The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 8 | Issue 41 | Number 1 | Article ID 3422 | Oct 11, 2010

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Nation, Region and the Global in East Asia: Conflict andCooperation　東アジアにおける国家、宗教、世界性−−対立と協力

Mark Selden

Nation, Region and the Global inEast Asia: Conflict and Cooperation*

Mark Selden

I propose to examine the resurgence of EastAsia in the final decades of the long twentiethcentury in relation to three major forces thatshape the era and the region: nationalism,regionalism and globalism. I understandcontemporary globalism primarily in relation tothe US bid to forge a hegemonic orderpredicated on military and diplomaticsupremacy and neol iberal economicpresuppositions enshrined in internationalinstitutions.1 “The characteristic policy vectorsof neo-liberalism,” Richard Falk comments inhis critique of the economic and socialdimensions of globalism, “involve such movesas liberalization, privatization, minimizingeconomic regulation, rolling back welfare,reducing expenditures on public goods,tightening fiscal discipline, favoring freer flowsof capital, strict controls on organized labor,tax reductions, and unrestricted currencyrepatriation.” It is the sum total of the effects ofthese measures, from the perspectives of globalgovernance , soc ia l jus t ice , and theenvironment, that drove his conclusions aboutPredatory Globalism, a volume that appeared inthe year of the Seattle anti-globalizationprotests and a decade before the economicmeltdown of 2008.2

I am particularly interested in exploringinsights that derive from regional as opposed tonational and global perspectives. In what waysdoes contemporary East Asian regionalism,pivoting on processes fostered by state and

non-state actors whose actions construct andredefine the geographical, political andespecially the economic parameters of a region,require that we reconceptualize both thenational and the global?3 I reflect on regionformation in light of the geopolitics andeconomics of empire in an effort to gauge whatnew possibilities regional integration offers forEast Asia. To do so, I briefly examine thecontemporary region in light of two earlierepochs, the Sinocentric tributary trade system(16th - 18th century), and the era of systemdisintegration, colonialism, nationalism,endemic wars, and revolutions (1840-1970).

This study breaks with the standardperiodization for the long twentieth century,which stresses two great divides of 1945 and1990. In the conventional view, 1945 markedthe formation of a US-structured yet bi-polarpostwar order ushering in the displacement ofcolonial empires by nationalist-driven new

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nations in the wake of the defeat of the oldcolonialisms, and 1990 the end of the “ColdWar” and the inauguration of what some haverushed to style the era of “globalization”, or ofuntrammeled American supremacy. Thosewere, of course, critical moments in shapingregional and global outcomes. Nevertheless,from the perspective of national ism,regionalism, and globalism in East Asia, andwith an eye to gauging the resurgence of EastAsia in general and China in particular, the US-China opening of 1970 and the US defeat inIndochina five years later, I suggest, providemore fruitful framing which highlights the endof a century of war that devastated and dividedthe region and paved the way for an era ofeconomic complementarity and, perhapseventually, systemic integration andgeopolitical restructuring. This watershedallows us to appreciate the magnitude ofchanges that made it possible to overcomecertain divisions of an earlier colonial era, aswell as the legacy of the Asia-Pacific War andsubsequent regional polarization associatedwith the Soviet and American empires.Post-1970 changes have transformed both EastAsia and the world economy. Since the 1970s,geopolitical change (centered on the US-Chinaopening but including breakthroughs in ROK-China and Japan-China relations) and domesticsocio-political and economic change (notablymarket- and mobility-oriented developmentsincluding decollectivization, mass migration,m e g a - u r b a n i z a t i o n a n d c a p i t a l i s ttransformation in China) have led toward rapidinterpenetration of East Asian economies withtrade, investment and migration playingimportant roles. Central to this process hasbeen both China’s dramatic ascent and the roleof major cities, notably Beijing, Shanghai,Tianjin, Guangzhou, Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong,Taipei and Singapore in establishing newregional and global networks. In assessing theresurgence of East Asia and emerging EastAsian regionalism, a critical question remains:will these foundations for region formationtransform the geopolitics of the region in which

a declining US relinquishes its military primacyand the continued divisions among China,Japan and Korea yield to deepening politicaland cultural bonds?

Shanghai

This is not to suggest the arrival of a post-nationalist world. A new regional order is itselfthe product in no small part of the meshing ofdiverse national agendas, and in East Asia aselsewhere, it faces challenges from nationalistconflicts exemplified by unresolved tensionsrooted in historical experiences of colonialismand war, postwar territorial divisions,asymmetric economic imperatives, amongothers. Critically important to fueling andsustaining these conflicts have been theterritorial outcomes enshrined in the SanFrancisco Treaty that the US imposed in endingthe formal occupation of Japan in 1952. AsKimie Hara has documented through theanalysis of successive drafts of the treaty, theUS moved from clear specif ication ofboundaries for resolution of territorial issuesincluding Dokdo/Takeshima (Korea and Japan),Diaoyutai/Senkakus (China and Japan), theKuriles/Northern Islands (Russia and Japan),and Taiwan (China) to vague formulations thatleft unresolved the legacies of colonialism andwar and pose diff icult challenges forovercoming national rivalries. The result has

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been continuing territorial conflicts over sixdecades, which have continued to block aRussia-Japan peace treaty in the wake of WorldWar II and to fuel myriad conflicts amongregional powers.4 And long-term nationaldivisions—notably China and Taiwan, as well asthe Korean peninsula—that reflect not only theresul ts o f World War I I and postwarindependence and revolutionary movements,but above all US military and diplomaticinterventions to redraw boundaries throughoutthe Asia-Pacific. This involved both the empireof bases, in Chalmers Johnson's evocativephrase, the permanent stationing of US troopsin Japan, Korea and elsewhere and the securingby the US of Japan's mandate over the PacificIslands.

Not surprisingly, each of the major players inthe integration of East Asia—China, Japan andSouth Korea—has its own conception of theemerging region formation as well as of therelationship to the superpower. Criticaldifferences hinge on the question of thegeopolitical and economic position of theUnited States in the region, the rise of China,the reunification of China-Taiwan and Northand South Korea, and the relationship betweenthe emerging regional order and ASEAN, theShanghai group, and South Asia.

While noting these and other obstacles toregional accommodation, and the fact that thetwo great historical examples of East Asianregional order—the China-centered tributary-trade network of the 16-18 th century andJapan’s short-lived but ambitious Greater EastAsia Co-Prosperity Sphere of the years1937-45—were both predicated on empiresassociated with the supremacy of a singlepower, I nevertheless emphasize theimportance of contemporary momentum towarda more broadly based regional integration. Thecombination of growing interdependence ofstrong East Asian economies at a time ofwaning American power stimulates interest ofEast Asian leaders in promoting regional

accommodation and overcoming nationaldivisions involving China/Taiwan (substantialintegration) and the Korean peninsula (despitethe reversal of nearly a decade of progresstoward the reduction of North-South tensionssince the 2007 election of President LeeMyung-bak).

Signs of region formation abound. They includean explosion of cultural interchanges, risingcross-border tourism within the region, labormigration, joint government-sponsored historyprojects, and student and scholar exchanges.Importantly, new forms of diplomacy haveaccompanied China’s rise as a regional power,illustrated by the China-ASEAN free tradeagreement and the Six-Party Talks centered onNorth Korea security and nuclear issues, all ofwhich cast China in a leading diplomatic role.The emergence of ASEAN + 3 (China, Japan,South Korea) is perhaps the best example ofSoutheast Asian nations taking the initiative inpromoting regionalism, one in which theChinese role is again notable. Yet, despiteimportant areas of progress, conflictingapproaches to East Asian regionalism and inter-state divisions continue to be driven bycompetitive nationalisms and diverseapproaches to conceptualizing the nature of theregion and perhaps, above all, the question ofthe role of the United States as a participant orpartner in an emerging East Asian order andconflicts involving North Korea nucleardevelopment, Japan-Korea conflict overDokdo/Takeshima, and Japan-China conflictover Senkakus/Diaoyutai islands, among others.What can be learned from a brief excursionthrough earlier regional approaches that mightusefully frame understanding of contemporaryregionalism or future prospects?

I East Asian Regionalism: The 18th Century

The dominance of the Western colonial powersand the subjugation of much of Asia, Africa andLatin America provided the foundationsthroughout the 19th and well into the 20th

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century for essentialist views in both East andWest of a permanent state in which a dynamicand aggressive Western world order wouldinvariably predominate over a weak, inward-looking and conservative East Asia thatcollapsed in the face of Western capitalism andmilitary predominance. This was the foundationfor a Eurocentric world vision that reified theperspective of the colonial powers and theirsuccessors.5

Such a view belies the East-West relationshipof earlier epochs. An alternative paradigm thathas emerged in recent years recognizes thesalience of China not only as the dominanteconomic and geopolitical center of an EastAsian regional order but also as a major actorin the East Asian and global political economyfrom at least the 16th to the 18th century andarguably continuing to the arrival of theWestern powers in full force in the mid-19th

century.6 Interestingly, the avatars of thisChina-centered perspective on East Asia andthe world economy were not primarily Chineseb u t J a p a n e s e a n d A m e r i c a nresearchers.7 China’s economic strides ofrecent decades, and, above all, the resurgenceof East Asia with China, Japan and Korea as anexpansive and inter-connected core of thecapitalist world economy in the final decades ofthe long twentieth century and into the newmillennium, lend plausibility to an approachtha t reassesses no t on ly Ch ina butreconceptualizes the East Asia region.

The work of Takeshi Hamashita, R. Bin Wong,Kenneth Pomeranz, Kaoru Sugihara, AnthonyReid and Andre Gunder Frank, among others,shows that between the 16th and 18th century,at the dawn of European capitalism, East Asiawas the center of a vibrant geopolitical andeconomic zone. Two elements of the East Asianorder together defined its regional and globalfeatures.

First, among the most important linkages thatshaped the political economy and geopolitics of

the East Asian world was the China-centeredtributary-trade order, a regional systempivoting on political and economic transactionsnegotiated through formal state ties as well asproviding a framework for informal tradecomplementing tributary missions.8 The systemencompassed both principles for governinginterstate relations and a robust legal andillegal trade, much of it linking port cities thatwere largely beyond the control of the Chineseimperial state and other states.

