User:Madalibi/Social Darwinism in East Asia

Shaped Pan-Asianism and nationalism in the the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in East Asia.

Social Darwinism was the first Western intellectual theory to make a strong impact on China.

Background of rapid social change, political unrest, and foreign encroachment.

Was a crucial intellectual movement with cross-regional ramifications, since East Asian intellectuals traveled between countries and read and translated each other's works. The cross-regional ramifications of social Darwinism in East Asia can be illustrated by Vietnamese Phan Bội Châu's History of the Loss of Vietnam (Việt Nam vong quốc sử), which Phan wrote and published in Japan under the encouragement of Liang Qichao, an exiled Chinese intellectual, and which was later widely read in Korea, first in classical Chinese, and then in vernacular Korean translation.

The common point of East Asian Social Darwinism was the emphasis on the interests of the group above those of the individual. This was taken as the pre-requisite of a successful national struggle. In East Asian countries, Social Darwinism provided intellectuals with a powerful tool to understand why their nation either had fallen or was in danger of falling to more powerful nations. Thinkers thought that the west had temporarily proven its superiority in the "struggle between races," but that it could be overtaken through emulation. Starting in the 1920s, however, other intellectuals started to criticize Social Darwinian ideas, arguing that they were exploitative for the masses, and could lead to collaboration with imperialist powers in the name of progress.

Enthusastic advocates used Darwinian to support their own agendas, which spanned from authoritarian statism to cooperative socialism. Eugenicists, laissez-faire economists, and advocates of a strong state all found Spencerian ideas attractive.

Translations and reinterpretations
"Because East Asian interpretations of Spencer's thought often downplayed its relentless determininism in favor of a more optimistic voluntarism, social Darwinism as the Vietnamese received it also presented a path to national revival.... This recasting of the transcendent power of the human will allowed East Asian reformers and, later, their Vietnamese counterparts to look past the deterministic and impersonal socio-historical forces fundamental to Western conceptions of social Darwinism and formulate a voluntarist Darwinian prescription for social evolution."

Japan
Soon after the beginning of the Meiji reforms in 1868, Japan created institutions modeled after European universities. On the year of its foundation in 1877, Tokyo Imperial University invited American zoologist Edward Sylvester Morse (1838–1925) to teach modern biology. From 1877 to 1879 and again in 1882 and 1883, Morse disseminated Darwin's new evolutionary theories in Japan through both formal classes and public lectures. Morse's lectures were transcribed and translated by Ishikawa Chiyomatsu (1861–1935), who published them as Animal Evolutionism (Dōbutsu shinkaron 動物進化論) in 1883. On Morse's initiative, the young Ernest Fenollosa (1853–1908) was invited to teach political science, philosophy, and economics at the university in 1878. Fenollosa gave a central place in his teaching to Herbert Spencer's ideas, of which he was very fond.

Social scientist and dean of Tokyo University Katō Hiroyuki (1836–1916) heard Morse's lectures and was attracted to the social implications of Darwin's ideas. He had supported the Freedom and People's Rights Movement in the 1870s, but after the Meiji government suppressed it, Katō used Social Darwinian doctrines to argue that the interests of the group should be put above those of individuals. In his New Theory of Human Rights (Jinken Shinsetsu 人權新說; 1882), he advocated strengthening the Japanese state to make it the "fittest." He has been called "the leading social Darwinist in Meiji Japan."

Korea
Social Darwinian ideas were introduced to Korea in the 1880s by intellectuals who had studied in Japan. Their first two proponents were Yu Kil-chun (1856–1914) and Yun Chi-ho (1864–1945), who both went to Japan in the spring of 1881 as members of Eo Yun-jung's (어윤중, 魚允中; 1848–1896) Courtiers' Observation Mission (조사 시찰단, 朝士視察團) the Korean royal court dispatched to observe the Meiji reforms. Both adopted Social Darwinism in different ways, Yun from a Christian point of view, and Yu by integrating ideas of struggle into his Confucian worldview. In early 1883 Yu Kil-chun wrote Treatise on the Main Tendencies of the World [Segye daese pyeon, 세계대세편, 世界大勢編] and a Treatise on Competition [Gyeongjaengron, 경쟁론, 競爭論] both of which were imbued with Social Darwinist ideas. However, these works remained unpublished. Influenced by the thought of Katō Hiroyuki, Yu understood "state, nation, and race as social organisms" that struggled with other nations for survival. Yu and Yun did not manage to popularize Social Darwinism in Korea. Yun mentioned such ideas in editorials published in The Independent (1896–1899), but not enough to disseminate these ideas widely.

