Borders of Chinese Civilization: Geography and History at Empire's End.

BORDERS OF CHINESE CIVILIZATION: Geography and History at Empire's End by D. R. Howland (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996)

The question of why China and Japan followed such vastly divergent paths into the modern world presents itself to anyone with even a passing interest in East Asian history. Ironically, the manner in which the Chinese and Japanese themselves have sought to respond to this question is often given relatively little consideration. With this stimulating volume, D. R. Howland has endeavored to remedy such oversight, especially with regard to the Chinese perspective. His innovative approach enables us to secure a firmer grasp on subtle changes in China's self-image and vision of international relations during the last decades of the nineteenth century.

As Howland points out, the relationship between China and Japan had been extremely one-side during the traditional period. Like many cultures lying on the periphery of successive Chinese empires, Japan had ingested great gulps of Chinese culture at a number of points in their history. Unlike cultures such as Korea and Vietnam, however, geographic isolation allowed the Japanese the luxury of considerable control over the extent and nature of contact. For long periods of time they refused to participate in the tributary system which valorized China's vision of itself as the center of the world and the embodiment of all that was civilized. It was precisely their aloofness that made the Japanese so problematic for the Chinese when the two empires initiated Western-style diplomatic contact in the mid-nineteenth century. Lacking extensive geographic or historic accounts of Japan, Chinese diplomats found themselves trying to reconcile poorly formed and conflicting images of the country and its people. On the one hand, early accounts found in the official dynastic histories tended to place Japan among the "civilized" nations which had adopted Chinese culture and writing system. On the other hand, later accounts from the Ming and early Qing identified the Japanese with the treacherous "Dwarf pirates" whose fleets savaged the Chinese coast all too regularly during those dynasties. Making use of some unique materials -- in particular recorded proceedings of the "brush-talk" sessions which took place in Japan and involved Chinese and Japanese scholars-diplomats -- Howland demonstrates that the Chinese initially opted for the more flattering image of Japan as a country which shared a literature with China and thus was located within the compass of civilization. The problem of dealing with the increasing presence of Western powers in East Asia was likewise seen as something which Chinese and Japanese shared.

Howland spends considerable time examining contemporaneous Chinese examples from several genres of geo-historical accounts of Japan. He does not confine himself to conventional treatises, but looks at such things as travel diaries and poetry as well. As "performative" accounts, such literature helped literate Chinese contextualize Japan and Japaneseness in subjective terms. Much detailed analysis is devoted to Huang Zunxian's Poems on Divers Japanese Affairs. Students of literature as well as historians will benefits from many of the observations made here. Quite apart from helping us see Huang's particular vision of Japan, Howland gives much illuminating evidence of the non-belle-lettristic role played by poetry within the general context of traditional elite society in China.

In his discussion of the more orthodox forms of geo-political accounts of Japan Howland maintains a strong conceptual and theoretical grounding. He characterizes these "common sense" reports of the island kingdom as attempts to "objectify" Japan. In contrast to the literary treatment of travel diaries and poems, geographical treatises conveyed an understanding of Japan removed from social context. They were intended to provide practical information which might serve those intent on dealing with the pragmatics of Sino-Japanese affairs. Those pragmatics increasingly were related to the rapid pace of Westernization in Japan and its implications for a China which saw in that Westernization the disintegration of its traditional view of civilization and world order. Overall, Borders of Chinese Civilization succeeds admirably in its primary task of constructing the dynamics of a critical moment in the history of China's laborious march toward the twentieth century. By making well-considered use of contemporary theoretical strategies and by examining a variety of non-traditional source materials, D. R. Howland had brought fresh insight to a complex problem. One must be particularly impressed with the manner in which literary theory and an analysis of literary culture have been integrated into a study of phenomena traditionally located in the exclusive domain of historians. In this respect this book can be seen as an excellent example of how the borders of academic disciplines are being redefined in search of a more complete and multi-dimensional vision of Chinese history.