Superstate of Eastasia

The Superstate of Eastasia is one of the three totalitarian superstates that divide the world in Nineteen Eighty-Four, a shifting and largely offstage power whose identity as ally or enemy changes with the Party's needs. In Emmanuel Goldstein's forbidden book, Eastasia is the smallest of the three, with a less definite western frontier, and is defined as comprising China and the countries south of it, the Japanese islands, and large but fluctuating portions of Manchuria, Mongolia and Tibet. Its creed, known to Oceania under a Chinese name usually translated as Death-Worship or Obliteration of the Self, makes it the most easily rewritten of the three poles of Orwell's projected world.

Identity and Geography

Goldstein's account treats Eastasia as the last superstate to take shape. Where Eurasia and Oceania were already effectively in being after the absorption of Europe by Russia and the British Empire by the United States, Eastasia emerged only as a distinct unit after another decade of confused fighting. The book stresses its defensive basis: Eastasia is protected by the fecundity and industriousness of its inhabitants, in contrast to Eurasia's vast land spaces and Oceania's ocean barriers. Its internal life is barely described; what Oceania knows of it is the name of its creed, which is execrated as a barbarous outrage upon morality while being, in Goldstein's analysis, barely distinguishable from Ingsoc and the Eurasian Neo-Bolshevism.

Thomas Pynchon's introduction locates Eastasia's origins in Orwell's geopolitical imagination rather than in any settled geography. The Teheran Conference of 1943 had discussed the division of a defeated Germany into occupation zones, and Orwell made a leap in scale from that plan, projecting the occupation of a defeated country into the occupation of a defeated world. Although China had not been represented at Teheran and the Chinese revolution was still in progress while the novel was being revised in 1948, Orwell had been in the Far East and knew better than to ignore the weight of Eastasia when arranging his own Zones of Influence. Eastasia is thus the element in the tripartite structure that most clearly carries the trace of Orwell's time in the Far East.

Place in the Tripartite World Order

Within Goldstein's theory of oligarchical collectivism, the three superstates exist in a condition of permanent, limited war whose real purpose is not conquest but the absorption of surplus production and the preservation of hierarchy. None of the three can be definitively conquered, and each props up the others, in Goldstein's simile, like three sheaves of corn. Eastasia participates in this system on the same terms as its rivals, with the same pyramidal structure, the same worship of a semi-divine leader, and the same economy existing by and for continuous warfare. Pynchon's introduction traces this geometry to James Burnham's geopolitics, in which a victorious Japan becomes Eastasia, the Russian heartland controls Eurasia, and the Anglo-American alliance becomes Oceania.

Although Eastasia is the smallest of the three, its weight in the global war is considerable. Goldstein's analysis describes the disputed equatorial and polar territories as the only battlefields, with the islands of the Indian Ocean and the Pacific constantly captured and recaptured by Oceania or by Eastasia; the possession of these thickly populated regions means command of their labour power, which is expended in the race to produce more armaments and capture more territory. In this economy of permanent mobilisation, Eastasia is not a nation in any ordinary sense but one of three interchangeable engines of a system that none of them can escape.

The Fluidity of the Enemy: Alliances and Memory

For most of the novel's opening, Oceania is at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia, and Winston privately remembers that only four years earlier the alignment had been exactly reversed. This memory is itself a piece of forbidden knowledge, because the Party never admits that the groupings have changed; the enemy of the moment is represented as absolute evil, so any past or future agreement with him is made to seem impossible. When the shift comes, during the climax of Hate Week, it is announced with extreme suddenness and everywhere at once: Oceania is at war with Eastasia, and the entire five-year political record must be rectified before any trace of the war with Eurasia remains.

The same fluidity is written into public monuments and into individual memory. Big Brother's statue in Victory Square commemorates his vanquishing of the Eurasian aeroplanes in the Battle of Airstrip One, though as Winston notes it had been the Eastasian aeroplanes only a few years earlier; Julia, who regards the whole war as a sham, does not even remember that Oceania was once at war with Eastasia and is unmoved when the enemy's name changes. Even the faces associated with the war are interchangeable. A convoy of Eastasian prisoners passing through Victory Square offers only momentary glimpses of "little yellow men" with sad Mongolian faces, whose interest for the crowd is the curiosity owed to a strange animal; the state itself never appears as a society, only as a succession of enemy images.

Narrative and Ideological Significance

Eastasia's role in the novel is chiefly ideological. Because the Ministry of Truth exists to rewrite the past, the superstate can be repositioned in the historical record as easily as a name in a newspaper; a power that is at war with Oceania today can be its ally tomorrow without any admission that a change has taken place. The lethal seriousness of the arrangement is embodied by the Ministry of Love, the windowless building of barbed-wire entanglements and hidden machine-gun nests into which any Party member who clings to the wrong memory will eventually be taken.

Orwell's construction of Eastasia belongs to his broader war against totalitarianism. Pynchon recalls that Orwell went to Spain in 1937 and came to believe that every line of serious work he wrote afterwards was directed against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism; the English Left's willingness to accept the Russian regime as socialist while knowing its practice was alien was, for Orwell, a "schizophrenic manner of thinking" that the novel would analyse as doublethink. In that scheme, Eastasia has no independent content: it is a placeholder in a closed world-system, defined by what the Party needs it to mean at any given moment, and kept permanently offstage so that the imagination of the reader, like the memory of the citizen, is never allowed to fill it in.