Ming tributary order

Second, East Asian commercial linkages withthe world economy from the 16 th centuryforward, mediated by silver exchange,transformed East-West trade relations as wellas the domestic Chinese and regionaleconomies. This was not, in short, an insularregionalism. Rather, East Asia was linked to theworld economy in significant ways. Silver flows,to pay for tea, silk, ceramics, spices and opiumamong other high value products, were criticalin binding Europe and the Americas with EastAsia, particularly China, with Manila as the keyport of transit. Indeed, the large-scale flow ofsilver from the Americas to China beginning inthe 16th century and peaking in the mid-17th

century linked the major world regions andtransformed both intra-Asian trade and China’sdomestic economy. As Reid observes of

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Chinese-Southeast Asian trade in globalperspective in the years 1450-1680: “Thepattern of exchange in this age of commercewas for Southeast Asia to import cloth fromIndia, silver from the Americas and Japan andcopper cash, si lk, ceramics and othermanufactures from China, in exchange for itsexports of pepper, spices, aromatic woods,resins, lacquer, tortoiseshell, pearls, deerskin,and the sugar exported by Vietnam andCambodia.”9 Massive silver flows to China fromother parts of Asia, Europe and the Americaspaid for silk, tea, porcelain and miscellaneousmanufactures. China’s domestic economy wassimultaneously transformed as silver becamethe medium for taxation in the Ming’s singlewhip reform, deeply affecting the agrarianeconomy as well as urban exchange.

Silver provides a thread linking Europe, theAmericas and Asia as well as a means todeconstruct Eurocentric history and to chartprofound changes internal to Chinese economyand society. Tracing the world-wide flow ofsilver from the 16th century problematizes theunilinear notion of world history as determinedby the discovery of the “New World,” followedby the flow of silver to Europe, and thence fromEurope to Asia. As Hamashita shows, thearticulation of Asian silver markets with Euro-American silver dynamics shaped worldfinancial flows and facilitated the expansion oftrade that took place in the 16th to the 18th

centuries, with East Asia a major beneficiary ofthe vibrant trade.10

Beyond the tributary system and the flow ofsilver, trade centered less on states and moreon open ports and their hinterlands. Thissuggests the need for a new spat ia lunderstanding of the relationship between landand sea, between coastal and inland regions,and among port cities and their hinterlands.11

At its height in the 18th century, large regionsof East Asia experienced protracted peace andprosperity on the foundation of a tributary-

trade order at a time when Europe was more orless continuously engulfed by war.12 If tributaryand private trade lubricated the regional order,so too did common elements of statecraft andritual in the neo-Confucian orders in Japan,Korea, the Ryūkyūs, and Vietnam. In contrastto European colonialism in the 18th and 19th

century, this Sinocentric order placed fewerdemands for assimilation on China’s neighborsand on those incorporated within the Chineseempire. Moreover, in contrast with Europeanconquerors, it appears to have been lessexploitative in economic and political terms,with tributary trade providing lucrative sourcesof income for local rulers, as well as thelegitimating imprimature of the Chinese court.Tribute, ritual power and diplomacy structuredinter-state relations across East Asia.

Chinese recognition frequently contributed topeace through legitimating local rulers inKorea, Vietnam, and the Ryūkyūs amongothers, as well as assuring a sustained transferof resources to them via direct subsidies andguaranteed access to lucrative trade. ForChinese rulers, this appears to have been asmall price to pay to assure stability onsometimes sensitive borders. While Korea,Vietnam, the Ryūkyūs and a number ofkingdoms of Inner and Southeast Asia engagedregularly in tributary and non-tributary tradewith China, Japan sent no tributary missions inthe course of the Tokugawa era (1600-1868).China-Japan direct trade neverthelesscontinued through Nagasaki as well asindirectly through the Ryūkyūs and Hokkaidō,in addition to vibrant coastal trade that theChinese state defined as piracy. Japanmanipulated the tributary system by seizingcontro l o f Ryūkyū tr ibute miss ions ,simultaneously securing lucrative trade withChina while subordinating the Ryūkyūkingdom. Likewise, Vietnam implemented asub-tributary order with Laos.

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Deshima, 1820, the center of Chinese andDutch trade with Japan

In these and other ways, a distinctive EastAsian political economy and geopolitics waslinked by trade and diplomacy to other parts ofAsia, Europe and the Americas in the 16th to18th centuries. This is particularly significant inlight of the general Orientalist slighting of theEast within an East-West binary.13

The Chinese empire, under Manchu rule, maybe viewed as the hegemonic power in East Asiaduring the long 18th century in the triple senseof being the most powerful state presiding overa protracted peace and legitimating selectiveregimes in wide areas of the region within ah ie ra rch i ca l o rder ; a s the l ead ingmanufacturing exporter and magnet for theworld’s silver; and by radiating cultural-polit ical norms as exemplif ied by thepredominance of Neo-Confucian thought andmodes of statecraft in Japan, Korea, Vietnam,the Ryūkyūs and beyond.

II The Demise of the East Asian RegionalOrder in the Colonial Era, 1840-1970

The disintegration of the Qing in the early 19th

century set the stage for the onslaught of theWestern imperialist powers in China and EastAsia, bringing to an end the regional order andthe protracted peace that had extended acrossEast and Inner Asia to parts of Southeast andCentral Asia.

As the Chinese state crumbled internally and

was battered by waves of foreign invaders, tensof millions of Chinese migrants spread acrossAsia and the world from the second half of the19th century. The migration of Chinese toManchuria, Southeast Asia, the Americas,Europe and elsewhere coincided with, and wasin part a response to the disintegration of theQing empire and formation of Western andJapanese colonial empires across Asia and thePaci f ic . Stated d i f ferent ly , China’sdisintegration coincided with the globalexpansion of ethnic Chinese who wouldredefine China’s place in the world in thecourse of the long twentieth century. And notonly Chinese. If the largest number of migrantswere Chinese (an estimated 40 to 60 million),significant numbers of Japanese, Okinawansand Koreans, among others, also migratedacross Asia, as well as to Hawaii and theAmericas. Each group created networks andflows of commodities, labor and capital. As thecolonial powers, led by the British, dominatedlong distance trade across Asia and the Pacificin the 19th century, they relied on Chinese,Indian, Islamic and other trade and financialnetworks to penetrate the societies of theregion.14

From the latter half of the 19th century, withChina in disintegration facing invasion andrebellion, and then carved up by the Westernpowers and Japan, with much of Southeast Asiacolonized by the British, Dutch, French andAmericans, and with Korea, Taiwan and theRyūkyūs incorporated within the Japaneseempire by the first decade of the 20th century,the region experienced a century of inter-colonial conflict. In contrast to the East Asianregional order of the eighteenth century PaxSinica, war and bilateral metropolitan-periphery relations became hallmarks of thenew disorder. Through it all, Asian port citiescontinued to extend their reach throughdiaspora networks, but these too wereabsorbed into colonial networks centered onEurope, Japan and North America, with thediaspora facilitating European penetration

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throughout the region.

From the final decades of the 19th century,Japan and the United States expanded into theAsia-Pacific, inaugurating a process that wouldlead to the eventual clash of the two risingimperial powers. With Japan’s seizure of theRyūkyūs, the integration of Hokkaidō, thecolonization of Taiwan and Korea, the victory inthe Russo-Japanese War and the establishmentof the puppet state of Manchukuo between1872 and 1932, and eventually over the nextdecade the conquest of large swatches of Chinaand Southeast Asia, Japan became the onlynation of Asia, Africa or Latin America to jointhe club of the colonial powers and gainprivileged access to land, labor and resources.

But there were other equally importantconsequences. Prasenjit Duara observes that,“While the British and the Japanese empireswere trying to create autarkic, interdependentregions to sustain their imperial power in Asia,anti-imperialist thought linked to rising Asiannationalism was seeking to build an alternativeconception of the region.”15

Let’s briefly consider Japan’s Asia from threeperspectives: first, economic development andsocial change; second, war, nationalism, andanti-colonialism; and third, regional dynamicsand regional ties to the world economy.

The Japanese empire in 1942 includes thePacific Island Mandates that Japan secured

from Germany after World War I

Like the Western colonial powers, Japanrelentlessly mined the colonies for naturalresources and human resources to spur Japan’sindustrialization. At the same time, far morethan either the Chinese tributary-trade order orthe Western colonial order elsewhere in Asia,Japan fostered colonial agricultural andindustrial development through investment ininfrastructure as well as large-scale migration,notably involving Japanese and Korean settlersin China, Korea, Taiwan and Manchukuo.16

Japanese colonialism would have lasting impacton the countries of the region. As AngusMaddison has shown, per capita GDP gains inTaiwan and Korea in the years 1913-1938 weresubstantially higher than those for all othercolonies in East and Southeast Asia, andprobably in Latin America, the Caribbean, andAfrica.17 By 1938, per capita GDP in Korea andTaiwan were 53 and 60 percent respectively ofthat of the metropolitan country, Japan. Bycomparison, the range was 10-25 percent forBritish, French, Dutch and US colonies in Asia(Booth Table 2). And Japan would leave anindustrial legacy in Manchukuo that wouldbecome the core of China’s iron and steel

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industry in the early years of the People’sRepublic. In short, the developmental impacton Japan’s colonies, and the degree ofeconomic integration with the metropolis, werefar greater than in the case of European orAmerican colonies.

Japan’s Showa Steelworks in Anshan wouldbecome the core of China’s steel industry

in the 1950s

Trade between Japan and its colonies anddependencies expanded rapidly. The trade ofManchukuo, Korea and Taiwan were alldramatically redirected (in many instancesaway from China and toward Japan) betweenthe late 19th century and the 1930s. Taiwan’sexports to Japan increased from 20 percent oftotal exports at the time of colonization in 1895to 88% by the late 1930s, with rice and sugarthe dominant products.18 Comparable tradedependence on the metropolis in the late 1930swas similarly notable in the case of Korea.19

Economic bonds among the colonies anddependencies, by contrast, weakened orremained weak. In Taiwan, Manchukuo andKorea, trade with China was redirected towardJapan. Like that of the European colonialpowers, Japan’s spokes and wheel trade patternin Asia precluded the development of tradecomplementarities or other forms of economic

integrat ion among the co lonies anddependencies.

