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Deutsches Institut für Japanstudien
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February 15, 2021

New book chapter on Japanese occupation of China

© UBC Press

DIJ historian Torsten Weber has contributed a chapter on Chinese Asia discourse to the sourcebook Translating the Occupation. The Japanese Invasion of China, 1931–45, published by the University of British Columbia Press in February 2021 and edited by Jonathan Henshaw, Craig A. Smith, and Norman Smith. It is the first English-language volume to provide a diverse selection of important primary sources on Japan’s occupation of China translated from Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Torsten’s chapter “Finding China’s ‘Asia’ in Japanese Asianism” studies how Chinese elites in the pro-Japanese Reorganized National Government (1940-45) tried to find a balance between cooperation and resistance to Japan by appropriating Japanese Asianist rhetoric of a ‘New Order in East Asia’ and an ‘East Asian League’. This chapter draws on his earlier research on Japanese and Chinese Asianism and his monograph Embracing ‘Asia’ in China and Japan. Asianism Discourse and the Contest for Hegemony (Palgrave 2018).