East Asia is home to some of the most ancient civilizations on Earth. Settled agricultural societies have flourished in China for more than 7000 years, which makes China among the oldest continuous civilizations in the world. After centuries of leading the world technologically and economically, East Asia was gradually eclipsed by European powers beginning in the seventeenth century. Outright domination by Europeans occurred only in certain places and not until the nineteenth century. The twentieth century was violent and tumultuous, and after World War II, the countries of East Asia adopted entirely new economic systems. Three of the countries—China, Mongolia, and North Korea—became communist, and stayed so until the 1980s, when all but North Korea began to allow more capitalist practices. The other three countries—Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan—took a more capitalist route after World War II and today have among the highest standards of living in the world. China is now a global economic superpower that rivals the United States and the European Union.

Chinese civilization evolved from several hearths, including the North China Plain, the Sichuan Basin, and the lands of interior Asia that were inhabited by Mongolian nomadic pastoralists. On East Asia’s eastern fringe, the Korean Peninsula and the islands of Japan and Taiwan were profoundly influenced by the culture of China, but they were isolated enough that each developed a distinctive culture and maintained political independence most of the time. In the early twentieth century, Japan industrialized rapidly by integrating the European influences that China disdained. As Figure 9.11 shows, both ancient and contemporary traditions are celebrated in East Asia today.

Although humans have lived in East Asia for hundreds of thousands of years, the region’s earliest complex civilizations appeared in China about 4000 years ago. Written records exist only from the civilization that was located in north-central China. There, a small, militarized, feudal aristocracy (see Chapter 4 for a discussion of feudalism) controlled vast estates on which the majority of the population lived and worked as semi-enslaved farmers and laborers. The landowners usually owed allegiance to one of the petty kingdoms that dotted northern China. These kingdoms were relatively self-sufficient and well-defended with private armies.

An important move away from feudalism came with the Qin empire (beginning in 221 b.c.e.), which instituted a trained and salaried bureaucracy in combination with a strong military to extend the monarch’s authority into the countryside. One part of the legacy of the Qin empire is shown in Figure 9.12B.

The Qin system proved more efficient than the old feudal allegiance system it replaced. The estates of the aristocracy were divided into small units and sold to the previously semi-enslaved farmers. The empire’s agricultural output increased because the people worked harder to farm the land they now owned. In addition, the salaried bureaucrats were more responsible than the aristocrats they replaced, especially about building and maintaining levees, reservoirs, and other tax- supported public works that reduced the threat of flood, drought, and other natural disasters. Although the Qin empire was short-lived, subsequent empires maintained Qin bureaucratic ruling methods, which have proved essential in governing a united China.

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The philosophy of Confucianism is closely related to China’s bureaucratic ruling tradition. Confucius, who lived from 551 to 479 B.C.E., was an idealist who was interested in reforming government and eliminating violence from society. He thought human relationships should involve a set of defined roles and mutual obligations. Confucian values include courtesy, knowledge, integrity, and respect for and loyalty to parents and government officials. These values diffused across the region and are still widely shared throughout East Asia (see Figure 9.12A).

The Confucian Bias Toward Males The model for Confucian philosophy was the patriarchal extended family. The oldest male held the seat of authority and was responsible for the well-being of everyone in the family. All other family members were aligned under the patriarch according to age and gender. Beyond the family, the Confucian patriarchal order held that the emperor was the grand patriarch of all China, charged with ensuring the welfare of society. Imperial bureaucrats were to do his bidding and commoners were to obey the bureaucrats.

Over the centuries, Confucian philosophy penetrated all aspects of East Asian society. Concerning the ideal woman, for example, a student of Confucius wrote: “A woman’s duties are to cook the five grains, heat the wine, look after her parents-in-law, make clothes, and that is all! When she is young, she must submit to her parents. After her marriage, she must submit to her husband. When she is widowed, she must submit to her son.” These concepts about limited roles for women affected society at large, where the idea developed that sons were the more valuable offspring, with public roles, while daughters were primarily servants within the home.

The Bias Against Merchants For thousands of years, Confucian ideals were used to maintain the power and position of emperors and their bureaucratic administrators at the expense of merchants. In parable and folklore, merchants were characterized as a necessary evil, greedy and disruptive to the social order. At the same time, the services of merchants were sorely needed. Such conflicting ideas meant the status of merchants waxed and waned. At times, high taxes left merchants unable to invest in new industries or trade networks. At other times, however, the anti-merchant aspect of Confucianism was less influential, and trade and entrepreneurship flourished. Under communism, merchants again acquired a negative image. Later, when a market economy was encouraged, the social status of merchants rose once again.

