International Relations of East Asia

This book is intended to serve two purposes that usually do not suit each other well. One is to introduce the internal cultural, social, historical, political, and economic factors that have shaped East Asia into the region it is today. Xiaoming Huang discusses them in separate chapters. The other is to construct an overarching narrative that emphasizes the unity and endogeneity of regional relations that encompasses both Northeast and Southeast Asia from ancient times through the present and into the future (p. 4). Despite a number of small copy-editing glitches, the book is well organized and clearly written for easy student comprehension. It presents an impressive survey of the academic literature on East Asian area studies touching on the history, societies, comparative politics, international politics, and political economies of China, Northeast Asia, and Southeast Asia. It uses a conventional model of international politics that is derived from structural realism, i.e., it is an anarchic system that is structured by the number of great powers. International order is contingent on their ability to dominate smaller states and surrounding regions. Power is used to create international institutions and authority relations. Power, institutions, and authority relations make international order possible. It is clear that Huang devoted enormous time and effort to cull from this broad swath of academic writing those elements that support the notion that East Asia in some sense has always had primary significance as an endogenously determined regional order

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