Thinking Like a State: Policing Dangerous Thought in Imperial Japan, 1900–1945

This article explores the changing ways the Japanese police understood and policed radical politics between 1900 and 1945. Specifically, it traces the process in which the objective of policing transformed from an emphasis on political organizations, their activities, publications, and assemblies in the 1900s to the policing of individuals ostensibly harboring “dangerous ideas” that were deemed threatening to state and capital—what the police came to categorize as “thought crime” by the late 1920s. Once “thought” was identified as an object for policing, Japanese police agencies began to practice a kind of intellectual history—thinking like a state—to distinguish dangerous thought and to understand its origin and its spread during the socioeconomic turbulence of the interwar period. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s theory of police, this article explores how police manuals and other publications categorized certain ideas, texts, enunciations, and slogans and distributed them based on the presumed degree of danger they posed to the imperial polity. It reveals how the expanded classifications and distributions of dangerous thought transformed policing in the 1920s, thereby extending imperial state power into various aspects of social life in interwar Japan.

The Long Game

For more than a century, no US adversary or coalition of adversaries—not Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, or even the Soviet Union—has ever reached 60 percent of US GDP. China is the sole exception, and it is fast emerging into a global superpower that could rival, if not eclipse, the United States. What does China want, does it have a grand strategy to achieve it, and what should the United States do about it? The Long Game draws from a rich base of Chinese primary sources, including decades’ worth of party documents, leaked materials, memoirs by party leaders, as well as careful analysis of China's conduct, to provide a history of China’s grand strategy since the end of the Cold War. Taking readers behind the Party’s closed doors, this book uncovers Beijing’s long, methodical game to displace America from the regional and global order through three sequential “strategies of displacement.” The book shows how China’s strategy is profoundly shaped by key events that change its perception of American power—the end of the Cold War, the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, the populist elections of 2016, and the coronavirus pandemic of 2020. Finally, the book offers a comprehensive yet “asymmetric” plan for an effective US response to the China challenge. Ironically, the proposed approach takes a page from Beijing’s own strategic playbook to undermine China’s ambitions and strengthen American order without competing dollar-for-dollar, ship-for-ship, or loan-for-loan.