AHC: Pan-Asianism as a viable force

ThAn Jung-geun, who assassinated the Japanese prime minister in Korea, believed in the union of China, Korea, and Japan in order to counter and fight off European Colonialisn and interference, considering the trajectory that Asian history took, it clearly did not happen.

Your challenge, with a POD as far back as possible, if you choose to accept it, is to create and make pan-asianism a viable force in the late 19th and 20th centuries.
 
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ThAn Jung-geun, who assassinated the Japanese prime minister in Korea, believed in the union of China, Korea, and Japan in order to counter and fight off European Colonialisn and interference, considering the trajectory that Asian history took, it clearly did not happen.

Your challenge, with a POD as far back as possible, if you choose to accept it, is to create and make pan-asianism a viable force in the late 19th and 20th centuries.

Not having the Japanese run their colonies in Asia so badly that the British colonial authorities looked like saints in comparison would have been a good start.
 
I don't know if I'd say the Japanese ran them badly; I'd stack South Korea or Taiwan up against India any day of the week...

I think the POD requires a stronger China; if the two powers were both developing and strong enough to make a confrontation between the two look foolish, then you are more likely to see Pan-Asianism emerge. Even in OTL, many Chinese nationalists looked to Japan for help (Sun Yat-sen among them). But China was simply too poor and backwards to be a serious ally.
 
I don't know if I'd say the Japanese ran them badly; I'd stack South Korea or Taiwan up against India any day of the week...

I think the POD requires a stronger China; if the two powers were both developing and strong enough to make a confrontation between the two look foolish, then you are more likely to see Pan-Asianism emerge. Even in OTL, many Chinese nationalists looked to Japan for help (Sun Yat-sen among them). But China was simply too poor and backwards to be a serious ally.

I'm thinking of a time period later than that when it was actually possible for them to unite a lot of Asian territory, that is 1920s and later. For Japan to pull this off long term they can't act like the Mongol Horde on a bad day.
 
I'm thinking of a time period later than that when it was actually possible for them to unite a lot of Asian territory, that is 1920s and later. For Japan to pull this off long term they can't act like the Mongol Horde on a bad day.

Sure, but Japan in the 1890s or even 1920s is very different than Japan in 1938. Pan-Asianism doesn't require the conquest of Asia; it requires the Japanese and Chinese to work together to kick the European colonialists out of their territory.
 
Sure, but Japan in the 1890s or even 1920s is very different than Japan in 1938. Pan-Asianism doesn't require the conquest of Asia; it requires the Japanese and Chinese to work together to kick the European colonialists out of their territory.

I guess, but China would have to be considerably more powerful though.
 
I don't know if I'd say the Japanese ran them badly; I'd stack South Korea or Taiwan up against India any day of the week...

I think the POD requires a stronger China; if the two powers were both developing and strong enough to make a confrontation between the two look foolish, then you are more likely to see Pan-Asianism emerge. Even in OTL, many Chinese nationalists looked to Japan for help (Sun Yat-sen among them). But China was simply too poor and backwards to be a serious ally.

Being Chinese, I can assure you that pretty much anyone in China would vastly prefer British rule to Japanese rule, if forced to choose between the two.
 
Being Chinese, I can assure you that pretty much anyone in China would vastly prefer British rule to Japanese rule, if forced to choose between the two.

To be blunt, your perspective is colored by the fact that the Japanese killed millions of you between 1937 and 1945 and committed horrific war crimes.

But before that? The British were bombarding Chinese cities as late as the 1920s. We aren't talking about whether China and Japan could form a national union today, but whether that was a feasible movement in the late 19th, early 20th century.
 
Won't Pan-Asianism just end up as a way for Japan and China to replace Western domination with their own brand of control. China has the population and history of dominating its neighbours, while Japan has the military and economy that can't be challenged by other non-western states.

I'm sceptical of Japan's or China's goal.
 
A rough idea: Meiji Japan invoke the mandate of heaven and cite Qing's humiliation and the Japan's rise as the proof that it's heaven's will to transfer the mandate of heaven to Japan (for the ignorent mass and the hardcore Confucian scholars), benefits of constitutional monarchy over traditional monarchy (for the middle class), and "Industrialization 101: How to make money beneficially to the nation" to the rich, would-be capitalists.
 
Won't Pan-Asianism just end up as a way for Japan and China to replace Western domination with their own brand of control. China has the population and history of dominating its neighbours, while Japan has the military and economy that can't be challenged by other non-western states.

I'm sceptical of Japan's or China's goal.

Yes, most likely Japan and China would divide the rest of Asia between themselves.
 
Yes, most likely Japan and China would divide the rest of Asia between themselves.

Pan-Arabism, an example that I believe is closest to what we are trying to discuss here, worked because of several reasons that we need to understand here:

1. They had a unifying factor, other than the fact that they are all, well, "Asians". The Arabs were all on equal stance from the Maghreb to Mesopotamia, between the African and Gulf Arabs - believers in the Islam faith, speakers of a non-dialectic Arabic, etc. If Asia is to pursue something that looks similar to what occurred in the Arab world, it is possible the movement may be quite limited(the Sinosphere).

2. They all were in equal standing, more or less; or, more to say, there were multiple major players. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire and colonisation of those regions by Europe, all nations were cut up into similar pieces and did not have complete supremacy over one another. This is not the case for the Sinosphere - unless, of course, China falls completely and the warlords declare independence.

3. Most of them were directly colonised. This meant that, unlike the Sinosphere, the nations were all resisting European powers and thus unified them against the common enemy, along with bringing them to a more desperate position(necessitating a unified front). In the Sinosphere, only the Philippines and Vietnam are colonised by Western powers(counting the Philippines into the Sinosphere).

There are much more that we can go into if we pursue detail, but the general point is clear: we need elements both from outside and within which brings a group of nations together. For that to happen, Asia(by differing definitions) can either be too large a nation-group to see a unifying factor, or can be too dominated by large, previously imperialist nations. And it will be especially hard for the Sinosphere because it was historically dominated by the Confucian domination-tributary system; as I said, only with a shattered China(and, I should add, a not-very-strong Japan) can we forsee the true development of Pan-Asianism.
 
Why is Pan-Arabism, but not the European Union, the appropriate analogy?

In perspective of the fact that in the early 1910s~1920s(when Ahn's ideology was still there), I thought East Asia would be most similar to the Arab world than post-1945 Europe - although this may be my opinion, I believe before the fall of the USSR the EU and its predecessors existed basically because of US support. The major West European nations got together, basically, because the United States asked them to.
 
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