Nation, Region and the Global in East Asia: Conflict and Cooperation 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 in non-state actors whose actions construct and East Asia: Conflict and Cooperation* redefine the geographical, political and especially the economic parameters of a region, Mark Selden require that we reconceptualize both the national and the global?3 I reflect on region I propose to examine the resurgence of East formation in light of the geopolitics and Asia in the final decades of the long twentieth economics of empire in an effort to gauge what century in relation to three major forces that new possibilities regional integration offers for shape the era and the region: nationalism, East Asia. To do so, I briefly examine the regionalism and globalism. I understand contemporary region in light of two earlier contemporary globalism primarily in relation to epochs, the Sinocentric tributary trade system the US bid to forge a hegemonic order (16th - 18th century), and the era of system predicated on military and diplomaticdisintegration, colonialism, nationalism, supremacy and neoliberal economicendemic wars, and revolutions (1840-1970). presuppositions enshrined in international institutions.1 “The characteristic policy vectors of neo-liberalism,” Richard Falk comments in his critique of the economic and social dimensions of globalism, “involve such moves as liberalization, privatization, minimizing economic regulation, rolling back welfare, reducing expenditures on public goods, tightening fiscal discipline, favoring freer flows of capital, strict controls on organized labor, tax reductions, and unrestricted currency repatriation.” It is the sum total of the effects of these measures, from the perspectives of global governance, social justice, and the environment, that drove his conclusions about Predatory Globalism, a volume that appeared in the year of the Seattle anti-globalization protests and a decade before the economic meltdown of 2008.2 This study breaks with the standard periodization for the long twentieth century, I am particularly interested in exploring which stresses two great divides of 1945 and insights that derive from regional as opposed to 1990. In the conventional view, 1945 marked national and global perspectives. In what ways the formation of a US-structured yet bi-polar does contemporary East Asian regionalism, postwar order ushering in the displacement of pivoting on processes fostered by state and colonial empires by nationalist-driven new

1 8 | 41 | 1 APJ | JF nations in the wake of the defeat of the old a declining US relinquishes its military primacy colonialisms, and 1990 the end of the “Cold and the continued divisions among China, War” and the inauguration of what some have Japan and Korea yield to deepening political rushed to style the era of “globalization”, or of and cultural bonds? untrammeled American supremacy. Those were, of course, critical moments in shaping regional and global outcomes. Nevertheless, from the perspective of nationalism, regionalism, and globalism in East Asia, and with an eye to gauging the resurgence of East Asia in general and China in particular, the US- China opening of 1970 and the US defeat in Indochina five years later, I suggest, provide more fruitful framing which highlights the end of a century of war that devastated and divided the region and paved the way for an era of economic complementarity and, perhaps eventually, systemic integration and geopolitical restructuring. This watershed allows us to appreciate the magnitude of Shanghai changes that made it possible to overcome certain divisions of an earlier colonial era, as well as the legacy of the Asia-Pacific War and This is not to suggest the arrival of a post- subsequent regional polarization associated nationalist world. A new regional order is itself with the Soviet and American empires.the product in no small part of the meshing of Post-1970 changes have transformed both East diverse national agendas, and in East Asia as Asia and the world economy. Since the 1970s, elsewhere, it faces challenges from nationalist geopolitical change (centered on the US-China conflicts exemplified by unresolved tensions opening but including breakthroughs in ROK- rooted in historical experiences of colonialism China and Japan-China relations) and domestic and war, postwar territorial divisions, socio-political and economic change (notably asymmetric economic imperatives, among market- and mobility-oriented developments others. Critically important to fueling and including decollectivization, mass migration, sustaining these conflicts have been the mega-urbanization and capitalistterritorial outcomes enshrined in the San transformation in China) have led toward rapid Francisco Treaty that the US imposed in ending interpenetration of East Asian economies with the formal occupation of Japan in 1952. As trade, investment and migration playingKimie Hara has documented through the important roles. Central to this process has analysis of successive drafts of the treaty, the been both China’s dramatic ascent and the role US moved from clear specification of of major cities, notably Beijing, Shanghai, boundaries for resolution of territorial issues Tianjin, Guangzhou, Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong, including Dokdo/Takeshima (Korea and Japan), Taipei and Singapore in establishing new Diaoyutai/Senkakus (China and Japan), the regional and global networks. In assessing the Kuriles/Northern Islands (Russia and Japan), resurgence of East Asia and emerging East and Taiwan (China) to vague formulations that Asian regionalism, a critical question remains: left unresolved the legacies of colonialism and will these foundations for region formation war and pose difficult challenges for transform the geopolitics of the region in which overcoming national rivalries. The result has

2 8 | 41 | 1 APJ | JF been continuing territorial conflicts over six accommodation and overcoming national decades, which have continued to block a divisions involving China/Taiwan (substantial Russia-Japan peace treaty in the wake of World integration) and the Korean peninsula (despite War II and to fuel myriad conflicts among the reversal of nearly a decade of progress regional powers.4 And long-term national toward the reduction of North-South tensions divisions—notably China and Taiwan, as well as since the 2007 election of President Lee the Korean peninsula—that reflect not only the Myung-bak). results of World War II and postwar independence and revolutionary movements, Signs of region formation abound. They include but above all US military and diplomatic an explosion of cultural interchanges, rising interventions to redraw boundaries throughout cross-border tourism within the region, labor the Asia-Pacific. This involved both the empire migration, joint government-sponsored history of bases, in Chalmers Johnson's evocative projects, and student and scholar exchanges. phrase, the permanent stationing of US troops Importantly, new forms of diplomacy have in Japan, Korea and elsewhere and the securing accompanied China’s rise as a regional power, by the US of Japan's mandate over the Pacific illustrated by the China-ASEAN free trade Islands. agreement and the Six-Party Talks centered on North Korea security and nuclear issues, all of Not surprisingly, each of the major players in which cast China in a leading diplomatic role. the integration of East Asia—China, Japan and The emergence of ASEAN + 3 (China, Japan, South Korea—has its own conception of the South Korea) is perhaps the best example of emerging region formation as well as of the Southeast Asian nations taking the initiative in relationship to the superpower. Criticalpromoting regionalism, one in which the differences hinge on the question of the Chinese role is again notable. Yet, despite geopolitical and economic position of the important areas of progress, conflicting United States in the region, the rise of China, approaches to East Asian regionalism and inter- the reunification of China-Taiwan and North state divisions continue to be driven by and South Korea, and the relationship between competitive nationalisms and diverse the emerging regional order and ASEAN, the approaches to conceptualizing the nature of the Shanghai group, and South Asia. region and perhaps, above all, the question of the role of the United States as a participant or While noting these and other obstacles to partner in an emerging East Asian order and regional accommodation, and the fact that the conflicts involving North Korea nuclear two great historical examples of East Asian development, Japan-Korea conflict over regional order—the China-centered tributary- Dokdo/Takeshima, and Japan-China conflict th trade network of the 16-18 century and over Senkakus/Diaoyutai islands, among others. Japan’s short-lived but ambitious Greater East What can be learned from a brief excursion Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere of the yearsthrough earlier regional approaches that might 1937-45—were both predicated on empires usefully frame understanding of contemporary associated with the supremacy of a single regionalism or future prospects? power, I nevertheless emphasize the importance of contemporary momentum toward I East Asian Regionalism: The 18th Century a more broadly based regional integration. The combination of growing interdependence of The dominance of the Western colonial powers strong East Asian economies at a time of and the subjugation of much of Asia, Africa and waning American power stimulates interest of Latin America provided the foundations East Asian leaders in promoting regional throughout the 19th and well into the 20th

3 8 | 41 | 1 APJ | JF century for essentialist views in both East and the East Asian world was the China-centered West of a permanent state in which a dynamic tributary-trade order, a regional system and aggressive Western world order would pivoting on political and economic transactions invariably predominate over a weak, inward- negotiated through formal state ties as well as looking and conservative East Asia thatproviding a framework for informal trade collapsed in the face of Western capitalism and complementing tributary missions.8 The system military predominance. This was the foundation encompassed both principles for governing for a Eurocentric world vision that reified the interstate relations and a robust legal and perspective of the colonial powers and their illegal trade, much of it linking port cities that successors.5 were largely beyond the control of the Chinese imperial state and other states. Such a view belies the East-West relationship of earlier epochs. An alternative paradigm that has emerged in recent years recognizes the salience of China not only as the dominant economic and geopolitical center of an East Asian regional order but also as a major actor in the East Asian and global political economy from at least the 16th to the 18th century and arguably continuing to the arrival of the Western powers in full force in the mid-19th century.6 Interestingly, the avatars of this China-centered perspective on East Asia and the world economy were not primarily Chinese but Japanese and American researchers.7 China’s economic strides of recent decades, and, above all, the resurgence Ming tributary order of East Asia with China, Japan and Korea as an expansive and inter-connected core of the capitalist world economy in the final decades of Second, East Asian commercial linkages with th the long twentieth century and into the new the world economy from the 16 century millennium, lend plausibility to an approach forward, mediated by silver exchange, that reassesses not only China buttransformed East-West trade relations as well reconceptualizes the East Asia region. as the domestic Chinese and regional economies. This was not, in short, an insular The work of Takeshi Hamashita, R. Bin Wong, regionalism. Rather, East Asia was linked to the Kenneth Pomeranz, Kaoru Sugihara, Anthony world economy in significant ways. Silver flows, Reid and Andre Gunder Frank, among others, to pay for tea, silk, ceramics, spices and opium shows that between the 16th and 18th century, among other high value products, were critical at the dawn of European capitalism, East Asia in binding Europe and the Americas with East was the center of a vibrant geopolitical and Asia, particularly China, with Manila as the key economic zone. Two elements of the East Asian port of transit. Indeed, the large-scale flow of order together defined its regional and global silver from the Americas to China beginning in th th features. the 16 century and peaking in the mid-17 century linked the major world regions and First, among the most important linkages that transformed both intra-Asian trade and China’s shaped the political economy and geopolitics of domestic economy. As Reid observes of

