Introduction
In recent years, scholars have taken new approaches in discussing China and India's historical relationship(s) and comparability in the twentieth century. Previous research examining China and India from a comparative or transnational perspective largely took one of the two major approaches. Many scholars either treated both countries as unchanging “civilizations” with static cultural and spiritual values or as occupying two opposite poles on a spectrum of Asian politics – democracy versus authoritarianism.Footnote 1 Both of these approaches reduced the complexity of both countries' political evolutions and trajectories by foregrounding either abstract understandings of civilizational commonalities or overly simplistic models of geopolitical competition and incompatibility.
In contrast, by drawing our attention to similar social, economic, and political trends in both countries, their common approaches to statecraft and policymaking, and the important ways in which they diverged, a new wave of scholarship has helped to challenge those older paradigms.Footnote 2 This body of work is notable not only for its novelty, but in its interest in breaking away from the nation-state mold in favor of more sophisticated modes of comparative and connective analysis.Footnote 3 A particular branch of this new wave of India–China scholarship has urged us to take seriously the close relationship that both countries had in the early 1950s, prompting reconsiderations about Chinese and Indian foreign policy and its connection to both countries' postcolonial ambitions.Footnote 4 Instead of focusing our attention on diplomatic breakthroughs and state rhetoric as a brief prelude or honeymoon before the inevitable outbreak of war, we now treat Indian and Chinese commitments to friendship and mutual learning as a set of interactions worthy of study in their own right.
However, despite these changing currents, China–India studies remains somewhat insular in its scope, nuancing our understanding of transnational connections without necessarily placing them within a broader context. It would be difficult to understand the 1950s without likewise pointing out the two countries' centrality within the diverse networks of solidarity that emerged throughout Asia in the immediate post-war period, or the shadow that the emergent Cold War order cast on postcolonial projects.Footnote 5 This paper proposes that one possible focus for future scholarship should be the influence that both countries had as leaders in the fight for decolonization in a Cold War world. Much as recent scholars of China have written about studying China “from without,” China–India studies could also benefit from a similarly multi-lingual and multi-archival approach.Footnote 6 Indeed, Sino–Indian friendship can be understood as one of many attempts to conceive of another model for international relations in a world where bipolar tensions could threaten the prospects of postcolonialism.Footnote 7 It is thus worth considering how the growing exchanges between China and India and state and private actors' proclamations of friendship were understood, interpreted, and then redeployed far beyond their borders.
To that end, this paper draws our attention to Japanese invocations of India and China following the country's catastrophic defeat in World War II. Although relatively understudied, following the failure of state-sponsored Pan-Asianism, Japanese actors sought a way to “return to Asia” by reconceptualizing their country's relationship with the region and using recent political shifts abroad to effect positive changes at home.Footnote 8 Following the Zhou Enlai–Jawaharlal Nehru meetings in 1954 and the Afro-Asian Conference at Bandung in 1955, coupled with growing dissatisfaction with Japan's relationship with the United States, Japanese actors often imagined of an Asia with Sino–Indian friendship at its core.
In focusing on Japanese interactions with “China–India” as a model for politics, this paper makes two arguments. First, Sino–Indian attempts to cast their countries' mutual friendship and dedication to mutual learning and coexistence was based at least in part on an understanding that they were both “Asian” countries that were struggling against their feudal and colonial pasts. Even as we must seek to understand China and India from beyond the perspective of Asianisms in the early twentieth century, it is also necessary to acknowledge the enduring influence that conceptions of Asia had for creating pathways of solidarity and mutual learning in the early Cold War.Footnote 9 As the Japanese example will show, Japanese historians, activists, and statesmen alike all saw Sino–Indian friendship as a vision of “Asian” politics which could help them to radically transform Japan in the aftermath of the Treaty of San Francisco. Developments in China and India thus inspired a myriad of Japanese actors to invoke Asia in a way that broke with Japan's imperialist legacy on the continent by positioning the country as a pupil in the region instead of the “teacher” it had once aspired to be.
Second, by focusing on Japanese receptions and translations of this “Asia,” I argue that the discourses of Sino–Indian friendship must also be understood as a serious challenge to the emergent Cold War order and preexisting beliefs about international politics and history. Actors in Japan did not only want to emulate India and China because of exciting developments in both countries' domestic political environments. Rather, their embrace of an “Asian” model of international relations that prioritized cooperation and coexistence instead of competition and conflict inspired Japanese actors to contemplate the political possibilities that would open up if their own country likewise embarked on such a trajectory. The notion that blocs could be eschewed in favor of a united front revolving around political heterogeneity and cosmopolitanism was attractive in a country whose sovereignty was perceived as permanently crippled by American influence. In that sense, China and India's growing friendship became the canvas for imagining how a resurgent Asia could transform the international system and remake the post-war order.
Beginning with a brief outline of post-war perceptions of Japan in China and India and vice-versa, this paper will use the experiences of key activists, statesmen, and intellectuals to navigate the various reactions that Japanese actors had to Sino–Indian declarations of a new Asian political order in the immediate aftermath of the Panchsheel Declaration. A comprehensive summary of the ways that Japanese actors used China and India to interpret new political directions in an imagined “Asia” is beyond the scope of this study. Rather, I want to alert us to the insights that emerge from exploring the importance that friendship between the two largest, most populous postcolonial states had for the larger region and indeed the world; the example of Japan is particularly interesting owing to its long history of engagement with “Asia” as a political ideal. Thus, by analyzing Japanese interpretations of “China–India” as an analytic, we can better understand the reverberations that both countries' politics and their promise of a decolonized world had for a region scarred by past imperialisms and dreading future ones.
