China and Asia after the Second World War have often been understood in terms of seemingly national events, for example the Chinese Civil War and the independence of India and Pakistan through Partition. Historians who investigate how Asians attempted to shape the future of their region have focused on Japanese Pan-Asianism in the 1930s or Asian-African internationalism in the 1950s. However, they have overlooked the decisive 1940s. It is impossible to understand post-war Asia, or indeed China’s and India’s recent prominence and competition, without investigating how Chinese and Indians influenced its birth.

My dissertation examines how in the 1940s leaders of China’s Nationalist Government (under the Chinese Nationalist Party) and the Indian National Congress, such as Wang Chonghui and Jawaharlal Nehru, imagined post-war Asia and attempted to realize their ideas. Using largely unexamined archival sources from Taiwan, India and Britain, it argues that Chinese and Indian ideas and policies for post-war Asia were mainly divergent: China sought an Asia where China would eventually be the dominant power; India aimed to create an Asia in its idealized self-image, where nations were relatively more equal in status. Specifically, my dissertation considers how Chinese and Indian leaders dealt with three pressing issues: Asian nationalist movements, the treatment of Chinese and Indian diasporas, and economic reconstruction. It decenters Asian history from its reliance on an American or British orientation.

Departing from studies by historians such as Tansen Sen that mainly foreground China-India connections, my dissertation contrasts Chinese and Indian visions. Their disagreements both challenge what Prasenjit Duara terms "convergent comparison" – that modern China and India responded to global currents in similar ways – and provide a new explanation for the post-war China-India divergence. They had reservations about Asian independence movements for almost the opposite reasons. Chinese leaders such as Wu Tiecheng regarded them as too hasty, not least because they might have endangered the Chinese diaspora’s interests. In contrast, Nehru worried that a world of nation-states might be insufficient to secure true political freedom, as new Asian nation-states could not defend themselves against the great powers.

My study not only highlights China’s and India’s agency, which was not always predicated on their relationship with the West or the Soviet Union, in remaking the wider region. It also questions the recent works on post-colonial world-making by scholars such as Adom Getachew, who contends that leaders of the Global South attempted to create a world free of domination through self-determination. Wu Tiecheng and Wang Chonghui avoided larger questions of racial injustice while striving to end discrimination against diasporic Chinese.

My dissertation reveals the downplayed attempts of China and India in what might be called anti-Asianist Asianism for remaking Asia in their own favour while denying any connection with wartime Japan’s idea of an exclusive Asian bloc. Rather than being buried with Japan’s surrender in 1945, Asianism reemerged at the Asian Relations Conference, held by Indian nationalists in early 1947, which proposed greater cooperation of Asians in areas as far apart as regional economic development and resistance against European empires. Both Nationalist China and Nehruvian India favored state-led industrialization, demonstrating that the interest in development did not necessarily originate from Euro-American powers; Global South countries proactively promoted projects of regional and national development. Yet such unity was difficult to sustain not least because of the suspicion that China and India might become the new hegemons of Asia.