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Chinese-Southeast Asian trade in globaltrade order at a time when Europe was more or perspective in the years 1450-1680: “The less continuously engulfed by war.12 If tributary pattern of exchange in this age of commerce and private trade lubricated the regional order, was for Southeast Asia to import cloth from so too did common elements of statecraft and India, silver from the Americas and Japan and ritual in the neo-Confucian orders in Japan, copper cash, silk, ceramics and otherKorea, the Ryūkyūs, and Vietnam. In contrast manufactures from China, in exchange for its to European colonialism in the 18th and 19th exports of pepper, spices, aromatic woods, century, this Sinocentric order placed fewer resins, lacquer, tortoiseshell, pearls, deerskin, and the sugar exported by Vietnam and demands for assimilation on China’s neighbors Cambodia.”9 Massive silver flows to China from and on those incorporated within the Chinese other parts of Asia, Europe and the Americas empire. Moreover, in contrast with European paid for silk, tea, porcelain and miscellaneous conquerors, it appears to have been less manufactures. China’s domestic economy was exploitative in economic and political terms, simultaneously transformed as silver became with tributary trade providing lucrative sources the medium for taxation in the Ming’s single of income for local rulers, as well as the whip reform, deeply affecting the agrarian legitimating imprimature of the Chinese court. economy as well as urban exchange. Tribute, ritual power and diplomacy structured inter-state relations across East Asia. Silver provides a thread linking Europe, the Americas and Asia as well as a means to Chinese recognition frequently contributed to deconstruct Eurocentric history and to chart peace through legitimating local rulers in profound changes internal to Chinese economy Korea, Vietnam, and the Ryūkyūs among and society. Tracing the world-wide flow of others, as well as assuring a sustained transfer silver from the 16th century problematizes the of resources to them via direct subsidies and unilinear notion of world history as determined guaranteed access to lucrative trade. For by the discovery of the “New World,” followed by the flow of silver to Europe, and thence from Chinese rulers, this appears to have been a Europe to Asia. As Hamashita shows, the small price to pay to assure stability on articulation of Asian silver markets with Euro- sometimes sensitive borders. While Korea, American silver dynamics shaped worldVietnam, the Ryūkyūs and a number of financial flows and facilitated the expansion of kingdoms of Inner and Southeast Asia engaged trade that took place in the 16th to the 18th regularly in tributary and non-tributary trade centuries, with East Asia a major beneficiary of with China, Japan sent no tributary missions in the vibrant trade.10 the course of the Tokugawa era (1600-1868). China-Japan direct trade nevertheless Beyond the tributary system and the flow of continued through Nagasaki as well as silver, trade centered less on states and more indirectly through the Ryūkyūs and Hokkaidō, on open ports and their hinterlands. This in addition to vibrant coastal trade that the suggests the need for a new spatial Chinese state defined as piracy. Japan understanding of the relationship between land manipulated the tributary system by seizing and sea, between coastal and inland regions, 11 control of Ryūkyū tribute missions, and among port cities and their hinterlands. simultaneously securing lucrative trade with At its height in the 18th century, large regions China while subordinating the Ryūkyū of East Asia experienced protracted peace and kingdom. Likewise, Vietnam implemented a prosperity on the foundation of a tributary- sub-tributary order with Laos.

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was battered by waves of foreign invaders, tens of millions of Chinese migrants spread across Asia and the world from the second half of the 19th century. The migration of Chinese to Manchuria, Southeast Asia, the Americas, Europe and elsewhere coincided with, and was in part a response to the disintegration of the Qing empire and formation of Western and Japanese colonial empires across Asia and the Pacific. Stated differently, China’s Deshima, 1820, the center of Chinese and disintegration coincided with the global Dutch trade with Japan expansion of ethnic Chinese who would redefine China’s place in the world in the In these and other ways, a distinctive East course of the long twentieth century. And not Asian political economy and geopolitics was only Chinese. If the largest number of migrants linked by trade and diplomacy to other parts of were Chinese (an estimated 40 to 60 million), Asia, Europe and the Americas in the 16th to significant numbers of Japanese, Okinawans 18th centuries. This is particularly significant in and Koreans, among others, also migrated light of the general Orientalist slighting of the across Asia, as well as to Hawaii and the East within an East-West binary.13 Americas. Each group created networks and flows of commodities, labor and capital. As the The Chinese empire, under Manchu rule, may colonial powers, led by the British, dominated be viewed as the hegemonic power in East Asia long distance trade across Asia and the Pacific th during the long 18th century in the triple sense in the 19 century, they relied on Chinese, of being the most powerful state presiding over Indian, Islamic and other trade and financial a protracted peace and legitimating selective networks to penetrate the societies of the 14 regimes in wide areas of the region within a region. hierarchical order; as the leading th manufacturing exporter and magnet for the From the latter half of the 19 century, with world’s silver; and by radiating cultural- China in disintegration facing invasion and political norms as exemplified by therebellion, and then carved up by the Western predominance of Neo-Confucian thought and powers and Japan, with much of Southeast Asia modes of statecraft in Japan, Korea, Vietnam, colonized by the British, Dutch, French and the Ryūkyūs and beyond. Americans, and with Korea, Taiwan and the Ryūkyūs incorporated within the Japanese th II The Demise of the East Asian Regional empire by the first decade of the 20 century, Order in the Colonial Era, 1840-1970 the region experienced a century of inter- colonial conflict. In contrast to the East Asian The disintegration of the Qing in the early 19th regional order of the eighteenth century Pax century set the stage for the onslaught of the Sinica, war and bilateral metropolitan- Western imperialist powers in China and East periphery relations became hallmarks of the Asia, bringing to an end the regional order and new disorder. Through it all, Asian port cities the protracted peace that had extended across continued to extend their reach through East and Inner Asia to parts of Southeast and diaspora networks, but these too were Central Asia. absorbed into colonial networks centered on Europe, Japan and North America, with the As the Chinese state crumbled internally and diaspora facilitating European penetration

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From the final decades of the 19th century, Japan and the United States expanded into the Asia-Pacific, inaugurating a process that would lead to the eventual clash of the two rising imperial powers. With Japan’s seizure of the Ryūkyūs, the integration of Hokkaidō, the colonization of Taiwan and Korea, the victory in the Russo-Japanese War and the establishment of the puppet state of Manchukuo between 1872 and 1932, and eventually over the next decade the conquest of large swatches of China and Southeast Asia, Japan became the only nation of Asia, Africa or Latin America to join the club of the colonial powers and gain privileged access to land, labor and resources. The Japanese empire in 1942 includes the Pacific Island Mandates that Japan secured But there were other equally important from Germany after World War I consequences. Prasenjit Duara observes that, “While the British and the Japanese empires Like the Western colonial powers, Japan were trying to create autarkic, interdependent relentlessly mined the colonies for natural regions to sustain their imperial power in Asia, resources and human resources to spur Japan’s anti-imperialist thought linked to rising Asian industrialization. At the same time, far more nationalism was seeking to build an alternative than either the Chinese tributary-trade order or conception of the region.”15 the Western colonial order elsewhere in Asia, Japan fostered colonial agricultural and Let’s briefly consider Japan’s Asia from three industrial development through investment in perspectives: first, economic development and infrastructure as well as large-scale migration, social change; second, war, nationalism, and notably involving Japanese and Korean settlers anti-colonialism; and third, regional dynamics in China, Korea, Taiwan and Manchukuo.16 and regional ties to the world economy. Japanese colonialism would have lasting impact on the countries of the region. As Angus Maddison has shown, per capita GDP gains in Taiwan and Korea in the years 1913-1938 were substantially higher than those for all other colonies in East and Southeast Asia, and probably in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa.17 By 1938, per capita GDP in Korea and Taiwan were 53 and 60 percent respectively of that of the metropolitan country, Japan. By comparison, the range was 10-25 percent for British, French, Dutch and US colonies in Asia (Booth Table 2). And Japan would leave an industrial legacy in Manchukuo that would become the core of China’s iron and steel

7 8 | 41 | 1 APJ | JF industry in the early years of the People’s integration among the colonies and Republic. In short, the developmental impact dependencies. on Japan’s colonies, and the degree of economic integration with the metropolis, were In contrast to the Qing empire, between 1895 far greater than in the case of European or and 1940 imperial Japan directly assimilated American colonies. colonized and conquered peoples, above all the Koreans, Taiwanese, the peoples of Manchuria (including Chinese, Mongols, Hui (Muslims) and Manchus), Ryūkyūans and Ainu.20 The colonized were educated in the language of the conqueror and subjected to intense assimilation as Japanese (or Manchukuo) citizens and subjects. In all these respects, Japan broke sharply with patterns of the tributary-trade order in East Asia and also differentiated the Japanese from European and American colonization in the degree of assimilation.