Cycles of Expansion, Decline, and Recovery Although the Confucian bureaucracy at times facilitated the expansion of imperial China (Figure 9.13), its resistance to change also led to periods of decline. Heavy taxes were periodically levied on farmers, bringing about farmer revolts that weakened imperial control. Threats from outside, particularly invasions by nomadic people from what are today Mongolia and western China, inspired the creation of massive defenses such as the Great Wall (see Figure 9.12C) built along China’s northern border. Nevertheless, the Confucian bureaucracy always recovered from invasions. After a few generations, the nomads were indistinguishable from the Chinese. At the same time, Chinese culture and civilization absorbed a tremendous mixture of different influences and, as a result, has itself changed.

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One nomadic invasion did result in important links between China and the rest of the world. In the 1200s, the Mongolian military leader Genghis Khan and his descendants were able to conquer all of China. They then pushed west across Asia as far as Hungary and Poland (see Chapter 5). It was during the time of this Mongol empire (also known as the Yuan Empire) that traders such as the Venetian Marco Polo made the first direct contacts between China and Europe. These connections proved much more significant for Europe, which was dazzled by China’s wealth and technologies, than for China, which saw Europe as backward and barbaric.

Indeed, from 1100 to 1600, China remained the world’s most developed region, despite enduring several cycles of imperial expansion, decline, and recovery. It had the largest economy, the highest living standards, and the most magnificent cities. Improved strains of rice allowed dense farming populations to expand throughout southern China and supported large urban industrial populations. Nor was innovation lacking: Chinese inventions included paper making, printing, paper currency, gunpowder, and improved shipbuilding techniques.

During the well-organized Ming dynasty, 1368–1644, Zheng He, a Chinese Muslim admiral in the emperor’s navy, directed an expedition that could have led to China conquering a vast overseas empire. From 1405 to 1433, Zheng He sailed 250 ships—the biggest and most technologically advanced fleet that the world had ever seen. Zheng He took his fleet throughout established Chinese trade routes to Southeast Asia, across the Indian Ocean, and all the way to the east coast of Africa.

The lavish voyages of Zheng He were funded for almost 30 years, but they never resulted in an overseas empire like those established by European countries a century or two later. These newly explored regions simply lacked much that China needed or wanted. Moreover, back home the empire was continually threatened by the armies of nomads from Mongolia, so any surplus resources were needed for upgrading the Great Wall. Eventually the emperor decided that Zheng He’s explorations were not worth the effort. In the years following Zheng He’s voyages, China reduced its contacts with the rest of the world as the emperor focused on repelling the Mongols. As a result, the pace of technological change slowed, leaving China ill prepared to respond to growing challenges from Europe after 1600. China did, however, become a regional colonizing power by extending control to include territories in Central Asia and Southeast Asia (see Figure 9.13).

By the mid-1500s, during Europe’s Age of Exploration, Spanish and Portuguese traders interested in acquiring China’s silks, spices, and ceramics found their way to East Asian ports. They brought a number of new food crops from the Americas to exchange such as corn, peppers, peanuts, and potatoes. These new sources of nourishment contributed to a spurt of economic expansion and population growth during the Qing, or Manchurian, dynasty (1644–1912), and by the mid-1800s, China’s population was more than 400 million; at that same time, Europe had 270 million people.

By the nineteenth century, European merchants gained access to Chinese markets and European influence increased markedly. In exchange for Chinese silks and ceramics, British merchants supplied opium from India, which was one of the few things that Chinese merchants would trade for. The emperor attempted to crack down on this drug trade because of its debilitating effects on Chinese society. The result was the Opium Wars (1839–1860), in which Britain badly defeated China. Hong Kong became a British possession, and British trade, including its opium trade, expanded throughout China well into the twentieth century (see Figure 9.12D).

The final blow to China’s long preeminence in East Asia came in 1895, when a rapidly modernizing Japan won a spectacular naval victory over China in the Sino-Japanese War (and to solidify its emerging regional dominance, Japan also defeated Russia). After this first defeat by the Japanese, the Qing dynasty made only halfhearted attempts at modernization, and in 1912, it was overthrown by an internal revolt and collapsed. From the time of the decline of the Qing empire (1895) until China’s Communist Party took control in 1949, much of the country was governed by provincial rulers in rural areas and by a mixture of Chinese, Japanese, and European administrative agencies in the major cities.

