East Asia Before the West

Five Centuries of Trade and Tribute

David Kang

• Editorial: Columbia University Press
• Año: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780231526746
• Categoría: Politics & International Relations
• Categoría: International Relations

From the founding of the Ming dynasty in 1368 to the start of the Opium Wars in 1841, China has engaged in only two large-scale conflicts with its principal neighbors, Korea, Vietnam, and Japan. These four territorial and centralized states have otherwise fostered peaceful and long-lasting relationships with one another, and as they have grown more powerful, the atmosphere around them has stabilized.

Focusing on the role of the "tribute system" in maintaining stability in East Asia and in fostering diplomatic and commercial exchange, Kang contrasts this history against the example of Europe and the East Asian states' skirmishes with nomadic peoples to the north and west. Although China has been the unquestioned hegemon in the region, with other political units always considered secondary, the tributary order entailed military, cultural, and economic dimensions that afforded its participants immense latitude. Europe's "Westphalian" system, on the other hand, was based on formal equality among states and balance-of-power politics, resulting in incessant interstate conflict.

Scholars tend to view Europe's experience as universal, but Kang upends this tradition, emphasizing East Asia's formal hierarchy as an international system with its own history and character. This approach not only recasts our understanding of East Asian relations but also defines a model that applies to other hegemonies outside the European order.

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.¹ 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.² 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.³ 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.⁴

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,”⁵ 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.”⁶ 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 West phalia.” 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.⁷

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 selfevident . . . 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.⁸

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.”⁹ 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.”¹⁰ 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.¹¹

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.¹² 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.¹³ 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.¹⁴ But they are actually current political disputes, not historical issues.¹⁵

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 w...