Japan extended its territorial reach with the 1932 incorporation of Manchukuo and its 1937 invasion of China south of the Great Wall, but it quickly clashed with Soviet forces at Japan’s Showa Steelworks in Anshan would Nomonhan in 1939, while the two expansive become the core of China’s steel industry colonial powers, the US and Japan, were on in the 1950s collision course. Indeed, one might say that by Nomonhan, the allied powers that would join forces in Europe in World War II had already Trade between Japan and its colonies and begun to crystallize in opposition to Japan’s dependencies expanded rapidly. The trade of Asian advance. Manchukuo, Korea and Taiwan were all dramatically redirected (in many instances away from China and toward Japan) between the late 19th century and the 1930s. Taiwan’s exports to Japan increased from 20 percent of total exports at the time of colonization in 1895 to 88% by the late 1930s, with rice and sugar the dominant products.18 Comparable trade dependence on the metropolis in the late 1930s was similarly notable in the case of Korea.19 Economic bonds among the colonies and dependencies, by contrast, weakened or remained weak. In Taiwan, Manchukuo and Korea, trade with China was redirected toward Japan. Like that of the European colonial powers, Japan’s spokes and wheel trade pattern in Asia precluded the development of trade Japanese infantry march into battle with complementarities or other forms of economic Soviet forces at Nomonhan

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The 1940 US oil and scrap iron embargo led From the perspective of Asian regionalism, inexorably to the attack on Pearl Harbor in however, important continuities spanned the Japan’s desperate and briefly successful1945 divide. Far from inaugurating an era of attempt to supplant the European andpeace, East and Southeast Asia became the American colonial powers throughout East and primary zone of world conflict over the next Southeast Asia and the Pacific. If Meiji Japan quarter century. The Chinese, Korean and had placed its hopes for modernization and Vietnamese wars and revolutions—invariably prosperity on economic, political and cultural explained as the products of the “Cold War”, ties with, and emulation of, the Western are equally, perhaps above all, legacies of the powers, Japan now found itself isolated from colonial era that were played out within the core regions of the world economy while purview of US-Soviet conflict—were the fighting wars against powerful adversaries on decisive events establishing Asia’s division, and multiple fronts and striving to create an indeed national divisions, in the wake of World autarkic region in Asia.21 War II.22 New nations, or nation fragments The colonial era in Asia left three important (China, Korea, Vietnam), established primary legacies: first, massive dislocation, destruction relationships with either the US or the Soviet and loss of life that were the product of colonial Union, forging relationships that were and world wars; second, the stimulus to paramount in defining each nation’s nationalist and anti-colonial revolutions; third, international relations and shaping its the spur to economic development anddevelopmental and geopolitical trajectory. And industrialization in Japan’s colonies andeach of these wars would be fought out in the dependencies, notably Korea, Taiwan and post-colonial periphery, the overwhelming Manchukuo, but also in China to a lesser casualties being local people with the war degree. scarcely interrupting the pace and mode of life in the metropolitan countries. Historians of many persuasions have taken World War II as the major watershed of As in the century of colonialism, in post-colonial twentieth century Asian and global geopolitics, Asia bilateral ties to one of the great powers as indeed it was in so many ways. It marked the (generally, of course, the United States) were defeat and dismantling of the Japanese empire decisive and multilateral intra-Asian economic and propelled the US to superpower and political linkages largely absent. Nowhere preeminence, its power expanding most was this truer than in the case of Japan, firmly dramatically in the Asia Pacific, and, as the only joined at the hip to the US, occupied by major power to span the Atlantic and the American forces, its international relations Pacific, its new found power was also global. played out within the purview of the US-Japan The War also spurred waves of nationalist- inspired revolutionary and independence Security Treaty, and docilely supporting movements across the colonized world. If the successive US wars throughout the region, a Chinese, Vietnamese and Korean revolutions pattern as true today as it was in the wake of were landmark events in postwar East Asia, the Asia-Pacific War. But it was equally true of independence movements in the Philippines, South Korea both during and after the US- Malaya, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, Korean War, a war which, in fact remains Burma, India and elsewhere brought profound suspended rather than concluded, and in the change to other parts of Asia, signaling the end US-Vietnam War in which Korea provided the of the classical colonial empires and an era of second largest military force behind that of the independent states. US.

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development is best understood not as a series of discrete national phenomena, but as a regional and global process that encompasses economic development but equally geopolitics, social change and cultural interchange. This is because important facets of national and global development are driven in part by the dynamic interpenetration of Asian economies, polities and cultures, by a changing intra-Asian division of labor, and by urban networks that function largely independent of and transcending national structures. Consider an expansive East Asia in global perspective. Prasenjit Duara has argued that, “The Cold War division of the world into two camps controlled The 1970 Divide and the Resurgence of East militarily by nuclear superpowers seeking to Asia dominate the rest of the developing and 1970 set the stage for new East Asian regional decolonizing nations may be seen as a kind of possibilities and a global reconfiguration of supra-regionalism. While in fact the two camps power: in the wake of the China-Soviet rift of or blocs represented trans-territorial spaces the 1960s, the US-China entente and including non-contiguous nations, the burgeoning economic relationship opened the contiguity of core Eastern and Western way for ending the bifurcation that had Europeans nations within each camp served as characterized not only postwar Asia but East- a stepping stone for subsequent regionalism to 23 West global geopolitics and economics. China’s develop within Europe.” re-entry on the world stage in 1970, its This formulation seems to me appropriate for assumption of a UN Security Council seat, its Eastern Europe where the Soviet Bloc and access to US and global markets in the early Comecon stood against NATO and the1970s, and its eventual position at the center of European Union. In Asia, however, in part East-West trade and investment and because the Sino-Soviet split led to fierce membership in the World Trade Organization, rivalry by 1960, and because ASEAN, founded opened the way to the re-knitting of economic in 1967, was long so weak a reed, it is difficult and political bonds across Asia and to discern any effective region formation in strengthening Asian linkages with the global economic or security terms in the initial economy. Little noted, given the formal postwar decades. That would change from the periodization of China’s Cultural Revolution 1970s. (1966-76), is the fact that important internal changes including the rapid growth of domestic III Economic Resurgence,and international markets and small-scale Complementarity and the Sprouts of industry proceeded apace in the final years of 24 Regionalism in East Asia Mao’s rule (1970-76). Within decades, China emerged as the workplace and motor driving Since the 1980s, China’s rapid and sustained the Asian and world economies, facilitated by economic growth, coming in the heels of the the deepening and/or opening of Japan-China advance of Japan, Korea and the newlyand South Korea-China relations, and the industrializing countries of East Asia, has expansive trade and investment role of riveted attention. Contemporary East Asian overseas Chinese linking China with East and

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Southeast Asian and other economies. With the drive.26 With China-Taiwan trade soaring from reunification of Vietnam (1975), of Germany $8 billion in 1991 to $102 billion in 2007, and (1989) and subsequently of China with Hong with Taiwan investors pouring an estimated Kong (1997) and Macau (1999), only a divided $150 billion into the mainland’s export-oriented Korea and the China-Taiwan division remain of sectors, Taiwan’s economic future has become the major national ruptures that were the inseparable from that of the mainland.27 The legacy of colonialism, World War II and 2008 electoral victory of the Guomindang’s Ma subsequent conflicts. These profound changes Ying-jeou as president strengthened cross- illustrate the interface of geopolitics and strait ties as indicated by the initiation of political economy both in global (particularly regularly scheduled flights as well as direct US-China) and regional (China-Japan-Korea as shipping and postal links between Taiwan and well as mainland China-Taiwan-Hong Kong and mainland China, the signing of oil development North-South Korea) perspective. agreements, and China’s offer of a $19 billion loan package to Taiwan enterprises in Among the remarkable changes made possible China—all factors suggestive of further by the US-China opening has been thepossibilities for economic, social and political emergence and deepening of China-ROK integration.28 The Taiwan-Hong Kong flight has relations: from anti-Communist mecca, a South reportedly become the world’s second busiest Korea that fought China in the US-Korean War international route, following New York- and then provided yeoman mercenary service London, with many business, pleasure and for the US in Vietnam, emerged as one of family/lineage travelers continuing on to China’s most important trade and investment complete a Taiwan-mainland trip and vice partners from the 1980s. Within decades, versa. And in 2009, Hong Kong was the world’s China, Japan and South Korea would become second busiest cargo hub. Immediately after one another’s leading trade and investment China’s entry into the World Trade partners, but also in some fields competitors, Organization in 2001, Taiwan entered as surpassing in significant ways even their “Chinese Taipei”, one of many signs that China economic and financial bonds with the United has relaxed efforts to isolate Taiwan nd rd States. In 2009 they were the world’s 2 , 3 diplomatically. A June 2010 Taiwan-China and 13th largest economies by CIA reckoning Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement based on purchasing power parity estimates, strengthens the legal structure of the and their trade surpluses were among the relationship, lowers tariffs and opens the cross- world’s largest.25 strait market to services such as banking.29 While tensions continue to erupt Another important regional development with over such issues as Taiwan purchase of profound geopolitical consequences has been advanced US military technology, the China- the trade, investment and technologicalTaiwan relationship nevertheless appears to partnership that links Taiwan and mainland have entered a period of stability rooted in China. In less than two decades, the core of economic interdependence and multi-faceted Taiwan’s high tech production migrated across social and cultural exchange. the Straits. Approximately one million Taiwanese workers, engineers, managers and The role of diasporic Chinese capital, family members presently work and live on the technology and labor, including a major role for mainland, most of them in Guangdong, Fujian, returnees from North American and European and especially in the Shanghai-Suzhou corridor. universities and enterprises, is large, multi- Taiwanese capital and technology are central to directional, and embracing the full range of China’s industrialization and exportactivities spanning investment, technological

