Abstract
In this chapter, I look at Asian responses to Mizoguchi Yuzo’s (1 932–2010) notion of Sinic kitai (i.e., the basic substance, body history, underlying concepts, and essential being of China) through a multisited approach. Mizoguchi’s notion refers to a China that has a life of its own and does not follow modernist historiography. Politically, recognition of the Chinese kitai neutralizes Japan’s own modernization as that of an outsider and demolishes the legitimacy of its intervention in Chinese affairs on the pretext of Asian modernization. The kitai method involves a critical reflection on the East Asian international relations (IR) scholarship that is embedded in modern Asianism. While early Asianism coped with the collapse of the Sinic world order by proposing the conquest of China, contemporary Asianism copes with China rising by deconstructing it. This chapter gathers those narratives that, taken together, allow one to move beyond the typical epistemological collusion between social science and history that treats China as a distinctive, substantive subject of inquiry, tangible or intangible, modernist or kitai oriented.
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Shih, Cy. (2013). Korean Asian: The Sinic Tribute System of China and Its Equals. In: Sinicizing International Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137289452_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137289452_9
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