Liang Qichao was first mentioned in the 15 February 1898 issue of the Journal of Great Joseon's Independence Club (Daejoseon Tongnip Hyeophoe Hoebo, 大朝鮮獨立協會會報), a monthly published in classical Chinese by the Independence Club (1896–1898). An eloquent editorial "On Patriotism" that Liang wrote for the Qingyibao (清議報) – a magazine he edited in Yokohama from December 1898 to December 1901 – was published in its original classical Chinese in the moderate Hwangseong Sinmun in March 1899, and in vernacular Korean in the Tonging Sinmun in July of the same year. Until 1906, few of Liang's other writings were translated. From 1906 to 1910, however, Korean monthly journals run by academic societies published 33 of his texts, mostly in mixed Chinese and Korean scripts. Many of these articles were selected from Liang's newspaper articles and editorials that he wrote between 1896 and 1898 – which had been made available by the publication of his Yingbingshi wenji in Shanghai in 1902 – when his thinking was less seeped by Social Darwinian ideas than it later would.

Social Darwinian ideas became popular among Korean intellectuals starting with the publication of Liang Qichao's Selected Writings from the Ice-Drinker's Studio (Yinbingshi zhuanji) in 1904 (?). Liang's works, many of which were translated into vernacular Korean, became the most popular source of information on Social Darwinism for Korean intellectuals in the first decade of the twentieth century. After 1910 the Japanese colonial government banned Liang's works as "potentially subversive." As a rising number of Koreans—especially Christian converts and students in Japan—mastered Western languages and Japanese, they started to read European and American works in the original or in Japanese translation.

China
Social Darwinian ideas were first introduced into China by Yan Fu's (1854–1921) translation of Thomas Huxley's Evolution and Ethics (1893) as Tianyan lun 天演論 ("On Evolution") in 1898. In this short work, Huxley had criticized Herbert Spencer's application of an evolutionary logic to human ethics. Yet because Yan Fu was primarily concerned with the wealth and power of the Chinese nation, he tried "to find in the Darwinian cosmos prescriptions for human behavior." Throughout his translation, Yan inserted his own defense of Spencer's ideas against Huxley's points. He used Huxley's pamphlet to convince his readers of the unity of mankind rather than a world radiating around Confucian civilization. Yan thus committed himself to the social values implicit in Darwinism. These values were of course revolutionary to China.

Yan's translation was to be "his most resounding success" and had a "resounding impact" on young Chinese thinkers of the turn of the century, who were attracted by the "strident slogans of social Darwinism" and by the book's concern for "self-strengthening and the preservation of the race."

Vietnam
Social Darwinism arrived in Vietnam "around the end of the nineteenth century" through Chinese writings, notably those of Chinese reformers Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao. A movement for "Eastern study" encouraged Vietnamese youth to study in Japan, where they also got into contact with Chinese works that promoted social Darwinian ideas, as well as the ideas of Japanese thinkers who had led their country to rapid modernization in the past decades.

As in other East Asian countries, the doctrine's portrayal of national struggle caught the imagination of Vietnamese intellectuals, notably revolutionaries Phan Chu Trinh (1872–1926) and Phan Bội Châu (1867–1940). Far from seeing Social Darwinism in fatalistic terms, they used it to understand "the rules of the game by which nations who sought to survive had to play." Spencer's critique of traditional society gave these reformers tools to understand why Vietnam was dominated by France and how they could get out of this predicament.

The Civilization of New Learning (Van minh tan hoc sach), an anonymous manifesto that launched the Vietnamese Reform movement in 1904, was the first Vietnamese document to mention Herbert Spencer. Deploying "Spencerian rhetoric" and themes typical of Chinese and Japanese reformers, this pamphlet sharply criticized Vietnamese society's failure to innovate, yet remained optimistic about the future, proposing to emulate the achievements of the West as a way to get rid of French colonialism. This spirit shaped much of the activities of Vietnamese reformers. In 1905 one of these reformers, Phan Bội Châu, met with Liang Qichao in Tokyo, where they discussed the plight of Vietnam. Saddened to hear how Vietnam had fallen to France, Liang encouraged Phan to write about this loss. The result was Phan's History of the Loss of Vietnam (Việt Nam vong quốc sử), which Liang published in his journal Xinmin Congbao later in 1905.

Check sources in, survival of the fittest: 61, 92, 103, 107, 117, 118, 213, 233-34, 255, 256, 273, 321, 414; pp. 128 (Nguyen An Ninh attacks SD), 128-29 (SD fails to condemn oppression), 315-16 (Marxism-Leninism oppose SD); Tran Huu Do relies on: 127, 289-90; Vietnamese collaborators employ: 294-95; perceived differently from European variety: 297-302 (includes bourgeois Vietnamese interpret); Vietnamese uncomfortable about: 317, 414, 415. Herbert Spencer: 256, 316, 317n, 356.

Relevant links: Duy Tân hội