Thread by @WholePicture_

Here a #Thread about the #History of #China and #Japan:
The inhabitants of the areas that are now China have always identified with their family, their hometown, their province, but not with "China".

#Asia #AsianLivesMatter #AsiansAreHuman
#conflict
nzz.ch/pro-global/asi…

Until the end of the 19th century, it would not have occurred to the Chinese to speak of their “nation”, and even the name “China” was alien to them.

It was the “imperialist powers”, especially the Japanese, who first gave the Chinese the idea that they were a nation.

In Japan, the Chinese found the name for their country and learned about the concept of the nation.

Thousands of Chinese students and scholars moved to Japan to study as early as the Qing dynasty in the 19th century, and especially in the early 20th century.

Practically the entire political and social vocabulary of the modern age has been adopted from Japanese into Chinese.

At the turn of the century, Japan's influence in China was so great that observers spoke of a Japaneseization of China.

From the beginning of the Meiji period, 1868, the Japanese had reformed their entire society in a tremendous effort and had become a modern industrial nation: ...................

...................an ascent that reached its preliminary climax in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894/95, in which the Japanese inflicted a crushing defeat on Qing forces.

Yet the Chinese did not react with a national furore, as they have so often done in the 21st century - because nation and nationalism were still unknown to them.

Instead, senior scholars chose to learn from Japan. As early as 1896, the Qing government sent 13 young men to Japan to study. Thousands were to follow in the next few years to do an apprenticeship with the former students.

In addition to the Japanese language and modern science, the Chinese students mainly learned something about themselves there. Because they had not traveled to Japan as “Chinese”, but as Hunanese, Sichuan, Shanghai or Cantonese.

The Japanese are completely different. For them, all the strangely braided figures were “Shinajin”, Chinese, or better: “Chinamen”, because the word was used as a dirty word.

"Stupid, stupid, your age is a 'Shinajin'", the children teased: This word sounded so contemptuous that some Chinese shamefully avoided asking about their origins in order not to have to say they were a "Shinajin".

Named “Shinajin” across the board by the Japanese, the Chinese students recognized commonalities that unite them across all compatriots, social classes and dialects and that set them apart from the Japanese.

In this way, the national idea gradually infiltrated the minds of the international students: the Chinese nation was born in Japan.

If the Chinese once taught Japan, it was the other way around. It was only in Japan that the Chinese got to know their own history: it was Japanese historians who were the first to write “Chinese” history - not the history of individual dynasties, but the history of a nation.

"It is a shame," said the Chinese scholar Luo Zhenyu later, "that the history of our country could not be written by one of our compatriots, but by someone from another country."

Other areas of Chinese culture were also presented for the first time by Japanese scholars.

"To build a national school system, Japanese school rules, educational writings and entire textbooks were translated."

By the end of the Qing Dynasty, 1912, most of the textbooks used in Chinese schools were adaptations or direct translations of Japanese textbooks.

The Japanese established educational schools in Beijing and other cities to train the first generations of Chinese teachers, and they sent highly decorated academics to teach in Chinese schools and universities.

Japanese manufactories, chambers of commerce and industrial fairs provided models for the industrialization of China in the late Qing period; the Japanese played a crucial role in building the modern Chinese military and police force.

The public order that now reigned in Chinese cities was decidedly Japanese.

The same was true of the legal system: Japanese jurists drafted a new criminal law, a civil law, and a commercial law, and even the constitution that the Qing drafted in their final years was based in important ways on the Meiji constitution.

Even if things turned out differently and China's “Japan fever” died out with the First World War and the notorious “21 demands”, at the latest with the occupation of Manchuria and the atrocities of World War II - the ties to Japan remained.

Japanese investments made a major contribution to China's growth in the 1980s and 1990s.