In contrast to the Qing empire, between 1895and 1940 imperial Japan directly assimilatedcolonized and conquered peoples, above all theKoreans, Taiwanese, the peoples of Manchuria(including Chinese, Mongols, Hui (Muslims)and Manchus), Ryūkyūans and Ainu.20 Thecolonized were educated in the language of theconqueror and subjected to intense assimilationas Japanese (or Manchukuo) citizens andsubjects. In all these respects, Japan brokesharply with patterns of the tributary-tradeorder in East Asia and also differentiated theJapanese from European and Americancolonization in the degree of assimilation.

Japan extended its territorial reach with the1932 incorporation of Manchukuo and its 1937invasion of China south of the Great Wall, but itquickly clashed with Soviet forces atNomonhan in 1939, while the two expansivecolonial powers, the US and Japan, were oncollision course. Indeed, one might say that byNomonhan, the allied powers that would joinforces in Europe in World War II had alreadybegun to crystallize in opposition to Japan’sAsian advance.

Japanese infantry march into battle withSoviet forces at Nomonhan

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The 1940 US oil and scrap iron embargo ledinexorably to the attack on Pearl Harbor inJapan’s desperate and briefly successfulattempt to supplant the European andAmerican colonial powers throughout East andSoutheast Asia and the Pacific. If Meiji Japanhad placed its hopes for modernization andprosperity on economic, political and culturalties with, and emulation of, the Westernpowers, Japan now found itself isolated fromcore regions of the world economy whilefighting wars against powerful adversaries onmultiple fronts and striving to create anautarkic region in Asia.21

The colonial era in Asia left three importantlegacies: first, massive dislocation, destructionand loss of life that were the product of colonialand world wars; second, the stimulus tonationalist and anti-colonial revolutions; third,the spur to economic development andindustrialization in Japan’s colonies anddependencies, notably Korea, Taiwan andManchukuo, but also in China to a lesserdegree.

Historians of many persuasions have takenWorld War II as the major watershed oftwentieth century Asian and global geopolitics,as indeed it was in so many ways. It marked thedefeat and dismantling of the Japanese empireand propel led the US to superpowerpreeminence, its power expanding mostdramatically in the Asia Pacific, and, as the onlymajor power to span the Atlantic and thePacific, its new found power was also global.The War also spurred waves of nationalist-inspired revolutionary and independencemovements across the colonized world. If theChinese, Vietnamese and Korean revolutionswere landmark events in postwar East Asia,independence movements in the Philippines,Malaya, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies,Burma, India and elsewhere brought profoundchange to other parts of Asia, signaling the endof the classical colonial empires and an era ofindependent states.

From the perspective of Asian regionalism,however, important continuities spanned the1945 divide. Far from inaugurating an era ofpeace, East and Southeast Asia became theprimary zone of world conflict over the nextquarter century. The Chinese, Korean andVietnamese wars and revolutions—invariablyexplained as the products of the “Cold War”,are equally, perhaps above all, legacies of thecolonial era that were played out within thepurview of US-Soviet conflict—were thedecisive events establishing Asia’s division, andindeed national divisions, in the wake of WorldWar II.22 New nations, or nation fragments(China, Korea, Vietnam), established primaryrelationships with either the US or the SovietUnion, forging relationships that wereparamount in def ining each nation’sinternational relations and shaping itsdevelopmental and geopolitical trajectory. Andeach of these wars would be fought out in thepost-colonial periphery, the overwhelmingcasualties being local people with the warscarcely interrupting the pace and mode of lifein the metropolitan countries.

As in the century of colonialism, in post-colonialAsia bilateral ties to one of the great powers(generally, of course, the United States) weredecisive and multilateral intra-Asian economicand political linkages largely absent. Nowherewas this truer than in the case of Japan, firmlyjoined at the hip to the US, occupied byAmerican forces, its international relationsplayed out within the purview of the US-JapanSecurity Treaty, and docilely supportingsuccessive US wars throughout the region, apattern as true today as it was in the wake ofthe Asia-Pacific War. But it was equally true ofSouth Korea both during and after the US-Korean War, a war which, in fact remainssuspended rather than concluded, and in theUS-Vietnam War in which Korea provided thesecond largest military force behind that of theUS.

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Prasenjit Duara has argued that, “The Cold Wardivision of the world into two camps controlledmilitarily by nuclear superpowers seeking todominate the rest of the developing anddecolonizing nations may be seen as a kind ofsupra-regionalism. While in fact the two campsor blocs represented trans-territorial spacesincluding non-contiguous nations, thecontiguity of core Eastern and WesternEuropeans nations within each camp served asa stepping stone for subsequent regionalism todevelop within Europe.”23

This formulation seems to me appropriate forEastern Europe where the Soviet Bloc andComecon stood against NATO and theEuropean Union. In Asia, however, in partbecause the Sino-Soviet split led to fiercerivalry by 1960, and because ASEAN, foundedin 1967, was long so weak a reed, it is difficultto discern any effective region formation ineconomic or security terms in the initialpostwar decades. That would change from the1970s.

I I I E c o n o m i c R e s u r g e n c e ,Complementarity and the Sprouts ofRegionalism in East Asia

Since the 1980s, China’s rapid and sustainedeconomic growth, coming in the heels of theadvance of Japan, Korea and the newlyindustrializing countries of East Asia, hasriveted attention. Contemporary East Asian

development is best understood not as a seriesof discrete national phenomena, but as aregional and global process that encompasseseconomic development but equally geopolitics,social change and cultural interchange. This isbecause important facets of national and globaldevelopment are driven in part by the dynamicinterpenetration of Asian economies, politiesand cultures, by a changing intra-Asian divisionof labor, and by urban networks that functionlargely independent of and transcendingnational structures. Consider an expansive EastAsia in global perspective.

The 1970 Divide and the Resurgence of EastAsia

1970 set the stage for new East Asian regionalpossibilities and a global reconfiguration ofpower: in the wake of the China-Soviet rift ofthe 1960s, the US-China entente andburgeoning economic relationship opened theway for ending the bifurcation that hadcharacterized not only postwar Asia but East-West global geopolitics and economics. China’sre-entry on the world stage in 1970, itsassumption of a UN Security Council seat, itsaccess to US and global markets in the early1970s, and its eventual position at the center ofEast -West trade and investment andmembership in the World Trade Organization,opened the way to the re-knitting of economicand po l i t ica l bonds across As ia andstrengthening Asian linkages with the globaleconomy. Little noted, given the formalperiodization of China’s Cultural Revolution(1966-76), is the fact that important internalchanges including the rapid growth of domesticand international markets and small-scaleindustry proceeded apace in the final years ofMao’s rule (1970-76).24 Within decades, Chinaemerged as the workplace and motor drivingthe Asian and world economies, facilitated bythe deepening and/or opening of Japan-Chinaand South Korea-China relations, and theexpansive trade and investment role ofoverseas Chinese linking China with East and

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Southeast Asian and other economies. With thereunification of Vietnam (1975), of Germany(1989) and subsequently of China with HongKong (1997) and Macau (1999), only a dividedKorea and the China-Taiwan division remain ofthe major national ruptures that were thelegacy of colonialism, World War II andsubsequent conflicts. These profound changesillustrate the interface of geopolitics andpolitical economy both in global (particularlyUS-China) and regional (China-Japan-Korea aswell as mainland China-Taiwan-Hong Kong andNorth-South Korea) perspective.

Among the remarkable changes made possibleby the US-China opening has been theemergence and deepening of China-ROKrelations: from anti-Communist mecca, a SouthKorea that fought China in the US-Korean Warand then provided yeoman mercenary servicefor the US in Vietnam, emerged as one ofChina’s most important trade and investmentpartners from the 1980s. Within decades,China, Japan and South Korea would becomeone another’s leading trade and investmentpartners, but also in some fields competitors,surpassing in significant ways even theireconomic and financial bonds with the UnitedStates. In 2009 they were the world’s 2nd, 3rd

and 13th largest economies by CIA reckoningbased on purchasing power parity estimates,and their trade surpluses were among theworld’s largest.25

Another important regional development withprofound geopolitical consequences has beenthe trade, investment and technologicalpartnership that links Taiwan and mainlandChina. In less than two decades, the core ofTaiwan’s high tech production migrated acrossthe Straits. Approximately one millionTaiwanese workers, engineers, managers andfamily members presently work and live on themainland, most of them in Guangdong, Fujian,and especially in the Shanghai-Suzhou corridor.Taiwanese capital and technology are central toChina’s industrial ization and export

drive.26 With China-Taiwan trade soaring from$8 billion in 1991 to $102 billion in 2007, andwith Taiwan investors pouring an estimated$150 billion into the mainland’s export-orientedsectors, Taiwan’s economic future has becomeinseparable from that of the mainland.27 The2008 electoral victory of the Guomindang’s MaYing-jeou as president strengthened cross-strait ties as indicated by the initiation ofregularly scheduled flights as well as directshipping and postal links between Taiwan andmainland China, the signing of oil developmentagreements, and China’s offer of a $19 billionloan package to Taiwan enterprises inChina—all factors suggestive of furtherpossibilities for economic, social and politicalintegration.28 The Taiwan-Hong Kong flight hasreportedly become the world’s second busiestinternational route, following New York-London, with many business, pleasure andfamily/lineage travelers continuing on tocomplete a Taiwan-mainland trip and viceversa. And in 2009, Hong Kong was the world’ssecond busiest cargo hub. Immediately afterCh ina ’s entry in to the Wor ld TradeOrganization in 2001, Taiwan entered as“Chinese Taipei”, one of many signs that Chinahas relaxed efforts to isolate Taiwandiplomatically. A June 2010 Taiwan-ChinaEconomic Cooperation Framework Agreementstrengthens the legal structure of therelationship, lowers tariffs and opens the cross-s t r a i t m a r k e t t o s e r v i c e s s u c h a sbanking.29 While tensions continue to eruptover such issues as Taiwan purchase ofadvanced US military technology, the China-Taiwan relationship nevertheless appears tohave entered a period of stability rooted ineconomic interdependence and multi-facetedsocial and cultural exchange.

