Why We Need to Understand East Asian History
Way back in the mid-1970s, while I was still an undergraduate student, I made the fateful decision to specialize in the study of East Asian history. My commitment to East Asia (which consists of greater China, Japan, and Korea, with Vietnam as an additional borderline case) was at least partially driven by a conviction that it represented a very large portion of the total human experience that was all too often simply left out of conventional English-language presentations of history. It also seemed obvious to me already that the age of overwhelming Western global domination in industrial production, technological sophistication, and outright colonial empire was rapidly receding, and that East Asia would surely become increasingly more globally important in the future. In the wake of post-WWII decolonization, the Vietnam War, and the rise of multicultural studies in the U.S., it also seemed at the time that American cultural horizons were expanding, and that an historical education confined merely to “Western Civilization” would inevitably become a thing of the past.
More than three decades later, East Asia indisputably has risen economically quite spectacularly—perhaps more so than even I had imagined during my undergraduate days, when China, the largest country in East Asia, was still deeply mired in Maoist communism. Since the 1960s, however, and beginning with Japan, East Asian economies have consistently been among the fastest growing in the world. China is now officially the world’s second-largest national economy, after the U.S., with Japan as number three. Hong Kong, a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China, has a per capita income (estimated in terms of purchasing power parity) higher than that of Germany, France, Britain, Canada, and, indeed, all but a few of the world’s most prosperous places. (For convenient statistics, see the CIA’s World Factbook.) China has already passed the United States as a market for automobile sales, as well as cell phones and Internet usage. China’s dramatic economic rise is, furthermore, quite visible, and is widely recognized even in the United States (as Japan’s had been earlier). Yet I am not so sure that most Americans really know, or care, that much more about East Asian history than we did back in the 1970s. Especially in terms of historical knowledge, American cultural horizons may not have expanded all that much.
Part of the problem, of course, is simply the abysmal state of historical knowledge in general. We don’t even know much about American history. I have an acquaintance, is currently serving in the U.S. Air Force, who once thought that the American Revolutionary War was fought against France! In addition, there has also been something of a predictable counter-reaction against the once-trendy multicultural studies. With the end of the Cold War (which some imagined as representing “the end of history,” and the ultimate global triumph of an American model), the rise of neo-conservatism, and other recent events, we have been perhaps more inclined to celebrate “our own heritage” (though the American heritage itself is actually diverse, and now includes East Asian elements—there are, for example, many more Chinese restaurants in the U.S. than there are McDonald’s), and re-emphasize U.S. and Western history.
Furthermore, if places like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore are demonstrably successful, it is all too easy to imagine condescendingly that this is only because they are copying us. Modernization is often still assumed to be identical to Westernization, or more specifically Americanization. Therefore, it is often taken for granted that while East Asia may have some charmingly quaint old traditions that may still have some entertainment value, the flow of vitally important knowledge can only be from us to them. My university, for example, currently has an “exchange” program that brings a group of our students to China for a month each summer—to teach English! They do not necessarily study anything about China while they are there, although they do get to see the sights.
In addition, there is simply the force of intellectual inertia. The existing body of historical knowledge tends naturally to perpetuate itself. In my home state of Iowa, all high school students are required to take classes only in American history. Anything beyond U.S. history is a matter for local discretion. At my university, which seems relatively enlightened, all students are currently required to take one multi-disciplinary (not merely history, and, depending on the instructor, in some cases probably not including much history) core introductory class concerning a particular non-Western world culture (somewhat dubiously including Russia and Latin America as “non-Western”), and two classes in the standard sequence of Western civ. Even this relatively balanced distribution, however, still seems to permit a lingering tendency to assume that there has been only a single-track development of human “civilization”—one which originated in the Fertile Crescent, later shifted its center to Greece and Rome, then moved to Western Europe, and finally reached its culmination here in the United States—beyond which lie only various exotic “native cultures,” which are presumed to have remained largely traditional, static, and unchanging until the onset of Westernization, and which, perhaps, we should now politely try to be a little more sensitive to in the name of political correctness.
