In East Asia, the liberal Westernizing tendencies of the 1920s were replaced in the 1930s by authoritarian single-party rule in China and ultranationalistic militarism in Japan. Japan was wracked by a series of assassinations and attempted coups, which left the miliary in control. On the pretext of a staged explosion on the tracks of the Japanese-run South Manchurian Railroad (in China) in 1931, the Japanese army seized control over much of Manchuria and established a puppet state called Manchukuo. While Chiang Kai-shek struggled to put the Republic of China on a secure foundation, the rising communist leader Mao Zedong began experimenting with rural peasant revolution. After Chiang Kai-shek was kidnapped by his own generals and compelled to agree to a United Front with the Communists against Japan, a minor incident in July 1937 triggered the start of full-scale war with Japan. Japan’s inability to decisively defeat Nationalist China, then, led Japan to expand the war, eventually attacking Pearl Harbor and bringing the Allies into the war on China’s side.

The East Asian community of states, having matured by the tenth century, thereafter continued to develop along somewhat independent trajectories. China settled into a distinctive late imperial form, characterized by the presence of an examination-recruited mandarin elite. Korea became more uncompromisingly Confucian; Vietnam gained independence; and Japan came to be dominated by uniquely Japanese warrior elites: the Shogun and samurai. China, under the Song Dynasty, became a major center of maritime trade and advanced technology. In the thirteenth century the Mongols erupted into East Asia, conquering China and reducing Korea to a subordinate “son-in-law” state. The Mongols, ironically, helped expose Koreans to Neo-Confucianism, and under increasing Confucian influence, Chinese-style family patterns became the new “tradition” in Korea. In Japan, conflict between leading warrior families resulted in the epochal Gempei War (1180–1185), from which Minamoto Yoritomo emerged victorious and became Japan’s first Shogun. By the end of this period, growing volumes of maritime trade ushered East Asia into the Early Modern age.

In the late eighteenth century, the British East India Company discovered that opium grown in colonial India sold well in China, where it was, however, illegal. Mounting tensions caused by the illegal trade led to an Opium War in 1840–1842, won by Britain and leading to the establishment of a “semi-colonial” treaty port system in China. Mid nineteenth-century China was also wracked by multiple rebellions, including the massive Christian Taiping Rebellion. Yet the Qing Dynasty not only survived but also experienced some revitalization. Meanwhile, in 1854 a U.S. Navy squadron pressured Japan to end its seclusion policy, and a similar treaty port system was established in Japan as well. In 1867 the last Shogun resigned, and in 1868 power was returned to the Japanese imperial government in the Meiji Restoration. Meiji Japan embraced rapid Westernization in the name of an allegedly primordial imperial line. Japan then pressured Korea into granting it treaty port privileges, and, after defeating China in a war fought over Korea, Japan eventually reduced Korea to an outright colony. Starting with the seizure of Saigon in 1859, Vietnam was colonized by France.

Far from being “the end of history,” the post-Cold War era has seen dramatic new developments in East Asia. China rose with astonishing speed to superpower status, and reasserted Communist Party control after a period when it seemed in danger of becoming irrelevant to China’s new consumer society. China is now openly challenging the United States and western Europe for global leadership. China has also, surprisingly, witnessed some revival of old traditions such as Confucianism. South Korea has captivated the world with its attractive modern pop culture, as well as with the products of its industry such as smartphones and automobiles. South Korea has also ended authoritarian rule and become a democracy (while North Korea, on the other hand, still seems to be mired in the Cold War). Japan has remained economically stagnant after the bursting of its stock market and real estate bubbles in 1990, but Japan has also made itself a globalizing center of exciting new pop culture. Vietnam, meanwhile, consolidated its socialist reunification, and implemented some of the same kinds of market-based economic reforms that had been pioneered in China.

The Cold War divided East Asia. Beginning around 1978, the communist People’s Republic of China implemented market-based reforms that unleashed spectacular economic takeoff, but which were not accompanied by corresponding political reforms. After a bloody war, Korea has remained divided between an impoverished and isolationistic communist regime in the north and the non-communist south. Japan’s postwar “developmental state” economy boomed, and by 1981 Japan had become the world’s largest automaker. Trade wars with the U.S. led to a sharp increase in the exchange value of the yen, however, and the bursting of the Japanese bubble economy in 1990. In Vietnam, after the defeat and withdrawal of French colonial forces, massive American military intervention in support of the non-communist south became deeply controversial. Eventually the U.S. disengaged, and Vietnam was reunified by communist northern forces in 1975. The Cold War therefore ended, somewhat surprisingly, with communist regimes still entrenched in East Asia in mainland China, Vietnam, and North Korea.