The Japan question and imagining “Asia”
The idea of “Asia” as representative of new political possibilities had animated a variety of movements throughout the twentieth century, with perhaps the most notable of these being Japanese-led efforts to promote Asianism. Asianism was a set of transnational discourses whose adherents proposed solidarity on the grounds of a shared, albeit ambiguous “Asian” identity and an opposition toward Western imperialism.Footnote 10 Beginning in the early twentieth century, Asia was seen by intellectuals throughout the region, most notably in China, India, and Japan, as being fundamentally united.Footnote 11 However, definitions of what this singular Asia represented varied considerably. The Japanese thinker Okakura Tenshin [岡倉天心, 1863–1913] believed that it stemmed from vague cultural and spiritual norms that distinguished Asia from the West.Footnote 12 The co-founder of the Chinese Communist Party Li Dazhao [李大釗, 1889–1927] on the other hand saw Asian values as derived from Asian nations' shared material reality under imperialism and their struggle for national liberation.Footnote 13 Moreover, depending on the thinker in question, the geography of this conceptual “Asia” either stretched from Turkey to Hawaii, or only encompassed countries in East and Southeast Asia that shared a supposedly “Confucian” heritage.Footnote 14
Regardless of their differences, many of these Asianists believed that the region ultimately shared a similar historical trajectory and fate. Asia was thus less a geographic fixture and more an imaginative canvas for pushing the boundaries of the politically possible and generating transnational solidarity. However, as the century went on, this canvas became markedly narrower in its scope. Although Japan had always occupied a central place in these different renditions of Asia, visions of collaboration between the region's colonial peoples grew overshadowed by the Japanese Empire's increasing ambitions. Japanese militarism soon transformed the project from ideals of an amorphous “Asia” united against Western imperialism into a singular bloc that would help secure the Japanese Empire's interests.Footnote 15 As Rabindranath Tagore [1861–1941], an early proponent of Asianism, reflected in a letter to a Japanese friend after the invasion of mainland China: “You are building your conception of an Asia which would be raised on a tower of skulls.”Footnote 16
The Japanese Empire's defeat was accompanied by the end of its vision of a united Asia, and a vastly different relationship with its neighbors. Although “Asia” remained an important political category and continued to provide avenues for transnational solidarity, Japanese imperialism cast a long shadow. At the Asian Relations' Conference in Delhi, held in 1947 months prior to India's independence, the memory of Japan's wartime crimes hung heavy in the air.Footnote 17 As one of the conference's official round tables reported, the “cry of ‘Asia for Asiatics’ raised by Japan [was] for its own motives.”Footnote 18 Likewise, an Indonesian delegate also claimed that the Japanese had forever tainted any notion of a united Asian bloc.Footnote 19 Distancing themselves from this history, Indian and Chinese delegates characterized their approach to solidarity with – and implicit leadership over – the region as fundamentally different from Japan's.Footnote 20
At the same time, Nehru and several other delegates noted that Japan's absence from the conference was regrettable and the result of a much more concerning development. Japanese delegates had not been allowed to attend the conference due to the American occupying government's ban on foreign travel.Footnote 21 The conference declared that the “Asia” it represented was primarily defined by its experiences under colonialism. Thus, Japan's subjugation under the United States also conversely kept it a part of Asia's struggle against imperialism, despite its own imperialist past.
Likewise, even as Chinese coverage of the conference condemned Japan's commitment to Asianism as a ploy to “create a Japan-centered empire,” there were also fears that the American occupation of the country foreshadowed continued colonial or semi-colonial interference in the region.Footnote 22 These anxieties about Japan's past and future continued to influence interpretations of “Asia” in the newly established People's Republic of China (PRC) as well. At one of the first international conferences held in the country, the Conference of Asian Women in December 1949, Deng Yingchao [邓颖超, 1904–1992] reminded her audience of delegates from all over the region that the “peoples of Asia fought tenaciously to overthrow Japanese imperialism” and that any American plot to turn the country into a “military base” had to be decisively opposed.Footnote 23
Fears in the PRC that the Japanese Empire would be reborn with American backing reached new heights with the Korean War and subsequent signing of the Treaty of San Francisco.Footnote 24 The nationwide campaign to “Resist America, Support Korea” mobilized the population with arguments that the United States would use the war in Korea to remilitarize Japan.Footnote 25 Moreover, at the influential 1952 Asia-Pacific Peace Conference in Beijing, the conference's organizers and foreign participants alike used shared memories of Japanese oppression and fears that the past could repeat itself to argue for the unity of all “peace-loving peoples of Asia,” while also expressing sympathy with Japanese suffering under the American occupation.Footnote 26 Japan thus became a specter of the imperialist past and the threat of war in the present, the epitome of an Asia caught between older colonial powers and the growing hegemony of the United States.
