Copyright information Chapter 1, The Puzzle: War and Peace in East Asian History Outside are insignia, shown in state;But here are sweet incense-clouds, quietly ours. . . . Suzhou is famed as a center of letters; And all you writers, coming here, Prove that the name of a great land Is made by better things than wealth. -- Wei Yingwu (c. 737--791) INTRODUCTION In 1592, the Japanese general Hideyoshi invaded Korea, transporting over 160,000 troops on approximately seven hundred ships. He eventually mobilized a half million troops, intending to continue on to conquer China. Over sixty thousand Korean soldiers, eventually supported by over one hundred thousand Ming Chinese forces, defended the Korean peninsula. After six years of war, the Japanese retreated, and Hideyoshi died, having failed spectacularly in his quest. The Imjin War "easily dwarfed those of their European contemporaries" and involved men and material five to ten times the scale of the Spanish Armada of 1588, which has been described as the "greatest military force ever assembled" in Renaissance Europe. That in itself should be sufficient cause for international-relations scholars to explore the war's causes and consequences. Yet even more important for the study of international relations is that Hideyoshi's invasion of Korea marked the only military conflict between Japan, Korea, and China for over six centuries. For three hundred years both before and after the Imjin War, Japan was a part of the Chinese world. That the three major powers in East Asia -- and indeed, much of the rest of the system -- could peacefully coexist for such an extended span of time, despite having the military and technological capability to wage war on a massive scale, raises the question of why stability was the norm in East Asian international relations. In fact, from 1368 to 1841 -- from the founding of the Ming dynasty to the Opium wars between Britain and China -- there were only two wars between China, Korea, Vietnam, and Japan: China's invasion of Vietnam (1407--1428) and Japan's invasion of Korea (1592--1598). Apart from those two episodes, these four major territorial and centralized states developed and maintained peaceful and long-lasting relations with one another, and the more powerful these states became, the more stable were their relations. China was clearly the dominant military, cultural, and economic power in the system, but its goals did not include expansion against its established neighboring states. By the fourteenth century, these Sinicized states had evolved a set of international rules and institutions known as the "tribute system," with China clearly the hegemon and operating under a presumption of inequality, which resulted in a clear hierarchy and lasting peace. These smaller Sinicized states of the region emulated Chinese practices and to varying degrees accepted Chinese centrality. Cultural, diplomatic, and economic relations between the states in the region were both extensive and intensive. Built on a mix of legitimate authority and material power, the tribute system provided a normative social order that also contained credible commitments by China not to exploit secondary states that accepted its authority. This order was explicit and formally unequal, but it was also informally equal: secondary states were not allowed to call themselves nor did they believe themselves equal with China, yet they had substantial latitude in their actual behavior. China stood at the top of the hierarchy, and there was no intellectual challenge to the rules of the game until the late nineteenth century and the arrival of the Western powers. Korean, Vietnamese, and even Japanese elites consciously copied Chinese institutional and discursive practices in part to craft stable relations with China, not to challenge them. The East Asian historical experience was markedly different from the European historical experience, both in its fundamental rules and in the level of conflict among the major actors. The European "Westphalian" system emphasized a formal equality between states and balance-of-power politics; it was also marked by incessant interstate conflict. The East Asian "tribute system" emphasized formal inequality between states and a clear hierarchy, and it was marked by centuries of stability among the core participants. Although there has been a tendency to view the European experience as universal, studying the East Asian historical experience as an international system both allows us to ask new questions about East Asia and gives us a new perspective on our own contemporary geopolitical system. Much of world history has involved hegemons building hierarchies and establishing order, and studying these relations in different historical contexts promises to provide new insights into contemporary issues. Although anarchy -- the absence of an overarching government--is a constant in international life, international-relations scholars are increasingly aware that "every international system or society has a set of rules or norms that define actors and appropriate behavior," which Christopher Reus-Smit calls the "elementary rules of practice that states formulate to solve the coordination and collaboration problems associated with coexistence under anarchy." Although scholars have expended considerable effort in studying early modern East Asian history, rarely have they explored it from the perspective of an international system. Indeed, we tend to take for granted the current set of rules, ideas, and institutions as the natural or inevitable way that countries interact with one another: passports that define citizenship, nation-states as the only legitimate political actor allowed to conducted diplomatic relations, borders between nation-states that are measured to the inch, and, perhaps most centrally, the idea of balance-of-power politics as the basic and enduring pattern of international relations. After