Pan-Asianism

Japan's 1905 victory over Russia, a European power, was received as an exhilarating event throughout Asia. During the following decade, a large number of students and revolutionaries from China, Korea, Philippines, India, and other areas of Asia came to Japan hoping to find encouragement for their nationalistic causes. Sojourners in Tokyo developed a sense of community as Asians. In 1907 Zhang Binglin, Zhang Ji, Liu Shipei, and other revolutionaries from China organized a Yazhou heqin hui (Asiatic humanitarian brotherhood) with revolutionaries from India, Vietnam, Burma, Philippines, and Korea, as well as Japanese socialists, to help each other's anti-imperialist activities. Among its members and their associates were Phan Boi Chau of Vietnam and Mariano Ponce of Philippines. This organization and other similar associations did not last long because Tokyo became a less hospitable place for expatriate revolutionaries. Other Asians increasingly criticized Japanese Pan-Asianism as mere rhetoric for Japanese imperialism. In 1919 Li Dazhao wrote that weak nations in Asia must unite themselves to form a "new Greater Asianism" to defeat Japan's "Greater Asianism." Sun Yat-sen gave a lecture on Pan-Asianism in Kobe in 1924 and tried to persuade the Japanese to join a truly pan-Asian movement instead of becoming a watch-dog for Western imperialists. To the 1926 Japanese call for a Pan-Asian conference in Nagasaki, Chinese and Korean newspapers responded with strong protest against Japan's "Twentyone Demands" on China and imperialist oppression of Koreans.

In India, in the early decades of the twentieth century, Bengali intellectuals had lively debates on the civilizations of the East and the West. Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) eloquently advocated the revival of Asian culture and the unity of Asia, but was against political nationalism. Jawaharlal Nheru followed Tagore in spirit in promoting the ideal of united Asia giving peace to a troubled world.