In response to the absence of a central state authority, two rival reformist groups arose in China in the early twentieth century. The Nationalist Party, known as the Kuomintang (KMT), was an urban-based movement that appealed to workers as well as the middle and upper classes. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), on the other hand, found its base among the rural poor. At first the KMT gained the upper hand, uniting the country in 1924. However, Japan’s invasion of China in 1931 changed the dynamic.

By 1937, Japan had control of most major Chinese cities. The KMT did not resist the Japanese effectively and were confined to the few deep interior cities not under Japanese control. The CCP, however, waged a constant guerilla war against the Japanese throughout rural China, where they gained widespread support. Japan’s brutal occupation caused 10 million Chinese deaths, including those of 250,000 to 300,000 civilians in the city of Nanjing, then China’s capital. Similar acts of wartime brutality, as well as the keeping of local “comfort women” (forced prostitution) by the Japanese army in the occupied territories during World War II, still complicate the relationship between Japan and its East Asian neighbors today. When Japan finally withdrew in 1945, defeated at the end of World War II by the United States, Russia, and other Allied forces, the vastly more popular CCP pushed the KMT out of the country and into exile in Taiwan. In 1949, the CCP, led by Mao Zedong, proclaimed the country the “People’s Republic of China,” with Mao as president.

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Mao’s Communist Revolution Mao Zedong’s revolutionary government became extremely powerful, dominating all the outlying areas of China—the Far Northeast, Inner Mongolia, and western China (Xinjiang)—and launched a brutal occupation of Tibet (Xizang). The People’s Republic of China was in many ways similar to past Chinese empires. The Chinese Communist Party replaced the Confucian bureaucracy and Mao Zedong became a sort of emperor with unquestioned authority. China received support from the Soviet Union, but the two communist states remained wary of each other for decades.

Among the early beneficiaries of the revolution were the masses of Chinese farmers and landless laborers. On the eve of the revolution, huge numbers lived in abject poverty. Famines were frequent, infant mortality was high, and life expectancy was low. The vast majority of women and girls held low social status and spent their lives in unrelenting servitude.

The revolution drastically changed this. All aspects of economic and social life became subject to central planning by the Communist Party. Land and wealth were reallocated, often resulting in an improved standard of living for those who needed it most. Major efforts were made to improve agricultural production and to reduce the severity of floods and droughts. Everyone, regardless of age, class, or gender, was mobilized to construct almost entirely by hand huge public works projects—roads, dams, canals, whole mountains terraced into fields for rice and other crops. “Barefoot doctors” with rudimentary medical training dispensed basic medical care, midwife services, and nutritional advice to people in even the most remote locations. Schools were built in the smallest of villages. Opportunities for women became available, and some of the worst abuses against them, such as the crippling binding of feet to make women’s feet small and childlike, were stopped. Most Chinese people who are old enough to have witnessed these changes say that the revolution did a great deal to improve overall living standards for the majority.

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Mao’s Missteps Progress, however, came at enormous human and environmental costs. During the Great Leap Forward (a government-sponsored program of massive economic reform initiated in the 1950s), 30 million people died, many from famine brought on by poorly planned development; others because they were persecuted for opposing the reforms. Meanwhile, deforestation, soil degradation, and agricultural mismanagement became widespread. In the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward, some Communist Party leaders tried to correct the inefficiencies of the centrally planned economy only to be demoted or jailed as Mao Zedong remained in power.

In 1966, partially in response to the failures of the Great Leap Forward, a political movement known as the Cultural Revolution enforced support for Mao and punished dissenters. Everyone was required to study the “Little Red Book” of Mao’s sayings (see Figure 9.12E). Educated people and intellectuals were a main target of the Cultural Revolution because they were thought to instigate dangerously critical evaluations of Mao and the central planning of the Communist Party. Tens of millions of Chinese scientists, scholars, and students were sent out of the cities to labor in mines and industries or to jail, where as many as 1 million died. Children were encouraged to turn in their parents. Petty traders were punished for being capitalists, as were those who adhered to any type of organized religion. The Cultural Revolution so disrupted Chinese society that by Mao’s death in 1976, the Communists had been seriously discredited.

Changes After Mao Two years after Mao’s death, a new leadership formed around Deng Xiaoping. Limited market reforms were instituted, but the Communist Party retained tight political control. In 2009, after more than 30 years of reform and remarkable levels of economic growth, China’s economy became the third largest in the world, behind those of the European Union and the United States. It passed Japan (although Japan’s per capita wealth is still five times that of China’s) when China managed to weather the world recession beginning in 2008 better than expected. However, the disparity of wealth in China has been increasing for some years, human rights are still often abused, and political activity remains tightly controlled even as discontent occasionally boils over into open protests against the government.