all, this characterizes much of contemporary international relations. Yet this current international system is actually a recent phenomenon in the scope of world history. These international rules and norms arose among European powers only beginning in the seventeenth century. In 1648, the great powers of Europe signed a series of treaties creating a set of rules governing international relations that became known as the "peace of Westphalia." Over the next few centuries, the European powers gradually regularized, ritualized, and institutionalized these Westphalian definitions of sovereignty, diplomacy, nationality, and commercial exchange. For example, although diplomats and merchants occasionally carried various types of identifying credentials before the nineteenth century, it was not until 1856 that the U.S. Congress passed a law giving the Department of State the sole power to issue an official documentation of citizenship, and only after World War I did passports become commonplace. One outgrowth of this particular Western system of international relations is that equality is taken for granted both as a normative goal and as an underlying and enduring reality of international politics. In this current system, all nation-states are considered equal and are granted identical rights no matter how large the disparity in wealth or size. In fact, the notion of equality is deeply woven into our modern thinking about domestic rights, international rights, and individual "rights of man," from rationalist French philosophy to the U.S. Declaration of Independence, which "holds these truths to be self-evident . . . that all men are created equal." In international relations, the idea of equality is most clearly expressed in the belief that the balance of power is a fundamental process: too powerful a state will threaten other states and cause them to band together to oppose the powerful state. This idea -- that international relations are most stable when states are roughly equal -- conditions much of our thinking about how international politics functions. In this way, the European experience, in which a number of similarly sized states engaged in centuries of incessant interstate conflict, is now presumed to be the universal norm. Thus, Kenneth Waltz's confident assertion that "hegemony leads to balance" and has done so "through all of the centuries we can contemplate" is perhaps the default proposition in international relations. But these patterns, ideas, and institutions are actually specific ideas from a specific time and place, an Enlightenment notion from the eighteenth century, and there is as much inequality as equality in international relations, both now and in the past. In fact, there are actually two enduring patterns to international relations, not just the balance of power: the opposite idea -- that inequality can be stable -- also exists. Known as "hegemony," the idea is that under certain conditions, a dominant state can stabilize the system by providing leadership. Both equality and inequality could be stable under certain conditions and unstable under other conditions. Important for us is to realize that even "anarchic" systems differ, and different anarchic systems develop different rules, norms, and institutions that help structure and guide behavior. Because the European system of the past few centuries eventually developed into a set of rules, institutions, and norms now used by all countries around the world, we have tended to assume both that this was natural and inevitable and that all international systems behave the same way. With the increasing importance and presence of East Asian states in the world, it has been common to apply ideas and models based on the European experience in order to explain Asia. For example, Aaron Friedberg's famous 1994 article compared modern Asia to the past five hundred years of European history, concluding that "for better or for worse, Europe's past could be Asia's future." As Susanne Rudolph has observed, "there appeared to be one race, and the West had strung the tape at the finish line for others to break." Few scholars have taken East Asia on its own terms and not as a reflection of Europe, and few have crafted theories that can explain East Asia as it actually was. What History Can Tell Us About Today We care about the research presented in this book both for how it might broaden our understanding of the past and for what it might mean for contemporary issues in East Asia. Knowing East Asian history helps us contextualize and make sense of the region's economic dynamism and interconnected relations of the past half century. Today's East Asian system is often discussed as if it emerged fully formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus, in the post--World War II and postcolonial era. However, as this book will show, if anything, many East Asian countries have been deeply economically integrated and interconnected, geographically defined, and centrally administered political units for much longer than those of Europe. To explain East Asian international relations in the twenty-first century, we might begin by exploring how the region got to where it is today. The question of history's effect on the present comes in two ways: does history, either forward or backward, affect contemporary issues today? History "forward" is the typical way we think about history: time moves linearly from past to present, and what came before affects what comes after. In this way, we might ask what are the historical roots of the contemporary relations in East Asia: do the history, culture, beliefs, or goals of East Asian states reflect to any degree their evolution and formation over time? However, although history moves forward, we also learn about history "backward," looking over our shoulder. And this backward view of history can be consequential for relations today. For a myriad of reasons, states, peoples, and