Huang Chin-Hao and David C. Kang, State Formation through Emulation: The East Asian Model

Excerpt

This important new book explains why powerful, centralized, and bureaucratically administered governments arose in premodern Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. Rejecting the prevailing bellicist explanations for state formation, the authors argue that, unlike in Europe, “neither war nor preparations for war were the cause or effect of state formation in East Asia” (p. i). In fact, they find that war was relatively rare before the arrival of the Western powers and that the regional hegemon, China, did not pose an existential threat to its East Asian neighbors. Instead, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam built strong states, especially between the fifth and eighth centuries, in emulation of China. As the book lays out, China had a tremendous civilizational influence in Korea, Vietnam, and even Japan, leading to the diffusion of cosmological-political concepts such as the Mandate of Heaven, the syncretic traditions of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism, meritocratic examinations for civil servant, the organization of government into functional ministries, a system of writing, taxation techniques, the famous (and controversial) tributary system model of international relations, and numerous other political and social practices that led to stronger states. As a result, East Asian states were more complex, less corrupt, and more capable at providing public goods by 700 CE than European states would be for more than half a millennia afterwards. …