The role of diasporic Chinese capital,technology and labor, including a major role forreturnees from North American and Europeanuniversities and enterprises, is large, multi-directional, and embracing the full range ofactivities spanning investment, technological

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transfer, research and development,networking, and labor migration criss-crossingthe Pacific and spanning Asia. The US, Taiwan,Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore are amongthe inter-linked sites for movement back andforth from and to Chinese cities.

Comparable, but slower and more erraticstrides brought the two Koreas closer with theKim Dae-jung—Kim Jong Il summit of 2000 asthe key point of inflection, leading to effortstoward rapprochement and economicintegration.30 The failure, however, of the 6-Party talks and the 2007 election of LeeMyung-bak as president of South Korea, thestroke suffered by North Korean leader KimJong Il, and the controversy over the 2010sinking of the South Korean ship Cheonan allb r o u g h t t o a h a l t p r o g r e s s t o w a r drapprochement. Deep divisions remain inKorean politics, divisions that could againexplode in intra-Korean and international war.

As multi lateral intra-Asian trade andinvestment deepened from the 1970s, so toodid the region’s ties to Europe and the US.Trade between the East Asian trade surplusnations and the US, the world’s leading tradedeficit nation, presently comprises one of thesignature patterns of the contemporary worldeconomic order. The enormous surplusesgenerated by China ($227 billion in 2009),Japan ($44 billion in 2009) and South Korea($11 Billion in 2009) account for the largestpart of the massive US trade deficit, and inturn, these nations have made it possible forthe US to continue to live beyond its means.This is not only because as the dollar remainsthe universal currency but above all becausedollar surpluses are recycled back to the US,primarily in the form of purchases of USTreasury bonds, but also in the form of directand indirect investment.31 As of April 2010,according to the US Treasury Department,China with $900 billion dollars and Japan with$796 billion in holdings of US treasuries rankedfirst and second in the world, accounting for

more than 40 percent of the world total of $4.0trillion.32 Chinese, Japanese and South Koreanpurchases of treasury bonds over the last fiveyears helped to hold down US interest ratesand the yuan-dollar, yen-dollar and won-dollarratio, boosting the trade and growth of all foureconomies. This made it possible for the US tofinance the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars at thesame time that US manufacturing jobscontinued their inexorable flight to China, USmanufacturing hollowed out, and the USexperienced the most severe unemploymentsince World War II.33 If there is anything that isTBTF (too big to fail) it may be the symbioticUS-China trade, investment, and deficit/surplusrelationship that has made this the world’smost important bilateral economic andgeopolitical relationship. Nevertheless, asdiscussed below, the relationship remainsconflictual, above all in geopolitical terms.

Two major developments of global significancefacilitated China’s reentry in the worldeconomy and the formation of a dynamicinterconnected East Asian economic zone fromthe 1970s. First, the primary global war zone,which had been centered in East Asia betweenthe 1940s and the 1970s—the Asia-Pacific Warfollowed by Chinese, Korean, and Indochineserevolutionary wars and international conflictinvolving the US and its allies, as well asindependence struggles in the Philippines,Malaysia, and the Dutch East Indies amongothers—shifted after 1975 to the Middle Eastand Central Asia. If intra-East Asian and Asia-Pacific politics remain contentious, above all inthe Korean peninsula, the growth anddeepening of the Asian regional economy sincethe 1970s has taken place in the midst of ageneral peace, widening cultural and economicexchange, and easing of tensions throughoutEast Asia.34 Second, China’s full entry into theworld economy took place at precisely themoment when the postwar global economicexpansion came to an end, the B-phase in theKondratieff cycle began, and the US soughtways to stave off economic collapse and the

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demise of the dollar as the internationalcurrency through the expansion of a worldeconomy that included China even as its ownindustrial strength and economic growth ratesplummeted and its economy became ever moredependent on finance and services.35

A number of comparisons to the colonial era ingeneral, and Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in the years 1930-1945 inparticular, are instructive. First, the rapidlygrowing multidirectional flow of trade andinvestment involving China, Japan, SouthKorea, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan inrecent decades may be contrasted with thepredominantly bilateral economic relationshipslinking European, American and Japanesecolonies with the metropolis as well as framingthe dependent relationships with themetropolis of the prewar and early postwarperiods. In the years 1988-2004, as world tradeexpanded at an annual rate of 9.5%, intra-EastAsian trade grew at 14% per year, comparedwith 9% for that of the European Union. EastAsia’s share of world exports increased by 6%in the course of those years, while that of theEuropean Union decreased by 3%.36 Between1963 and 2008 Asia’s share of world exportsincreased from 12.5 to 27.7 percent, with thatof China alone increasing from 1.3 to 9.7percent.37

Among the indicators of East Asia’s resurgence,and China’s growth in particular, two bearparticular mention. One is the number ofparent transnational corporations andparticularly foreign affiliates located in China:parent corporations increased from 359 in2002 to 3,429 in 2005, compared with 4,663 inJapan (2006), 7,460 in South Korea (2007),2,360 in the US (2005) and 2,607 in UK (2003)out of a world total of 56,448 in 2008. If thenumbers bear any relationship to the reality,with 280,000 foreign affiliates in China by2005, China surpassed the combined total ofthe other major countries. In the event, onceagain it is the dynamism of the region that isstriking. Overall, the figures for China seemconsistent with other data on the rapidexpansion of foreign direct investment.

Table 1. Number of Parent TransnationalCorporations and Foreign Affiliates

(selected countries)

Derived from Table 1, Saskia Sassen, “TheGlobal City Perspective. Theoretical

Implications for Shanghai,” in Xiangming Chen,ed. with Zhenhua Zhou, Shanghai Rsing. StatePower and Local Transformations in a Global

Megacity (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press), 2009, pp. 9-10, based on

UNCTAD, World Investment Report (1998, 4;2004, 273, 274; 2008, 211). The figure for

China’s foreign affiliates bears furtherchecking.

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The second is China as a magnet for foreigndirect investment, with rapid growthcontinuing, and only the US far in the lead as alocale for foreign investment. The data revealthe sharp rise in both inward and outwardinvestment in East Asia in general, with Chinaleading the way, between 1990 and 2008.During this period, China surpassed all othersas a target for international investment exceptthe United States, while East Asia as a regionexhibits dynamism in both inward and outwardinvestment.

Table 2. Foreign Direct Investment byCountry and Region, 1990-2000, 2006,

2008 in US$billion

Note: 1990-2000 is annual average.

United Nations Conference on Trade andDevelopment, World Investment Report 2009,

World Investment Directory On-line(http://www.unctad.org/Templates/Page.asp?int

ItemID=3198&lang=1)

In contrast to the autarky of East Asia between1937 and 1945 at the peak of Japanese power,and the bipolar division of the years 1945-70,since the 1970s the region has been fullyenmeshed in global trade, financial and

inves tment ne tworks w i th growinginterdependence of its national economies.China’s economy was most foreign investmentdependent in the 1990s, with the ratio to totalinvestment dropping in the following decade(while absolute amounts remained large) whileChina’s own international investmentsrose.38 But while global attention has focusedon investment in China, the pattern underlinedby Athukorala and Hill is one of a region-widesurge in attraction of FDI. They particularlynote a pattern of production fragmentation andoutsourcing such that in many instances noteven China is producing the entire product, butfactories throughout the region and beyondcontribute components in a complex regional-global division of labor that extends frominvestment, management, production andassembly to trade and marketing. Among thehistorical and contemporary factors facilitatingrapid economic development, industrialization,substantial growth in per capita income, andthe formation of a vibrant multi-directional EastAsian regional economy, the following seemparticularly important:

• The legacy of Asian economicand political strengths examinedearlier in the epoch of Chinesepreeminence, protracted peace,and the regional tributary-tradeorder of the 18th century, legaciesthat would become clear with theresurgence of Chinese strength atthe center of an emergent EastAsia. China and East Asia merelyreclaimed a position of strengththat was lost via a combination ofinternal disintegration and theravages of imperialism. This is notto suggest continuity in the natureof organizing production or tradeprocesses, or in labor relations orthe role of the state or capital.

• The Chinese, Japanese and

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Korean diaspora has played acentral role in re-linking Asian andWestern economies through trade,technology and investmentnetworks that extend across theregion and link East Asia globally.

• Early postwar developmental ands o c i a l c h a n g e s t r a t e g i e sthroughout East As ia werep r e d i c a t e d o n s t a t e - l e daccumulation and investment,social change strategies thatpivoted on egalitarian landreforms, and measures thatblocked takeover by internationalcapital whi le creat ing f irmfoundations for the domesticeconomy. Far from the neoliberalorthodoxy that has prevailed inmany quarters since the 1990s,this was state-led developmentwith restrictions on the market,wi th , o f course , importantvariations in the approach of thethree East Asian nations.

If intra-Asian factors are important, theresurgence of East Asia as a region has equallybeen shaped by global factors, notably thecontradictory role of the United States in theAsia Pacific, but also the dynamic growth oftrade and investment relations involvingEurope and, in recent decades, the search forresources linking Asia with Africa and LatinAmerica as well. During the immediate postwardecades the US played a key role not only inshaping such global institutions as the WorldBank, IMF and United Nations, but also instructuring a bifurcated Asia Pacific, inplunging the region into protracted wars, andin assuring the primacy of bilateral overmultilateral relations. Since 1970, andparticularly since the demise of the SovietUnion in 1990, it has not only facilitated theresurgence of the national economies of East

Asia, but also, in diverse and at timesunintended ways, contributed to transcendingsome of the divisions inherent in earlier East-West conflicts.

In light of a two centuries-long patterncharacterized by the primacy of unequalbilateral relationships and a virtual absence ofmultilateral bonds, a number of recentmultilateral initiatives merit attention in termsof changing regional geopolitics. For only thesecond or third time since the eighteenthcentury, and the first in half a century, Chinahas taken the lead in an important regional andeven global geopolitical initiative:39 as host andthe leading force in the six-party talks thatcould eventually lead to a breakthrough thatresults in North Korean denuclearization andopens the way toward ending the half centuryKorean War between North Korea and theUnited States and between North and SouthKorea. The Korean conflict is but the mostintractable of concerns that can only beresolved in multilateral terms, requiring astriking departure from largely unilateral USattempts to impose its will on others throughmilitary action. The persistence of a dividedChina and a divided Korea have not preventedimportant strides toward the formation of acohesive economic region, laying the basis forfurther political accommodation and,eventually, addressing the environmental andpolitical economy issues of pollution, povertyand inequality that have accompanied gallopinggrowth and challenge the future of the region(we return to these issues below).