11 8 | 41 | 1 APJ | JF transfer, research and development,more than 40 percent of the world total of $4.0 networking, and labor migration criss-crossing trillion.32 Chinese, Japanese and South Korean the Pacific and spanning Asia. The US, Taiwan, purchases of treasury bonds over the last five Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore are among years helped to hold down US interest rates the inter-linked sites for movement back and and the yuan-dollar, yen-dollar and won-dollar forth from and to Chinese cities. ratio, boosting the trade and growth of all four economies. This made it possible for the US to Comparable, but slower and more erratic finance the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars at the strides brought the two Koreas closer with the same time that US manufacturing jobs Kim Dae-jung—Kim Jong Il summit of 2000 as continued their inexorable flight to China, US the key point of inflection, leading to efforts manufacturing hollowed out, and the US toward rapprochement and economicexperienced the most severe unemployment 30 integration. The failure, however, of the 6- since World War II.33 If there is anything that is Party talks and the 2007 election of Lee TBTF (too big to fail) it may be the symbiotic Myung-bak as president of South Korea, the US-China trade, investment, and deficit/surplus stroke suffered by North Korean leader Kim relationship that has made this the world’s Jong Il, and the controversy over the 2010 most important bilateral economic and sinking of the South Korean ship Cheonan all geopolitical relationship. Nevertheless, as brought to a halt progress towarddiscussed below, the relationship remains rapprochement. Deep divisions remain in conflictual, above all in geopolitical terms. Korean politics, divisions that could again explode in intra-Korean and international war. Two major developments of global significance facilitated China’s reentry in the world As multilateral intra-Asian trade andeconomy and the formation of a dynamic investment deepened from the 1970s, so too interconnected East Asian economic zone from did the region’s ties to Europe and the US. the 1970s. First, the primary global war zone, Trade between the East Asian trade surplus which had been centered in East Asia between nations and the US, the world’s leading trade the 1940s and the 1970s—the Asia-Pacific War deficit nation, presently comprises one of the followed by Chinese, Korean, and Indochinese signature patterns of the contemporary world revolutionary wars and international conflict economic order. The enormous surpluses involving the US and its allies, as well as generated by China ($227 billion in 2009), independence struggles in the Philippines, Japan ($44 billion in 2009) and South Korea Malaysia, and the Dutch East Indies among ($11 Billion in 2009) account for the largest others—shifted after 1975 to the Middle East part of the massive US trade deficit, and in and Central Asia. If intra-East Asian and Asia- turn, these nations have made it possible for Pacific politics remain contentious, above all in the US to continue to live beyond its means. the Korean peninsula, the growth and This is not only because as the dollar remains deepening of the Asian regional economy since the universal currency but above all because the 1970s has taken place in the midst of a dollar surpluses are recycled back to the US, general peace, widening cultural and economic primarily in the form of purchases of US exchange, and easing of tensions throughout Treasury bonds, but also in the form of direct East Asia.34 Second, China’s full entry into the and indirect investment.31 As of April 2010, world economy took place at precisely the according to the US Treasury Department, moment when the postwar global economic China with $900 billion dollars and Japan with expansion came to an end, the B-phase in the $796 billion in holdings of US treasuries ranked Kondratieff cycle began, and the US sought first and second in the world, accounting for ways to stave off economic collapse and the

12 8 | 41 | 1 APJ | JF demise of the dollar as the international Among the indicators of East Asia’s resurgence, currency through the expansion of a world and China’s growth in particular, two bear economy that included China even as its own particular mention. One is the number of industrial strength and economic growth rates parent transnational corporations and plummeted and its economy became ever more particularly foreign affiliates located in China: dependent on finance and services.35 parent corporations increased from 359 in 2002 to 3,429 in 2005, compared with 4,663 in Japan (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 the numbers bear any relationship to the reality, with 280,000 foreign affiliates in China by 2005, China surpassed the combined total of the other major countries. In the event, once again it is the dynamism of the region that is striking. Overall, the figures for China seem consistent with other data on the rapid expansion of foreign direct investment.

Table 1. Number of Parent Transnational Corporations and Foreign Affiliates (selected countries)

A number of comparisons to the colonial era in general, and Japan’s Greater East Asia Co- Prosperity Sphere in the years 1930-1945 in particular, are instructive. First, the rapidly growing multidirectional flow of trade and investment involving China, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan in recent decades may be contrasted with the predominantly bilateral economic relationships linking European, American and Japanese colonies with the metropolis as well as framing the dependent relationships with the metropolis of the prewar and early postwar periods. In the years 1988-2004, as world trade Derived from Table 1, Saskia Sassen, “The expanded at an annual rate of 9.5%, intra-East Global City Perspective. Theoretical Asian trade grew at 14% per year, compared Implications for Shanghai,” in Xiangming Chen, with 9% for that of the European Union. East ed. with Zhenhua Zhou, Shanghai Rsing. State Asia’s share of world exports increased by 6% Power and Local Transformations in a Global in the course of those years, while that of the Megacity (Minneapolis: University of European Union decreased by 3%.36 Between Minnesota Press), 2009, pp. 9-10, based on 1963 and 2008 Asia’s share of world exports UNCTAD, World Investment Report (1998, 4; increased from 12.5 to 27.7 percent, with that 2004, 273, 274; 2008, 211). The figure for of China alone increasing from 1.3 to 9.7 China’s foreign affiliates bears further percent.37 checking.

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The second is China as a magnet for foreign China’s economy was most foreign investment direct investment, with rapid growthdependent in the 1990s, with the ratio to total continuing, and only the US far in the lead as a investment dropping in the following decade locale for foreign investment. The data reveal (while absolute amounts remained large) while the sharp rise in both inward and outward China’s own international investments investment in East Asia in general, with China rose.38 But while global attention has focused leading the way, between 1990 and 2008. on investment in China, the pattern underlined During this period, China surpassed all others by Athukorala and Hill is one of a region-wide as a target for international investment except surge in attraction of FDI. They particularly the United States, while East Asia as a region note a pattern of production fragmentation and exhibits dynamism in both inward and outward outsourcing such that in many instances not investment. even China is producing the entire product, but factories throughout the region and beyond Table 2. Foreign Direct Investment by contribute components in a complex regional- Country and Region, 1990-2000, 2006, global division of labor that extends from 2008 in US$billion investment, management, production and assembly to trade and marketing. Among the historical and contemporary factors facilitating rapid economic development, industrialization, substantial growth in per capita income, and the formation of a vibrant multi-directional East Asian regional economy, the following seem particularly important:

• The legacy of Asian economic and political strengths examined earlier in the epoch of Chinese preeminence, protracted peace, and the regional tributary-trade order of the 18th century, legacies that would become clear with the resurgence of Chinese strength at the center of an emergent East Note: 1990-2000 is annual average. Asia. China and East Asia merely reclaimed a position of strength United Nations Conference on Trade and that was lost via a combination of Development, World Investment Report 2009, internal disintegration and the World Investment Directory On-line ravages of imperialism. This is not to suggest continuity in the nature In contrast to the autarky of East Asia between of organizing production or trade 1937 and 1945 at the peak of Japanese power, processes, or in labor relations or and the bipolar division of the years 1945-70, the role of the state or capital. since the 1970s the region has been fully enmeshed in global trade, financial and • The Chinese, Japanese and investment networks with growing Korean diaspora has played a interdependence of its national economies. central role in re-linking Asian and

