East Asia

• 1. Introduction

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  East Asia is home to around 33 percent of continental Asia's people and about 20 percent of everyone alive. Its overall population density runs to 133 people per square kilometer, roughly three times the world average of 45. Yet that crowding is wildly uneven. Mongolia, a landlocked sovereign state, holds the lowest population density on Earth, while the coastal and riparian zones rank among the most packed places anywhere. This is a region that includes China, Japan, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, and Taiwan, alongside the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau. Why do four of these economies sit among the world's largest? How did one civilization come to lend its writing, its calendar, and its philosophy to so many neighbors? And how did a region governed for two millennia by tribute become, by the early twentieth century, the stage for an empire that nearly led the world?

• 2. The Chinese Sphere

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  Historian Ping-ti Ho called China the cradle of Eastern civilization, placing it beside the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt and the Greek cradle of the West. China was the first region settled in East Asia and the core from which other parts of the region took shape. For thousands of years it stood as the leading civilization, and succeeding dynasties exerted cultural, economic, political, and military influence for over two millennia. East Asian vocabularies and scripts often derive from Classical Chinese and Chinese script. The Chinese calendar serves as the root from which many other East Asian calendars descend. China, Japan, and Korea form the three core countries and civilizations, having once shared a written language, a culture, and a Confucian value system instituted by Imperial China. The various other regions were selective, adopting only the Chinese influences that suited their local customs. The relationship has been likened to the historical sway of Greco-Roman civilization over the classical West.

• 3. Tribute And Transmission

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  Under Emperor Wu of Han, the Han dynasty made China the regional powerhouse, hosting the largest unified population in East Asia and the most literate, urbanized, and technologically advanced civilization of the time. China's reach into Korea began in 108 BC, when Han forces conquered the northern Korean peninsula and established a province called Lelang. Through that contact, Korea took on the Chinese writing system, monetary system, rice culture, philosophical schools, and Confucian political institutions. Starting in the fourth century AD, Japan adopted Chinese characters, which remain integral to its writing system. Jomon society in ancient Japan had earlier incorporated wet-rice cultivation and metallurgy through contact with Korea. From the third through the eighteenth centuries, a tributary system governed diplomacy and trade. The Chinese emperor received tribute and returned political benefits like recognition or non-aggression agreements, or physical gifts like porcelain and silks, conferring legitimacy on other rulers. Drawing on the Tang political system, Prince Naka no Oe launched the Taika Reform in 645 AD, transforming Japan into a more centralized bureaucratic empire. During the Nara period Japan imported Chinese government styles, and the kimono drew inspiration from Chinese hanfu in the eighth century.

• 4. The Japanese Ascent

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  By the mid-nineteenth century the weakening Qing dynasty was fraught with political corruption and stagnation, unable to rejuvenate itself against industrializing European powers and a rapidly modernizing Japan. Commodore Matthew C. Perry of the United States opened Japan to Western influence, and the country expanded in earnest after the 1860s. The Meiji Restoration sparked a transformation from an isolated feudal state into East Asia's first industrialized nation. Japan defeated the Qing dynasty in the First Sino-Japanese War, then defeated Russia in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. That victory was the first major military win in the modern era by an East Asian power over a European one. During World War I, with European presence reduced, Japan occupied Germany's concessions in Shandong. In December 1914 it issued its Twenty-One Demands to China, and the Republic of China under Yuan Shikai conceded to most of them in 1915. Japanese hegemony grew into an empire that would include Taiwan and Korea. During World War II, the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere brought Korea, Taiwan, much of eastern China and Manchuria, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia under Japanese control.

• 5. Partition And Miracle

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  On the 1st of October 1949, the People's Republic of China was proclaimed, after the Communists defeated the Nationalist Republic of China and that government retreated to Taiwan. The Chinese Civil War had resumed once the Japanese were defeated. The Korean peninsula was partitioned, producing the Democratic People's Republic of Korea in the north and the Republic of Korea in the south. The Korean War, fought from 1950 to 1953, raised regional and international tensions, and the northeast hardened along communist and anti-communist lines. The latter half of the twentieth century brought Japan's postwar economic miracle, three decades of unprecedented growth, followed by a slowdown in the 1990s. Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan saw their own economic rise, and Hong Kong and Macau were handed over near the century's end. In the twenty-first century, China integrated into the global economy through its entry into the World Trade Organization. As of at least 2022, the region is more peaceful, integrated, wealthy, and stable than at any time in the previous 150 years.

• 6. Drawing The Borders

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  In common usage, East Asia typically refers to Greater China, Japan, Korea, and Mongolia, yet no single definition holds. The World Bank frames the region as the three major Northeast Asian economies of China, Japan, and South Korea, plus Mongolia, North Korea, the Russian Far East, and Siberia. The Council on Foreign Relations adds the Russian Far East, Mongolia, and Nepal. The Economic Research Institute for Northeast Asia includes China, Japan, the Koreas, Nepal, Mongolia, and eastern Russia. Mongolia troubles the boundary, since Confucianism and the Chinese writing system had limited impact there, so it is sometimes grouped with Central Asian states like Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan. Some scholars include Vietnam as part of the greater Chinese cultural sphere, though Chinese characters are no longer used in its written language and many organizations classify it as Southeast Asian. The World Health Organization avoids the term entirely, labeling the region the Western Pacific and grouping China, Japan, and Korea with Australia and the rest of Oceania. Certain Japanese islands are associated with Oceania because of non-continental geology and biogeographical ties to Micronesia.

• 7. Peoples And Faiths

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  East Asia counts 76 officially recognized minority or indigenous ethnic groups: 55 native to mainland China, 16 native to Taiwan, one native to Hokkaido in the Ainu, and four native to Mongolia. The Han are the major group in China and Taiwan, the Yamato in Japan, Koreans across the two Koreas, and Mongols in Mongolia. The Ryukyuan people, indigenous to islands stretching from Kyushu to Taiwan, remain unrecognized. Religion follows the same many-rooted pattern. Buddhism, mostly Mahayana, sits alongside Confucianism, Taoism, ancestral worship, and Chinese folk religion in Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. Japan practices Shinto, while Korea holds Christianity and Musok. Tengerism and Tibetan Buddhism prevail among Mongols and Tibetans, and Shamanism is widespread among indigenous populations of northeastern China such as the Manchus. Shared festivals knit these peoples together. The Dragon Boat Festival falls on the fifth day of the fifth month, observed by Han, Koreans, and Yamato, with dragon boat races in China and iris-water hair washing in Korea. The Hanshi or Cold Food Festival traditionally fell on the 105th day after the winter solstice, honoring the loyal Jie Zhitui at the order of Duke Wen of Jin.

• 8. A Warming Region

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  Guangzhou is projected to experience the single largest annual economic losses from sea level rise in the world, potentially reaching US$254 million by 2050. Under the highest warming scenario and without adaptation, the city's cumulative losses would exceed US$1 trillion by 2100. Shanghai is expected to face annual losses of around 1 percent of local GDP absent adaptation. The Yangtze River basin, a sensitive and biodiverse ecosystem, may lose around 20 percent of its species this century under 2 degrees of change and roughly 43 percent under 4.5 degrees. The region has grown warmer, with measurable increases in the frequency and severity of heatwaves, and its monsoon is expected to intensify, bringing more flooding. China has embarked on a sponge cities program, designing urban areas with more green space and permeable paving to handle flash floods from greater precipitation extremes. Under high-warming scenarios, critical health thresholds for heat stress will at times be breached in areas like the North China Plain during the twenty-first century.