Abstract
With these words the Chinese scholar Liang Qichao (1873–1929) expresses a sentiment that was quite common during the years following the armistice of November 1918. In many parts of the world the Great War was understood as a watershed, a turning point that opened up possibilities for a new world order and new forms of internationalism. Many intellectuals in China, India, Europe, and other regions went even farther beyond Liang’s assessment and predicted that the dusk of the war would be followed by the dawn of a new epoch. The disasters in Europe appeared to have shaken the foundations of the international structure enough to make profound adjustments palpable. The immediate aftermath of the war seemed to be the right time to promote great visions for the future and to critically reassess the recent past. Understanding, contextualizing, and interpreting the Great War was believed to provide one of the keys that could open new doors toward a better future. Consequently, in such divergent societies as China, Germany, and Korea the war quickly acquired a highly symbolic power—its meaning was evoked, constructed, and instrumentalized by competing political camps, and it was done so in profoundly different ways.
The Great War is not the manuscript for a new world history, but it is a transition that continues many elements from above and opens up new ones for the space below.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
See Hui Huang, “Overseas Chinese Studies and the Rise of Foreign Cultural Capital in Modern China,” International Sociology 17, no. 1 (2002): 35–55.
See Paul Cohen, “Remembering and Forgetting National Humiliation in Twentieth-Century China,” Twentieth-Century China 27, no. 2 (2002): 1–39.
For example, William Kirby, “The Internationalization of China,” China Quarterly 150 (1997): 433–58.
See, for example, Leo Ou-fan Lee, “The Cultural Construction of Modernity in Urban Shanghai: Some Preliminary Explorations,” in Wen-hsin Yeh, ed., Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000 ), pp. 1–30.
For more details see Wen-hsin Yeh, The Alienated Academy: Culture and Politics in Republican China, 1919–1937 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990 ). See also
Timothy B. Weston, The Power of Position: Beijing University, Intellectuals, and Chinese Political Culture, 1898–1929 ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004 ).
A statistical analysis is provided by Hui Huang, The Chinese Construction of the West, 1862–1922: Discourses, Actors and the Cultural Field ( Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 1996 ).
See, for example, Vera Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986 ).
John Fitzgerald, Awakening China: Politics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist Revolution ( Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996 ).
See, for example, Weili Ye, Seeking Modernity in China’s Name: Chinese Students in the United States, 1920–1927 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001 ).
Lee Feigon, Chen Duxiu: Founder of the CCP ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983 ).
A seminal study of the New Culture and May Fourth movements is still Chow Tse-tsung, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China ( Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960 ).
Chen Duxiu, “Xin Wenhua Yundong shi shenme?” Xin Qingnian 6, no. 1 (1920), p. 4.
See Xu Guoqi, China and the Great War. China’s Pursuit of a New National Identity and Internationalization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005 ). See also
Klaus Mühlhahn, “China,” in Gerhard Hirschfeld, Gerd Krumeich, and Irina Renz, eds., Enzyklopädie Erster Weltkrieg ( Paderborn: Schöningh, 2002 ), pp. 412–16.
A transcultural perspective of the hopes for independence in the aftermath of the Great War is provided by Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007 ).
See, for example, Elizabeth Perry, Shanghai on Strike: The Politics of Chinese Labor (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993 ).
An account of Chinese liberalism is provided by Benjamin Tsai, Enemies of the Revolution: Ideology and Practice in the Making of Chinese Liberalism, 1890–1927 ( Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2001 ).
About Hu Shi see Jerome B. Grieder, Hu Shi and the Chinese Renaissance: Liberalism in the Chinese Revolution, 1917–1937 ( Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970 ).
See Akira Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), chapter 2.
See, for example, Zhang Zhongdong, “Similarities and Differences between Hu Shi and Yin Haiguang during the Initial Stage of Anti-Communism,” Chinese Studies in History 38, no. 1 (2004): 77–93.
For more details see James Pusey, China and Charles Darwin ( Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983 ).
See, for example, Kauko Laitinen, Chinese Nationalism in the Late Qing Dynasty: Zhang Binglin as an Anti-Manchu Propagandist ( London: Curzon Press, 1990 ).
For example: Hua Lu, “Lessons and Warnings Derived from World War One,” Dongfang Zazhi 21, no. 14 (1924): 17–22.