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Western economies through trade, some of the divisions inherent in earlier East- technology and investment West conflicts. networks that extend across the region and link East Asia globally. In light of a two centuries-long pattern characterized by the primacy of unequal • Early postwar developmental and bilateral relationships and a virtual absence of social change strategies multilateral bonds, a number of recent throughout East Asia were multilateral initiatives merit attention in terms predicated on state-led of changing regional geopolitics. For only the accumulation and investment, second or third time since the eighteenth social change strategies that century, and the first in half a century, China pivoted on egalitarian land has taken the lead in an important regional and reforms, and measures that even global geopolitical initiative:39 as host and blocked takeover by international the leading force in the six-party talks that capital while creating firm could eventually lead to a breakthrough that foundations for the domestic results in North Korean denuclearization and economy. Far from the neoliberal opens the way toward ending the half century orthodoxy that has prevailed in Korean War between North Korea and the many quarters since the 1990s, United States and between North and South this was state-led development Korea. The Korean conflict is but the most with restrictions on the market, intractable of concerns that can only be with, of course, important resolved in multilateral terms, requiring a variations in the approach of the striking departure from largely unilateral US three East Asian nations. attempts to impose its will on others through military action. The persistence of a divided China and a divided Korea have not prevented If intra-Asian factors are important, theimportant strides toward the formation of a resurgence of East Asia as a region has equally cohesive economic region, laying the basis for been shaped by global factors, notably the further political accommodation and, contradictory role of the United States in the eventually, addressing the environmental and Asia Pacific, but also the dynamic growth of political economy issues of pollution, poverty trade and investment relations involving and inequality that have accompanied galloping Europe and, in recent decades, the search for growth and challenge the future of the region resources linking Asia with Africa and Latin (we return to these issues below). America as well. During the immediate postwar decades the US played a key role not only in As it gained strength in recent decades, China shaping such global institutions as the World began to spearhead other regional initiatives: Bank, IMF and United Nations, but also in these include efforts to bring about an ASEAN structuring a bifurcated Asia Pacific, in+ 3 arrangement involving China, Japan and plunging the region into protracted wars, and Korea to unify East and Southeast Asia, and an in assuring the primacy of bilateral over ASEAN-China Free Trade Area which took multilateral relations. Since 1970, andeffect on January 1, 2010 together with a $15 particularly since the demise of the Soviet billion Chinese credit to promote regional Union in 1990, it has not only facilitated the integration and connectivity. It should be resurgence of the national economies of East noted, however, that in contrast to China’s Asia, but also, in diverse and at timescentrality in the tributary-trade order of the unintended ways, contributed to transcending 18th century, Southeast Asian nations, through

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ASEAN, have played a leading proactive role in and real estate values, with further heavy hits the emerging regionalism in the newduring the 2008-09 economic and financial millennium, as in the planning for this and pandemic. Second is the political turmoil that other free trade areas while it is the US, the has resulted in six prime ministers between only nation with military bases and troops 2006 and 2010, political stalemate in the wake positioned throughout the region, retains of the defeat of the LDP after fifty years of rule, geopolitical dominance. These agreements and signs of tension within the US-Japan have been predicated on a willingness by the relationship centered on the unresolved parties to set aside for future resolution such Okinawa base transfer issue. For these reasons, contentious territorial issues as Chinese border and because of fears that the region will be disputes with India, Russia, Japan, and Vietnam dominated by a resurgent China, Japan has among others, including disputes overfailed to exercise leadership in an emerging potentially oil rich islands, the Spratlys and Asia. Finally, perhaps most important and Paracels, that involve claims by manydirectly related to the second point, is the fact Southeast Asian nations. Particularly notable that Japan remains firmly in the American for its potential regional and globalembrace, viewing its future in terms of the US- significance, is the China-Japan provisional Japan alliance even as the Democratic Party accord on territorial issues involving the administration has sought to strengthen Diaoyutai/Senkaku Islands and Okinotorishima, relations with China while attempting, thus far making possible an agreement (albeit one that abortively, to establish a more equal US-Japan would be immediately contested) for joint oil relationship. Even as signs abound of the exploration in the disputed area, although declining power of the US, Japanese leaders conflicts continue.40 This is not to take a and the media have continued to prioritize their Panglossian view of the prospects for regional subordinate relationship within, and harmony: continued territorial disputes and dependence on, the US-Japan relationship, that unresolved historical conflicts rooted inis what Gavan McCormack calls the client state colonial and war have the potential to disrupt bond. The Democratic Party cabinet of regional accord, as best illustrated by the Hatoyama Yukio fell when its attempt to close China-Japan clash over the Diaoyutai/Senkaku the dangerous Futenma base and transfer the Islands in September 2010. Nevertheless, majority of US Marines to Guam, failed to sway powerful trends unleashed over the last four US policymakers who have remained insistent decades have opened new possibilities for the on implementing an earlier agreement with the region. LDP to construct yet another new high tech base in Oura Bay, that is on expanding rather As China’s star has burned brightly in regional than reducing its enormous military footprint in and global affairs, Japan, long the world’s Okinawa in the face of entrenched Okinawan second economic power, and the motor that opposition. (For Japanese policymakers, drove region-wide economic growth in the transfer of the base to mainland Japan was 1960s and 1970s, has virtually disappeared politically unthinkable.) This despite US plans from much analysis of Asian regionalism and to transfer 8,000 Marines and 9,000 global geopolitics. This is a product of three dependents to Guam with Japan agreeing to main factors. First is the surge in China’s pay the bulk of the costs, and despite the fact economic and financial strength over the last that the Marine presence in Okinawa is largely two decades while Japan’s economy never irrelevant to Japan’s own security but primarily recovered momentum after the bubble burst of supports US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.41 1990 inaugurated more than a decade of stagnation, and the collapse of stock market In short, Japanese diplomacy pivots on the US-

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Japan economic and security relationship, “[s]ince the end of the Cold War, including the nuclear umbrella, the stationing the most important strategic of US forces, and the provision of Japanese relationship in East Asia has been financial and logistical support for US wars to and will continue to be the one Iraq and the Persian Gulf and to support US between the United States and forces in Japan. Despite professed interest in China. Given this profound reality, Asian regional agendas, and despite the Japan is obviously a lesser growing strength of intra-regional financial and strategic player, and it is a economic ties, Japan remains transfixed on its fundamental mistake, both dependent relationship with the United States, analytically and policy-wise, to a relationship that has been accentuated in the treat Japan as one of the "four wake of North Korean nuclear development and great powers" (including Russia) in 43 the conflict over Diaoyutai. Northeast Asia.”

Nevertheless, Japan remains Asia’s leading technological power and a formidable economic and financial force, even as the size of its economy slips below that of China and its demographic profile points to further decline.

In recent years East Asia has taken steps toward interregional cooperation in numerous areas including economic and financial security, easing territorial conflicts, resource management, fishing, counterterrorism, drugs, smuggling, piracy, human trafficking and organized crime control, disaster relief, environmental degradation and container security. The 1997 Asian financial and currency crisis provided impetus for regional responses, the most important of which was the currency swaps initiated with the Chiang Mai initiative of May 2005 to help shore up nations facing currency and financial crises (at the time of the 1997 Asian financial crisis the United States blocked such efforts), an initiative reinforced in 2008.44

China and Japan claim the The first summit of the three East Asian Diaoyutai/Senkaku Islands which Japan nations, held in Fukuoka, Japan on December has held since the 1972 reversion of 13, 2008 in an effort to frame a common policy Okinawa. in response to the world recession is illustrative of the possibilities for East Asian regional responses to the contemporary financial and Certainly Japan has been slow to exercise economic crisis. The brief meeting, however, leadership in a resurgent East Asia.42 As also highlighted obstacles to framing common Yoshihide Soeya darkly observes, policies at a time when world recession

17 8 | 41 | 1 APJ | JF presents severe challenges that may derail to resolve issues pertaining to the United even—or particularly—their high-flyingStates and its role in East Asian or in Asia economies with its heavy reliance on export Pacific geopolitical outcomes. markets and foreign investment.45 As David Shambaugh noted of the “US-led A 2009 summit held following the ASEAN security architecture across Asia . . . includes summit in the wake of the global economic and five bilateral alliances in EA; non-allied security financial crisis resulted in importantpartnerships in SEA, SA and Oceania; a buildup agreements including determining financial of US forces in the Pacific; new US-India and contributions (and voting weight) in the Chiang US-Pakistan military relations; and the US Mai Initiatives, and establishment of amilitary presence and defense arrangements in commission for an official international study of SW and CA.”48 That formulation should be the long stalled China-Japan-Korea FTA.supplemented by recognizing the importance of Coming at the initiative of the newly elected multiple US military bases throughout the Democratic Party of Japan government, this region and beyond, US militarization of space represented a break in Japanese policy over the where again it has a virtual monopoly, the fact years 2002-09 which had been designed to stall that a substantial portion of the US naval progress on an FTA without explicitly rejecting armada is deployed in the Pacific maritime the plan.46 Whether fundamental differences region, and the expansive conception of the US- over agricultural imports can be resolved, Japan Security Treaty which has led Japan to however, is at best an open question. extend its military reach to the Indian Ocean and to explore security arrangements with Set off against the obvious value ofIndia and Australia.49 In early 2009, moreover, coordination among the three East Asian both China and Japan responded to Somalian powers is the continuing shadow of intra-Asian piracy with the dispatch of ships to patrol off conflicts, including historical memory conflicts the coast of Africa, and in April 2010 South centered around a Japan whose neo-nationalist Korea dispatched a destroyer to the Gulf of elements continue to prevent it from laying to Aden in pursuit of a captured oil tanker, while rest the divisive memories associated with the China has quietly expanded its naval reach into Asia-Pacific War and colonial rule. Historical the Indian Ocean.50 Each of these acts involved issues could again undermine or slowa major expansion of the military reach of the promising regional initiatives, as they did in respective nations and a potential source of China-Japan relations in the reign of Prime conflict. Minister Koizumi, 2001-2006. There are, however, positive signs. Negotiations in 2010 are at an advanced stage for resolving longstanding conflicts between Japan and China and between Japan and Korea centered on apology and compensation to former forced laborers.47 Similarly, a China-Japan commission to prepare a common modern history of the two nations has made progress toward its goal. In each instance, however, the task remains to be completed. The two most intractable challenges to strengthening regional bonds may lie in Japan’s territorial conflicts with Russia, China and Korea, and the inability of the three nations

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the ill-fated wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.51

Paradoxically, Mark Beeson observes, “the legacy of the Bush administration may be that U.S. foreign policy effectively undermined the multilateral transnational basics of American power by encouraging the creation of regionally based groupings with which to represent and protect local interests.”52 Nowhere has this been truer than in East Asia and the Asia Pacific.

