Territorial Order and Collective-Identity Tensions in Confucian Asia: China, Vietnam and Korea
Author(s)
Woodside, Alexander
Abstract
Writing in the sixteenth century, the great European essayist Montaigne called attention to the rich suggestiveness of Plutarch’s remark that the people of Asia were subject to despotism because they did not “know how to pronounce the single syllable, No.” The best-selling books that have appeared in contemporary Asian countries four centuries later, with titles such as A Japan That Can Say No (by Shintaro Ishihara and Akio Morita), An Asia That Can Say No (by Shintaro Ishihara and Mahathir Mohamad), or A China That Can Say No (by Song Qiang and other Chinese journalists), are obvious postcolonial responses to a long Western tradition of dismissing premodern Asian political orders. But it is not just the musty theme of “Oriental despotism” that is in question. Asian thinkers want to say “no” to Western constructions of historical time, hoping to find in the process a more ecumenical scheme of human evolution that does not disempower them. The search for such a scheme, as it relates to the “modernity” or potential for modernity of non-Western political orders and collective identities, involves more than armchair-bound professors, at least outside the West. The command of time, and of the definition of time, can be as significant a part of the development of power as the command of space or money; in eastern Asia, historical modernization timetables, as manipulated by elite figures, have practically become the substitutes for religious prophecies.