leaders emphasize and glorify certain historical events, ignore or denigrate other events, and craft stories about their past. Unsurprisingly, contemporary nation-states also often disagree with one another over these stories about their shared pasts. Crafting a glorious history is central to modern national life, and disputes between countries over how history is remembered and taught is really a dispute over whose side of the story gets told . Put this way, we might also ask whether contemporary East Asian states care about and deal with one another in ways that privilege certain historical interpretations over others. History forward will explore whether there are any roots that help us understand today's East Asian states and what they care about. That is, the historical countries studied in this book are recognizably the same major powers in East Asia today. And, as the twenty-first century begins, there is immense interest and concern about whether China and Japan can develop a stable relationship, whether a "rising China" will destabilize the region, and whether the Korean peninsula can finally find a peaceful solution to its division. Thus, understanding and explaining past stability may be a critical step both in explaining why East Asia is stable today and for predicting how the region will evolve. Furthermore, many Western views reveal a striking ambiguity about East Asia. On the one hand, many of our international-relations theories, and indeed popular perception, see East Asians as essentially identical to Westerners in goals, attitudes, and beliefs. Some argue that the homogenizing influence of globalization and modernization has made us all the same and has rendered geography, history, and culture essentially irrelevant, an argument perhaps best popularized by Thomas Friedman's book The World Is Flat. Indeed, a basic starting point of much social-science theorizing is the universal applicability of models derived from the European historical experience. On the other hand, our perceptions of East Asia are ambiguous, and it is certainly worth asking whether the Westphalian ideas have completely replaced older ideas in East Asia. Some scholars see a unique Chinese strategic culture; others wonder whether China can truly be a responsible member of the international community. Whether East Asian countries actually share the same basic worldviews as do Western countries is not just a diplomatic issue -- for example, the rapid economic emergence of first Japan and then the other East Asian economies spawned an intense debate over the causes and consequences of that growth, and two decades ago influential books such as The Enigma of Japanese Power argued that Japan's economic success was fundamentally different from that of the West. Today, the plethora of business-school textbooks claiming to teach how to do business in Japan or China reveals that many continue think that those societies and economies operate in different ways than do Western ones. There exists a strong undercurrent of belief that East Asian life, society, and business is fundamentally different than its Western counterparts. If we are all the same now, and all states and peoples act and perceive the same whether they are East Asian or European, there is probably little to be gained from studying history. However, if how we got to where we are is important, then an ahistorical view of modern East Asia, one that merely looks at current capabilities and ignores the evolution of these states, is likely to be misleading. Although much has changed since the fourteenth century, it is worth asking whether and how states' and peoples' interests and beliefs have changed and how they inform their goals and beliefs today. Whether the past has any bearing on the present is an open question, to be sure, but as this book will show, we ignore history at the risk of not truly understanding why the region operates today in the way that it does. What about history backward? East Asia today is more stable, prosperous, and peaceful than at any time since the arrival of the Western colonial powers in the late nineteenth century. Few states fear for their survival, and most states have experienced rapid economic and social modernization. Yet the East Asian region is not as stable as is Europe, and some enduring and vexing disputes remain between countries in the region. Indeed, the most enduring East Asian disputes are largely about various versions of how history is remembered and characterized in the present. What Taiwan's status is, disputes between Japan and all of its neighbors over maritime borders, and other maritime issues such as the ownership of the Spratly Islands continue to plague East Asia, and these are often presented in the popular press, by governments, and even by scholars as historical disputes. But they are actually current political disputes, not historical issues. That is, many of these disputes over uninhabited rocks and maritime boundaries are a result of the modern, Westphalian system that all states now unquestioningly accept -- after all, five hundred years ago, nobody cared about the uninhabited rocks in the middle of the ocean except the fishermen who tried to avoid wrecking upon them. Thus, working backward into time to see what ancient kings thought of these islands is useless, because they did not think anything about them at the time. The rulers of historical states in East Asia were concerned with other territorial and border issues, to be sure, as this book will show. But the contemporary preoccupation in many East Asian countries over historical issues is really a modern political matter, as leaders and peoples attempt to craft a glorious identity that celebrates and elevates their particular country. This book helps provide a better historical context for these putatively historical disputes and places the cause and solution for their enduring disputation