As it gained strength in recent decades, Chinabegan to spearhead other regional initiatives:these include efforts to bring about an ASEAN+ 3 arrangement involving China, Japan andKorea to unify East and Southeast Asia, and anASEAN-China Free Trade Area which tookeffect on January 1, 2010 together with a $15billion Chinese credit to promote regionalintegration and connectivity. It should benoted, however, that in contrast to China’s

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centrality in the tributary-trade order of the18th century, Southeast Asian nations, throughASEAN, have played a leading proactive role inthe emerging regional ism in the newmillennium, as in the planning for this andother free trade areas while it is the US, theonly nation with military bases and troopspositioned throughout the region, retainsgeopolitical dominance. These agreementshave been predicated on a willingness by theparties to set aside for future resolution suchcontentious territorial issues as Chinese borderdisputes with India, Russia, Japan, and Vietnamamong others, including disputes overpotentially oil rich islands, the Spratlys andParacels, that involve claims by manySoutheast Asian nations. Particularly notablefor i ts potent ia l regional and globalsignificance, is the China-Japan provisionalaccord on territorial issues involving theDiaoyutai/Senkaku Islands and Okinotorishima,making possible an agreement (albeit one thatwould be immediately contested) for joint oilexploration in the disputed area, althoughconflicts continue.40 This is not to take aPanglossian view of the prospects for regionalharmony: continued territorial disputes andunresolved historical conflicts rooted incolonial and war have the potential to disruptregional accord, as best illustrated by theChina-Japan clash over the Diaoyutai/SenkakuIslands in September 2010. Nevertheless,powerful trends unleashed over the last fourdecades have opened new possibilities for theregion.

As China’s star has burned brightly in regionaland global affairs, Japan, long the world’ssecond economic power, and the motor thatdrove region-wide economic growth in the1960s and 1970s, has virtually disappearedfrom much analysis of Asian regionalism andglobal geopolitics. This is a product of threemain factors. First is the surge in China’seconomic and financial strength over the lasttwo decades while Japan’s economy neverrecovered momentum after the bubble burst of

1990 inaugurated more than a decade ofstagnation, and the collapse of stock marketand real estate values, with further heavy hitsduring the 2008-09 economic and financialpandemic. Second is the political turmoil thathas resulted in six prime ministers between2006 and 2010, political stalemate in the wakeof the defeat of the LDP after fifty years of rule,and signs of tension within the US-Japanrelationship centered on the unresolvedOkinawa base transfer issue. For these reasons,and because of fears that the region will bedominated by a resurgent China, Japan hasfailed to exercise leadership in an emergingAsia. Finally, perhaps most important anddirectly related to the second point, is the factthat Japan remains firmly in the Americanembrace, viewing its future in terms of the US-Japan alliance even as the Democratic Partyadministration has sought to strengthenrelations with China while attempting, thus farabortively, to establish a more equal US-Japanrelationship. Even as signs abound of thedeclining power of the US, Japanese leadersand the media have continued to prioritize theirsubordinate relationship within, anddependence on, the US-Japan relationship, thatis what Gavan McCormack calls the client statebond. The Democratic Party cabinet ofHatoyama Yukio fell when its attempt to closethe dangerous Futenma base and transfer themajority of US Marines to Guam, failed to swayUS policymakers who have remained insistenton implementing an earlier agreement with theLDP to construct yet another new high techbase in Oura Bay, that is on expanding ratherthan reducing its enormous military footprint inOkinawa in the face of entrenched Okinawanopposition. (For Japanese policymakers,transfer of the base to mainland Japan waspolitically unthinkable.) This despite US plansto transfer 8,000 Marines and 9,000dependents to Guam with Japan agreeing topay the bulk of the costs, and despite the factthat the Marine presence in Okinawa is largelyirrelevant to Japan’s own security but primarilysupports US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.41

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In short, Japanese diplomacy pivots on the US-Japan economic and security relationship,including the nuclear umbrella, the stationingof US forces, and the provision of Japanesefinancial and logistical support for US wars toIraq and the Persian Gulf and to support USforces in Japan. Despite professed interest inAsian regional agendas, and despite thegrowing strength of intra-regional financial andeconomic ties, Japan remains transfixed on itsdependent relationship with the United States,a relationship that has been accentuated in thewake of North Korean nuclear development andthe conflict over Diaoyutai.

China and Japan claim theDiaoyutai/Senkaku Islands which Japan

has held since the 1972 reversion ofOkinawa.

Certainly Japan has been slow to exerciseleadership in a resurgent East Asia.42 AsYoshihide Soeya darkly observes,

“[s]ince the end of the Cold War,the most important strategicrelationship in East Asia has beenand will continue to be the onebetween the United States andChina. Given this profound reality,Japan is obviously a lesserstrategic player, and it is afundamental mistake, bothanalytically and policy-wise, totreat Japan as one of the "fourgreat powers" (including Russia) inNortheast Asia.”43

Nevertheless, Japan remains Asia’s leadingtechnological power and a formidable economicand financial force, even as the size of itseconomy slips below that of China and itsdemographic profile points to further decline.

In recent years East Asia has taken stepstoward interregional cooperation in numerousareas including economic and financialsecurity, easing territorial conflicts, resourcemanagement, fishing, counterterrorism, drugs,smuggling, piracy, human trafficking andorganized crime control, disaster relief,environmental degradation and containersecurity. The 1997 Asian financial and currencycrisis provided impetus for regional responses,the most important of which was the currencyswaps initiated with the Chiang Mai initiative ofMay 2005 to help shore up nations facingcurrency and financial crises (at the time of the1997 Asian financial crisis the United Statesblocked such efforts), an initiative reinforced in2008.44

The first summit of the three East Asiannations, held in Fukuoka, Japan on December13, 2008 in an effort to frame a common policyin response to the world recession is illustrativeof the possibilities for East Asian regionalresponses to the contemporary financial andeconomic crisis. The brief meeting, however,also highlighted obstacles to framing commonpolicies at a time when world recession

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presents severe challenges that may deraileven—or particularly—their high-flyingeconomies with its heavy reliance on exportmarkets and foreign investment.45

A 2009 summit held following the ASEANsummit in the wake of the global economic andfinancial crisis resulted in importantagreements including determining financialcontributions (and voting weight) in the ChiangMai Initiatives, and establishment of acommission for an official international study ofthe long stalled China-Japan-Korea FTA.Coming at the initiative of the newly electedDemocratic Party of Japan government, thisrepresented a break in Japanese policy over theyears 2002-09 which had been designed to stallprogress on an FTA without explicitly rejectingthe plan.46 Whether fundamental differencesover agricultural imports can be resolved,however, is at best an open question.

Set o f f aga inst the obv ious va lue o fcoordination among the three East Asianpowers is the continuing shadow of intra-Asianconflicts, including historical memory conflictscentered around a Japan whose neo-nationalistelements continue to prevent it from laying torest the divisive memories associated with theAsia-Pacific War and colonial rule. Historicalissues could again undermine or slowpromising regional initiatives, as they did inChina-Japan relations in the reign of PrimeMinister Koizumi, 2001-2006. There are,however, positive signs. Negotiations in 2010are at an advanced stage for resolvinglongstanding conflicts between Japan andChina and between Japan and Korea centeredon apology and compensation to former forcedlaborers.47 Similarly, a China-Japan commissionto prepare a common modern history of the twonations has made progress toward its goal. Ineach instance, however, the task remains to becompleted. The two most intractable challengesto strengthening regional bonds may lie inJapan’s territorial conflicts with Russia, Chinaand Korea, and the inability of the three nations

to resolve issues pertaining to the UnitedStates and its role in East Asian or in AsiaPacific geopolitical outcomes.

As David Shambaugh noted of the “US-ledsecurity architecture across Asia . . . includesfive bilateral alliances in EA; non-allied securitypartnerships in SEA, SA and Oceania; a buildupof US forces in the Pacific; new US-India andUS-Pakistan military relations; and the USmilitary presence and defense arrangements inSW and CA.”48 That formulation should besupplemented by recognizing the importance ofmultiple US military bases throughout theregion and beyond, US militarization of spacewhere again it has a virtual monopoly, the factthat a substantial portion of the US navalarmada is deployed in the Pacific maritimeregion, and the expansive conception of the US-Japan Security Treaty which has led Japan toextend its military reach to the Indian Oceanand to explore security arrangements withIndia and Australia.49 In early 2009, moreover,both China and Japan responded to Somalianpiracy with the dispatch of ships to patrol offthe coast of Africa, and in April 2010 SouthKorea dispatched a destroyer to the Gulf ofAden in pursuit of a captured oil tanker, whileChina has quietly expanded its naval reach intothe Indian Ocean.50 Each of these acts involveda major expansion of the military reach of therespective nations and a potential source ofconflict.

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China conducts first naval escort missionoff the coast of Somalia, Dec. 2009.

At the same time, signs abound of theweakening of American power in East Asia andglobally. While the collapse of the Soviet Unionleft the US without serious geopoliticalconstraints, the rationale for massive militarybudgets and permanent stationing andstrengthening of US forces—in Japan/Okinawa,in South Korea, in Taiwan, and in Guam, forexample—was simultaneously weakened in theeyes of almost everyone except Pentagonplanners who continue their insatiable pursuitof more international bases, with Guam thepresent site of choice for major expansion inthe Asia-Pacific. The US has lost internationalcredibility as a result of failed costly andprotracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan andthe heavy pressures it imposed on othernations to pay for those wars and support themmilitarily. To be sure, no nation or group ofnations possesses the power to directlychallenge the international primacy of the USor to assert leadership on a global scale. Yet UShegemonic claims are the victim of imperialoverstretch with US threats of new orexpanded wars in Iran, North Korea, Somaliaand elsewhere coming at a time when itseconomic and financial preeminence havefaded, and US state and local governmentsconfront massive cutbacks in health, educationand services, while doubts of success grow over

the ill-fated wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.51

Paradoxically, Mark Beeson observes, “thelegacy of the Bush administration may be thatU.S. foreign policy effectively undermined themultilateral transnational basics of Americanpower by encouraging the creation ofregionally based groupings with which tor e p r e s e n t a n d p r o t e c t l o c a linterests.”52 Nowhere has this been truer thanin East Asia and the Asia Pacific.

