A note on terminology

[ahorbinski]

It occurs to me that I tend to throw around certain chronological adjectives while assuming that people know what I mean when there's no guarantee that they do. So when I say…

"Modern" Japan: roughly from the Meiji to the Taisho era, 1868-1920s
"Imperial" Japan: roughly from the Taisho era to the end of the war, 1910-1945
"Postwar" Japan: 1945 onward, but especially until the 1970s
"Contemporary" or "postmodern" Japan: 1970s onward, especially since 1991

"Modern" China: You'll get a lot of different answers on this one. I say 1894 onwards
"Republican" China: 1912-1949
"Communist" China: 1949-onwards, but especially until 1980
"Contemporary" China: 1980s onward, especially since 1989

But as far as departmental divisions go, all of these subdivisions fit under the "modern Japan" and "modern China" rubrics.

Comments

[oyceter]

Ooo, thanks for the notes! I've always thought of Qing Dynasty China (1644-1911) as premodern China and Edo Japan (1600-1868) as premodern Japan, but don't know if other people do or not?

[lnhammer]

Edo is commonly, yes, also called premodern. (I'm more iffy on Qing.)

---L.

[ahorbinski]

Yeah, Edo is commonly called premodern, or rather 'premodern' fits up until the end of Edo--I think a lot of Edo specialists prefer to call it the early modern (because there's all this crap on the American side about the modern versus the early modern that just doesn't happen in Europe; there everything from 1500 on is the modern, and Japan from 1600 is the modern). But the Qing Dynasty is way less clear--the premodern would cover through most of the Qing period, but the 19th century is trickier. It's a break, but not a particularly well-defined one. It might be interesting to think about whether the 19thC could plausibly be called the early modern in China, actually.

[oyceter]

Ahaha, I should probably have said I don't actually think of those periods as "premodern," but the classes I've taken have labeled them as such, so I've kind of adopted it. I still remember talks with my ex the engineer, where he was like, "What do you mean, the nation-state as a modern concept?" And I said, "Uh. Modern compared to several centuries of human civilization?"

[ahorbinski]

I don't really like calling the Edo period premodern either, unless it's preModern as in before-the-high-modern, but obviously no one writes it that way and the distinction is probably too subtle to be contained in the term. I am one of those heretics who thinks that it's possible to have a nation before the (high) modern period--unlike most people who study modern Japan, I don't think talking about nation in the Edo period, which obviously existed, does anything to diminish the radical innovation that the Japanese nation-state represented. And ditto for the rest of the world, as applicable. But this is very much a live debate in the field, which I find sort of ludicrous, but there it is.

China, I don't know. I've read a few books about the Qing/British interaction in the 19thC that seem to make it really clear that it was partially structured by the differences between the classical and the modern, not using those words in a value-laden way but in terms of worldview.

[ahorbinski]

Argh, I can't edit comments. What do you think of the Edo and Qing periods as? Since I really only know what people in my department think, and in some ways we have a very particular understanding of some things.

[oyceter]

Ahaha, this is where I go /o\ am such a FAKE SCHOLAR! I am not actually sure what Modern-with-a-capital-M is? Is it basically nation-state formation and stuff with colonialism and post-colonialism and globalization and etc? (Someday I will actually read all of Imagined Communities instead of just snippets...)

But yeah, I think there is national identity of a sort preModern stuff and WWI and the nation-state, although I always get hung up on "But did people in Qing Dynasty China think of themselves as zhongguaren or as hanren or manzuren or ?? DO NOT KNOW ENOUGH."

I am really interested in the Qing/British interaction and the classical vs. the modern! What does that mean?

I think I haven't thought in a long time about the terminology for Qing and Edo stuff. I do feel kind of nidgy about the term "premodern," especially when applied to non-Western Europe/USian places, just because it can also be used as a judgment even when the person doesn't necessarily mean to imply judgment, and I think naming the whole era a certain name elides a lot of the subtleties, like what happened in the latter part of the Qing Dynasty and the Opium Wars and what "modernization" even means. I remember one class and talking about the basically assembly-line process of creating some Qing Dynasty china, as well as Needham's look at tech in China, and how hard it is to do hard and fast definitions, especially when the judgments are so loaded thanks to colonialism and stuff.

... uh. I am not sure that actually made any sense whatsoever.

[ahorbinski]

Well, all that I know about this I learned from three books: English Lessons, The Clash of Empires, and Staging the World. The first two are about the British setting out to make the Qing Empire "perfectly equal" with the rest of the community of nations, and thus actually basically destroying it as such, but for me both books implicitly showed the differences between the two empires--the Qing was constituted on the classical model of polyethnic polyglot empires, whereas the British empire was a nation-state with a bunch of colonies (but I may be the only person who gets that impression, due to my classics background). And the third one is about the growth of consciousness of themselves as Hanren (against the Manchus in particular) among intellectuals in the 1890s.

And yeah, I agree with you completely about the inadequacy of the terms and the implicit value judgments. In Japan studies the modern period is explicitly equated with modernity (the communications technology, the mass mobilization, the ideology pervading daily life), which actually now that I think about it reinforces the "modernity = westernization" equation, which is obviously false.