squarely in the contemporary era. It is as important to explain how the past affects the present as it is to realize that we in the present create myths and folktales about the past. Much of the historiography about the region needs to be taken in context. "Nationalist" writings and histories in many of these countries during the twentieth century sought to emphasize or elevate the glory or equality of their own particular country's origins, often in response to colonialism and independence. To the extent that history has become a captive of the modern nation-state, we should be wary of accepting too easily these nationalist histories about a wonderful imagined past, and we should be aware that the solution to historical disputes is in the present, not the past. What this book attempts to do is view history without nationalist lenses, to explore how relations worked at the time. Themes in This Book This book explains the historical East Asian international system and contains three overarching themes. First, almost all the actors in East Asia accepted a set of unquestioned rules and institutions about the basic ways in which international relations worked. Known as the tribute system , and involving in particular a hierarchic rank ordering based on status, these rules were taken for granted as the way in which political actors interacted with one another. Largely derived from Chinese ideas over the centuries, by the fourteenth century these ideas and institutions had become the rules of the game. This does not mean, however, that the tribute system was identically and consistently applied by every state in every situation -- far from it. Like the basic rules and institutions of the Westphalian system today, different states modified, abandoned, and used these ideas in a flexible manner depending on situation and circumstance. The tribute system did, however, form the core organizing principles of the system, and these principles endured for centuries as the basis for international interaction throughout East Asia. Within this system, cultural achievement in the form of status was as important a goal as was military or economic power. The status hierarchy and rank order were key components of this system, and ranking did not necessarily derive from political, economic, or military power. China was the hegemon, and its status derived from its cultural achievements and social recognition by other political actors, not from its raw size or its military or economic power. All the political units in the system played by these rules. Even political units that rejected Confucian notions of cultural achievement -- such as the nomads -- accepted the larger rules of the game, the way hierarchy was defined, and the manner in which international relations was conducted, and they defined their own ideals and cultures in opposition to the dominant ideas and institutions of the time. Movement up and down the hierarchy occurred within the rules, and it was not until the arrival of Western powers in the nineteenth century that there appeared an alternative set of rules for how to conduct international relations. Second, within this larger set of rules and institutions existed a smaller Confucian society made up of China, Korea, Vietnam, and Japan. I use the term "society" to mean a self-conscious political grouping where shared ideas, norms, and interests determine membership in the group. Their interests may not be identical, and indeed the goals of the group members can often conflict, but they share the same basic understandings about what the criteria for membership in the group are, the values and norms of the group, and how status is measured. These four states accepted Chinese ideas and were culturally similar, and although many other political units existed in the system and used the larger rules of the game, it was essentially these four states that formed an inner circle based largely on Confucian ideas. Within this Confucian society, Japan was the liminal -- or boundary -- case. In fact, Japan sat at the edge of the society of Sinicized states, was the most hesitant about accepting Chinese ideas and Chinese dominance, and was the most interested in finding alternative means of situating itself in relation to the other states. Although deriving many of their domestic ideas, innovations, system of writing, and cultural knowledge from China, the Japanese were always skeptical of China's central position. Indeed, Japanese scholars and officials often made a distinction between Chinese civilization, which they revered, and the Chinese state, which they often held in contempt. Yet even while the Japanese were hesitant and skeptical about viewing themselves as a Confucian, Sinicized state, it remained far more Confucianized than other political units in the region such as Siam or the Mongols, and, notably, Japan militarily challenged the existing order only once in five hundred years. Finally, these rules and norms were consequential for diplomacy, war, trade, and cultural exchange between political units in East Asia. Far more than a thin veneer of meaningless social lubricants, the tribute system and its ideas and institutions formed the basis for relations between states. The tribute system, with its inherent notions of inequality and its many rules and responsibilities for managing relations among unequals, provided a set of tools for resolving conflicting goals and interests short of resorting to war. In fact, although there has recently been a great deal of historiography about the early modern East Asian era, little scholarship has focused directly on war, and there is also almost no work that puts nomads and East Asian states in a comparative context, leading to a view of China as an "empire without neighbors." In this way, the research presented in this book extends Iain Johnston's pioneering work about the sources of Chinese grand strategy, where he identifies two