front cover of Chen Jiongming and the Federalist Movement
Chen Jiongming and the Federalist Movement
Regional Leadership and Nation Building in Early Republican China
Leslie H. Dingyan Chen
University of Michigan Press, 2000
The local self-government movement in China began in the late Qing, and by the Revolution of 1911 no fewer than five thousand self-government councils had formed around the country. While the early revolutionaries cherished the idea of a federated state, federalist and centralist leaders engaged in a growing conflict that culminated in the defeat of federalism in the mid-1920s. The story of this movement has since remained hidden behind Nationalist and Communist accounts of the early revolutionary struggle.
Chen Jiongming and the Federalist Movement reopens the record on federalist efforts from the perspective of the son of one of the movement’s key figures. Challenging the accepted accounts of the federalist movement, Leslie Chen focuses on his father Chen Jiongming's policies and administrative achievements in Fujian and Guangdong. Chen Jiongming played a key role in the tumultuous politics of southern China from 1909 until his death in 1933. He built a relationship and then notoriously broke with Sun Yat-sen, the leader of the centralist revolutionaries. Leslie Chen argues that his father's attempts to create a democratic federalist system in Guangdong were aimed at providing a model for China as a whole. His account is lively and readable; it gives an intimate, yet historically accurate, account of Chen Jiongming's considerable role in early twentieth-century Chinese history.
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An Imperial Path to Modernity
Yoshino Sakuzō and a New Liberal Order in East Asia, 1905–1937
Jung-Sun N. Han
Harvard University Press, 2013

An Imperial Path to Modernity examines the role of liberal intellectuals in reshaping transnational ideas and internationalist aspirations into national values and imperial ambitions in early twentieth-century Japan. Perceiving the relationship between liberalism and the international world order, a cohort of Japanese thinkers conformed to liberal ideas and institutions to direct Japan’s transformation into a liberal empire in Asia. To sustain and rationalize the imperial enterprise, these Japanese liberals sought to make the domestic political stage less hostile to liberalism. Facilitating the creation of print-mediated public opinion, liberal intellectuals attempted to enlist the new middle class as a social ally in circulating liberal ideas and practices within Japan and throughout the empire.

In tracing the interconnections between liberalism and the imperial project, Jung-Sun N. Han focuses on the ideas and activities of Yoshino Sakuzo (1878–1933), who was and is remembered as a champion of prewar Japanese liberalism and Taisho democracy. Drawing insights from intellectual history, cultural studies, and international relations, this study argues that prewar Japanese liberalism grew out of the efforts of intellectuals such as Yoshino who worked to devise a transnational institution to govern the Japanese empire.

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