When the Chinese Communist Party turns 100 this July, one of the factors in its founding will probably not play a major role in the celebrations: The first members did not get to know Marxism through the Soviet Union, let alone Germany, but through Japan, the country, of all places whose campaign of conquest in China would later become the prelude to the civil war won by the People's Liberation Army.

It was only after the Russian October Revolution that Chinese intellectuals began to take an interest in communism, which now appeared to them as a real power and modernization option for the country.

But access to this strange world of terms and categories turned out to be difficult, not only because of the lack of translators who knew German.

Mark Siemons

Feuilleton correspondent in Berlin.

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    For large parts of the reform-minded young intelligentsia in China, the place of the avant-garde had been Japan since the end of the 19th century, where an opening to the West that began much earlier had resulted in an incomparably greater competence in dealing with European texts and ideas. Socialist ideas had been on the rise here since World War I, before they came to China through activists studying in Japan. Thirteen of the eighteen books on Marxism published in China between 1919 and 1921 were translations from Japanese: including the Communist Manifesto, “Karl Marx's Economic Teachings” by Karl Kautsky and Wilhelm Liebknecht's memorial on Karl Marx. Ironically, sixty years later, it was also Japan from which the Communist Party adopted its successful capitalist model,promoted not least by the fact that Japan was also China's largest donor at this time. Both western systems that have helped China to its current position of power, communism as well as capitalism, the country owes to the mediation of Japan, who is portrayed as an eternal antagonist.

    This is the latest paradoxical turnaround in the paradoxical relationship between the two countries, which the Hamburg sinologist Kai Vogelsang described in an extraordinarily thoughtful book that stimulates further thought. The author manages to turn the internal relations of a part of the world, which for large parts of the German public is still very remote, into a reflection on how the exchange of terms can establish entire cultures and states. “China and Japan” is not just the story of a geopolitical relationship that oscillates between turning and repulsion. This is also a particularly striking example of how it is only the interrelationship with the outside world that repeatedly creates the basis of ideas and categories on which societies base their “own”.

    The appropriation of western modernity

    Much more fundamentally than the adaptation of communism, this was true of the appropriation of western modernity in general, which the Chinese language accomplished through Japanese terms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Chinese readers did not find the European categories in their Japanese form quite so foreign, since they were already expressed there with the help of Chinese characters. In just a few years, the Chinese written language was expanded to include the entire vocabulary of modern European times, including terms such as culture, society, progress, evolution, religion, philosophy, history, nation and democracy. Vogelsang presents this as an epoch-making process, as these "future concepts" would have opened up a horizon of expectations.which historical reality then gradually followed.

    This was preceded by the radical self-creation of Japan since 1868. In the so-called Meiji reform, the country quickly adapted its categories, institutions and external manifestations to the West. Not only was a centralized state and nation created, but everything that went with it: newspapers, police, banks, industry, land surveying, compulsory education, railroad, telegraph connection, even western suits. The goal was “a rich state and a strong army”, because the immediate impetus for the reforms was a military one, the threat from the European armies, which the great Chinese empire was helpless to face.