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Rediscovery of Asia – from the Value-Based Orientalism to Strategic Universal Asianism
The so-called Asian Values debate has long history. In the late 19th and the early 20th century not only in Japan, but also in China as well as other Asian countries (e.g. Korea and India), the Asian intelligentsia had dealt with the modernization. They faced with the essential problem, in which they would want on the one hand to slough off categories of the objectivism such a like an orientalism defined by the western, simultaneously, they want to modernize themselves without loss of their own identity, because the process of Asian modernization at that time had lain between Scylla of nationalism and Charybdis of imperialism. For that reason, one of the notorious Japanese historian, Tsuda Shoukichi, and his colleagues had contended with traditional Confucianism and orientalism of linear development expressed by European, and have attempted to de-objectivation of Japan and the whole Asia in the name of ‘Great Asia’. On the contrary, Sun, yat-sen, the father-figure of modern China, has attempted with his famous three principles of the people(so-called sam-min doctrine) to find the Asian way of modernization, which consist of democracy, nationalism, and welfarism. Despite of brief contents, he has tried with these principles to pioneer the strategic universal Asianism unless falling into a trap of ‘Great Asia’, which had been identified as the main obstacles in the way of East Asian integration.
Focusing on the past debate inherited in the present to criticize certain version of an East Asian Community and to frame alternative conceptions of Asian commonality, this article will examine the dynamics of critical regionalism in Asia from the 1990s to today, and suggest new dimensions of universal Asianism like peace, prosperity of mankind, democratic sovereignty, and socio-cultural integration.