Why China Studies? | Tomoki Kamo, Dean of the Faculty of Policy Management
February 15, 2022
Why do I study China? I am often asked this question.
It's not that I had any special connection to China. However, as a Japanese person born in the mid-1970s, only thirty years after Japan's defeat in the war, perhaps I did have a common sort of connection: my grandfather. Before the war, he ran a relatively large factory with his family on the Korean Peninsula and the Chinese mainland. When I became a junior high school student, he often told me, "If you want to be active in the future of Asia, you should study China."
At the time, however, I was engrossed in China in a world far removed from reality: the world of the Three Kingdoms. In "Romance of the Three Kingdoms," the story ends abruptly with the fall of Shu in Chapter 118 and the surrender of Wu in Chapter 120. Outraged by this, I spent one summer vacation writing a fictional novel in which Shu defeats Wei and Wu to unify the land, and I submitted it to the Keio Futsubu School's student project exhibition. I have long since forgotten what the story was about, but I clearly remember being highly praised by my homeroom teacher.
It was the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident that prompted me to confront China in the real world. To be more precise, however, it was the news reports that summer of "refugees" washing ashore on the coast of Kyushu. A search of newspapers from that time quickly reveals articles about boats discovered off the coast of the Goto Islands and elsewhere, carrying Chinese people along with Vietnamese refugees. While I was shocked by the events in Tiananmen Square, I felt this news was just as, if not more, significant. When a nation is in turmoil, refugees are created. At the time, I must have imagined the Yellow Turban Rebellion at the end of the Han dynasty. From then on, I began to think that I needed to study politics. Then, in my undergraduate years, I met a mentor and have since been immersed in the study of China, which I love.
Thirty years have passed since then. In those thirty years, China has achieved dramatic growth, and it is now discussed that it may surpass the United States to become the world's largest economy in the 2030s. How many people could have imagined this reality thirty years ago?
In the 1990s, driven by the "end of history" thesis, people debated "when and how China would democratize." This was the central question in China studies around the world. Less than thirty years later, the question has shifted to "why does the one-party rule of the Chinese Communist Party persist?" The order changes, and so do the questions.
The first chapter of "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" begins with the following words: "The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide." Perhaps this sensibility—that order is fluid—is extremely important.
There is a saying: "A nation without a sense of diplomacy is doomed to decline." Is not the sensibility that the international order is fluid important for us living in Japan? Japan's geopolitical environment does not change. Since the Meiji Restoration, Japan has faced the challenge of how to balance its relationships with China and the Korean Peninsula on one hand, and with the United States and the Western powers on the other. The history of that failure is the defeat of 1945, and postwar Japanese diplomacy, learning from that experience, seems to be doing well for now. However, there is no guarantee that it will continue to do so in the future. We need to sharpen our diplomatic sensibilities.
Order is fluid. A desirable order is not something to be wished for; it is something to be created. This can be said to be one of the sensibilities we hope to cultivate through education and research at the Faculty of Policy Management, where we "think about policy, think about the future." I learned this at the Faculty of Policy Management.