Despite their very different experiences with Japanese imperialism, the news of war in Korea and the Treaty of San Francisco weighed on Indian activist communities and the highest echelons of the state alike. Nehru offered a blunt assessment of the treaty by noting that the agreement kept Japan from regaining its sovereignty, which would in turn not only affect the Japanese but “large sections of people in Asia” because of the possible role the country would play in another conflict in the region.Footnote 27 Likewise, the All-India Peace Council had a similarly dismal view of Japan's status following the treaty and dedicated significant time at its public conferences to discussing “the Japanese question” and the potential for American troops to use the country as a launching pad for future incursions into the region.Footnote 28 As one Indian peace worker argued, the Treaty had made it clear that America had “spread its net” from “Japan to Formosa and even beyond.”Footnote 29
These Cold War anxieties about Japan's status as former imperialist power and newly colonized vassal – and the implications this would have for the rest of Asia – were reflected in domestic Japanese discourses and activities as well. In addition to participating in major conferences held in India, China, and elsewhere, explicitly international organizations such as the Ajia Rentai Iinkai [アジア連帯委員会, Japan Asian Solidarity Committee] and domestic organizations such as the Shufu Rengōkai [主婦連合会, Housewives Association] alike committed to pursuing solidarity with their equivalents abroad.Footnote 30 Launching conferences, protests, peace marches, and other mass movements to oppose rearmament and militarism in Japan, Japanese actors increasingly placed their domestic struggles in a regional context. As the Japanese Communist Party declared in 1955, American influence was empowering “reactionaries” at home in a way that both harmed Japanese lives and “threatens peace in all of Asia.”Footnote 31
The next sections will showcase how China and India's declaration of friendship in 1954 following the Zhou–Nehru meetings was a major catalyst for this burst of internationalism by focusing on Japanese receptions of the Panchsheel (Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence) as a vehicle for transforming Japan's domestic politics, foreign relations, and understanding of world history. As I will discuss, even as the Panchsheel and Bandung Conference offered models for international relations that were adopted by a variety of different countries, Japanese actors for much of the 1950s specifically associated both with political trends in China and India in particular, namely the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) revolutionary domestic politics and Nehru's international program. Armed with this understanding, diverse groups of burakumin activists, liberal politicians, and radical historians invoked “China–India” as the model of an Asia that was worth emulating and eventually rejoining.
China–India as liberation
At home and abroad, the end of the Japanese Empire signaled the unleashing of powerful social movements. Among this wave of dissent and calls for liberation, Matsumoto Jiichirō [松本治一郎, 1887–1966], a veteran leader of the burakumin Footnote 32 movement throughout the early twentieth century, helped to revive the movement by founding the National Buraku Liberation Committee [全国部落解放委員会] in 1946.Footnote 33 A committed internationalist and socialist, Matsumoto sought to uplift his fellow burakumin by creating an organization that could voice their demands at a national level, but also learn from and appeal to the international struggle against racial discrimination. Faced with political repression and rifts between Japanese Socialist and Japanese Communist Party members, the Liberation Committee nonetheless strove to abolish anti-burakumin discrimination in Japan, which it argued was the result of Japan's peculiar mixture of capitalist development and semi-feudal social structures.Footnote 34
Like other members of the Japanese Socialist Party's left-wing, Matsumoto believed that Japan could remain a peaceful country in the aftermath of the Treaty of San Francisco and the ongoing Korean War if it built a productive relationship with the region.Footnote 35 As he understood it, not only had Japan failed the continent by turning to imperialism, but that very imperial project had also cost Japan its sovereignty. In order to free itself from the stifling influence of the United States, the country thus needed to “return” to Asia. As he declared in a message to the aforementioned Asia-Pacific Peace Conference, Asia had been defined by its recent “trampling under Western imperialism.” Thus Japan, as a country that similarly sought to reap the “rewards of independence” while committing to avoiding “repeating recent history,” would pledge itself to peace in Asia as the “basis of peace in the world” and “overcoming backwardness.”Footnote 36
Similarly, senior members of the Buraku Liberation Committee used the organization's official organ Buraku to analyze events in Asia and their relationship to burakumin oppression in Japan. Studying the Indian government's approach to empowering the scheduled castes, along with revolutionary practices in “New China,” were particularly common topics in the journal's early issues. Buraku's authors stressed that both countries held lessons for the burakumin struggle and stood in contrast to the deeply conservative government of Yoshida Shigeru [吉田茂].Footnote 37 To that end, encouraged by growing networks of peace workers and activists in the region, Matsumoto became the chairman of the Japan–China Friendship Association [日中友好協会] and began to work closer with the World Peace Council and the Socialist International alike.Footnote 38
However, Matsumoto's internationalism and its echoes in Buraku took on a new urgency by 1954. As one prominent editorial declared, 1954 marked the year that “Asia…stepped onto the stage of world history”; the Geneva Conference, with both China and India in attendance, had signaled that Asia was rising up. However, in marked contrast to the ideals of an Asia unshackled by the threat of imperialism and dedicated to “mutual equality,” the editorial decried the Japanese elites as being seduced by the promise of American hegemony. As far as these elites were concerned, Japan was not part of any new tendencies in Asia and they instead sought to turn the country “into a companion of the Western imperialist countries by subordinating and holding down the underdeveloped and oppressed peoples of Asia.” As opposed to representing the possibilities for a new world order or widespread liberation for peoples throughout the region and beyond, the Japanese elites had sold their country's sovereignty in return for acting as a surrogate for Western interests in the region.Footnote 39 As the editors forcefully argued in their conclusion:
the path for Japan's progress as dictated by the Japanese masses will be to act as a member of Asia, to create good, equal relations and, with that in mind, conduct a political program that can relieve the sufferings of our people, protect our way of life, and allow us to embrace a true vision of peace and independence.Footnote 40
Mirroring rhetoric among similar networks of activists in India and China, Buraku's editors and Matsumoto alike argued that Japan was an Asian country by nature of its subjugation; liberation for the burakumin and indeed all Japanese people thus hinged on opposing the Japanese elites and their alliance with the United States in favor of closer ties with the rest of the region. For Matsumoto and the burakumin movement, Zhou Enlai and Nehru's commitment to the Panchsheel represented a unique blueprint for Japanese liberation. Instead of allowing themselves to be dictated by the whims of either Washington or the former colonial powers, the Chinese and Indian government's commitment to coexistence instead of confrontation marked a break with the emerging logic of Cold War geopolitics and the “countries that can only think through weapon defense systems.”Footnote 41 The Zhou–Nehru talks and their emphasis on the Panchsheel had demonstrated to the Liberation Committee that there was a way forward for the countries of Asia to launch their own “diverse struggles for peace, independence, and democracy” while supporting each other and without compromising on a desire to break with the feudal and colonial past. In the wake of foreign interventions in Korea and Southeast Asia, this promise of cosmopolitan alliances and non-interference took on an increased urgency. Thus, as part of its tenth national conference, the Liberation Committee changed its name to the Buraku Liberation League and invoked the Panchsheel in its desire to “deepen internationalist solidarity” and fight “American imperialism” alongside the rest of Asia.Footnote 42
Although Matsumoto viewed all his transnational work as useful for the fight back home, he was disappointed with what he saw in the Soviet Union. Likewise, he believed that European approaches to racism were too narrow because of racism in the West being unequitable with experiences in Asia due to the latter's historical experiences with imperialism.Footnote 43 In contrast, India and China formed dual examples of what Japan could look like if it could escape the conservative politics that had begun to dominate the country's echelons in the aftermath of the American occupation. Matsumoto had long regarded China's experience with land reform and socialist development as crucial for influencing the rest of the region.Footnote 44 Likewise, having met Nehru in 1953, he praised the Indian government's dedication to carving out an independent foreign policy coupled with social reform at home.Footnote 45
Like other members of the burakumin movement, the Panchsheel gave Matsumoto a way to envision what a liberated Japan could look like if it decided to participate in this new wave of “Asian” politics. Instead of focusing on domestic battles to topple feudal economic structures or remove American bases as separate endeavors, he believed it was necessary for the burakumin and the Japanese left more broadly to understand their domestic activity as inherently connected to a larger “Asian” struggle for a better world.Footnote 46 The Panchsheel's emphasis had on one hand given countries in the region the space to focus on domestic reforms in a way that would suit their own interests while also creating a united front against aggression. Indeed, on a visit to Beijing as part of a multi-party delegation in 1954, he met with both Nehru and Zhou Enlai, who both advised him that Japan's struggle against militarism and for true sovereignty would only be advanced if the country likewise pledged to use “the five principles of peaceful co-existence” as the basis for its relationship with the region. Specifically, Zhou argued that these principles gave China and Japan a foundation to rekindle their historic relationship, while also encouraging them to both develop peacefully and according to their own needs.Footnote 47
Matsumoto would continue to periodically tour the region. As Ian Neary notes, the principles of peaceful coexistence as the foundation of a new “Asian” identity continued to animate much of his work for the rest of his life.Footnote 48 As with much of the Japanese left, the Bandung Conference was particularly influential, reinforcing his belief than an Asia under the leadership of China and India could foster greater cooperation in the struggle against societal injustice at a domestic and international level.Footnote 49 Before Bandung, however, he stopped in Delhi to take part in the “unofficial” Conference of Asian Countries.Footnote 50 The Conference was meant to showcase popular support for Bandung, but its organizers also declared their belief in “India–China friendship” as a guarantor for peace and progress in the region.Footnote 51 Other delegates likewise celebrated the Panchsheel as proof that China and India's “heroic struggle for liberty and national independence” could help guide the rest of Asia's colonies embark on a similar path by providing them with an example to strive toward.Footnote 52 Matsumoto and his fellow Japanese delegates agreed, likewise noting that only the “solidarity of Asian countries” based on the Panchsheel's emphasis on cooperation and unity despite their “different ideological and political opinions” would help to guarantee that Asia could secure its own political and economic interests in a world that was quickly splitting into two blocs.Footnote 53
The example of Matsumoto and the burakumin movement suggests that fascinations with the Chinese Revolution and India's internationalism helped to redefine Japanese approaches to “Asia” as a political imaginary. No longer was Japan leading the charge in the region. Moreover, even as a variety of other countries adopted the Panchsheel remained fundamentally linked to the political developments occurring in both “New China” and “Independent India,” helping to transform the meaning of the struggle against imperialism both at home and abroad. Similarly, the novelty of an Asia under the leadership of both countries also affected Japanese understandings of regional geopolitics amid the raging Cold War and the country's alignment with the United States.
