ABSTRACT
Through examining the work of two Japanese Sinologists, this chapter introduces us to a double politics of time. The postwar Sinologists Nishi Junzō and Mizoguchi Yūzō each draw on two Chinese pasts to imagine a different future. First, like many postwar Sinologists, they both were inspired by the 1949 Revolution and believed that this might inaugurate a new future beyond Western imperialism and global capitalism. However, second, they each connected the Chinese Revolution to premodern Chinese pasts, which were somehow sublated into the revolutionary present. Through drawing on different readings of the Chinese concept of tianxia or all-under-heaven, they establish alternative visions of socialism that go beyond what they believed were modernizing Marxist narratives.
