

Topic Summary:

The twentieth century was an age of revolution in much of Asia. One factor promoting
radical change in many Asian nations was the pressure of Euro-American imperialism,
starting in the 19th century. As England, then France, Germany, and the United States
industrialized in the nineteenth century, their global reach expanded along with their
demand for a variety of raw materials. A belief in the superiority of Western values
combined with economic and technological innovations in shipbuilding, weaponry, and
communications to create a potent mix that would challenge Asian societies in many
ways.
The Asian experience of imperialism and revolution was as varied as Asia itself. India,
directly colonized by Britain starting in the 18th century, saw the development of a
small, professional middle class and a political organization, the Indian National
Congress, which spearheaded the nationalist anti-colonial movement of the 20th
century. China, humiliated in the Opium Wars of the mid-19th century, was never
colonized but lost substantial economic and political sovereignty as European nations,
the U.S., and Japan established treaty ports and spheres of influence in the country,
factors which fueled the first revolution in Asia in the 20th century, the Republican
Revolution of 1911. Japan, weakened by unequal treaties it was forced to sign with
Western powers in the 1850s, transformed itself by the beginning of the 20th century
into an industrial powerhouse with colonies of its own — a process historians have
hesitated to call a “revolution" but one which was undeniably “revolutionary." Southeast
Asian societies, from the Philippines to Vietnam, would also become colonies of various
Western countries. The experience of imperialism helped spark many of the revolutions
of 20th century Asia. It was the historical condition that radicalized revolutionaries from
Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong, to Mohandas Gandhi.
Many Asian revolutionaries sought not simply to achieve independent nationhood, but
also to transform their societies internally. In the early 20th century, many believed that
becoming modern required the elimination of old hierarchies and the creation of new,
more equal social relations. In China, this meant condemning old Confucian customs
and hierarchies and undertaking fundamental socio-economic and political reforms.
Mohandas Gandhi took a different approach, rejecting Western-inspired “civilization"
and advocating a return to “traditional" Indian ways. In both examples, internal
transformation was considered a necessary component of revolution for national
independence.
These diverse experiences and understandings of “revolution" underline the importance
of political and social revolution to modern Asian history. In recent years, with the
dismantling of revolutionary regimes in the Soviet Union and elsewhere and China’s
movement toward a market economy, some historians have begun revising their
understandings of revolution and its outcomes. Even in light of these reevaluations,
there can be no doubt about the importance of revolution — as both a goal and
historical process — to the formation of modern Asia and the modern world.

