7 Confucianism and Human Rights

2018

This article examines the role assigned to citizens by the ideology of authoritarianism in the relationship between Chiang Kaishek’s war to retake mainland China and the wartime regime constructed for fighting that war. Viewing Chiang’s ambition of retaking China by force as an anti-communist nationalist war, this paper considers this prolonged civil war as Chiang’s attempt at restoring the impaired sovereignty of the Republic of China. Adopting the concept of “necropolitics,” this paper argues that what underlay the planning for war was the manipulation of the life and death of the citizenry and a distinction drawn between the Chinese nation to be saved and the condemned communist Other. This manipulation and demarcation was institutionally enforced by an authoritarian government that violated citizens’ human rights for the sake of winning the nationalist war.

Abstract The binary of martial and civil virtues (wen-wu) is one of the oldest and most pervasive concepts in East Asian thought. This paper examines the transmission of Chinese wen-wu thought to Japan, and its subsequent independent development in that country. Whereas in China and Korea, primacy has traditionally been given to civil virtues over martial ones, the unique warrior-centered social and governmental structure that developed in Japan led its thinkers to more strongly emphasize the martial. As a result, at least in the context of wen-wu, many Japanese were willing to accept, rather than invert, the China/barbarian binary that marked continental interpretations. In comparison, many Japanese Confucians and related schools of thought had otherwise tended to revise ideas imported from China in ways that removed them from their source and relocated the moral center to Japan. The identification of Japan as the “martial country” and China/Korea as the “civil countries” came to be broadly accepted by intellectuals in all three societies. At the same time, the exact nature of Japanese “martiality” varied greatly among different thinkers, often to the extent that definitions of the concept could be polar opposites. This paper argues that it was this vagueness and flexibility of the wen-wu binary that ensured its continued prominence as the concepts were adapted to new situations, and further led to movements by Chinese and Korean thinkers to introduce Japanese martiality into their own nations around the turn of the twentieth century. In this process, Japanese bun-bu (wen-wu) theories were variously packaged with the teachings of Wang Yangming and the modern martial ethic of bushido (the way of the warrior), and this paper considers the roles of the reformers Liang Qichao and Pak Un-sik in the dissemination of bun-bu thought in China and Korea, respectively. 摘要 文、武二分法是東亞思想中最古老且最為普遍的概念之一。本文檢視中國文武思想傳至日本，及其在該國的後續獨立發展。「文」在中國和韓國傳統上位於「武」之上，居首位，而日本因發展出以武士為中心的獨特社會與政治結構，使其思想家特別強調「武」。因此，至少在文、武的脈絡下，許多日本人願意接受，而非轉化，標誌著大陸解釋的華夷之辨。相較而言，許多日本儒家及相關學派的思想卻傾向於將自中國傳入的思想以將其與源頭分離，並將道德中心重置於日本的方式，加以修訂。日本等同「武國」，中國和韓國等同「文國」為三個社會的知識分子廣泛接受。與此同時，各思想家對於日本「武」的真正內涵卻有極為不同的見解，其間的歧異往往到對該概念的定義可以完全相反的程度。本文主張，便是這種對文武二分法的含糊不清與彈性，確保其在適應新形勢時能持續突顯，並進而導致中國和韓國思想家於二十世紀初將日本的「武」介紹給其祖國的運動。在此過程中，日本的文武理論與王陽明的學說、武士道的現代武術倫理有各種不同程度的結合。本文分別討論改革家梁啟超和朴殷植於文武思想在中國與韓國傳布上的角色。

Journal of Contemporary Asia , 2017

Seoul Journal of Japanese Studies, 2022

This article analyzes the participation mechanisms and collective behavior displayed during the 1931 Anti-Chinese riot in colonial Korea. It focuses specifically on collectivity and its ability to transcend individual values and generate group behavior (e.g., riots), arguing that this collectivity has normative characteristics emerging from ethnic conflict. This approach is unique and can enable a better understanding of such behavior. First, the research takes the riots themselves and their place of occurrence as the central vantage point rather than focusing on the background factors that precipitated them. Second, this approach provides a more substantial explanatory process because it addresses the compulsory nature of crowd participation in addition to its voluntary nature. To contextualize this argument, the paper explores the significance of the Wanbaoshan incident that triggered Koreans at that time. This exploration reveals that Koreans' mass participation can be accounted for by the idea of "perceived legitimacy" shared by rioters. Second, this paper investigates whether this perceived legitimacy coerced others to participate while also probing if specific norms led to selective and self-regulatory forms of violence and involvement. The paper also shows that the Pyŏngyang riot (where the pogrom occurred) represents more than an isolated case; it is, instead, a more evolved form of rioting than that which occurred in other regions. Finally, the paper discusses the response of the security police to further contextualize how the riot progressed. This article is a revised and translated version of YIM Joon-Gyu's Korean article “1931-yŏn singminji Chosŏn esŏ ŭi pan-Chunggugin p’oktong: p’oktong ŭi chinhaeng kwajŏng ŭl chungsim ŭro,” published in Sahoe wa yŏksa [Society and history] 131 (2021) with the permission of Han’guk Sahoesa Hakhoe [Korean Social History Association]. The translation and English editing of this article were supported by the (Chae) Hakbong Changhakhoe [Hakbong Scholarship Foundation].

New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies , 2016

This article argues that war memories of transnational ethnic groups remain relevant and expedient in constructing modern national history in this age of globalization. In narrating the history of the overseas Chinese Nanyang Volunteers, I discuss how this particular war memory was marginalized not just by the power stakeholders but within the community as well. It was not till the 1980s when alternate war narratives began emerging in public spaces and both the Singapore state and the civil society collaborated in reconfiguring public spaces for the commemoration of the Nanyang Volunteers, framing them as part of a “globalized war memory”.

Global War Studies, 2013

Journal of Modern Chinese History, 2017

In the 140 years following the mid-nineteenth century, China was frequently caught up in wars whose causes and scales varied. In their frequency, duration, and scale, and in the large number of people whose lives they impacted, these wars constituted a determining factor in modern Chinese history. Over these years, China was transformed from an empire to a nation-state, and arguably, this transformation was in important ways carried out during or even through wars. Many key factors in contemporary China's ideological constitution, administrative and military systems, social structure, collective memory, cultural values, and even aesthetic choices originated in wartime experiences or were even enabled by wars. As is the case in many other countries, including those in East Asia, most of the external and internal conflicts China faces today are rooted in the military conflicts that took place during this century and a half. It is important for historians to identify moments of structural changesthe turning points in history. These wars very often constituted just such turning points for the modern world. If we fail to recognize the impacts of these wars, we will miss a fundamental force that contributed to the shaping of modern Chinese history. This special issue is the product of two conferences, collaboratively organized by the Institute of Modern History of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the China Studies Program at the University of Washington, that were held in Beijing in 2015 and in Seattle in 2016. At the first meeting, the participants introduced their projects and shared their primary sources; at the second meeting a year later, they read and commented on one another's completed papers. Although the original plan was to include projects on all wars in the twentieth century, the majority of the papers turned out to be on World War II in China, that is, the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression (War of Resistance), so that became the focus of this special issue. The conferences coincided with China's celebration of the "70th Anniversary of the Victory of the Chinese People's War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War," and a large number of commemorative events were held across the country. These primarily highlighted the role of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during the war. While it is important to study the War of Resistance as a political and military event, the group of scholars whose works are included in this special issue focus instead on local expressions of national politics and on individual experiences of the history shaped by impersonal forcesin other words, on how the war was lived.