ABSTRACT
This chapter traverses a number of different conceptions of the past in China and Japan in order to ask about the nature of time and politics. We inquire into the Confucian ideal of the ancient past as ideal, the past as part of a genealogy of a divine Japanese emperor, and the past as part of an evolutionary process. These visions of the past are not merely temporal, but geographical, and each will invoke the image of China differently. China was assumed to be the center of tianxia (“all-under-heaven”), an imaginary politico-geographical conception within which the ancient institutions of China were considered the foundation of an ideal polity. During various periods, political elites in Korea and Japan also invoked the Chinese past as an ideal. However, during the modern period, as both China and Japan enter the global capitalist system of nation-states, Chinese and Japanese intellectuals both begin to decenter China. This adherence to evolutionary time and decentering of China represents the advent of new dominant political ideologies associated with modernity and capitalism. Intellectuals in China and Japan would now have to rethink earlier political theories in relation to modernity, capitalism, and liberal ideas such as freedom and equality.
