Chinose Sovereignty as Alterity Japan’s Failed Desires in the Possibility of an Eastasian Ontology
Author: Chih-Yu Shih, Kuo-ting Kao
Abstract / Chinese PDF Download
Chinese sovereignty means very different things to people of different cultural background as well as social position. In modern history, Japanese narrators were among the first to ponder the meaning of Chinese sovereignty. Their narratives, and derived desires of China, varied widely as each envisioned a Japan of a kind respectively in terms of realism, idealism, statism, democraticism, humanism, fascism, neo-traditionalism, socialism and revolution. Torn between progressivism and conditionism, narrators in the Chinese state lost their own discursive capacity in responding to all these desires. Not empathizing with one another embedded in ontologically different composition, countries could not therefore form an Eastasian system in the realist/liberal sense. However, once recognized and named so, the Eastasian system, which has been a non-system, has the potential to bring in forms of alterity previously excluded by the closed world of sovereignty. This paper welcomes this possibility.