China–India as geopolitics
Matsumoto Jiichirō and the Buraku Liberation League's increasing interest in China and India as the joint guarantors of a new Asia was also mirrored by a plethora of organizations closer to the levers of political power. By the mid-1950s, engagement with Asia and breaking away from dependence on the United States in the wake of the Treaty of San Francisco had become a bipartisan issue. Delegates representing the full spectrum of Japanese politics began to travel throughout mainland Asia; they brought back stories of a region that could help Japan conceive of ways to secure true economic and political sovereignty. One member of a cultural mission to China noted that Japan's isolation from the region was costing it the potential to establish mutually beneficial economic and cultural ties, and that in many ways the Soviet Union was filling this void.Footnote 54 Matsumoto likewise hinted that as an advanced economic power, Japan could potentially help India overcome its dependence on Western countries for grains and foodstuffs.Footnote 55 In other words, a wide variety of Japanese actors believed that Japan's failure to manage its own foreign relations without American influence was hindering the country's ability to build productive relations in the region and contribute to world peace in its own way.
In contrast to this, Sino–Indian friendship and the Panchsheel Declaration struck Japanese intellectuals as a roadmap for Japan to engage with Asia in a mutually beneficial way. As the acclaimed economist Tsuru Shigeto [都留重人, 1912–2006] noted in a piece in the influential monthly Sekai [世界, The World], the principles of peaceful coexistence as put forward by India and China were useful because they centrally undermined the logic that the United States used to justify its continued intervention in the region. By clearly showcasing that the American government's Manichean characterization of all communist states as “evil” was false and that co-existence was possible, the Panchsheel and its eventual adoption by all countries in the region could potentially create a geopolitical order based on at least a temporary peace.Footnote 56 Tsuru echoed many of his contemporaries by declaring that peace depended on the ability of countries in Asia to prevent further foreign exploitation. Although these countries had finally achieved political independence, Tsuru feared that an unstable geopolitical environment in the wake of American and European interventions in Korea and Southeast Asia would prevent India and similarly agrarian countries from developing without turning to foreign capital. In other words, “maintaining peace [was] a necessary precondition for the development of the Asian economy.”Footnote 57
As Tsuru understood it, the principles that India and China had declared to the region could help galvanize Japan into playing a larger role as well. As an industrialized power that was conversely buckling under the weight of “subordination to the United States,” Tsuru submitted that it was natural for the countries of Asia to “view the hands of Japan with an understandable suspicion.” At the same time, even with a more independent policy, Japan's unending thirst for capital and external markets would default to a “path of imperialistic development.” If Asia really required industrialization, then Japan could benefit from “[cooperating] in removing the forces that impede it and support those forces that will promote it; thus, it is necessary [for Japan] to set the direction of its own policy.”Footnote 58 An “Asia” seeking the peace that Zhou Enlai and Nehru proclaimed possible could thus benefit from Japan's aid while also empowering Japan to break free from its own internal and external policy deficiencies.
This vision of Asia as representative of a new horizon for foreign policy and geopolitics struck a chord among Japanese intellectuals and political figures alike. Tsuru was hardly the only major figure to theorize on the importance of the Panchsheel; indeed, the pages of Sekai alone were full of such debate.Footnote 59 This was in many ways reflective of the changes within Japan's own political landscape. The Japanese Democratic Party, founded in late 1954 from various factions of the Liberal and Progressive Parties, took power under Hatoyama Ichirō [鳩山 一郎, 1883–1959] in March of 1955.Footnote 60 Although deeply conservative, Hatoyama sought to undermine his predecessor Yoshida Shigeru's dependence on the United States and “pivot” to the Asian mainland based on an understanding that the geopolitical conditions in the region demanded this.Footnote 61 As the Democratic Party's founding resolutions argued:
Despite our hopes, three years have passed since the restoration of peace, and even still Japan remains accustomed to the inertia of the occupation administration, the ethos of self-reliance has not been aroused, industry is withering, democracy has become unstable, and political morality has fallen to the ground…Moreover, from the perspective of diplomacy, diplomatic relations with countries around the world remain hallow, and in particular we are in a state of affairs where we cannot yet achieve friendly, neighborly relations with the countries of Asia…Thus burning with the hopes and beliefs of a new era, we comrades will join forces to form a healthy conservative force: the Democratic Party of Japan.Footnote 62
It was clear to the Democratic Party's leadership that political inertia in Japan could be countered by reaching out to the rest of Asia. Although the Party advocated for working alongside “democratic” and “liberal” countries, it also espoused the “principles of mutual trust and kindness” with the hopes of conducting peaceful relations with all countries in the region, including China.Footnote 63 This desire to lean toward Asia as opposed to the United States did not necessarily reflect imperial pretensions. As the document stresses, engagement with Asia and even rapprochement with China was meant to be part of a gesture of good faith toward the region after its experiences under Japanese imperialism.Footnote 64 Moreover, the Democratic Party firmly argued that without being able to strike its own path in foreign policy and trade, Japan's post-war growth would be limited and entirely dictated by the United States. Even if Hatoyama himself acknowledged the centrality of the US–Japan alliance for the country's security interests, his party believed that the inability for a sovereign country to strike an independent path in foreign policy was a travesty that had to be corrected.Footnote 65 Thus, even when the Democratic Party and Liberal Party merged to create the hegemonic Liberal Democratic Party in November 1955, the new party's agenda maintained a commitment to engaging with Asia under the principles of “peaceful treaties” and “mutual non-interference”.Footnote 66
