Despite the diversity in income levels, languages, culture, resource endowments, and political systems, the countries of East Asia are more integrated now than they have ever been. Goods, money, and ideas are being traded across the region. East Asia is redefining itself from a collection of disparate nations that looked mainly to markets in the west, to a more self-reliant, innovative, and networked region. Countries in this region are strengthening ties with each other and seeking more strategic partnerships with the rest of the world. 'East Asian Visions' is a collection of essays that convey, firsthand, how some of the most influential thinkers in East Asia view these challenges. The writers are eminent policy makers, statesmen, and scholars. They write about how competition with the west has bred success; how crises in the region have provoked introspection; and how the rise of China is catalyzing change.

Collection of essays by Cumings on the complex problems of political economy and ideology, power and culture in East and Northeast Asia, providing an understanding of the United States's role in these regions and the consequences for subsequent policy mak

Emerging from a conference on Communities in Question: Religion and Authority in East and Southeast Asia, held in Hua Hin, Thailand, May 1989, this volume examines some of the tensions and conflicts between states and religious communities over the scope of religious views of the communities, the

There is great interest in the Pacific Century and what its implications for the future will be. The rapid economic growth of East Asia was already setting the region apart from the rest of the world by the 1970s. By the 1980s the trend was seen to have spread southward to Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, while China's provinces had also become integral to the regional economic boom. In this exciting new study many of the ideas and expectations associated with the Pacific Century are placed under critical scrutiny. The book includes studies of particular countries such as China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia and Malaysia. There is analysis of economic and political trends in the region, the reasons behind its rise and its importance on a global scale. The rise of East Asia represents an historic turning point with immense significance world-wide. This book will be of interest to anyone concerned about the new approaches to and the debate about the rise of east Asia and the coming of the Pacific Century.

In The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Jeremy Yellen exposes the history, politics, and intrigue that characterized the era when Japan's "total empire" met the total war of World War II. He illuminates the ways in which the imperial center and its individual colonies understood the concept of the Sphere, offering two sometimes competing, sometimes complementary, and always intertwined visions—one from Japan, the other from Burma and the Philippines. Yellen argues that, from 1940 to 1945, the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere epitomized two concurrent wars for Asia's future: the first was for a new type of empire in Asia, and the second was a political war, waged by nationalist elites in the colonial capitals of Rangoon and Manila. Exploring Japanese visions for international order in the face of an ever-changing geopolitical situation, The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere explores wartime Japan's desire to shape and control its imperial future while its colonies attempted to do the same. At Japan's zenith as an imperial power, the Sphere represented a plan for regional domination; by the end of the war, it had been recast as the epitome of cooperative internationalism. In the end, the Sphere could not survive wartime defeat, and Yellen's lucidly written account reveals much about the desires of Japan as an imperial and colonial power, as well as the ways in which the subdued colonies in Burma and the Philippines jockeyed for agency and a say in the future of the region.

Though when people discuss World War I, they usually center on the fighting in Europe, it truly was a global war. This book examines the role of East Asia in the fighting. It looks at how East Asian commentators saw and interpreted the war, both in Europe and elsewhere, and what lessons they drew from the experience for their own societies. What influence did World War I have on East Asian visions of the world order? Presenting scholarship by a number of East Asian authors in English for the first time, the book greatly expands our understanding of World War I and its effects.

This fascinating work draws together a lifetime of research by highly regarded scholar Ralph Bernard Smith, who at the time of his death in December 2000 was examining the post-war changes in East Asian politics, economics and society.

The Confucian doctrine of tianxia (all under heaven) outlines a unitary worldview that cherishes global justice and transcends social, geographic, and political divides. For contemporary scholars, it has held myriad meanings, from the articulation of a cultural imaginary and political strategy to a moralistic commitment and a cosmological vision. The contributors to Chinese Visions of World Order examine the evolution of tianxia's meaning and practice in the Han dynasty and its mutations in modern times. They attend to its varied interpretations, its relation to realpolitik, and its revival in twenty-first-century China. They also investigate tianxia's birth in antiquity and its role in empire building, invoke its cultural universalism as a new global imagination for the contemporary world, analyze its resonance and affinity with cosmopolitanism in East-West cultural relations, discover its persistence in China's socialist internationalism and third world agenda, and critique its deployment as an official state ideology. In so doing, they demonstrate how China draws on its past to further its own alternative vision of the current international system. Contributors. Daniel A. Bell, Chishen Chang, Kuan-Hsing Chen, Prasenjit Duara, Hsieh Mei-yu, Haiyan Lee, Mark Edward Lewis, Lin Chun, Viren Murthy, Lisa Rofel, Ban Wang, Wang Hui, Yiqun Zhou

Chinese Visions of Progress, 1895 to 1949 offers a panoramic study of Chinese reflections on “progress,” its multifaceted expressions, contesting interpretations, highly optimistic implications, but also the criticism it encountered.