ABSTRACT
The Master Said: Put me in the company of any two people at random – they will inevitably have something to teach me. I can take their qualities as a model and their defects as a warning.
(The Analects of Confucius, 7.22)
The following chapters build on the previous discussions which investigated both China and Japan’s acquisition of ‘knowledge’ – the development of an awareness for the social rules of the environment the actor finds herself in – by concentrating primarily on exploring the ‘strategic learning’ and ‘emulative learning’ phase of the socialization process. The previous chapter demonstrated that some of the Chinese and the
Japanese elites were beginning to engage with the two faces of a Janus-faced European International Society. They were beginning to notice that some states were accorded the protection of the Society’s institutions more than their own countries, and that these states shared similar features. What then, were these features? In Chinese and Japanese eyes, the most conspicuous was military and industrial power. This is not surprising, as these material characteristics were most readily discernible. In the context of Chinese and Japanese experiences of encountering the Society’s coercive, ‘civilizing’ mode of interaction, military power was also seen to afford a state protection from the powerful armies and navies of the ‘civilized’ members of the Society. To realize these goals, however, some form of institutional reforms seemed
inevitable: the Western powers posed an unprecedented threat with their vastly superior military, technology, and industrial development. China and Japan appeared incapable of attaining parity with the European powers in these areas. The result of this was a concerted call for China and Japan to adapt to their new international environment by undergoing reforms that would transform their states into ‘rich and powerful’ states. However, was military power alone enough to be accorded the same treatment which the European powers enjoyed? To a certain extent it was, but the social logic of late nineteenth-century European International Society dictated that in addition to being militarily powerful, a state had to be judged as ‘civilized’ in order to be accorded the protection of its institutions. They had to
demonstrate ‘competence and skill’ in applying the rules of the Society in order to convince the ‘civilized’ members that they had undergone a successful process of socialization, and were now ready to enter the ‘civilized family of nations’ and be accorded the protection of their sovereign independence and territorial integrity – and in an era of clear European military dominance, the ‘uncivilized’ non-European states often had little choice but to comply. The Chinese and Japanese elites would thus have to recognize this ‘social logic’
and become militarily powerful and fulfil the social standards of the Society simultaneously. It is here that divergences between the two states appeared. Some of the Chinese reformist elites did attempt to introduce European industry and technology and modernize the military. Any reforms that they undertook, however, were not intended to demonstrate their ‘commitment’ to the norms and expectations of the Society. Therefore, the Chinese did not go beyond introducing Western technology and weapons. They did not introduce European-style political institutions on a wide scale (the establishment of the Zongli yamen being a notable exception). Japan, on the other hand, also introduced European technology and industry, but took a very different route. Their reforms not only sought to make Japan a military power, but also to demonstrate Japan’s ‘commitment’ to adhere to the Society’s norms and prove itself a worthy candidate of ‘civilized’ membership. To this end, they attempted to reinvent Japan into a ‘Europeanized’ state, thereby transforming Japan’s identity from a member of the East Asian International Society to a ‘civilized’ member of European International Society. The following two chapters focus on the process by which China and
Japan attempted to acquire (what they perceived to be) the ‘competence and skill’ needed to be accorded ‘civilized’ status within European International Society. It will be recalled that at this stage an actor is assumed to have acquired some degree of knowledge of her new social environment, and while this has yet to attain legitimacy in her eyes, the actor is, to a certain extent, able to conform to its procedural norms. The divergent paths followed by the two states mean that while the primary empirical cases presented are, for organizational purposes, from the stage of ‘gaining knowledge and competence’, in reality the analysis does overlap with the ‘commitment’ stage of socialization in the case of Japan. Accordingly, the in-depth empirical analysis that follows below examines
how China and Japan interacted with the ‘social pressures’ to attain ‘Europeanized’ statehood in the course of their reforms aimed at strengthening the state. The crucial benchmark by which to gauge the degree of China and Japan’s attainment of ‘competence and skill’ in applying the social norms of European International Society was the degree to which both states’ elites were willing to be judged by the standards of the Society’s ‘civilized’ members. If a state was more receptive to the social pressures of European International Society, it was likely that it would seek to attain the identity of a ‘Europeanized’ (or, to use the terminology of the nineteenth century,
‘civilized’) state that was also rich and strong. A state that was less receptive to the social norms of the Society was more likely to attempt to become ‘rich and strong’ by other means. In the latter case, a ‘Western-style’ state was not seen as possessing social prestige, and neither was success seen in terms of attaining a ‘Europeanized’ identity. With regard to attaining military power, I draw on Michael Howard’s
argument that ‘[o]nly sophisticated and wealthy political organisms [can] produce and sustain regular armies’ equipped with capital-intensive weaponry. To this end, a state needed efficient
[t]ax systems to pay for them [the military], the bureaucracy to levy and maintain them, the arsenals to manufacture their weapons, all [of which] implied a degree of social organization that was becoming palpably higher in Western Europe than among the other societies with which Europeans were in contact.1
