When Rishi Sunak became Britain’s first non-white prime minister last October, Ronnie Chiang, a Chinese-Malaysian comedian, was accused by “The Daily Show,” an American satirical current-affairs television program, of commenting on the news. was done. Everyone is really excited that this is the first Asian Prime Minister. But let’s be clear: Indians are not Asians,” he declared.
The segment provoked a minor backlash in the US. But some onlookers in Asia nodded along, because Mr. Chiang’s profanity was something they recognised. For centuries, people from the western and southern parts of the region and those from the east and southeast have struggled to understand each other. That conflict is at the center of “How Asia Found Herself,” a new book by Nile Green, a historian who teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles.
The term Asia was coined by Greek geographers nearly two millennia ago and did not appear on the mentioned continent until the 1600s, at the dawn of the age of European empire. The foreign roots of the word—and the concept—are visible in the transliterations that Asians made as they grappled with the idea: Asia in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu; Asia in Bengali and Gujarati; ajiya in Japanese; Yaxia in Chinese.
It took until the 19th century for the term to catch on, and even then its most prominent use was anticolonial: Asia as an anti-colonial tool, “not Europe”. Even the “Asian values” promoted by Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, the founder, are best understood as opposed to Western ones. According to Mr. Green, ironically, it was European colonial infrastructure that made inter-Asian cultural exchange possible in many cases, whether through steamship routes that provided access to Indo-Pacific ports for traders, missionaries and intellectuals. or, more specifically, through the European languages which act as a bridge between the vast number of Asian languages.
By the end of the 20th century, there were few dictionaries among major Asian languages such as Japanese, Urdu, Chinese, and Persian, let alone among minor languages. Sometimes this led to comical results. When Bahá’í missionaries sought to convert Japanese in 1914, they used Esperanto, a language invented in Poland in 1887. Similarly, indigenous literature on other Asian cultures was scarce, requiring scholars to look to English, French, or Russian sources.
When intellectuals from across the continent chose to engage with the idea of an Asia that united them, it was often in the form of self-projection. Chinese intellectuals saw India, whose people had been unable to fight colonialism, as a lesson not to fail. The Indians speculated on the influence of ancient Hindu scriptures on Daoism, or on the influence of India’s warrior caste on the samurai of Japan.
Asian Muslims attempted to reconcile the new (to them) religions of Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism and Shinto with their own faith, presenting Buddha as an Islamic prophet or Confucius as a philosopher. Japan’s Asians saw their country as a natural leader, particularly through its imperialist project of a continental “co-prosperity zone”. Accepting the idea of Asia did not automatically lead to a sense of brotherhood or respect. Mr. Green writes, “The quest for solidarity has always raised the question: unity on whose terms?”
In the 1930s an Indian freedom fighter, Ras Behari Bose (who married a Japanese woman and would die as a Japanese citizen), proposed to the proto-Hindu-nationalist Veer Savarkar that “every effort should be made So that a Hindu bloc can be created. Indian Ocean to the Pacific Ocean.” Nearly 70 years later, Abe Shinzo, the then Prime Minister of Japan, appraised in India’s Parliament the idea of a “broader Asia” taking shape at the confluence of the two seas, the Indian and Pacific Oceans. What geopolitical analysts have recently called the “free and open Indo-Pacific” now takes the US and Australia as partners in a grouping known as the Quad, which seeks to counter China’s rise. wants to do
Not for the first time, the idea of intra-Asian cooperation includes—and indeed depends on—the technology and infrastructure of the West. And once again, as one Asian country seeks to draw smaller states into its fold, other powers are asking themselves: “Asia on whose terms?” It is most useful when defined in opposition, in the guise of the Indo-Pacific.
Read more from Banyan, our columnist on Asia:
Abe Shinzo’s killer achieved his political goals (January 12)
Pakistan and China find they have little influence with the Taliban (January 5)
China’s border aggression has pushed India west (15 December)
© 2023, The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved. From The Economist, published under license. Original content can be found at www.economist.com
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