The State in China and Japan

Let us next turn to states in East Asia, or to be more precise, to the states of China and Japan. Just as in Europe, there is no doubting the formidable power of these entities. Indeed, the power of East Asian rulers was one of the things that most impressed the Europeans who visited this part of the world in the sixteenth century. The emperors of China and Japan, Jesuit missionaries and Dutch sea-captains reported, ruled like tyrants and everyone was forced to obey their commands. For the Europeans the kowtow – the practice of prostrating oneself flat on the ground before the ruler – became the symbol of what in the nineteenth century was known as ‘Oriental despotism’. In the twentieth century this image of East Asia as governed by omnipotent rulers was only strengthened as Japan subjected its citizens to fascism and much of the rest of Asia to imperialist rule, and as China was taken over by a dictatorship with totalitarian ambitions. And yet these impressions were quite mistaken. For one thing, authority in the East Asian context was typically understood in personalized rather than in institutionalized terms. In both China and Japan people were seen as connected with each other through long chains of hierarchical relationships stretching from the bottom of society to the very top. These relationships were organized according to particularistic rather than universal rules.