Hatoyama's Democratic Party was not alone in invoking a new approach to Asia using the language of the Panchsheel. The year 1955 also marked the reunion of the Japanese Socialist Party's left and right wings, becoming a united electoral force again after several years of schism.Footnote 67 Although this unity was in many ways an electoral strategy built to try and give the Japanese left a better chance at seizing power after languishing for several years, the Socialist Party also saw its unity as predicated on an engagement with Asia. In particular, the Party's new chairman Suzuki Mosaburō [鈴木 茂三郎, 1893–1970] believed that “rather than becoming America's ally against China, Japan should seek to consolidate economic self-reliance and independence within world peace and friendship, as Nehru is doing in India.”Footnote 68 Thus, India's friendship with China demonstrated that Japan could also benefit from committing to a “neutralist” geopolitical strategy; in doing so, Japan could have a stronger position within a new Asia.Footnote 69
As the Japanese Socialist Party's platform and policy guideline noted, India's commitment to friendship with China, “Nehru's visits to China and the Soviet Union”, and the holding of the Bandung Conference were among recent events in Asia that bore “careful evaluation.”Footnote 70 Even as different factions within the Left Socialists and Right Socialists continued to debate the nature of a united foreign policy, their new platform pledged a commitment to supporting the struggle against colonialism in Asia and all the countries in the region that “fear [another] world war,” including the Soviet Union and “New China.”Footnote 71 Indeed, in the leadup to the party's reunion, members from both wings endorsed a policy of “non-aggression and noninterference” with China based on the Five Principles and the success of the Zhou–Nehru meetings.Footnote 72 Both wings of the party thus believed that embracing the Panchsheel could influence Japan's standing on the international stage and contribute to more peaceful regional conditions.Footnote 73
As a result of this broad political alignment toward engagement with Asia in the wake of the Panchsheel, multi-party Japanese delegations to Beijing and Delhi and vice-versa helped to create an environment wherein transnational networks could discuss “questions of Inter-Asian cultural relations and the protection of the culture of Asian peoples against foreign domination.”Footnote 74 As Kweku Ampiah has argued, part of the Democratic Party's vision for an independent foreign policy was realized with the country's participation at Bandung itself.Footnote 75 This promoted a larger trend of engagement from Indian and Chinese actors as well. Members of the China–India Friendship Association and its Indian equivalent alike took the “Japan question” very seriously, and Japanese observers at celebrations of Sino–Indian friendship and “Asian” solidarity were a common sight.Footnote 76 Proponents of friendship between China and India in both countries were likewise invited to conferences and meetings in Japan to discuss denuclearization, decolonization in Southeast Asia, and propagating peace in the region.Footnote 77 As Nehru himself put it, “Japan and China must inevitably play an important role in Asia.”Footnote 78
That organizations as different from one another as the Democratic and Socialist Parties found reason to invoke China and India in their new parties' manifestos and agendas would suggest that the example of peaceful coexistence provided by Sino–Indian friendship had a broader appeal than has been previously assumed. Indeed, even the right-wing Yomiuri Shimbun featured editorials with unusually harsh critique against the Yoshida government for its position against normalizing relations with China in the aftermath of the Panchsheel Declaration.Footnote 79 China and India's promise of constructive relations between countries despite their inherent ideological differences showcased that the Cold War's logic of bifurcated geopolitics was not inevitable. Moreover, it also fed into a belief that “Asia” was uniting under as a collective force for world peace. This notion of an Asia now awakening from its colonial slumber at the behest of China–India's leadership thus prompted many to reconsider what role the region would play in the future grooves of world history, and what Japan's place in this new historical trajectory could look like.
China–India as history
As recent research on the scholar Takeuchi Yoshimi [竹内好, 1910–1977] has showcased, sections of the Japanese left believed that China's unique revolutionary conditions meant that the country was at the forefront of progressive change in the region, and that Japan's pretensions to “leading” the region as a developed country were deeply misinformed.Footnote 80 Where Japan relied on the example of the United States and other Western countries to understand its historical trajectory, Takeuchi argued that China was committed to forging its own, novel path. In that respect, although prior to the war “Asia” had often been analogous with backwardness of vulnerability to the advances of Western imperialism, Takeuchi and other intellectuals argued that adopting “Asia as Method” would mean reinterpreting the narrative of world history in a way that could make sense of the revolutionary struggles being waged on the mainland.Footnote 81
Takeuchi was a profoundly influential Sinologist and cultural critic, with his study of Lu Xun in particular gaining notable acclaim in Japanese intellectual circles and far beyond. As a Sinologist, Takeuchi's emphasized the importance of analyzing China and Chinese history and literature to understand the lessons that modern China could offer an occupied and deflated Japan.Footnote 82 Thus, his approach to understanding the substance of “Asian” modernity largely focused on the PRC and its relationship with longer trends in Chinese history. Indeed, one critique of his work has argued that the “Asia” he spoke of hardly ever touched on the experience of countries besides China.Footnote 83 However, despite his focus on China as representative of the potential for modernity outside of capitalism, he also noted that the country's leadership of Asia was in many ways shared by India. As he declared in one essay, “In the place of Japan, which once encouraged Asian nationalism, China has seized leadership in Asia, and has become qualified to represent Asia in global politics. This same leadership has also been sought after by the leaders of India, who seek to create a third force [in global politics] …. Thus from the beginning until the end, China, along with India, has been the standard-bearer of colonial nationalism.” In contrast to either country, Japanese nationalism had “lost its virginity [処女性を失った]” earlier on because of its crude imitation of Western modernization.Footnote 84
The Zhou–Nehru meetings and the apotheosis of the Panchsheel at Bandung as part of the eponymous “Bandung Spirit” also prompted Takeuchi to closely look at the trajectory that Asian nationalism and internationalism were taking in the wake of these shifts.Footnote 85 As he understood it, both India and China had replaced Japan's historic position as a “progressive” force in the region by providing an alternative to its imitation of Western imperialist and capitalist development. Indeed, he opened his essay on Asian nationalism and its trajectory by quoting Nehru's speech at Bandung, noting that his words “Rather than what we discuss at this conference, more important is that we are having a meeting like this at all” declared to the world that “the new movement in the world is that Asia has become capable of speaking in its own voice.”Footnote 86 As he elaborated elsewhere in reference to the Zhou–Nehru meetings:
“Chairman Mao Zedong says that the People's Republic of China has inherited Sun Yat-sen's ideals and movement. Prime Minister Nehru of India confesses that Tagore's spirit lives within him. Asia's heart has weathered many hardships, and finally last year it came to fruition with the Five Principles of Peace. Today, it is trying to actually change the direction of the world. This Asian heart must also be accepted by young Japanese people as well.”Footnote 87
Takeuchi was writing at a time when scholars were generally contemplating their task in Japanese society following the destruction of the Japanese Empire.Footnote 88 As he himself noted, there were different approaches to the question of world history and where Japan fit into Western notions of civilization or teleological progress.Footnote 89 Commenting on a recent debate among scholars, Takeuchi noted that there seemed to be some consensus even among scholars who otherwise disagreed with each other that “Japan is not part of Asia” and in many respects deserved to be grouped with the countries of the West or “zone 1 [第一地域]” as Umesao Tadao [梅棹忠雄, 1920–2010] described it in an influential work.Footnote 90 Takeuchi found that much of these arguments reflected a desire to preserve Japan's sense of superiority over Asia or the “hidden intention to earn a commission as the comprador standing between Asia and Western Europe (today's champion is in fact the United States).” He thus argued that such feelings of superiority over Asia ignored the relative vibrancy of the continent's new political grooves and were thus contrary to the direction of modern history.Footnote 91
Takeuchi went on to document his thoughts on Japan's imitative modernity versus the boldness of China – and to a lesser extent, India – in his famous work on “Asia as Method.”Footnote 92 But, he was not the only scholar to work on the questions of Japan's relationship to ideas of “Asia” in the aftermath of the shifts in India and China.Footnote 93 Acclaimed historian Uehara Senroku [上原專祿, 1899–1975], famed for his work on medieval Europe, also began to theorize the impact that an “Asia” with China and India as its nucleus would have on the study of history itself.Footnote 94 Uehara had spent the post-war years contemplating the historian's craft, its ultimate goals, and the political responsibilities that being in the profession carried. This desire to synthesize his academic and political interests later led to him becoming a major supporter of the 1960 protests against the Japan–US Security Treaty.Footnote 95 As he discussed with the Asahi Shimbun, he regarded historians as educators first, and worked to try and shift Japanese perceptions of their place in history. Uehara's desire to reshape the way that history was understood led him to study a historical shift that could change how both the past and present could be interpreted: the end of empire in Asia. Uehara understood that history was not just the domain of “experts” but the “people”; the people were ultimately meant to be the “active protagonists of recognizing and shaping our portrait of world history.”Footnote 96 This trend was reflected in recent political developments in Asia, which Uehara saw as events that demanded the Japanese public to contemplate their understanding of history and Japan's place within it.Footnote 97
Uehara believed that the recent meetings between Nehru and Zhou and the Panchsheel's importance for Bandung necessitated a reevaluation of world history, the relationship between the “West” and “Asia,” and Japan's position within larger historical trends. As he understood it, the principal problem of the study of history was that even in Japan it was largely the case that “rather than world history simply being centered on Europe, European history is equated with world history itself.”Footnote 98 However, the “recent vigorous political trends and conditions in Asia,” namely the “overall possibility and importance of cooperation between India and China” demanded that historians reexamine this older model of world history in order to assess the “long-term structure and trends” that they long assumed were unquestionable.Footnote 99 Uehara believed that Japan had inherited a conception of world history – along with associated understandings of progress and development – from Europeans. Such a vision of Europe having “fully integrated” the globe in its own world-historical narrative had been shattered by India and China's “common desire for peace and independence” in the region by aiming to redefine the region's relationship with Europe and colonialism.Footnote 100 Where Europe had once sought to define itself as the “vanguard of human culture” vis-à-vis Asia, Nehru and Zhou had showcased that the “‘Asia’ within Asia and Europe's politico-economic relationship has established its independence and autonomy.”Footnote 101
Thus, Uehara regarded the primary significance of the Panchsheel and Bandung after it as providing a path toward “the modern” that did not necessarily stick to European visions of “modernization.” Europe's vision of modernity had revolved around a Darwinian vision of international relations, fully encapsulated by the “age of nuclear power,” whereas the Five Principles could break this pattern. In this sense, without relying on tropes of Asia's “spiritual” superiority, Uehara nonetheless believed that “conditions and trends in Asia are moving past the ‘modern’ of Europe” due to China–India's mutual leadership of the region in both their domestic political innovations and their conceptualization of a new international system.Footnote 102 Europe had demanded that the world conform to a singular “European modernity”. In contrast, the Panchsheel did not seek to create a hegemonic “Asian” modernity. Rather, having been influenced by India and China's experience under imperialism, it hinged on introducing an “acceptance of diversity” into the international system: cosmopolitanism instead of social Darwinism. Just as the anti-colonial struggle had necessitated a united front in domestic politics, both countries sought to create a similar acceptance of differences in the relationship between all countries struggling against colonialism.Footnote 103 This would in effect extend the historical struggle for national independence into the international realm and “realize world peace.”Footnote 104
Like Takeuchi and many others of his contemporaries, Uehara believed that Japan's way forward would be to emulate the ‘Asia’ that India and China were paving the way for. Whereas Japan's commitments to America kept it trapped in an “old Asia,” the “Asia” represented by the Panchsheel and Bandung stood for “complete independence.” By attempting to join the latter Asia, Japan could become a “member of a new Asian world of equality, rather than attempting to become, as it attempted before the war, a ruler of East Asia.”Footnote 105 Uehara certainly acknowledged the challenges that a “new” Asia had to face in order to live up to its potential for peace and liberation. But by using the novelty of Sino–Indian friendship, he encouraged his countrymen to provincialize Europe and break with their imperial past and colonial present for a postcolonial future.