For the spread of racist theories in China see, for example, Kai-Wing Chow, “Imagining Boundaries of Blood: Zhang Binglin and the Invention of the Han ‘Race’ in Modern China,” in Frank Dikotter, ed., The Construction of Racial Identities in China and Japan: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives ( London: Hurst, 1997 ), pp. 34–52.
See, for example, Mike Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860–1945 ( Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997 ).
For a general account of the topic see, for example, Arif Dirlik, The Origins of Chinese Communism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989 ).
Consequently the relationship between Communist intellectuals and workers was often somewhat contradictory in the China of the early 1920s. See Daniel Y. Kwan, Marxist Intellectuals and the Chinese Labor Movement: A Study of Deng Zhongxia, 1894–1933 ( Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997 ).
For more details see Maurice M. Meisner, Li Ta-chao and the Origins of Chinese Marxism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967 ). See also
Michael Y.L. Luk, The Origins of Chinese Bolshevism: An Ideology in the Making, 1920–1928 ( Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1990 ).
See Anthony Saich, The Origins of the First United Front in China: The Role of Sneevliet (Alias Maring) ( Leiden: Brill, 1991 ).
See Roland Felber, “Berichte von Chinesen über die Verhaltnisse in Berlin nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Christoph Kaderas and Meng Hong, eds., 120 Jahre chinesische Studierende an deutschen Hochschulen (Bonn: DAAD, 2000 ), pp. 128–38.
See Charlotte Furth, “Culture and Politics in Modern Chinese Conservatism,” in idem, ed., The Limits of Change: Essays on Conservative Alternatives in Republican China ( Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976 ), pp. 22–56.
About aspects of Tagore’s intellectual agenda see Ashis Nandy, The Illegitimacy of Nationalism: Rabindranath Tagore and the Politics of Self ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994 ).
Compare Ying-shih Yu, “The Radicalization of China in the Twentieth Century,” Daedalus: China in Transformation 122, no. 2 (1993): 125–50, who speaks of a “double marginalization” (excluding personal marginalization).
See Benjamin Schwarz, In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West ( Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964 ), pp. 229–36.
Quoted in Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China ( London and New York: Norton, 1990 ), p. 302.
See Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance ( Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989 ).
See Werner Meißner, China zwischen nationalem “Sonderweg” und universaler Modernisierung: Zur Rezeption westlichen Denkens in China (Munich: Beck, 1994 ). Eucken’s works later became prominent in the early German Fascist movement.
Rudolf Eucken and Carsun Chang, Das Lebensproblem in Europa und China ( Leipzig: Quelle and Meyer, 1922 ).
For an intellectual biography see Tang Xiaobing, Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity: The Historical Thinking of Liang Qichao ( Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996 ).
See Joshua A. Fogel, ed., The Role of Japan in Liang Qichao’s Introduction of Modern Western Civilization to China (Berkeley: China Research Monograph Series 57, 2004 ).
For more details about Liang’s travels in Europe see the classic account by Joseph R. Levenson, Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and the Mind of Modern China ( Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953 ).
See Jürgen Osterhammel, Shanghai, 30. Mai 1925. Die chinesische Revolution (Munich: DTV, 1997), chapters 2 and 3.
A rich account of research approaches is provided by Craig Calhoun, “Nationalism, Modernism, and their Multiplicities,” in Elizer Ben-Rafael and Yitzak Sternberg, eds., Identity, Culture and Globalization ( Leiden: Brill, 2001 ): 445–70.
See, for example, Stein Ugelvik Larsen, ed., Fascism outside Europe: The European Impulse against Domestic Conditions in the Diffusion of Global Fascism ( New York: Columbia University Press, 2001 ).
Compare Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 ( New York: Vintage, 1994 ).
See Dominic Sachsenmaier, “Politische Kulturen in China nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg—Gedanken zu einer globalhistorischen Perspektive,” Zeitschrift für Weltgeschichte 4, no. 2 (2003): 55–68.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2007 Sebastian Conrad and Dominic Sachsenmaier
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Sachsenmaier, D. (2007). Alternative Visions of World Order in the Aftermath of World War I: Global Perspectives on Chinese Approaches. In: Conrad, S., Sachsenmaier, D. (eds) Competing Visions of World Order. Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230604285_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230604285_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-53848-5
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-60428-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)