A series of events of the spring-summer 2010reveal the volatility of the region and suggestthat the primary challenge to East Asianregional development—or rather to competingvisions for defining the geographical scope ofthe region and the character of regionaldevelopment—hinge on challenges posed insignificant part by continued US attempts toimpose its will throughout the region. The firstof these was the sinking of the South Koreanwar vessel Cheonan on March 26, 2010 duringa joint US-ROK military exercise. An ROKreport of May 20, immediately endorsed by theUS and its allies, held North Korea responsiblefor the disaster that took 46 lives. It was a starkreminder, if any were needed, of the unfinishedUS-Korean War that could again erupt inbattle, particularly with North-South tensionson the rise in recent years. Of particularinterest is the US-ROK response: following aUN Security Council resolution of July 9condemning the incident, but with China andRussia blocking the attempt to secure UNimprimatur for the charge that the DPRK wasresponsible, a mammoth US-ROK joint militaryexercise was announced, this time targetingnot only the DPRK but the PRC as well: theannouncement indicated that the exerciseinvolving the nuclear power aircraft carrierUSS George Washington with a crew of 6,250and 300 planes including FA-18 fighter jets andE-2C Hawkeye Airborne Early Warning aircraft,would take place on both sides of the Koreanpeninsula, that is the Yellow Sea, as originallyplanned, as well as the Japan Sea (Koreans

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refer to the West and East Sea). In the face ofrepeated Chinese protests about the exerciseon its border, beyond its internationallyrecognized territorial waters but in a regionclaimed by China, the US agreed to shift theinitial phase of the operation to the Japan Sea.

The Cheonan Incident and the US-ROKresponse illustrate the fact that the deepgeopolitical divisions that can be traced to theimmediate postwar global conflict remainfundamental to contemporary power politics: inthis instance, the United States rallying SouthKorea, Japan and its allies who formed theUnited Nations coalition in the US-Korean warof 1950 to pressure not only North Korea butalso China and Russia.53 In this sense, it may bepremature to assume that the conflicts stirredby the postwar US-Soviet conflict and makingthemselves felt most powerfully in East Asiahave truly been laid to rest.

Conclusion

East Asia has taken important steps toovercome the fragmentation associated withseveral centuries of political disintegration,war, colonial rule and the postwar US-Sovietdivision to reassert its position as a majorworld region with the potential to rival Europe.The combination of deepening intraregionaleconomic bonds in the world’s most dynamiceconomic zone, together with preliminaryregion-wide efforts to confront acuteenvironmental, territorial and security issues,suggests possible futures compatible withsubstantially reduced US- and US-Japan-dominated dynamics and momentum towardexpanded regional coordination.

At the same time, following in the footsteps ofASEAN, ties among long divided nations inChina, Korea and Indochina, are far weakerand less institutionalized than those of theEuropean Union. There is no East Asian Union,no common currency, parliament or high court.Nor do we find a military equivalent of theNATO alliance. Above all, the United States

remains the dominant military power in theregion, a major presence bolstered by anextensive network of military bases andalliances with Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan,among others, its power still primarily directedagainst North Korea and China, in this sense alegacy of postwar decades of conflict.54 Allthese may be best understood as legacies of theearlier colonial era that ushered in Asia’s long-term decline viewed in global perspective.

Intra-Asian national conflicts are evident notonly in response to US demands and unilateralactions, with respect to wars and the "war onterror" (a formula for permanent warfare), butalso in myriad conflicts inherent in, orexacerbated by, China’s rise as a regionalpower, unresolved legacies of divided nations(the two Koreas and China/Taiwan) and otherterritorial conflicts rooted in World War II.They are also rooted in historical issues, mostfamously those that pit Japan against herneighbors over unresolved conflicts from theepoch of colonialism and war, but also conflictsinvolving China with the two Koreas and otherssuch as the clash over historical heritagecentered on Koguryo/Gaogouli.55

Of signal importance are questions of thesustainability of economic growth patterns thathave paved the way for the resurgence of EastAsia, but which, above all in the case of China,exact a horrendous toll on the environment,conflicts among neighboring nations overwater, energy, and emissions which exacerbateinter-state conflicts. Indeed, it may be saidcategorically that the headlong race for growthbest exemplified in recent decades by China, isunsusta inable as industr ia l izat ion,urbanization, mega-dam and road construction,and automobilization in a society marked bydeep social inequality, all collide with theenvironment. The critical problems for nextgeneration development will require—above allfor China, and not only China—large-scalegreen technological breakthroughs and arethinking of the core equation between growth

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maximization and the good life. With its owndeep developmental problems, above all theenormous toll on land, water and air associatedwith Chinese high-speed growth, and internald i v i s i o n s o f r e g i o n , e t h n i c i t y a n dclass,56 China’s continued dramatic rise is farfrom assured. In recent years, China hasembarked on green development programs thathave made it a world leader in such fields aswind power and solar power. At the same time,however, its consumption of coal and oil hassoared and, regardless of the outcome of greenenergy programs, they will continue to soar inthe decades to come.

Does the Pax Sinica of the 18th century offerinsights into the possibilities for regionalharmony or hegemony in a period of peace inEast Asia in the new millennium? That earlierorder was, of course, one predicated on ahierarchical model with China at the center. Atits height in the 18th century, East Asia enjoyedan era of protracted peace and relativeprosperity fueled in part by exchange throughtributary-trade bonds and a favorable positionin world trade networks, as wel l as ahegemonic politics predicated on a relativelynonintrusive approach to the peoples onManchu China’s East and Southeast Asianperipheries. Both the subsequent Japan- andUS-centered models, for all their dynamism,proved incapable of ending endemic war orcreating effective regional bonds. Eachprioritized bilateral relations with the dominantpower and sought without success to assure itsown military primacy and security duringepochs of permanent warfare. Their search forhegemony instead wrought vast instability andpermanent warfare.

If the emergence of wide-ranging and deepmutual economic relations across East Asia,pivoting on China, Japan and Korea andextending via the Chinese diaspora, providesfoundations for a new regional order, China willsurely be a major actor within it. However, withJapan and the US as major powers in the

region, China cannot play a hegemonic role anytime soon, certainly none comparable to that ofthe eighteenth century. In contrast to realistinternational relations analysts such as JohnMearsheimer, who project the emergence of ahegemonic China in East Asia based onassumptions about China’s continued economicgrowth, a more likely prospect for the comingdecades is a regional order in which Chinaplays an important role, but the pace ofChinese development slows and no singlenation reigns supreme.57 Immediate challengesboth to national development trajectories andto regional accord will come from economicrecession, geopolitical conflicts of which adivided Korea remains the most dangerous,American attempts to dominate whatever Asianregional order emerges, and historical memoryconflicts that continue to divide China, Japanand Korea.

The present conjuncture suggests one otherimportant theme that differentiates thecontemporary era from that of both the PaxSinica of the 18 t h century and the PaxNipponica of the first half of the 20th century. Inboth of the earlier epochs, East Asia wasembedded in the global economy, yet thegeopolitical reach of its dominant powersremained limited to East Asia. In the newmillennium, China, Japan and Korea are allactively promoting the global reach of theireconomies, as exemplified by China’sengagement in Africa and the heavy stakes ofall three nations in the US and Europeaneconomies, while carefully assessinggeopolitical opportunities associated with theirgrowing economic clout.

Richard Falk’s critique of a predatoryneoliberal globalism dominated by US power,introduced at the beginning of this paper, leadsto reflection on whether other forms of orderare possible in the new millennium. Our surveyhas suggested that, with the imminent declineof American power and the resurgence of EastAsia, other forms of regional and global order

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become possible . . . if they can learn from thelessons of US failures, and overcome conflictsinternal to the region.

Mark Selden is a Senior Research Associate inthe East Asia Program at Cornell Universityand a coordinator of the Asia-Pacific Journal.His recent books include China, East Asia andthe Global Economy: Regional and historicalp e r s p e c t i v e s(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0415464595/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20) (with Takeshi Hamashita andLinda Grove), The Resurgence of East Asia:500 , 150 and 50 Year Perspec t i ves(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0415316367/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20) (edited by Giovanni Arrighi,Takeshi Hamashita and Mark Selden), and Warand State Terrorism: The United States, Japan,and the Asia-Pacific in the Long TwentiethC e n t u r y(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0742523918/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20) (with Alvin So). Hishomepage is www.markselden. info /(http://www.markselden.info/)

Recommended citation: Mark Selden, "Nation,Region and the Global in East Asia: Conflictand Cooperation," The Asia-Pacific Journal,41-1-10, October 11, 2010.

Notes

* An earlier version of this article waspresented at Symposium: From Area Studies toTransregional Studies? Contours ofGlobalization in Asia’s Re-integration,University of Iowa May 6-7, 2010. I am gratefulto the participants in that conference,particularly its organizer Sonia Ryang,Prasenjit Duara and Gavan McCormack, forstimulating my thinking on the issues. Thispaper has also benefited from comments byUradyn Bulag, Heonik Kwon, Taggart Murphyand Bin Wong.

1 This approach rejects the notion that global

processes are something new under the sun.Rather it seeks to set off earlier globalprocesses, some of which are described below,in contrast to contemporary manifestations ofboth regional and global processes.

2 Richard Falk, Predatory Globalization: ACritique (London: Polity Press, 1999) p. 2.

3 For discussion of concepts of region, seeShintaro Hamanaka, Asian Regionalism andJapan. The politics of membership in regionaldiplomatic, financial and trade groups,(London: Routledge, 2009), espec. pp. 3-5.

4 Cold War Frontiers in the Asia-Pacific: dividedterritories in the San Francisco system(London: Routledge, 2007).

5 Quintessential works in this literature areDavid Landes, The Unbound Prometheus.Technological Change and IndustrialDevelopment in Western Europe from 1750 tothe Present (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1969) (2nd edition, 2003); W. W. Rostow,The Stages of Economic Growth. A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge; CambridgeUniversity Press, 1962).