This chapter relates the legendary origins of the modern East Asian nations, and the importance of those legends to modern national identities. It then reconstructs the somewhat different story of the origins of Bronze Age civilization in East Asia based on the archeological evidence, starting in the Central Plain of what is today north China. As a fundamental feature, the languages of East Asia are discussed. This chapter argues that it was widespread shared regional use of the largely non-phonetic Chinese written characters, despite great linguistic diversity, that gave East Asia much of its cultural coherence and distinctiveness, as well as much shared vocabulary.

Much of the foreign investment that has fueled China’s post-reform economic boom has come from overseas Chinese people, with Hong Kong serving as China’s largest single source of foreign direct investment. In addition, there is extensive sharing of popular culture throughout the Chinese-speaking world. Hong Kong, a British colony since 1842, was returned to Chinese rule in 1997 under the formula “one country, two systems” – supposedly allowing Hong Kong a continued degree of autonomy. But a controversial extradition agreement in 2019 sparked mass protests, which Beijing reacted to in 2020 by imposing a new National Security Law that brought Hong Kong more firmly under control. Taiwan, meanwhile, became the last refuge for the Chinese Nationalist Party after it lost the Civil War to the Communists in 1949. In the 1980s–1990s, opposition political parties were legalized, and Taiwan evolved into a genuine multiparty democracy. Because Beijing insists that Taiwan is a renegade province that must be recovered eventually, and because Taiwan is a flourishing democracy that now produces more than 60 percent of all the world’s computer chips, Taiwan is a place of great global strategic concern.

An East Asian community of states based on shared cultural and institutional models matured in the seventh–tenth centuries. Beginning in the mid seventh century, Japan completely transformed itself according to Chinese-style codes of penal and administrative law. A unified and independent Korea, after 676, maintained a careful balance between native traditions and prestigious Chinese models. In China itself, the great Tang dynasty consolidated a more homogeneously Chinese culture and identity. Even South Asian Buddhism was domesticated. But the tenth century then brought changes of dynasty to both China and Korea, independence for what becomes Vietnam, and gradually emerging new directions in Japan, including weakening of the imperial government, the emergence of samurai warriors, and the flourishing of Japanese language literature.

This chapter describes the founding of the ancient Zhou Dynasty and its early articulation of Mandate of Heaven theory, which legitimated changes of Chinese dynasties. The loosely centralized Zhou eventually disintegrated into fully independent kingdoms called the Warring States. This became a time of cultural and intellectual ferment that gave birth to the Hundred Schools of classical Chinese thought, including Confucianism, Daoism, and Legalism. Confucianism eventually became a defining feature of all East Asia. More immediately, Legalism helped transform the Qin kingdom into the most powerful of the Warring States, conquer all its rivals, and forge the first Chinese imperial dynasty. Qin excesses led to its rapid collapse, but Qin was succeeded by a more enduring Han Dynasty based on similar, though more moderate, imperial institutions. After four centuries of Han imperial unity, it too collapsed into warlordism, followed by the famous Three Kingdoms period.

The Introduction explains what East Asia is and how it is defined here: which is culturally, primarily in terms of shared use of the Chinese writing system, shared institutional models, Confucianism, and common forms of Buddhism. It argues that East Asia has changed greatly over time and is internally diverse, but that there are also important commonalities and continuities. The relatively recent origins of some traditions are also discussed. East Asias global importance and continued relevance are emphasized.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, China’s weakness provoked crisis, and new Western-inspired ideas of nationalism were taking root in East Asia. A Nationalist Revolution in 1911–1912 replaced the Qing Empire with a new Republic of China, and rejection of Chinese tradition was promoted by the “New Youth” of the May Fourth Movement. After the first president of the republic died, China dissolved into warlordism. Under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalist Party struggled to reunify China. In 1905 the Japanese defeated Russia in war and acquired Russian facilities in Manchuria. Korea became a Japanese colony, which the Japanese attempted to assimilate. But Japanese rule in Korea was harsh and discriminatory, and a spirit of Korean nationalism was brewing. In the Japanese home islands, universal adult male suffrage was implemented in 1925, and Japan had become a multi-party democracy. In French colonial Vietnam, the 1920s brought accelerating French investment, and Western influences, ranging from Hollywood movies to Marxism. But, despite the appeal of the ideals of the French Revolution, many Vietnamese people felt excluded.