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Scholars of international relations have embraced the tributary system as the dominant lens to studying historical orders of East Asia. Hendrik Spruyt’s The World Imagined, a rare gem in the study of comparative international orders, argues that the tributary system articulated the ontology of the historical East Asia international society. This article cautions against two common pitfalls. First, the tributary system is a modern conceptual construct that can blind researchers to other types of political orders existing throughout East Asia’s diverse landscape and history, thus contributing to a Sinocentric bias. Both the Mongols and the Tibetans adopted a distinctive set of rules of inter-polity conduct that have little to do with the Chinese tributary system. Second, the tributary system perpetuates the myth that East Asia has been historically peaceful, while glossing over the numerous interpolity warfare that took place in the region as well as internal conflicts within the same cultural sphere of a state. I argue that our understanding of international orders can be substantially enriched when we take material power seriously and study its interplay with ideational factors.

Is unipolarity durable? IR scholars have offered contradictory answers, with primacists arguing for the longevity of US unipolarity and declinists suggesting the opposite. The literature suffers, h...

Should the United States end its security commitment to Taiwan to avoid war with an increasingly powerful China? This chapter argues that accommodating China on Taiwan will increase—not decrease—the probability of conflict in East Asia. Drawing on IR theory, I analyze the five errors of accommodationist proposals—underestimation of structural pressures, mistaken assumption of China’s limited aims, damage to US alliance credibility, downplaying of Taiwan’s democratic and strategic values, and destruction of the delicate balance between deterrence and reassurance. Contrary to accommodationist arguments, ending US security commitment to Taiwan will not make Asia more peaceful but rather more dangerous. For US grand strategy toward Asia, Taiwan is an asset, not a liability.

In this article I remedy the popular misconception that the East Asian international system was hierarchical and non-egalitarian in history. I argue that the tribute system is mainly a function of power. Backed by power, Confucian norms and rules became the rules of the game in the system. Power asymmetry gave rise to hierarchy in foreign relations while power symmetry led to diplomatic equality between great powers. East Asia during the tenth to the thirteenth centuries was a multistate system without a regional hegemon. In the Song-Liao international system (960–1125), due to power symmetry, the two great powers conducted their foreign policy on the basis of formal equality. In the Song-Jin international system (1127–1234), the weaker Song China became a Jin vassal state and acknowledged its inferior status in the Jin-derived hierarchy. In studying historical East Asia, Confucian rhetoric needs to be examined against power reality. Only by taking power seriously can we get a better understanding of the East Asian international system.

The rise of inequality in China is one of the most serious social problems in the reform era in China. Previous studies have debated the relative importance of human capital, political capital, and other factors in determining personal income. Using a new dataset from 2006 China General Social Survey (CGSS, 2006), the first author replicates earlier tests to measure whether the market or state has more impact on incomes as a way to the competing hypotheses related to human versus political capital. The results of the ordinary least squares regression analysis show no significance in party membership, state ownership, and work experience, while the first author does find high returns to education, which supports Nee’s market transition theory. Moreover, the findings indicate that market sectors, including domestic private enterprises and foreign enterprises have remarkable advantages in earnings, and there is a great income gap between different regions, sectors, and within the sectors. To summarize, the market and state play a dual role in determining income in transitional urban China.

This article examines the international factor underlying China’s grand strategy of peaceful development, which can be deciphered as a strategy to balance American power through internal balancing and soft balancing. The strategy of internal balancing aims to increase China’s relative power through economic development and military modernization, whereas the strategy of soft balancing attempts to limit US ability to impose its preference on China through Beijing’s engagement in multilateral institutions, bilateral partnerships, and economic diplomacy.The strategic logic is to maintain a stable external environment for China to concentrate on economic growth and accumulate relative power — without provoking a vigorous US response.

What can Chinese history tell us about China’s rise? “Chinese exceptionalism” holds that historical China has a peaceful culture rooted in Confucianism that cherishes harmony and abhors wars. China’s unique historical legacy suggests that the country will not follow the conflict-ridden path of the West. This article refutes the four popular myths of Chinese exceptionalism: 1) the myth of no foreign expansion; 2) the myth of Zheng He’s voyages; 3) the myth of the Great Wall; and 4) the myth of the kingly way. The historical record does not support the claims of Chinese exceptionalism. Historical China behaved like a realist power, much in the same way as other great powers did elsewhere. The distribution of power, not historical and cultural legacy, holds the key to understanding Chinese foreign policy. Demystifying China’s historical and cultural legacy will help us better assess the implications of China’s rise today.

This paper examines a period of East Asian history when the region was dominated by a regional hegemon: the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), and discusses the implications for understanding China’s broad international behavior today. The central question is two-fold: How does a political actor become a hegemon in its region of the world? And once it becomes dominant, how does the hegemon maintain its supremacy in the international system and minimize resistance by lesser political actors? I argue that a political actor becomes a regional hegemon through expansion and accumulation of relative power and manages its dominance through establishing rules of the game for the system. The Manchus of the Qing dynasty expanded from a small area in present northeastern China to become the preponderant state in East Asia, its hegemony lasting more than 150 years. The Qing conquered Ming China, Mongolia, and Xinjiang, and incorporated Tibet into the empire. Qing rulers skillfully adopted a strategy of domination that combined both force and diplomacy and used its preponderant power to establish tributary rules of the game to govern interactions between political actors in the system. Through the use of military force and institutional innovation, the Manchus were able to achieve regional hegemony in East Asia and eliminate security challenges to its dominance. The present boundary of China is a legacy of Qing territorial reach. Like its imperial predecessor, China’s current rise cannot be divorced from a consideration of relative power. The international distribution of power holds the key to understanding Chinese foreign policy today.

The central question of this article is: why is peripheral nationalism virtually non-existent in Guangdong but has long been a problem in Xinjiang? Existing theories are inadequate for answering this question. They are tailored to either wealthy or poor regions, but not both. They also fail to explain the absence of nationalism in Guangdong and its presence in Xinjiang. In this article, I propose a model that can explain peripheral nationalism in both wealthy and poor regions. The model incorporates two key variables, elite status and national identity. Specifically, I argue that if the elites from the peripheral region can hold important positions in the central government and if the peripheral residents identify themselves with the core nation, the probability of nationalist movements will be low. On the other hand, if their elites are excluded from high office in the central government and if their people do not identity themselves with the core nation, the probability of nationalist movements will be ...

In the present content distribution environment, many types of digital content exist, and there are many ways in which the content can be consumed and reused. Since content consumers can easily distribute their content to other users, the demand for re-edited content or "secondary content" has increased. In the long term, for any rights management system to be accepted by the market place, the system must effectively manage how different rights are granted under different usage request scenarios, provide a mechanism to enable clear rights description, precise control usage, and handle the derived rights. This paper presents a set of extended rights vocabulary for authoring tools, which manages usage control of copyrighted content. We consider the common features of modern authoring tools, and design a comprehensive rights schema for interactive video-editing systems. With our proposed rights vocabulary and framework, we can derive works that respect the rights of the original content owners, and the corresponding license(s) can be automatically generated based on various content authoring scenarios.

This paper presents a video editing system based on the proposed rights inheritance framework for generating a secondary content. We propose rights inheritance content editor (RICE) module that provides the editing control with digital rights management (DRM) according to the granted rights during the authoring process, and manages inherited rights generation for derived contents. With our proposed rights inheritance framework and RICE, a secondary content can be generated respecting the rights of original contents.