The nineteenth and the twentieth centuries in East Asia are known as a time of rapid
change. Whereas change was a daily and concrete experience in a globalizing
environment, it was also the object of psychological fear and ideological desire. During
that period, Asian countries and their intellectual and political elites confronted the
technical and military superiority of the western powers, as well as local inner tensions
and crises, by elaborating patterns of selective imitation, reconsidering their traditional
knowledge, and recreating their own cultural background. In order to conceptualize
these strategies, Asian intellectuals and political activists faced the theoretical problem
of naming the change in which they were living or to which they aspired. In those
years, a new vocabulary emerged, constituting a multifaceted discourse on change.
Drawing on western cultural traditions, the new vocabulary consisted of words such
as enlightenment, renaissance, evolution, revolution and renewal. However, indigenous
terms such as i, bian, ge, and xin were also part of it. Nevertheless, quite independently
of the cultural context from which they emerged, these terms were resignified within
the dynamic context of modernising Asia.
On the one hand, traditional terminology and concepts from Buddhism, Confucianism,
and Taoism found a new configuration that enriched their meanings. Such a process
dislocated well-established cultural roots and made them compatible with exogenous
systems of knowledge including modern physics and biology, Darwinism, Marxism,
Liberalism, and Christian theology. On the other hand, East Asian scholars applied
terms such as renaissance and enlightenment to their historical predicament and, in
doing so, they appropriated them. In that very moment of appropriation, these terms
started to exceed their primary historical referent. They belonged no more to the west
alone and became all-encompassing metaphors, universals and tropoi that gave
meaning to the experience of change.
The following collection of essays examines this emerging and transcultural discourse
on change centred in Asia, though not confined to it. The collection aims to show how
different reflections originated in different contexts across Japan and China, formed
networks of ideas, and actively related to discussions that were going on in Europe and
America. Together, the essays tell a story that is not reducible to the mere paradigm of
cultural reception. They consider East Asia not only as a latecomer to the game of
modernity, whilst narrating the vicissitudes of a world facing the acceleration of
historical development and growing complexity from the specific perspective of China
and Japan. Ultimately, this perspective helps us understand the background against
which a rhetoric of renewed centrality is growing in Asia today and how it is entwined
with a conceptualization of change that eschews monogenesis and all sorts of linear
paternities.
Mick Deneckere’s article, ‘The Japanese Enlightenment: a Re-examination of its Alleged
Secular Character’, explores the meaning and the limitations of using the term
enlightenment to describe the early Meiji period. Reading her contribution gives us the
opportunity to reflect on the enlightenment from a global perspective and to locate the
Japanese case within a wider and much longer movement. Deneckere does not describe
the Japanese Enlightenment as a mere offshoot of an essentially European historical
experience. On the contrary, building on Sebastian Conrad’s seminal study
‘Enlightenment in Global History: A Historiographical Critique’, she sheds light on a
multiplicity of enlightenments which cannot be explained by the paradigm of diffusion.
In this framework, Deneckere analyses the specificities of the Japanese advocacy for
intellectual, social and national change in periodical publications and other media from
the Meiji era, and, by doing so, she opens up the definition of enlightenment to
historical actors that have so far remained marginal in the prevailing historical narrative.
Describing an enlightenment that is no longer a copy of the European model, she goes
beyond the classic case of Fukuzawa Yukichi and the Meiroku Zasshi, embracing figures,
such as Buddhist priest Shimaji Mokurai, who have been sidelined in the more
traditional historiographical accounts.
Francesco Campagnola surveys the history of the symbolization of the Renaissance and
humanism in early Shōwa Japan up to the end of the Second World War. His analysis
does not limit itself to erudite books and purely scholarly essays but includes the
transcripts of public symposia and articles in newspapers in order to provide a wider
picture of the developing Japanese cultural climate. The article follows the fraught
relationship between the Renaissance/renaissance, on the one hand, and humanism on
the other. Campagnola points out that, whereas the Japanese Romantics ( Roman-ha)
and other Japanese authors added an anti-humanist slant to the Renaissance as a
symbol for national regeneration, other intellectuals belonging to different factions and
schools employed the same metaphor in order to conceive a different strategy with a
view to imagining a new human being. He devotes particular attention to the case of
Miki Kiyoshi’s specifically Japanese brand of humanism. Finally, after describing how, in
the 1940s, wartime censorship and militarist orthodoxy came to efface humanism from
the discourse on renaissance, the article ends with the underground survival of
humanism in the critical and anti-nationalistic form advocated by Watanabe Kazuo.
Li Man analyses the relationship between crisis and change in the decaying Qing Empire
following the First Opium War. Using Confucian official Wei Yuan as his compass, he
depicts the theoretical battle surrounding the notion of change itself and its intellectual
and political meaning in mid-nineteenth-century China. According to Li Man, making use
of philological investigation for the character i, which plays a major role in the history of
premodern Chinese culture, Wei Yuan tried to offer a new definition of change. Li Man’s
article highlights how, in Wei Yuan’s philosophical disquisition, the ontological level
meets the political one. Thus, the denial of change as the essential meaning of i, by
part of the Chinese intelligentsia is criticized as a form of blindness to the incoming new
world order. In this changing world, Wei Yuan kept firm his defence of the motherland
but advocated its transformation by means of the acquisition of Western technique. In
such a context of historical necessity and unavoidable confrontation with external
forces, the only possible choice was either to change or be changed. The ontological
reflection on the Way, as the fundamentally unchanged characterised by continuous
change, thus also becomes a criticism of those who, when faced with historical and
political change, stuck to their uncritical Sinocentrism.
Bart Dessein shows us how Gadamer’s perspective on European Renaissance, in which
socio-cultural transformation never completely effaces that which lies at its origin, also
applies to nineteenth- and twentieth-century China. He describes the climate of
incertitude and self-doubt that characterized China of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries and explains how German Idealism and Kant’s work became a tool
for revising and transforming the Confucianist tradition through the medium of Wang
Yangming. After a survey of the models of change, transformation and evolution
entailed by the theory of ‘China as essence, the West as function’ ( zhongti xiyong),
Dessein particularly focuses on philosopher Mou Zongsan and his discovery of a ‘moral
self’ and of individuality as a possible category within Confucian thought, as revised
from a Kantian perspective. However, Dessein notices how Mou Zongsan takes a
decidedly anti-Kantian stance when, in accordance with Confucianist holism, he asserts
that personal cultivation and political governance are complementary principles. In the
end, Dessein suggests that the cases made by Mou Zongsan and the other new
Confucianists render apparent how modernisation in China was a ‘renaissance’ based on
a reshaping of tradition, rather than a revolution from the outside.
This special issue is complemented with an introduction by global historian Wang Hui. A
professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, a former editor of the influential cultural
magazine Dushu, and a leading public intellectual in China, Wang Hui is one of the
world’s most eminent specialists in intellectual history from a transnational perspective.
His work, published in English by Harvard University Press and Verso, has been
translated into numerous languages.
The editors would like to express their gratitude to Prof. Wang for agreeing to take part
in this special issue as well as to Global Intellectual History for hosting it.
 Narrative Report

