Pan Asianism and the Legacy of the Chinese Revolution

Abstract

Viren Murthy’s third monograph, Pan-Asianism and the Legacy of the Chinese Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2023), shows how intellectuals in China and Japan promoted unity among weak Asian nations to resist Western domination.

To promote such unity, pan-Asianists struggled against Eurocentric visions of history articulated by philosophers such as Hegel, who argued that the Orient had to follow the West. At the same time, these thinkers appropriated Hegel’s criticisms of abstract individualism.

Murthy contends that Japanese and Chinese pan-Asianists drew on elements of both Asian and Western culture to posit a world beyond narrow self-interest, capitalism, and imperialism. The legacy of pan-Asianism is complex given that Japan employed this ideology to promote imperialism.

Consequently, postwar Japanese pan-Asianists had to confront the problem of war memory. Postwar pan-Asianists tried to show that a healthy transnationalism was both possible and necessary to struggle against Western imperialism.

About the speaker

Viren Murthy is a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. His present research project concerns how East Asian intellectuals drew on G.W.F Hegel to uncover logics to Chinese and Japanese history, which culminate in a new world order inspired by their respective cultures.

In addition to projects connected to East Asia, he is also involved in a project on South Indian Classical Music and Tamil Identity, which also explores issues of how traditions have been reconstituted by capitalist modernity. He has also been interested in how Marxists in (primarily in the North Atlantic) have drawn on Jewish Messianism to confront capitalist modernity.