Conclusion
As this paper has shown, the Panchsheel and its associated visions of an Asian solidarity under Sino–Indian friendship prompted excitement in various Japanese circles. That same excitement certainly suffered a blow as the relationship between China and India began to deteriorate by the end of the 1950s.Footnote 106 As one editorial for the Asahi Shimbun pleaded at the outbreak of the Sino–Indian War:
“From the beginning, this [the border dispute] has represented a great loss for international peace. We hope that the two countries will once again embrace the common-sense of ‘coexistence’ that they had once advocated for and will promptly stop all armed action.”Footnote 107
These pleas went ignored, and the project of Sino–Indian friendship collapsed. But, despite our presumptions about Sino–Indian friendship's relative brevity, Japanese flirtations with the Panchsheel as a model for a more “Asian” politics lived a rich afterlife beyond its original context. As Japanese visions – and indeed Indian and China visions too – of “Asia” morphed into “Afro-Asia” and broader Global South solidarity, memories of the infatuation with China and India's relationship were regularly invoked.Footnote 108 Even as the Japan–China Friendship Association took China's line in the 1960s and accused the Indian government as compromised by its association with “monopolist capitalists,” under Matsumoto Jiichirō's leadership it still made special reference to the “joint address of the Prime Ministers of China and India” as the ideal basis for a peaceful and “Asian” political order.Footnote 109 Likewise, although Japanese conservatives saw the Sino–Indian war as proof of the need to align with the United States against “communist aggression,” the Japanese Socialist Party believed that in the aftermath of Nehru's death, Japan could succeed where India failed in helping to guide a neutralist Asia against American militarism and toward sustainable, peaceful economic development.Footnote 110
Even as a new and exciting body of work on “China–India” as an analytic has slowly begun to capture the complexities and depth of the relationships between people in both countries throughout the twentieth century, we must also explore the way that those relationships transformed people far beyond their borders. This paper has only hinted at the various directions that such a research agenda could take. But more can be done to also showcase the variegated meanings that “China–India” took on for Indonesians, whose government often felt overshadowed by the two giants' solidarity for each other, or in other American-aligned countries in the region such as South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines, where visions of an anti-Communist alliance in Asia motivated transnational right-wing solidarity.Footnote 111 Moreover, the image of Sino–Indian leadership over an “Asia” yearning for freedom from foreign domination also had an impact on minorities in the United States.Footnote 112
Beyond expanding our archive, I believe that historians of Sino–Indian friendship should also consider the implications that this solidarity project has for understanding the relationship between the Cold War and decolonization. Like Uehara, we might dwell on the ways that the postcolonial societies that emerged in Asia following the Second World War sought to remake the world in their image, struggling to create viable alternatives to both Cold War brinkmanship and the former imperial order.Footnote 113 Even as they adopted potentially “derivative” discourses, people in both India, China, and beyond saw their new states as capable of creating novel approaches to domestic and international politics and thus escaping the horrors of the past for a new, “Asian” future.Footnote 114 Dwelling on the larger implications of these novelties, despite their ultimate failure, will help us to better understand the way that the Chinese and Indian states understood their place in national, regional, and global historical trends.
By taking on these potentially rich topics, we can highlight the fragilities and novelties of Sino–Indian friendship as a set of political practices and ideals, and its wider resonances among different societies and communities. Moreover, by focusing on the utopian visions of “Asia” at the heart of the two countries' relationship in the 1950s as heavily influenced by postcoloniality and bloc politics, scholars of China–India studies can add to growing literature on the Cold War and its divergent resonances throughout the Global South. In doing so, we can excavate the contours of a project that while ending in tragedy, helped to created hope and solidarity throughout the world.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the editors of The International Journal of Asian Studies and the anonymous peer reviewers for their very helpful feedback and advice on earlier drafts of this article. I am very grateful to Adhira Mangalagiri and Tansen Sen for their guidance in shaping this piece and for giving me the opportunity to be part of such an exciting special issue. Niuniu Teo, Matthew Foreman, and Harry Penfold provided much-needed feedback and encouragement while writing. Afia Khan was a constant source of support, for which I will always be thankful. Lastly, I would never have been able to finish this without the constant guidance of my Japanese sensei: Ishikawa, Komine, Kondo, Lory, and Katagiri. This work is dedicated to them.
Conflict of interest
None.
