Author's Response: Ideas and Power in East Asian International Relations

[ 173 ] book review roundtable • china rising Author’s Response: Ideas and Power in East Asian International Relations David C. Kang I am deeply grateful that such excellent scholars have taken my book seriously and have made such interesting and insightful points. I agree with many of their observations, and in this response I will clarify and comment on four themes that run through many of the responses: regions, identity and hierarchy, realist explanations, and the future. Regions Writing a book on a single region’s response to a central regional actor constitutes a difficult exercise, especially when the main focus of the book is a country already moving beyond the region and becoming a global actor. Yet while China’s global impact is beginning to be felt broadly, the country still remains first and foremost an East Asian actor, and states there must deal with China every day on all fronts: political, economic, and cultural. For that reason, China Rising is restricted in focus to only East Asia—in this region we can see the most direct impact of China’s rise and these states have already been forced to deal with China. Thus I agree with Jalal Alamgir and Ellen Frost that how India and China interact may have key repercussions for stability in the future. Yet rather than a comprehensive overview of China’s relations with every global actor, this book was written instead as a regional-level view on how states most directly interact with China. When focusing only on the East Asian region, it is harder to make the case that India is currently a major factor. For the time being, New Delhi is more focused on relations within South Asia, and particularly with Islamabad, and India’s economic growth is probably a decade behind China’s. Thus most scholarship exploring “Chindia” is prospective, being based on expectations regarding what might happen in the future. Although India and China do interact over border issues and Tibet, India is not yet a major economic or diplomatic presence in East Asia: India is not central to the North Korean problem, the Taiwan issue, or even to questions regarding Southeast Asian economic integration with China. For that reason China Rising did not include a focus on India. david c. kangis Professor in the Government department and Adjunct Professor at the Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College. He can be reached at . [ 174 ] asia policy I also wanted to emphasize in the book that taking East Asian history seriously is important for understanding the region. I did not claim, however, that the China-centered system of the fourteenth century will replicate itself today. What is important is to understand the history of these states, to realize how different their history is from that of Europe, and to ask how and in what way this might matter, as Bin Yu has pointed out. We should avoid making sweeping claims that present either an unbroken chronological continuity or an encompassing geographic component. 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 cultural 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. There is no “eternal China,” which exists unchanging outside of time, space, and dimension; nor is there a one-sizefits -all model of diplomacy (such as the tribute system) that has been applied identically in every situation since time immemorial. Although historical China was a font of civilizational ideas throughout the region, modern East Asian states no more turn to China for practical ideas on how to order their polity and society any more than Western states look to modern Greece. Identity and Hierarchy The main theoretical point of China Rising was that we need to take seriously state intentions, goals, and identities. The two dominant strands of thinking in international relations—realism and liberalism—are both largely mechanistic and material. Realism, with a focus on material...