The Racialization of ‘Asia’ in the Post-Versailles Period

Abstract

This chapter examines how after the Paris Peace Conference and the immigration exclusion legislation in the United States, the Asianist moments of 1919 and 1924, promoted racialist conceptions of Asianism to the centre of debate. Against the background of a growing racialization of political discourse and of political reality, this chapter explores how and why racialist conceptions of Asianism became dominant, how Asianism gradually changed from a theoretical enterprise into a movement, and how this affected Sino-Japanese interactions. This chapter also includes an in-depth analysis of Sun Yat-sen’s famous Kobe speech on Greater Asianism (1924), the most influential Chinese Asianist critique of Japanese Asianism, and of its reception in Japanese public discourse.

As has become obvious in the attitude of Great Britain and the United States regarding the race issue, they completely ignore the people of the East . On this occasion, the people of Japan and China must wake up and call for the establishment of Greater Asianism. The people of the East must never forget how the issue of racial discrimination was smothered at the Paris Conference. ¹

— Ōishi Masami (May 1919)