deeply enduring Chinese worldviews that encompass central paradigmatic assumptions about the nature of conflict, the inevitability of violence, and the enemy. Calling one "Confucian" and the other "parabellum," he argues that China and nomads operated in a parabellum strategic culture that considers that "the best way of dealing with security threats is to eliminate them through the use of force." Yet important as Johnston's work is, he does not address a key issue: why those threats arose mainly from nomads on China's northern and western frontiers instead of arising from the powerful states to the east and south such as Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. These Sinic states, which shared China's "Confucian" worldviews, had far more stable and peaceful relations with China. Early modern East Asia, like nineteenth-century Europe, operated in two very different international societies and was based on two different sets of rules: one that included the Sinicized states and one that regulated relations with the "uncivilized" nomadic world. Indeed, my central claim of East Asian stability does not imply that violence was rare in East Asia. There was plenty of violence, but it tended to occur between China and the seminomadic peoples on its northern and western borders, not between China and the other Sinicized states. This violence occurred in the form of border skirmishes, piracy, and the slow expansion and frontier consolidation of some states (such as China) at the expense of nonstate units. Although the nomads were generally more of a nuisance than a threat to China, when they managed to form statelike structures, they could become powerful and dangerous to the Sinic states. These nomads had vastly different worldviews, political structures, and cultures than the Sinicized states, and although they accepted the more fundamental aspects of the tribute system, they resisted Confucian cultural ideas, and thus crafting enduring or stable relations with them was difficult and troublesome. The nomads and the East Asian states both operated within a unipolar system: China was the unquestioned and only superpower. Yet China's relations with the nomads were characterized by war and instability, whereas its relations with the Sinicized states were characterized by peace and stability. The simple fact of Chinese military and economic predominance cannot account for both of these outcomes. Furthermore, although the states accepted Chinese authority, the nomads did not. What this book demonstrates is that there was a hierarchical relationship in place in the context of China and the East Asian states that was generated by a common culture defined by a Confucian worldview. These Sinic states possessed a shared sense of legitimacy that presupposes, in the context of Confucianism, that relations operate within an accepted hierarchy. This book helps clarify the distinction between an international system based only on material power and an international society based on culture. Perhaps most important is to ask why China had endemic conflicts with some groups such as the nomads but almost none with other states such as Vietnam and Korea. Most scholarship on war in historical East Asia has -- naturally enough -- focused on where the fighting was; that is, it has focused on China-nomad relations. From the popular imagination, as reflected in movies such as Mongol , to much more serious academic works, such as Iain Johnston's superb book, we find the overwhelming attention to war in East Asia emphasizing nomads and their relations to China. But we should also ask why some states did not fight -- and, in fact, why war between the Sinic states was so unlikely as to be almost unthinkable is just as important a question as why war with the nomads was a constant possibility. The Tribute System and Its Critics This book's overarching argument about the stabilizing role of the tribute system, Chinese hegemony, and the hierarchy of early modern East Asia stands in contrast to three main ways in which scholars have generally viewed the tribute system. From the time of John Fairbanks onward, scholars have generally viewed the tribute system as either functional or symbolic, or they have dismissed outright the idea of a tribute system. Yet although there was no eternal and unchanging tribute system that functioned the same way everywhere, the tribute system certainly existed and is worth taking seriously as an overarching set of rules that governed international relations at the time. The functionalist view sees the tribute system as a set of arbitrary and somewhat comical rules that were merely a means by which states could trade with one another. That is, they view the institutions and beliefs of the early modern East Asian international system as merely a set of rationalizing conventions or rules that allow actors to coordinate or pursue their interests. A modern example of this is the agreement that all cars drive on the right side of the road: as long as some type of coordination occurs, the substance of the rules is relatively unimportant, and it is just as likely that everyone could agree that all cars should drive on the left side of the road. Viewing the tribute system as essentially functional, John Fairbanks first popularized the notion that "tribute was a cloak for trade." Arguing that tribute was "not exactly what it seemed," Fairbanks saw the tribute system as an "ingenious vehicle" for the creation of trade between states. James Hevia concludes: "Virtually all those who followed Fairbank [and Teng] faithfully reproduced what was an insistence upon seeing the tribute system as dualistic in nature." Other scholars view the tribute system as merely symbolic, as a substance-free set of acts that masked the underlying "real" international politics based on military power and commerce. This view sees the tribute system as unimportant to explaining the power politics