6 China was the geopolitical center of East Asiain the 18th century, but, as during the Mongoldynasty earlier, it was ruled by a steppe people,the Manchus, who in turn drew heavily onMongol military and administrative strengths,thereby lending a distinctive multi-ethnic andcosmopolitan character to the Qing empire andits dealings with peoples on its borders, notablythe Mongols, Tibetans and Uyghurs of CentralAsia, as well as the peoples of Southeast Asiaas well.

7 Takeshi Hamashita, edited by Mark Seldenand Linda Grove, China, East Asia and theGlobal Economy: Regional and historicalperspectives (London: Routledge, 2008);Giovanni Arrighi, Takeshi Hamashita and MarkSelden, eds., The Resurgence of East Asia: 500,150 and 50 year perspectives, London:

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Routledge, 2003; R. Bin Wong, ChinaTransformed: Historical Change and the Limitsof European Experience, Ithaca: CornellUniversity Press, 1997; Kenneth Pomeranz, TheGreat Divergence: China, Europe, and theMaking of the Modern World Economy,Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000;Andre Gunder Frank, ReORIENT: GlobalEconomy in the Asian Age, Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 1998; Gary Hamilton,Commerce and Capitalism in Chinese Societies,London: Rout ledge, 2006; HidetakaYoshimatsu, The Political Economy ofRegionalism in East Asia. IntegrativeExplanations for Dynamics and Challenges,Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008; MarkBeeson, Regionalism and Globalization in EastAsia: Politics, Security and EconomicDevelopment, Basingstoke: PalgraveMacmillan, 2007; Francesca Bray, The RiceEconomies: Technology and Development inAsian Societies, New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1985; Nola Cooke and Li Tana, eds.,Water Frontier: Commerce and the Chinese inthe Lower Mekong Region, 1750-1880, LanhamMD, Rowman and Littlefield, 2004; AnthonyReid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce,1450-1680 (2 vols), New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 1988 and 1993. The issues have beensharply debated by historians and economistsin symposia in The Journal of Asian Studies,American Historical Review, and Modern Chinaamong others. They have also been examinedby a range of Japanese and Chinese scholars.See especially Sugihara Kaoru’s editedcollection on the links between Japanesedevelopment, intra-Asian trade, and the Asianeconomies, Japan, China and the Growth of theAsian International Economy, 1850-1949,Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, LindaGrove and Christian Daniel, eds. State andSociety in China: Japanese Perspectives onMing-Qing Social and Economic History (Tokyo:University of Tokyo Press, 1984); and WangHui, The Politics of Imagining Asia: Empires,Nations, Regional and Global Orders, Inter-AsiaCultural Studies, 8,1, 2007, pp. 1-34.

8 Our focus in this article is on East Asia.China’s tributary trade order extended, ofcourse, beyond East Asia, notably to Inner Asia,involving for example the Mongols, Tibetansand Manchus, and beyond to Southeast Asia,particularly the Vietnamese.

9 Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age ofCommerce, 1450-1680 vol.2, p. 33.

10 Chapter 4: “Silver in Regional Economies andthe World Economy: East Asia in the Sixteenthto the Nineteenth Centuries.” Translation byJ.P. McDermott. China, East Asia and theGlobal Economy. Cf. Andre Gunder Frank,ReORIENT, especially pp. 131-64; KennethPomeranz, The Great Divergence, espec. pp.159-62, 267-74.

11 See for example Saskia Sassen, The GlobalCity: New York, London, Tokyo, Princeton:Princeton University Press, 2001 2nd.ed); SaskiaSassen, Cities in a World Economy, 3rd Ed.Thousand Oaks, California: Pine Forge, 2006.

12 This is not to suggest the absence of armedconflict in Asia. China achieved the peak ofterritorial expansion during the 18th century,extending the reach of empire north and westinto Inner Asia including incorporation of Tibet,Mongolia and Xinjiang, and China’s informalreach extended into Southeast Asia as well.Most of China south of the Great Wall,however, and particularly coastal China, bycontrast, enjoyed protracted peace. As didlarge areas of East Asia.

13 Alain Gresh, “From Thermopylae to the TwinTowers: The West’s Selective Reading ofHistory,” Le Monde Diplomatique, January2009.

1 4 S. Sugiyama and Linda Grove, eds.,Commercial Networks in Modern Asia,Richmond Surrey: Curzon, 2001, especiallychapters by Hamashita Takeshi, FurutaKazuko, Linda Grove; A.J.H. Latham and HeitaKawakatsu, eds., Intra-Asian Trade and the

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World Market, London: Routledge, 2006; K NChaudhuri, Asia before Europe: Economy andCivilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Riseof Islam to 1750, Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1990.

15 “Asia Redux: Conceptualizing a Region forour Times”. Presented at the Iowa Symposium,April 6-7, 2010.

16 “ ( http://japanfocus.org/-Anne-Booth/2418) A n n e B o o t h , ” (http://japanfocus.org/-Anne-Booth/2418 ) Did ItReally Help to be a Japanese Colony? EastAsian Economic Performance in HistoricalPerspective,” The Asia-Pacific Journal.

17 Angus Maddison, The World Economy:Historical Statistics, Paris: OECD DevelopmentCentre, 2003, cited in Booth, Table 3.

18 Samuel Ho, "Colonialism and Development:Korea, Taiwan, and Kwantung" in Ramon H.Myers and Mark R. Peattie, eds., The JapaneseColonial Empire, 1895-1945, Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1984, p.382; Chih-ming Ka, Japanese Colonialism in Taiwan. LandTenure, Development and Dependency,Boulder: Westview, 1995; Harry J. Lamley,“Waitwan Under Japanese Rule, 1895-1945.The Vicissitudes of Colonialism,” in Marray A.Rubinstein, ed., Taiwan: A New History,Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1999.

19 Booth, “Did It Really Help to be a JapaneseColony,” Table 11. Booth shows that thepattern of metropolitan domination of the tradeof the colonies was not universal. While themodel well fit the Philippines (United States),in the late 1930s, trade dependence on themetropolis was less than twenty percent in thecase Malaya (Britain) and Indonesia (Holland).

20 Hui-yu Caroline Ts’ai, Taiwan in Japan’sEmpire Building. An institutional approach tocolonial engineering, London, Routledge, 2009.

21 Sven Saaler and J. Victor Koschmann, eds.,

Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese History.Colonialism, regionalism and borders, London,Routledge, 2008).

22 I am indebted to Heonik Kwon for clarifyingthe centrality of the colonial experience forunderstanding all wars of the post- World WarII epoch.

23 Asia Redux, p. 11.

24 Edward Friedman, Paul G. Pickowicz andMark Selden, Revolution, Resistance andReform in Village China, New Haven, YaleUniversity Press, 2005.

2 5 C I A — W o r l d F a c t b o o k(https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2001rank.html). In percapita terms, Japan ranked 42nd ($32,600),South Korea 49th ($28,000), and China 128th

($6,600) with Hong Kong 15th ($42,700) andT a i w a n 4 7 t h ( 2 9 , 8 0 0 ) ( l i n k(https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2004rank.html)). IMFcalculations for nominal GDP for 2008 placedJapan second, China third and South Korea1 5 t h . ( l i n k(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28nominal%29))

26 Yu Zhou, The Inside Story of China’s High-Tech Industry. Making Silicon Valley in Beijing,Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield, 2008.

2 7 Michael Roberge and Youkyung Lee(http://www.cfr.org/publication/9223/ ), “China-Taiwan Relations,” Council on ForeignRelations, 2009.

2 8 Y u - h u a y S u n a n d E u g e n e T a n g(http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601080&sid=aeoan51P.sBg&refer=asia),Taiwan, China Start Direct Links as RelationsImprove, Bloomberg December 15, 2008.

29 Daniel H. Rosen and Zhi Wang, “DeepeningChina-Taiwan Relations Through the Economic

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Cooperation Framework Agreement,” PolicyBrief 10-16, Peterson Institute for InternaitonalE c o n o m i c s , J u n e 2 0 1 0www.iie.com/publications/pb/pb10-16.pdf.Rosen and Wang model the significant gainsthat Taiwan’s economy is projected to make asa result of the agreement, and the necessity forTaiwan to act in light of the 2010 China-ASEANagreement earlier in the year, with moremodest economic gains anticipated for China.

30 To be sure, progress toward rapprochementhas slowed under South Korean Pres. LeeMyung-bak.

31 There is a further recycling via Japan’s multi-billion dollar subsidy (the so-called sympathypayments) to pay for an estimated seventypercent of the vast US military component inJapan, and especially Okinawa, and furtherbillions to support the projected shift of most orall of the US Marine component from Okinawat o G u a m . S e e G a v a n M c C o r m a c k(http://japanfocus.org/-Gavan-McCormack/3365), Ampo’s Troubled 50th: Hatoyama’s AbortiveRebellion, Okinawa’s Mounting Resistance andthe US-Japan Relationship,” three part article,The Asia-Pacific Journal, May 31, 2010.

3 2 U S T r e a s u r y D e p a r t m e n t(http://www.ustreas.gov/tic/mfh.txt ) .

3 3 M a r k L a n d l e r(http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/26/world/asia/26addiction.html?pagewanted=1&th&emc=th), “Dollar Shift: Chinese Pockets Filled asAmericans’ Emptied,” The New York Times,December 25, 2008; R. Taggart Murphy(http://japanfocus.org/-R_Taggart-Murphy/2931), Asia and the Meltdown of American Finance;Kosuke Takahashi and R. Taggart Murphy(http://japanfocus.org/-Kosuke-TAKAHASHI/3028), The US and the Temptation of DollarS e i g n o r a g e ; J a m e s F a l l o w s(http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200812/fallows-chinese-banker), “Be Nice to the CountriesThat Lend You Money,” Atlantic Monthly,

December 2008.

34 This is not to suggest that rapid economicgrowth can only occur in a peaceful milieu.Japan’s post-WWII recovery and economicgrowth was i n pa r t a p roduc t o f anindustrialization fostered by the US as a meansto support the Korean and Vietnam wars.Likewise the postwar US economic boom from1945-1968 occurred in the midst of, and wasfueled by, war and preparation for war. BothUS and Japanese gains were bought at theprice of devastation of Korea and Indochina.Stated differently, the US could enjoy the long“peace” of the postwar decades at home whileits wars abroad in the post-colonial periphery ofAsia were experienced as the extension of warand occupation that were the hallmarks of thecolonial era. Heonik Kwon astutely assessesthis bifurcation in a book in progress.

