This chapter offers an overview of the strategic environment and grand strategies employed by the Ming and Qing dynasties. It discusses how they built upon pre-existing strategic traditions while also incorporating new technologies and tactics to expand the empire, creating a sophisticated state capable of responding to a dazzling array of challenges. The chapter not only delineates the nature of the strategic threats faced by the last Chinese empires, but also covers the extensive primary source materials demonstrating how imperial leadership and personal networks operated alongside institutions to create an effective grand-strategy paradigm allowing the Ming and Qing to retain their superiority in east Asia for some five centuries. Finally, this overview of late imperial grand strategy offers clues into how China still perceives the world and its strategic goals in Asia.

This chapter looks at the grand strategic implications of the Japanese invasion of Korea in the 1590s, which was successfully thwarted by a Sino-Korean alliance that emerged out of China’s obligations to Korea as part of the so-called tributary system of foreign relations. The Great East Asian War of 1592–1598, known to Koreans as the Imjin War, was the largest conflict on the globe in the sixteenth century yet it is still barely known outside of East Asia. The chapter will offer an overview of how the war fit into the ongoing grand strategy of Ming-dynasty China as it sought to preserve its hegemonic position in East Asia. It will also examine the motivations and strategic calculations of the Japanese hegemon, Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536–1598), who sought to overturn the longstanding Ming order and create a new international system that could have fundamentally altered the course of Asian, if not world, history had it succeeded. In the end, the defeat of Hideyoshi’s ambitions preserved the East Asian world order and China’s hegemonic position therein for another 250 years. In addition to examining the motivations and ramifications of the war through primary research, this chapter touches upon some of the recent historical and political science literature concerning the war and its broader implications for the study of international relations and power politics in the early modern East Asian context.

This chapter provides an overview of the international relations of historical East Asia. We begin with the Qin–Han unification of what is now central China (221 BC – 220 AD), extending into the era of contact with the West, stopping around 1900 when the system had clearly disintegrated, and Western imperialism and the rise of Japan had created entirely new dynamics. Our purposes are multiple. The first is to provide a stylized periodization and chronology of crucial events – what might be thought of as key markers – and how they reshaped the regional order. However, our second is to amplify on a number of the theoretical themes raised in the Introduction, placing them in appropriate historical context. New scholarship is overturning many of the most hoary stereotypes, starting with the presumption that the history of East Asian international relations is simply the history of China and its dynastic changes. Rather, we have to think of the history of a vast, vibrant, and diverse region encompassing a variety of political forms on China’s peripheries, from well-established kingdoms and social orders, to frontiers of settled farmers, as well as nomadic peoples.

This chapter offers an overview of Chinese warfare, c. 1500–1800, with an emphasis upon the way in which state-sponsored violence was deployed to counter the multitude of strategic threats faced by the Ming and Qing dynasties. It highlights the role of violence in maintaining and extending the power and legitimacy of the imperial Chinese state. For even if Chinese dynasties were wont to extol Confucian values of benevolence and pacifism, the harsh reality was that state-sponsored violence was generally the key to maintaining authority, both domestically and in the broader East Asian world. The chapter shows how recent secondary studies have explored many dimensions of China’s martial culture and how these studies in turn illuminate the array of military challenges that faced all Chinese dynasties. It offers a typology of military threats and situates them specifically within the late imperial Chinese context. Central to this analysis is the massive size and ethnic diversity of the empire, which posed unique challenges to the rulers and their military establishments. The chapter also offers suggestions for future work and comparative studies.