A series of events of the spring-summer 2010 China conducts first naval escort mission reveal the volatility of the region and suggest off the coast of Somalia, Dec. 2009. that the primary challenge to East Asian regional development—or rather to competing visions for defining the geographical scope of At the same time, signs abound of thethe region and the character of regional weakening of American power in East Asia and development—hinge on challenges posed in globally. While the collapse of the Soviet Union significant part by continued US attempts to left the US without serious geopoliticalimpose its will throughout the region. The first constraints, the rationale for massive military of these was the sinking of the South Korean budgets and permanent stationing andwar vessel Cheonan on March 26, 2010 during strengthening of US forces—in Japan/Okinawa, a joint US-ROK military exercise. An ROK in South Korea, in Taiwan, and in Guam, for report of May 20, immediately endorsed by the example—was simultaneously weakened in the US and its allies, held North Korea responsible eyes of almost everyone except Pentagon for the disaster that took 46 lives. It was a stark planners who continue their insatiable pursuit reminder, if any were needed, of the unfinished of more international bases, with Guam the US-Korean War that could again erupt in present site of choice for major expansion in battle, particularly with North-South tensions the Asia-Pacific. The US has lost international on the rise in recent years. Of particular credibility as a result of failed costly and interest is the US-ROK response: following a protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and UN Security Council resolution of July 9 the heavy pressures it imposed on other condemning the incident, but with China and nations to pay for those wars and support them Russia blocking the attempt to secure UN militarily. To be sure, no nation or group of imprimatur for the charge that the DPRK was nations possesses the power to directlyresponsible, a mammoth US-ROK joint military challenge the international primacy of the US exercise was announced, this time targeting or to assert leadership on a global scale. Yet US not only the DPRK but the PRC as well: the hegemonic claims are the victim of imperial announcement indicated that the exercise overstretch with US threats of new orinvolving the nuclear power aircraft carrier expanded wars in Iran, North Korea, Somalia USS George Washington with a crew of 6,250 and elsewhere coming at a time when its and 300 planes including FA-18 fighter jets and economic and financial preeminence have E-2C Hawkeye Airborne Early Warning aircraft, faded, and US state and local governments would take place on both sides of the Korean confront massive cutbacks in health, education peninsula, that is the Yellow Sea, as originally and services, while doubts of success grow over planned, as well as the Japan Sea (Koreans

19 8 | 41 | 1 APJ | JF refer to the West and East Sea). In the face of remains the dominant military power in the repeated Chinese protests about the exercise region, a major presence bolstered by an on its border, beyond its internationallyextensive network of military bases and recognized territorial waters but in a region alliances with Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, claimed by China, the US agreed to shift the among others, its power still primarily directed initial phase of the operation to the Japan Sea. against North Korea and China, in this sense a legacy of postwar decades of conflict.54 All The Cheonan Incident and the US-ROKthese may be best understood as legacies of the response illustrate the fact that the deep earlier colonial era that ushered in Asia’s long- geopolitical divisions that can be traced to the term decline viewed in global perspective. immediate postwar global conflict remain fundamental to contemporary power politics: in Intra-Asian national conflicts are evident not this instance, the United States rallying South only in response to US demands and unilateral Korea, Japan and its allies who formed the actions, with respect to wars and the "war on United Nations coalition in the US-Korean war terror" (a formula for permanent warfare), but of 1950 to pressure not only North Korea but also in myriad conflicts inherent in, or 53 also China and Russia. In this sense, it may be exacerbated by, China’s rise as a regional premature to assume that the conflicts stirred power, unresolved legacies of divided nations by the postwar US-Soviet conflict and making (the two Koreas and China/Taiwan) and other themselves felt most powerfully in East Asia territorial conflicts rooted in World War II. have truly been laid to rest. They are also rooted in historical issues, most famously those that pit Japan against her Conclusion neighbors over unresolved conflicts from the East Asia has taken important steps toepoch of colonialism and war, but also conflicts overcome the fragmentation associated with involving China with the two Koreas and others several centuries of political disintegration, such as the clash over historical heritage 55 war, colonial rule and the postwar US-Soviet centered on Koguryo/Gaogouli. division to reassert its position as a major Of signal importance are questions of the world region with the potential to rival Europe. sustainability of economic growth patterns that The combination of deepening intraregional have paved the way for the resurgence of East economic bonds in the world’s most dynamic economic zone, together with preliminary Asia, but which, above all in the case of China, region-wide efforts to confront acuteexact a horrendous toll on the environment, environmental, territorial and security issues, conflicts among neighboring nations over suggests possible futures compatible with water, energy, and emissions which exacerbate substantially reduced US- and US-Japan- inter-state conflicts. Indeed, it may be said dominated dynamics and momentum toward categorically that the headlong race for growth expanded regional coordination. best exemplified in recent decades by China, is unsustainable as industrialization, At the same time, following in the footsteps of urbanization, mega-dam and road construction, ASEAN, ties among long divided nations in and automobilization in a society marked by China, Korea and Indochina, are far weaker deep social inequality, all collide with the and less institutionalized than those of the environment. The critical problems for next European Union. There is no East Asian Union, generation development will require—above all no common currency, parliament or high court. for China, and not only China—large-scale Nor do we find a military equivalent of the green technological breakthroughs and a NATO alliance. Above all, the United States rethinking of the core equation between growth

20 8 | 41 | 1 APJ | JF maximization and the good life. With its own region, China cannot play a hegemonic role any deep developmental problems, above all the time soon, certainly none comparable to that of enormous toll on land, water and air associated the eighteenth century. In contrast to realist with Chinese high-speed growth, and internal international relations analysts such as John divisions of region, ethnicity andMearsheimer, who project the emergence of a class,56 China’s continued dramatic rise is far hegemonic China in East Asia based on from assured. In recent years, China has assumptions about China’s continued economic embarked on green development programs that growth, a more likely prospect for the coming have made it a world leader in such fields as decades is a regional order in which China wind power and solar power. At the same time, plays an important role, but the pace of however, its consumption of coal and oil has Chinese development slows and no single soared and, regardless of the outcome of green nation reigns supreme.57 Immediate challenges energy programs, they will continue to soar in both to national development trajectories and the decades to come. to regional accord will come from economic recession, geopolitical conflicts of which a th Does the Pax Sinica of the 18 century offer divided Korea remains the most dangerous, insights into the possibilities for regional American attempts to dominate whatever Asian harmony or hegemony in a period of peace in regional order emerges, and historical memory East Asia in the new millennium? That earlier conflicts that continue to divide China, Japan order was, of course, one predicated on a and Korea. hierarchical model with China at the center. At its height in the 18th century, East Asia enjoyed The present conjuncture suggests one other an era of protracted peace and relativeimportant theme that differentiates the prosperity fueled in part by exchange through contemporary era from that of both the Pax tributary-trade bonds and a favorable position Sinica of the 18th century and the Pax in world trade networks, as well as aNipponica of the first half of the 20th century. In hegemonic politics predicated on a relatively both of the earlier epochs, East Asia was nonintrusive approach to the peoples on embedded in the global economy, yet the Manchu China’s East and Southeast Asian geopolitical reach of its dominant powers peripheries. Both the subsequent Japan- and remained limited to East Asia. In the new US-centered models, for all their dynamism, millennium, China, Japan and Korea are all proved incapable of ending endemic war or actively promoting the global reach of their creating effective regional bonds. Eacheconomies, as exemplified by China’s prioritized bilateral relations with the dominant engagement in Africa and the heavy stakes of power and sought without success to assure its all three nations in the US and European own military primacy and security during economies, while carefully assessing epochs of permanent warfare. Their search for geopolitical opportunities associated with their hegemony instead wrought vast instability and growing economic clout. permanent warfare. Richard Falk’s critique of a predatory If the emergence of wide-ranging and deep neoliberal globalism dominated by US power, mutual economic relations across East Asia, introduced at the beginning of this paper, leads pivoting on China, Japan and Korea and to reflection on whether other forms of order extending via the Chinese diaspora, provides are possible in the new millennium. Our survey foundations for a new regional order, China will has suggested that, with the imminent decline surely be a major actor within it. However, with of American power and the resurgence of East Japan and the US as major powers in the Asia, other forms of regional and global order

