Drawing on a wide range of texts and using an interdisciplinary approach, this volume shows how Chinese and Japanese intellectuals mobilized the past to create a better future and wove together nationalism, internationalism and a politics of time.

Viren Murthy teaches transnational Asian History and researches Chinese and Japanese intellectual history in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Introduction: Back to the Future-Rethinking Politics and Time 1. The Politics of the Past in China and Japan 2. Japanese Critiques of Linear Time in Global Context 3. Umemoto Katsumi, Subjective Nothingness, and the Critique of Civil Society 4. Tianxia and Postwar Japanese Sinologists' Vision of the Chinese Revolution: The Cases of Nishi Junzo and Mizoguchi Yuzo 5. Toward a New World Order: Reading Tianxia with Hegel and Marx. Coda: Futures of Chinese Politics of the Past