that was "really" motivating East Asian states. In this view, secondary states engaging in the outward acts of hierarchy, emulation, and deference were at heart merely engaging in a rational cost-benefit calculation. This symbolic view of the tribute system sees the smaller states surrounding China as not powerful enough to actually deter or defeat China by the force of arms, and so rather than defy China and risk invasion and conquest, these smaller states chose the path of placating China culturally while inwardly seething with resentment and wishing they had the power to challenge their much larger neighbor. For example, Keith Taylor has argued that "for several centuries, [Vietnam] was an independent kingdom posing as a tributary of the Chinese empire," and John Wills identifies the "appearances of the ceremonial supremacy of the Son of Heaven in the capital," thus emphasizing the distinction between the appearance and the reality of the tribute system. In his review of this literature, Liam Kelley points out that some scholars have a hard time understanding unequal relationships, at least normatively, and thus attempt to "look beyond the 'rhetoric' of the tribute system in the hope of finding an understandable 'reality.' Surely there had to be a logical reason why foreign kingdoms accepted a position of inferiority in this relationship." Finally, a number of prominent scholars have challenged the tribute system's very existence. These scholars generally make two points. First, the tribute system was applied in so many different ways at different times that generalizing beyond any particular case makes a caricature of the actual history of the time. Second, they argue that projecting modern concepts backward into East Asian history makes no sense, and that the tribute system, states, and even the notion of a "Korea" or a "China" are meaningless in their proper historical context. For example, James Hevia warns that using ideas such as "China" or the "tribute system" results in "modernist models of behavior and institutional forms such as the state [that] are projected onto the past." In his careful study of Vietnamese envoy writings, Liam Kelley avoids using "China" or "Vietnam," because those terms did not exist in antiquity, noting that "the names Vietnam and China are now laden with nationalistic concepts that evoke a world of ethnic boundaries and distinct cultures [which did not exist at the time]." That is, Kelley argues that the cultural and ethnic boundaries that we see today were not there in the past, even though he agrees that political boundaries were definitely there. These arguments are important, and we should take them seriously. However, one problem with the first two arguments -- that the tribute system was either functional or symbolic--is that it asks us to dismiss and ignore quite a bit of what officials, scholars, and governments actually did and said at the time. And both these arguments have a number of logical problems. First, these arguments posit literally centuries of self-delusion on the part of Chinese officials. As James Hevia puts it, an emphasis on the tribute system as merely symbolic leads to a view of Chinese bureaucrats thus: "caught up in illusion, unable to rationalize beyond a certain point, China's bureaucrats can only distinguish between appearances and reality when the two mesh . . . when [they do not], Qing officials could do little more than respond defensively and cling to the illusions fostered by ceremonialism, while even the most clearheaded drifted unawares." Why would so much energy, time, thought, and money be expended on the tribute system if it were purely symbolic and believed in by no one, neither the Chinese nor the foreigners? Were Ming and Qing officials so blinded by their own ceremonial delusions that they could not see Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, Mongolian, Siamese, and other envoys smirking at them as they went through these rituals? As this book will show, there is ample evidence that Korean, Vietnamese, and other envoys believed in what they were doing. Furthermore, rulers in secondary states such as Korea, Vietnam, and Japan used the basic institutional and discursive forms of the tribute system in their relations with one another. If the tribute system was merely a means of placating China, why would they have done so? In the case of relations between smaller states in the system, there was no need for the supposed symbolic deference to China. Perhaps most consequentially for these arguments, we are still left with the question of why there was so much stability in the system, particularly between the Sinic states. That is, the functionalist and symbolic views of the tribute system overlook one significant fact: these rules and rites were intimately involved with ordering diplomatic, cultural, economic, and political relations among a number of actors. Perhaps more important is to ask whether the tribute system existed at all and whether we can usefully apply modern concepts such as states or institutions back into East Asian history. Indeed, as I will argue in this book, some of the contemporary disputes in East Asia over historical borders are truly ahistorical, because we have no evidence that rulers thought or cared about demarcating maritime borders until the twentieth century. So I am greatly in sympathy with being careful about projecting backward from the present. However, other concepts, such as the tribute system, certainly existed and were used for centuries, and this book will show that one can reasonably make an argument that China, Korea, Vietnam, and even Japan were states as we think of them today -- that is, as governments defined over territory with a monopoly over domestic violence. Furthermore, while political identities and notions of what it meant to be Korean or Vietnamese have certainly changed substantially over the years, and while much