21 8 | 41 | 1 APJ | JF become possible . . . if they can learn from the Critique (London: Polity Press, 1999) p. 2. lessons of US failures, and overcome conflicts 3 internal to the region. For discussion of concepts of region, see Shintaro Hamanaka, Asian Regionalism and Japan. The politics of membership in regional diplomatic, financial and trade groups, Mark Selden is a Senior Research Associate in (London: Routledge, 2009), espec. pp. 3-5. the East Asia Program at Cornell University and a coordinator of the Asia-Pacific Journal. 4 Cold War Frontiers in the Asia-Pacific: divided His recent books include China, East Asia and territories in the San Francisco system the Global Economy: Regional and historical (London: Routledge, 2007). perspectives (with Takeshi Hamashita and 5 Linda Grove), The Resurgence of East Asia: Quintessential works in this literature are 500, 150 and 50 Year Perspectives (edited by David Landes, The Unbound Prometheus. Giovanni Arrighi, Takeshi Hamashita and Mark Technological Change and Industrial Selden), and War and State Terrorism: The Development in Western Europe from 1750 to United States, Japan, and the Asia-Pacific in the the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University nd Long Twentieth Century (with Alvin So). His Press, 1969) (2 edition, 2003); W. W. Rostow, homepage is www.markselden.info/ The Stages of Economic Growth. A Non- Communist Manifesto (Cambridge; Cambridge Recommended citation: Mark Selden, "Nation, University Press, 1962). Region and the Global in East Asia: Conflict 6 and Cooperation," The Asia-Pacific Journal, China was the geopolitical center of East Asia th 41-1-10, October 11, 2010. in the 18 century, but, as during the Mongol dynasty earlier, it was ruled by a steppe people, Notes the Manchus, who in turn drew heavily on Mongol military and administrative strengths, * An earlier version of this article wasthereby lending a distinctive multi-ethnic and presented at Symposium: From Area Studies to cosmopolitan character to the Qing empire and Transregional Studies? Contours ofits dealings with peoples on its borders, notably Globalization in Asia’s Re-integration,the Mongols, Tibetans and Uyghurs of Central University of Iowa May 6-7, 2010. I am grateful Asia, as well as the peoples of Southeast Asia to the participants in that conference,as well. particularly its organizer Sonia Ryang, 7 Prasenjit Duara and Gavan McCormack, for Takeshi Hamashita, edited by Mark Selden stimulating my thinking on the issues. This and Linda Grove, China, East Asia and the paper has also benefited from comments by Global Economy: Regional and historical Uradyn Bulag, Heonik Kwon, Taggart Murphy perspectives (London: Routledge, 2008); and Bin Wong. Giovanni Arrighi, Takeshi Hamashita and Mark Selden, eds., The Resurgence of East Asia: 500, 1 This approach rejects the notion that global 150 and 50 year perspectives, London: processes are something new under the sun. Routledge, 2003; R. Bin Wong,China Rather it seeks to set off earlier globalTransformed: Historical Change and the Limits processes, some of which are described below, of European Experience, Ithaca: Cornell in contrast to contemporary manifestations of University Press, 1997; Kenneth Pomeranz, The both regional and global processes. Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy, 2 Richard Falk,Predatory Globalization: A Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000;

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Andre Gunder Frank,ReORIENT: Global 9 Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Economy in the Asian Age, Berkeley: University Commerce, 1450-1680 vol.2, p. 33. of California Press, 1998; Gary Hamilton, 10 Commerce and Capitalism in Chinese Societies, Chapter 4: “Silver in Regional Economies and London: Routledge, 2006; Hidetakathe World Economy: East Asia in the Sixteenth Yoshimatsu, The Political Economy ofto the Nineteenth Centuries.” Translation by Regionalism in East Asia. Integrative J.P. McDermott. China, East Asia and the Explanations for Dynamics and Challenges, Global Economy. Cf. Andre Gunder Frank, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008; Mark ReORIENT, especially pp. 131-64; Kenneth Beeson, Regionalism and Globalization in East Pomeranz, The Great Divergence, espec. pp. Asia: Politics, Security and Economic159-62, 267-74.

Development, Basingstoke: Palgrave11 Macmillan, 2007; Francesca Bray,The Rice See for example Saskia Sassen, The Global Economies: Technology and Development in City: New York, London, Tokyo, Princeton: nd Asian Societies, New York: Oxford University Princeton University Press, 2001 2 .ed); Saskia rd Press, 1985; Nola Cooke and Li Tana, eds., Sassen, Cities in a World Economy, 3 Ed. Water Frontier: Commerce and the Chinese in Thousand Oaks, California: Pine Forge, 2006. the Lower Mekong Region, 1750-1880, Lanham 12 This is not to suggest the absence of armed MD, Rowman and Littlefield, 2004; Anthony conflict in Asia. China achieved the peak of Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, territorial expansion during the 18th century, 1450-1680 (2 vols), New Haven: Yale University extending the reach of empire north and west Press, 1988 and 1993. The issues have been into Inner Asia including incorporation of Tibet, sharply debated by historians and economists Mongolia and Xinjiang, and China’s informal in symposia in The Journal of Asian Studies, reach extended into Southeast Asia as well. American Historical Review, and Modern China Most of China south of the Great Wall, among others. They have also been examined however, and particularly coastal China, by by a range of Japanese and Chinese scholars. contrast, enjoyed protracted peace. As did See especially Sugihara Kaoru’s edited large areas of East Asia. collection on the links between Japanese development, intra-Asian trade, and the Asian 13 Alain Gresh, “From Thermopylae to the Twin economies, Japan, China and the Growth of the Towers: The West’s Selective Reading of Asian International Economy, 1850-1949, History,” Le Monde Diplomatique, January Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, Linda 2009. Grove and Christian Daniel, eds.State and Society in China: Japanese Perspectives on 14 S. Sugiyama and Linda Grove, eds., Ming-Qing Social and Economic History (Tokyo: Commercial Networks in Modern Asia, University of Tokyo Press, 1984); and Wang Richmond Surrey: Curzon, 2001, especially Hui, The Politics of Imagining Asia: Empires, chapters by Hamashita Takeshi, Furuta Nations, Regional and Global Orders, Inter-Asia Kazuko, Linda Grove; A.J.H. Latham and Heita Cultural Studies, 8,1, 2007, pp. 1-34. Kawakatsu, eds., Intra-Asian Trade and the World Market, London: Routledge, 2006; K N 8 Our focus in this article is on East Asia. Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe: Economy and China’s tributary trade order extended, of Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise course, beyond East Asia, notably to Inner Asia, of Islam to 1750, Cambridge: Cambridge involving for example the Mongols, Tibetans University Press, 1990. and Manchus, and beyond to Southeast Asia, particularly the Vietnamese. 15 “Asia Redux: Conceptualizing a Region for

23 8 | 41 | 1 APJ | JF our Times”. Presented at the Iowa Symposium, 23 Asia Redux, p. 11. April 6-7, 2010. 24 Edward Friedman, Paul G. Pickowicz and 16 “Anne Booth,” Did It Really Help to be a Mark Selden, Revolution, Resistance and Japanese Colony? East Asian EconomicReform in Village China, New Haven, Yale Performance in Historical Perspective,”The University Press, 2005. Asia-Pacific Journal. 25 CIA—World Factbook. In per capita terms, nd th 17 Angus Maddison,The World Economy: Japan ranked 42 ($32,600), South Korea 49 th Historical Statistics, Paris: OECD Development ($28,000), and China 128 ($6,600) with Hong Centre, 2003, cited in Booth, Table 3. Kong 15th ($42,700) and Taiwan 47th (29,800) (link). IMF calculations for nominal GDP for 18 Samuel Ho, "Colonialism and Development: 2008 placed Japan second, China third and Korea, Taiwan, and Kwantung" in Ramon H. South Korea 15th. (link) Myers and Mark R. Peattie, eds., The Japanese 26 Colonial Empire, 1895-1945, Princeton: Yu Zhou, The Inside Story of China’s High- Princeton University Press, 1984, p.382; Chih- Tech Industry. Making Silicon Valley in Beijing, ming Ka, Japanese Colonialism in Taiwan. Land Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield, 2008.

Tenure, Development and Dependency, 27 Boulder: Westview, 1995; Harry J. Lamley, Michael Roberge and Youkyung Lee, “China- Taiwan Relations,” Council on Foreign “Waitwan Under Japanese Rule, 1895-1945. Relations, 2009. The Vicissitudes of Colonialism,” in Marray A.

Rubinstein, ed., Taiwan: A New History, 28 Yu-huay Sun and Eugene Tang, Taiwan, Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1999. China Start Direct Links as Relations Improve, Bloomberg December 15, 2008. 19 Booth, “Did It Really Help to be a Japanese Colony,” Table 11. Booth shows that the 29 Daniel H. Rosen and Zhi Wang, “Deepening pattern of metropolitan domination of the trade China-Taiwan Relations Through the Economic of the colonies was not universal. While the Cooperation Framework Agreement,” Policy model well fit the Philippines (United States), Brief 10-16, Peterson Institute for Internaitonal in the late 1930s, trade dependence on the Economics, June 2010 metropolis was less than twenty percent in the www.iie.com/publications/pb/pb10-16.pdf. case Malaya (Britain) and Indonesia (Holland). Rosen and Wang model the significant gains that Taiwan’s economy is projected to make as 20 Hui-yu Caroline Ts’ai,Taiwan in Japan’s a result of the agreement, and the necessity for Empire Building. An institutional approach to Taiwan to act in light of the 2010 China-ASEAN colonial engineering, London, Routledge, 2009. agreement earlier in the year, with more modest economic gains anticipated for China. 21 Sven Saaler and J. Victor Koschmann, eds., Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese History. 30 To be sure, progress toward rapprochement Colonialism, regionalism and borders, London, has slowed under South Korean Pres. Lee Routledge, 2008). Myung-bak.