Title of Activity:
Topic: Intellectual Revolution that defined society
Scope: Asian

Objective:

To elaborate the science and technology transformed the society and its intellect
in Asian.

Topic Summary:

Asia’s information revolution

The rise of IT and the Internet have been boons to Asia, but not everyone has
benefited. There are challenges to overcome, not least in the area of governance.

The global information revolution is having profound effects on economies, societies

and politics in Asia. This should not be a surprise. After all, improved access to
information is of fundamental importance to development, as it can facilitate the
necessary improvement in an economy’s knowledge base, as well as more transparent
and accountable governance. And information and communications technologies (ICT)
enhance integration into the global economy.

But why have so many once-poor Asian countries been able to take advantage of ICT,
more than other developing countries? The main answers are history, timing and China.
The impact of the information revolution has been greater in Asia than elsewhere
because the region has always been both an important producer and user of IT
products. Indeed, Asia has always been fertile ground for informationbased activities.
China was at the heart of arguably the first information revolution when it invented
paper making and the printing press in the 9th century, and propagated to its
neighbours a Confucian culture which values education. The contemporary information
revolution arrived at the same time as China’s economy was opening up again, and as
Asian countries were experiencing the most dramatic period of economic development
that humankind has known.

Rapid progress in IT and investments in the necessary infrastructure have been key
drivers of the information revolution in Asia, which in turn has underpinned rising levels
of prosperity and education across the region.
Korea is the world’s most advanced player in ICT, according to the International
Telecommunication Union (ITU), a UN body, which says that it is overtaking many other
economies like the US, Japan and Germany which have much higher GDPs per capita
than Korea.

A number of other Asian economies were ranked by the ITU to be in the world’s top 20
for the “ICT Development Index”, notably Japan (8th), Hong Kong-China (11th) and
Singapore (12th). Other Asian countries stretch way back in the overall list of 155
countries, with Malaysia ranking 58th, China 78th, the Philippines 94th, Indonesia 95th
and India 119th.

Rising levels of education are in part due to better access to ICT, while at the same
time the ability to absorb and use information are being enhanced. Many Asian
economies are also global leaders in education. The OECD Programme for International
Student Assessment (PISA) ranks Shanghai-China, Korea, Hong Kong-China, Singapore
and Japan in its top 10. China is also becoming an important research centre (see
Databank). However, both Thailand and Indonesia are much lower down the list,
reflecting Asia’s “education divide”.

The ICT revolution has facilitated the development of East Asia’s manufacturing
production networks, or value-chains, that have enabled many economies to jump on a
fast track to development. A classic example of these production networks is Apple’s
iPhone. Its branding, design and marketing are undertaken in the US. Most of its high-
tech components are produced in Germany, Japan, Korea and Chinese Taipei. And
finally, the lower value-added assembly stage is conducted in China.