There is nothing strange or inappropriate about Americans favoring America, and it would be perverse and historically inaccurate to deny Europe’s driving role in shaping modern world history. The voyages of early modern European explorers, after all, really did first knit the entire planet into a relatively integrated whole. The Industrial and Scientific Revolutions really did begin in Western Europe, and they quickly propelled Europe and America to truly global dominance by the early 1900s. But the techniques of industrial production have since spread—and it should not necessarily complacently be assumed that Americans always make the best scientists.
The global spread of science and industry, stock exchanges, blue jeans, computers, cell phones, pop music, movies, McDonald’s, and all the other paraphernalia of the modern world, in a sense certainly can be described as Westernization. But the process is not nearly as simple as most people assume. For example, one of the most high profile “Western” influences in early-to-mid twentieth-century China actually was Marxism, even though many Americans seem shocked to be told that Marxism originated in the West. Even in places where a specifically U.S. influence has been particularly strong and sustained, such as Japan or Taiwan in East Asia, the patterns of modern cultural interaction have been highly complex. In Taiwan, for example, Japanese influences have arguably rivaled the American ones, and Japan itself has now become a world center of globalizing influences in its own right. Despite being thoroughly modern, successful, and Westernized, as the title of a Hollywood movie once humorously put it, an American visiting Japan can still easily feel lost in translation.
What is it that makes Japan somehow remain Japanese even after a century and a half of dramatic Westernizing changes? Only a deep understanding of Japanese history (including both pre-modern and modern) can explain. The same may also be said of China, Korea, and the whole of East Asia. Especially in the present age of globalization, it is not wise to continue living in ignorance of the larger world. Much as we should, indeed, all still be reasonably familiar with Plato, the Roman Empire, Shakespeare, Beethoven, and the Magna Carta, even if not perhaps exactly to the same level of detail, every educated person should also know something about East Asian equivalents -- Confucius, the Tang Dynasty, Chikamatsu, Du Fu, and Chinese Republicanism.
In approaching the study of East Asian history, it may be helpful to keep three broad themes in mind. The first is that you must brace yourself for an encounter on a sometimes stupendously vast scale. East Asia has up to three thousand years of continuously recorded history, some of the pre-modern parts of which may also be the most fully documented on earth, and also a substantial pre-history before that. Nor were these years necessarily any less eventful than the same years were in Europe. Pre-modern East Asia was probably no more static and unchanging than any other pre-modern society, including Europe, and the modern changes in East Asia have since been equally convulsive. East Asia is also, literally, huge in another dimension: China alone long contained a third or more of the world’s total population, and even relatively “little” Japan boasts twice the population of the United Kingdom today.
The second point to keep in mind is that East Asia is internally highly diverse, within an overarching framework of somewhat more limited broad commonalities. East Asia really does have a degree of coherence as a cultural macro-region, based on a number of important shared features. Most especially, these include the traditional use of a common logographic (non-phonetic) writing system, which we call Chinese characters漢字. This shared traditional writing system implanted a fairly extensively shared common vocabulary, and therefore also certain common ideas, such as those of what we call Confucianism. (In contrast to specifically Confucian East Asia, however, Asia as a whole—which extends from Iran [ancient Persia] to the Philippines—does not have any universally shared commonalities whatsoever.) But while China, Korea, and Japan do have important historical connections, and aspects of shared culture, they are at the same time also very different societies as evidenced, for example, by the very different versions of Confucianism dominant in each. Each, then, also contains within itself multiple levels of internal differences and complexities.
A final point to remember is that both the narrow details and the broad patterns of East Asian history do not necessarily always conform to prior assumptions that we may have formed based upon our understanding of the Western experience. For one example on the grand scale, I personally seriously question whether China really had any “medieval” period even remotely resembling that of Western Europe. Perhaps the greatest value of learning about East Asia, therefore, is that it can serve as an eye-opening and healthy corrective to some of our preconceptions, which turn out to not always be universally true. At the same time, of course, East Asians, and East Asian countries, are revealed on closer scrutiny to be not all that very different from everyone else on the planet: no more unique or peculiar, by any absolute neutral standard, than we are!