else has also changed in the past six hundred years, these political units conducted formal diplomatic relations with one another using a set of agreed-upon rules and institutions, and it is difficult to call this anything other than international relations. In fact, more nuanced studies and new interpretations actually only serve to underscore the centrality of the system for its participants. That is to say, we can easily acknowledge that they all saw and utilized the system in their own culturally specific ways, but that does not mean that they rejected the legitimacy of the system. As a result, we have no choice but to attempt to provide some type of general explanation and categorization for how relations worked at the time. At the same time, we should be careful to note that differences and exceptions occurred. In sum, what few scholars have done is take the tribute system as a set of international rules and ideas in the same way that we explore the Westphalian international system that orders our contemporary world. If we do this, and if we ask what were the principles and institutions that guided international relations in historical East Asia and how did this affect the behavior of the units, we might take more seriously the norms, rules, and institutions embodied in the tribute system. In this way, I am concerned with explaining why the system worked the way that it did and showing how this affected relations among the states in the system. From this perspective, the tribute system was far more than just a simple choice between "war or tribute," and it ordered the way officials and scholars in smaller states, and in the Sinic states in particular, thought about and acted in their relations with the Chinese hegemon. The Scope of This Study When studying East Asia, it is sometimes seductive to claim that behavior is immutable, permanent, and unchanging from the ancient mists of time up to the present era. Yet East Asia has changed as much as any other part of the world: some traits have historical roots, others do not, and all are constantly evolving depending on the circumstance, situation, institutional constraints, political and economic exigencies, and a host of other factors. We should avoid making sweeping claims that present either an unbroken chronological continuity or an encompassing geographic component. Chronologically, I focus on the era of the Ming and Qing Chinese dynasties up to the Opium wars between the United Kingdom and China (1368--1841) -- early modern East Asia -- because it represents the culmination of centuries of state building in East Asia, and at that point the East Asian international system was at its most complete and developed. The ideas and institutions in the international system developed over centuries in an uneven manner, and many of these ideas originally appeared over one thousand years earlier. Perhaps the greatest contrast to this early modern era were the three centuries preceding it, which witnessed the breakdown of central control in China, the Mongol Yuan invasions, and widespread instability throughout the region. Yet at the same time, the Yuan set the stage for the subsequent five centuries by reestablishing "centralized, unified rule in China, laying the foundation for the provinces of modern China . . . and restoring a single tax and legal system on the country." Each era merits study in its own right, but it is important to explore one epoch carefully before beginning comparisons and to avoid careless conclusions and dubious claims: what was true in the seventeenth century may not have been true a millennium earlier. The Mongols invaded everybody from China and Japan to Persia and Poland and arose outside of the state system that I describe here. The geographical domain of East Asian international relations studied in this book focuses mainly on the four Sinicized states of China, Korea, Vietnam, Japan. These countries were the major actors in the system, and they constituted an international society that clearly understood the requirements for membership, how status is evaluated, and the rules of the game. The entire early modern East Asian region began with Manchuria in the north, the Pacific to the east, the mountains of Tibet to the west, and the nations of Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia to the south. Other political units that were sufficiently involved in the system to warrant discussion include the nomadic peoples to the north and west of China, Siam, Burma, the Philippines, the Ryukyu Islands, and Malaysia. This book will trace and identify the contours of East Asia's international system from 1368 to 1841. I will concentrate on the four most consequential actors: China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, but I will also discuss the variety of other political units in the system, particularly the nomads to the north and west of China. The book first discusses the key concepts of hierarchy, hegemony, and status, as a way of clarifying the ideas that inform the rest of the book. Chapter 3 explores the nature of these Confucian states; chapter 4 discusses the diplomacy of the tribute system itself. Chapter 5 is concerned with war in East Asia; chapter 6 describes the extent of economic relations in the region. Chapter 7 compares these Confucianized East Asian states with the seminomadic peoples of the northern steppe, and chapter 8 concludes the book with some implications for the contemporary era. *** COPYRIGHT NOTICE : Copyrighted (c) 2010 by Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher, except for reading and browsing via the World Wide Web. Users are not permitted to mount this file on any network servers. For more information, please e-mail us or visit the permissions page on our Web site. Excerpted from East Asia Before the West: Five Centuries of Trade and Tribute by David C. Kang All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
