Focuses both on specific regional organizations like ASEAN, The Asian Development Bank and APEC, as well as on key institutions such as East Asian legal systems, the media, organized labour, Asian business systems, and the developmental state.

Over the past forty years, East Asia has been radically transformed from a war-damaged sub-continent to a region of global pre-eminence. With new, highly developed scientific resources, great economic strengths, significant global trading links and equally powerful financial resources, East Asia is now one of the most dynamic regions in the global system. This book illuminates the historical development trajectory and contemporary circumstances of the countries of the region. Embracing a cross-disciplinary perspective, it summarises the history of the region and goes on to focus upon the rise of East Asia since the ruins of the Pacific War. Analysing the region’s basic strengths and the distinctive elite development strategies across the various countries, it also examines areas of domestic, intra-regional and international conflict. It covers the basic ground of political economy, society, culture and politics, whilst also taking care to locate the contemporary region in its own history and asking, what further change can be expected in the future? Providing an excellent introduction to the study of the region, this book is an important read for students and scholars of East Asian politics, history and development.

This book offers an interpretive and critical comparative politics analysis of the post-1945 development trajectory of the broad East Asian region and its component countries. The discussion considers the region and its countries in terms of their historical legacies (colonialism, war and the preoccupation with development) and argues that each country has constructed their own way of ordering political life, each created its own political logic. Arguing that it is an error to judge these countries’ performance against the model of Europe or America, Preston discusses the era of expansionist colonialism, the episode of breakdown in highly destructive regional warfare in the early twentieth century and the subsequent diverse records of China (with its party-state turned towards a nominal state-socialism), Hong Kong (confronting the problems of living with distant masters), Singapore (with its elite directed national building) and Thailand (mired in elite-resistance to popular political reform).

Institutional activities have remarkably transformed East Asia, a region once known for the absence of regionalism and regime-building efforts. Yet the dynamics of this Asian institutionalization have remained an understudied area of research. This book offers one of the first scholarly attempts to clarify what constitutes institutionalization in East Asia and to systematically trace the origins, discern the features, and analyze the prospects of ongoing institutionalization processes in the world’s most dynamic region. Institutionalizing East Asia comprises eight essays, grouped thematically into three sections. Part I considers East and Southeast Asia as focal points of inter-state exchanges and traces the institutionalization of inter-state cooperation first among the Southeast Asian states and then among those of the wider East Asia. Part II examines the institutionalization of regional collaboration in four domains: economy, security, natural disaster relief, and ethnic conflict management. Part III discusses the institutionalization dynamics at the sub-regional and inter-regional levels. The essays in this book offer a useful source of reference for scholars and researchers specializing in East Asia, regional architecture, and institution-building in international relations. They will also be of interest to postgraduate and research students interested in ASEAN, the drivers and limits of international cooperation, as well as the role of regional multilateralism in the Asia-Pacific region.

This text explains political change and the shaping of political order in modern East Asian states: China, Japan, North Korea, South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam. Examining the transformative role of power, authority, and political culture in the shaping of political order, this book: Describes the emergence of statist and pluralist political order in East Asia. Outlines the dual process of state-building and nation-building, revealing the transformative role of the state. Highlights the causes and consequences of the reversion to centralized political order, describing the structure and institutions of Cold War regimes in East Asian states. Explores the structural and institutional consequences of industrial development on politics and state in East Asian states. Discusses the methods and outcomes of the democratization movements in the 1980s and 1990s and public sector reforms in the 1990s and 2010s. Utilizes survey data and newly developed indicators to measure and reveal the shaping of national political culture in each East Asian state. Features structural, institutional, and normative analysis of political change in modern East Asia. This will be an essential textbook for students of Political Science, International Relations, East Asian Politics and East Asian History, as well as policy analysts of East Asian states.

This systematic, innovative introduction to the dynamic politics and political economies of China, Japan, North Korea, South Korea, and Taiwan teaches students how to think analytically, critically, and independently about the most significant developments in the region. The text offers in-depth coverage of the unique experiences of each country, all within the framework of an explicit comparative perspective. Throughout, the five countries are contrasted with one another to maximize opportunities for learning. Covering the intertwined issues of politics, economics, and culture, this is a book that is ideally suited for assignment in any social science course on East Asia.