Intellectual Entanglements Between the League of Nations and Eastern Asia: Modernism or Anti-modernism?

Abstract

This chapter examines how Japanese and Chinese intellectuals engaged with the International Committee on Intellectual Co-operation (ICIC), which was established in 1922 to promote peace through implementing various cultural and educational programmes. Although Japan and China were among the most ardent advocates of this project, they had quite different views on its purpose. In Japan, intellectual co-operation was understood to be a means of introducing Japanese culture to the West according to the logic of cultural relativism. This emphasized the particularity of Japan’s national culture, which was seen as providing an alternative version of modernity from that of the West. The mode of intellectual co-operation that emerged from this attitude ultimately fell under the shadow of anti-modernist discourses. In China, on the other hand, intellectual co-operation was an element of the government’s policy of national reconstruction and modernization. The chapter thus concludes that the practice of international intellectual co-operation was quite different in the two countries, resulting in a tension that was embedded in the original idea of the ICIC.