22 I am indebted to Heonik Kwon for clarifying 31 There is a further recycling via Japan’s multi- the centrality of the colonial experience for billion dollar subsidy (the so-called sympathy understanding all wars of the post- World War payments) to pay for an estimated seventy II epoch. percent of the vast US military component in

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Japan, and especially Okinawa, and further World, The Asia-Pacific Journal; and R. Taggart billions to support the projected shift of most or Murphy, In the Eye of the Storm: Updating the all of the US Marine component from Okinawa Economics of Global Turbulence, an to Guam. SeeGavan McCormack, Ampo’s Introduction to Robert Brenner's Update, The Troubled 50th: Hatoyama’s Abortive Rebellion, Asia-Pacific Journal. Okinawa’s Mounting Resistance and the US- 36 Japan Relationship,” three part article,The Douglas H. Brooks and Changchun Hua, Asia-Pacific Journal, May 31, 2010. “Asian Trade and Global Linkages,”ADB Institute Working Paper No. 122, December, 32 US Treasury Department. 2008, “Intra-regional Trade of Major Regions (1988-2007), Fig. 6, p. 10. 33 Mark Landler, “Dollar Shift: Chinese Pockets 37 Filled as Americans’ Emptied,” The New York World Trade Organization, International Times, December 25, 2008; R. Taggart Murphy, Trade Statistics 2009. Trade by Region. Table Asia and the Meltdown of American Finance; 1.6. See also Prema-chandra Athukorala, Kosuke Takahashi and R. Taggart Murphy, The ed. “The Rise of Asia. Trade and investment in US and the Temptation of Dollar Seignorage; Global Perspective,” espec. Athukorala and Hal James Fallows, “Be Nice to the Countries That Hill, “Asian trade and investment. Patterns and Lend You Money,” Atlantic Monthly, December trends,” pp. 11-57. 2008. 38 Athukorala and Hill provide further data and

34 discussion of foreign investment in China in This is not to suggest that rapid economic regional and global perspective for the years growth can only occur in a peaceful milieu. 1984-2007, as well as sectoral data, pp. 37-52. Japan’s post-WWII recovery and economic growth was in part a product of an39 Other instances that merit comparative industrialization fostered by the US as a means analysis are the Geneva Conference on to support the Korean and Vietnam wars. Indochina of 1955 and the Afro-Asian Likewise the postwar US economic boom from Conference at Bandung in the same year, both 1945-1968 occurred in the midst of, and was heralding the importance of newly emerging fueled by, war and preparation for war. Both nations in a post-colonial world. US and Japanese gains were bought at the price of devastation of Korea and Indochina. 40 See Xinjun Zhang, “China’s ‘Peaceful Rise’, Stated differently, the US could enjoy the long ‘Harmonious’ Foreign Relations, and Legal “peace” of the postwar decades at home while Confrontation and Lessons From the Sino- its wars abroad in the post-colonial periphery of Japanese Dispute Over the East China Sea,” Asia were experienced as the extension of war Foreign Policy Research Institute, April 16, and occupation that were the hallmarks of the 2010; Suisheng Zhao, “China's Global Search colonial era. Heonik Kwon astutely assesses for Energy Security: cooperation and this bifurcation in a book in progress. competition in the Asia-Pacific,”Journal of Contemporary China, issue 55, 2008, pp. 35 For recent discussion of the Kondratieff 207-27; Michael Richardson, A Southward moment, see Immanuel Wallerstein interviewed Thrust for China’s Energy Diplomacy in the by Jae-Jung Suh, Capitalism’s Demise? The South China Sea, The Asia-Pacific Journal, and Asia-Pacific Journal; and, especiallyRobert David Rosenberg, Managing the Resources of Brenner interviewed by Jeong Seong-jin, the China Seas: China's Bilateral Fisheries Overproduction not Financial Collapse is the Agreements with Japan, South Korea, and Heart of the Crisis: the US, East Asia, and the Vietnam, The Asia-Pacific Journal.

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41 Gavan McCormack, Client State: Japan in 30-1-10, July 26, 2010;Ivy Lee, “Toward America’s Embrace, London: Routledge, 2007; Reconciliation: The Nishimatsu Settlements for Gavan McCormack, Ampo’s Troubled 50th: Chinese Forced Labor in World War Two,” The Hatoyama’s Abortive Rebellion, Okinawa’s Asia-Pacific Journal, August 9, 2010; but see Mounting Resistance and the US-Japanalso the alternative perspective advanced by Relationship, The Asia-Pacific Journal, 22-3-10, Kang Jian, “Rejected by All Plaintiffs: Failure of May 31, 2010; Kensei Yoshida, Okinawa and the Nishimatsu-Shinanogawa "Settlement" with Guam: In the Shadow of U.S. and Japanese Chinese Forced Laborers in Wartime Japan,” “Global Defense Posture,”The Asia-Pacific The Asia-Pacific Journal, August 9, 2010. Journal, 26-2-10, June 28, 2010. 48 David Shambaugh, “China Engages Asia: 42 The combination of Japan’s military power Reshaping the Regional Order,” International and the aspirations of neo-nationalistSecurity 29.3 (2004), pp. 64-99. politicians suggests other possible outcomes. The MSDF presence in the Indian Ocean since 49 Peter J. Katzenstein, “Japan in the American 2003 tasked with refueling US and allied ships Imperium: Rethinking Security,”The Asia- in the Afghan War, means that Japan’s navy has Pacific Journal; Richard Tanter, The Maritime taken up positions critical to guaranteeing its Self-Defence Force Mission in the Indian oil supplies from the Middle East. Similarly, Ocean: Afghanistan, NATO and Japan’s Political plans are under review for an active military Impasse, The Asia-Pacific Journal; Mel Gurtov, role in response to Somali hijacking of Japanese Reconciling Japan and China, The Asia-Pacific ships. See Michael Penn, “Somali Pirates and Journal; Gavan McCormack, "Conservatism" Political Winds Drive Japan to the Gate of Tears and "Nationalism". The Japan Puzzle, The Asia- off Somalia,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. Pacific Journal. 4-2-09, January 20, 2009. 50 South Korean navy pursues hijacked oil 43 "An East Asian Community and Japan-China tanker, BBC News, April 5, 2010; Harth Pant, Relations", JISS Commentary 89, 2010. “China’s Naval Expansion in the Indian Ocean and India-China Rivalry”The Asia-Pacific 44 Mark Beeson, “East Asian Regionalism and Journal May 3, 2010. the Asia-Pacific: After American Hegemony,” The Asia-Pacific Journal. 51 Dana Priest and William Arkin, three part series in The Washington Post, July 19, 20, 21, 45 Xetrade, “Japan, South Korea, China: 2010 beginning with “A Hidden World Growing trilateral ties, tensions”;Brad Setser, This Beyond Control.” Privatization has proceeded Doesn't Look Good: Taiwan, Korea and China rapidly since at least the George W. Bush Exports Tank, The Asia-Pacific Journal. administration. What is striking is that this has 46 Joel Rathaus, “China-Japan-Korea trilateral now penetrated the consciousness of the cooperation and the East Asian Community, establishment as illustrated by the Washington East Asia Forum, June 15, 2010. The first round Post series and an hour long PBS Frontline of research was completed in 2010 with plans program on Top Secret America to screen in to complete the study by 2012. October. The Washington Post has established a special homepage and data base on the more 47 William Underwood, “Redress Crossroads in than 45 government organizations and 1931 Japan: Decisive Phase in Campaigns tocompanies to track the story, Cf. Tim Shorrock, Compensate Korean and Chinese Wartime Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Forced Laborers,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Outsourcing (New York: Simon and Schuster,

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2008). Koguryo/Gaogouli and China-Korea Conflict, The Asia-Pacific Journal, 52 Beeson, East Asian Regionalism and the Asia- http://japanfocus.org/-Yonson-Ahn/2631 Pacific: After American Hegemony. 56 On the environmental obstacles to China’s 53 John McGlynn, Politics in Command: The continued rise, see Paul Harris,Confronting "International" Investigation into the Sinking of Environmental Change in East and Southeast the Cheonan and the Risk of a New Korean Asia: Eco-politics, Foreign Policy, and War,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, June 14, 2010; Sustainable Development (UN University Press, Seunghun Lee, J.J.Suh, “Rush to Judgment; 2005). Inconsistencies in South Korea’s Cheonan 57 Report,” The Asia-Pacific Journal July 10, 2010; John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Rick Rozoff, “U.S Risks Military Clash With Power Politics (New York: Norton, 2001), p. China In Yellow Sea,” Global Research, July 16, 402. This is Mearsheimer’s assumption about a 2010. China that succeeds in extending its developmental drive to become a wealthy 54 Peter J. Katzenstein, A world of regions: Asia nation. See Mark Beeson’s discussion of and Europe in the American imperium (Ithaca: hegemony in postwar East Asia, “Hegemonic Cornell University Press, 2005). transition in East Asia? The dynamics of Chinese and American power,”Review of 55 Yonson Ahn, The Contested Heritage of International Studies (2009), 35, pp. 95–112.

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