35 For recent discussion of the Kondratieffmoment, see Immanuel Wallerstein interviewedb y J a e - J u n g S u h(http://japanfocus.org/-I-Wallerstein/3005),Capitalism’s Demise? The Asia-Pacific Journal;and, especially Robert Brenner interviewed byJ e o n g S e o n g - j i n(http://japanfocus.org/-Robert-Brenner/3043),Overproduction not Financial Collapse is theHeart of the Crisis: the US, East Asia, and theWorld, The Asia-Pacific Journal; and R. TaggartM u r p h y(http://japanfocus.org/-R_Taggart-Murphy/3265), In the Eye of the Storm: Updating theEconomics of Global Turbulence, anIntroduction to Robert Brenner's Update, TheAsia-Pacific Journal.

36 Douglas H. Brooks and Changchun Hua,“Asian Trade and Global Linkages,” ADBInstitute Working Paper No. 122, December,2008, “Intra-regional Trade of Major Regions(1988-2007), Fig. 6, p. 10.

3 7 W o r l d T r a d e O r g a n i z a t i o n(http://www.wto.org/english/res_e/statis_e/its20

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0 9 _ e / i t s 0 9 _ w o r l d _ t r a d e _ d e v _ e . h t m ) ,International Trade Statistics 2009. Trade byRegion. Table 1.6. See also Prema-chandraAthukorala, ed. “The Rise of Asia. Trade andinvestment in Global Perspective,” espec.Athukorala and Hal Hill, “Asian trade andinvestment. Patterns and trends,” pp. 11-57.

38 Athukorala and Hill provide further data anddiscussion of foreign investment in China inregional and global perspective for the years1984-2007, as well as sectoral data, pp. 37-52.

39 Other instances that merit comparativeanalysis are the Geneva Conference onIndochina of 1955 and the Afro-AsianConference at Bandung in the same year, bothheralding the importance of newly emergingnations in a post-colonial world.

40 See Xinjun Zhang, “China’s ‘Peaceful Rise’,‘Harmonious’ Foreign Relations, and LegalConfrontation and Lessons From the Sino-Japanese Dispute Over the East China Sea,”Foreign Policy Research Institute, April 16,2010; Suisheng Zhao, “China's Global Searchfor Energy Security: cooperation andcompetition in the Asia-Pacific,” Journal ofContemporary China, issue 55, 2008, pp.2 0 7 - 2 7 ; M i c h a e l R i c h a r d s o n(http://japanfocus.org/-Michael-Richardson/2949), A Southward Thrust for China’s EnergyDiplomacy in the South China Sea, The Asia-Pacific Journal, and David Rosenberg(http://japanfocus.org/-David-Rosenberg/1789),Managing the Resources of the China Seas:China's Bilateral Fisheries Agreements withJapan, South Korea, and Vietnam, The Asia-Pacific Journal.

41 Gavan McCormack, Client State: Japan inAmerica’s Embrace, London: Routledge, 2007;G a v a n M c C o r m a c k(http://japanfocus.org/-Gavan-McCormack/3365), Ampo’s Troubled 50th: Hatoyama’s AbortiveRebellion, Okinawa’s Mounting Resistance andthe US-Japan Relationship, The Asia-Pacific

Journal, 22-3-10, May 31, 2010; Kensei Yoshida(http://japanfocus.org/-Yoshida-Kensei/3378),Okinawa and Guam: In the Shadow of U.S. andJapanese “Global Defense Posture,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, 26-2-10, June 28, 2010.

42 The combination of Japan’s military powerand the aspirations of neo-nationalistpoliticians suggests other possible outcomes.The MSDF presence in the Indian Ocean since2003 tasked with refueling US and allied shipsin the Afghan War, means that Japan’s navy hastaken up positions critical to guaranteeing itsoil supplies from the Middle East. Similarly,plans are under review for an active militaryrole in response to Somali hijacking of Japaneses h i p s . S e e M i c h a e l P e n n(http://japanfocus.org/-Michael-Penn/3022),“Somali Pirates and Political Winds Drive Japanto the Gate of Tears off Somalia,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 4-2-09, January 20, 2009.

43 "An East Asian Community and Japan-ChinaR e l a t i o n s "(http://www.jiia.or.jp/en_commentary/201004/30-1.html), JISS Commentary 89, 2010.

4 4 M a r k B e e s o n(http://japanfocus.org/-Mark-Beeson/3008),“East Asian Regionalism and the Asia-Pacific:After American Hegemony,” The Asia-PacificJournal.

4 5 X e t r a d e(http://www.xe.com/news/Fri%20Dec%2012%2020:48:00%20EST%202008/129221.htm?categoryId=5&currentPage= ), “Japan, South Korea,China: trilateral ties, tensions”; Brad Setser(http://japanfocus.org/_Brad_Setser-This_Doesn_t_Look_Good__Taiwan__Korea__and_China_Exports_Tank), This Doesn't Look Good: Taiwan,Korea and China Exports Tank, The Asia-PacificJournal.

4 6 J o e l R a t h a u s(http://www.eastasiaforum.org/2010/06/15/china-japan-korea-trilateral-cooperation-and-the-east-asian-community/), “China-Japan-Korea

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trilateral cooperation and the East AsianCommunity, East Asia Forum, June 15, 2010.The first round of research was completed in2010 with plans to complete the study by 2012.

4 7 W i l l i a m U n d e r w o o d(http://japanfocus.org/-William-Underwood/3387), “Redress Crossroads in Japan: DecisivePhase in Campaigns to Compensate Korean andChinese Wartime Forced Laborers,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, 30-1-10, July 26, 2010; Ivy Lee(http://japanfocus.org/-Ivy-Lee/3400), “TowardReconciliation: The Nishimatsu Settlements forChinese Forced Labor in World War Two,” TheAsia-Pacific Journal, August 9, 2010; but seealso the alternative perspective advanced byK a n g J i a n(http:/ / japanfocus.org/-Kang-Jian/3399),“Rejected by All Plaintiffs: Failure of theNishimatsu-Shinanogawa "Settlement" withChinese Forced Laborers in Wartime Japan,”The Asia-Pacific Journal, August 9, 2010.

48 David Shambaugh, “China Engages Asia:Reshaping the Regional Order,” InternationalSecurity 29.3 (2004), pp. 64-99.

4 9 P e t e r J . K a t z e n s t e i n(http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_J_-Katzenstein/2921), “Japan in the American Imperium:Rethinking Security,” The Asia-Pacific Journal;R i c h a r d T a n t e r(http://japanfocus.org/-Richard-Tanter/2868),The Maritime Self-Defence Force Mission in theIndian Ocean: Afghanistan, NATO and Japan’sPolitical Impasse, The Asia-Pacific Journal; MelG u r t o v(http://japanfocus.org/-Mel-Gurtov/2627),Reconciling Japan and China, The Asia-PacificJ o u r n a l ; G a v a n M c C o r m a c k(http://japanfocus.org/-Gavan-McCormack/2786), "Conservatism" and "Nationalism". The JapanPuzzle, The Asia-Pacific Journal.

50 South Korean navy pursues hijacked oilt a n k e r(http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8603098.stm), BBC

N e w s , A p r i l 5 , 2 0 1 0 ; H a r t h P a n t(http://japanfocus.org/-Harsh_V_-Pant/3353),“China’s Naval Expansion in the Indian Oceanand India-China Rivalry” The Asia-PacificJournal May 3, 2010.

5 1 D a n a P r i e s t a n d W i l l i a m A r k i n(http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/a-hidden-world-growing-beyond-control/), three part series in TheWashington Post, July 19, 20, 21, 2010beginning with “A Hidden World GrowingBeyond Control.” Privatization has proceededrapidly since at least the George W. Bushadministration. What is striking is that this hasnow penetrated the consciousness of theestablishment as illustrated by the WashingtonPost series and an hour long PBS Frontlineprogram on Top Secret America to screen inOctober. The Washington Post has establisheda s p e c i a l h o m e p a g e a n d d a t a b a s e(http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/national-security-inc/) on themore than 45 government organizations and1931 companies to track the story, Cf. TimShorrock, Spies for Hire: The Secret World ofIntelligence Outsourcing (New York: Simon andSchuster, 2008).

52 Beeson, East Asian Regionalism and the Asia-Pacific: After American Hegemony.

5 3 J o h n M c G l y n n(http://japanfocus.org/-John-McGlynn/3372 ),Politics in Command: The "International"Investigation into the Sinking of the Cheonanand the Risk of a New Korean War,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, June 14, 2010; Seunghun Lee,J.J.Suh (http://japanfocus.org/-JJ-Suh/3382),“Rush to Judgment; Inconsistencies in SouthKorea’s Cheonan Report,” The Asia-PacificJ ourna l J u l y 10 , 2010 ; R i ck Rozo f f(http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=ROZ20100716&articleId=20149), “U.S Risks Military Clash With ChinaIn Yellow Sea,” Global Research, July 16, 2010.

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54 Peter J. Katzenstein, A world of regions: Asiaand Europe in the American imperium (Ithaca:Cornell University Press, 2005).

55 Yonson Ahn, The Contested Heritage ofKoguryo/Gaogouli and China-Korea Conflict,T h e A s i a - P a c i f i c J o u r n a l ,http://japanfocus.org/-Yonson-Ahn/2631

56 On the environmental obstacles to China’scontinued rise, see Paul Harris, ConfrontingEnvironmental Change in East and SoutheastAsia: Eco-politics, Foreign Policy, and

Sustainable Development (UN University Press,2005).

57 John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of GreatPower Politics (New York: Norton, 2001), p.402. This is Mearsheimer’s assumption about aChina that succeeds in extending i tsdevelopmental drive to become a wealthynation. See Mark Beeson’s discussion ofhegemony in postwar East Asia, “Hegemonictransition in East Asia? The dynamics ofChinese and American power,” Review ofInternational Studies (2009), 35, pp. 95–112.

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