Sino-Japanese Debates on Modernity

Polemics over modernity seem endless in part because the word is deeply embedded in 20th century Asian intellectual history. Historians have shown how capital accumulation and developmentalism in the home islands and its colonies underwrote polemics among 20th century Japanese philosophers of the modern. This historiographic convention has tended to stress Japan-centric capital accumulation and to use capitalism and modernity almost synonymously, as capitalist modernity.  While its importance is indisputable to our general understanding, given Japanese colonial wars, corporate modernization schemes, and so on, history of Chinese intellectual history is less clear since China-centric historiography tends to short intellectual history, and focus on the birth of “cultural” forms of governmentality.  There are alternate means of enlivening the intellectual history of Chinese modernity debates. Intellectuals identifying as Chinese found a theoretical “ground” capable of defining the place where national and individual modern development was supposed to take place. They called this space society; its theory, sociology. Working against the grain of late Confucian governance theories and European social philosophy (Comte, Spencer, Montesquieu, Huxley, et al), politicized Chinese intellectuals, many Japan-educated, created Chinese sociology, the social science of the modern.  Shifting our focus away, in the end, from how the historiographic double bind grounds and limits our historical understanding, I take up two final points.  One considers a tipping point between Kang Youwei and Yan Fu, when the social became sociological. The second, recognizing that all history is historiography, argues that it should be possible to consider modernity as an event rather than an ideology or idea.  Event focused history writing may resolve entrenched historiographies. It privileges the contemporaries as those who did the thinking about their given circumstances, but without privileging the contemporary view, or native informant.  This is a thesis of colonial modernity.