Although China’s influence was preeminent in East Asia for thousands of years, Japan, with only one-tenth the population and 5 percent of the land area of China, dominated East Asia economically and politically for much of the twentieth century. Japan’s rise as a modern global power resulted largely from its response to challenges from Europe and North America.

Beginning in the mid-sixteenth century, active trade with Portuguese colonists brought new ideas and military technology that strengthened Japan’s wealthier feudal lords (shoguns), allowing them to unify the country under a military bureaucracy. However, the shoguns monopolized contact with the European outsiders, refusing to allow Japanese people to leave the islands, on penalty of death.

A second period of radical change began when a small fleet of U.S. naval vessels arrived in Tokyo Bay in 1853. The foreigners, carrying military technology far more advanced than Japan’s, forced the Japanese government to open the economy to international trade and political relations. In response, a group of reformers (the Meiji) seized control of the Japanese government, setting the country on a crash course of modernization and industrial development that became known as the Meiji Restoration. During this time, Japanese students were sent abroad and experts were recruited from around the world, especially from Western nations, to teach everything from foreign languages to modern military technology. Investments emphasized infrastructure development, especially in transportation and communication. The improvements that resulted enabled Japan’s economy to grow rapidly, surpassing China’s size in the early twentieth century.

Between 1895 and 1945, Japan fueled its economy with resources from a vast colonial empire. Equipped with imported European and North American military technology, its armies occupied first Korea, then Taiwan, then coastal and eastern China, and eventually Indonesia and much of Southeast Asia, as shown in Figure 9.14. Many people in these areas still harbor resentment about the brutality they suffered at Japanese hands. Japan’s imperial ambitions ended with its defeat in World War II and its subsequent occupation by U.S. military forces until 1952. 204. JAPANESE STILL RESOLVING FEELINGS ABOUT THE WAR

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Immediately following World War II, the U.S. government imposed many social and economic reforms on Japan. Japan was required to create a democratic constitution and reduce the emperor’s role to a symbolic one. Its military was reduced dramatically, forcing it to rely on U.S. forces to protect it from attack. With U.S. support, Japan rebuilt rapidly after World War II, and it eventually became a giant in industry and global business, exporting automobiles, electronic goods, and many other products (see Figure 9.12F). Japan’s economy is still among the world’s largest, wealthiest, and most technologically advanced (see Figure 9.20D).

The history of the remaining East Asia region has largely been shaped by what transpired in China and Japan.

The Korean War and Its Aftermath Korea was a unified but poverty-stricken country until 1945. At the end of World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union, as victorious allies, agreed to divide the former Japanese colony. The Soviet Union occupied and established a communist regime to the north, while the United States took control of the southern half of the Korean peninsula, where it instituted reforms similar to those in Japan. After the United States withdrew its troops in the late 1940s, North Korea attacked South Korea. The United States returned to defend the south, leading a 3-year war against North Korea and its allies, the Soviet Union and Communist China.

After great loss of life on both sides and the devastation of the peninsula’s infrastructure, the Korean War ended in 1953 in a truce. A demilitarized zone (DMZ) was established near the 38th parallel; it serves as the de facto border between North and South Korea. This border, which is 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) wide, is called “demilitarized” because it is a buffer zone not claimed by either side, although in the surrounding area, both sides are heavily armed.

North Korea closed itself off from the rest of the world, and to this day it remains isolated and impoverished, occasionally gaining international attention by hinting at its nuclear potential (see Figure 9.18D). South Korea, on the other hand, now has a prosperous and technologically advanced market economy. Relations between the two countries remain tense, with occasional skirmishes breaking out along the border.

201. INTER-KOREAN COOPERATION GROWS

210. HIGH-TECH KOREA EYES ‘UBIQUITOUS’ FUTURE

Taiwan’s Uncertain Status For thousands of years, Taiwan was a poor, agricultural island on the periphery of China. Then, between 1895 and 1945, it became part of Japan’s regional empire. In 1949, when the Chinese nationalists (the Kuomintang) were pushed out of mainland China by the Chinese Communist Party, they set up an anti-communist government in Taiwan, naming it the Republic of China (ROC). For the next 50 years, with U.S. aid and encouragement, the ROC became modern and industrialized. Its economy quickly dwarfed that of China and remained dominant until the 1990s, serving as a prosperous icon of capitalism right next door to massive Communist China.

Today, Taiwan remains an economic powerhouse. Taiwanese investors have been especially active in Shanghai and the cities of China’s southeast coast. Yet mainland China has never relinquished its claim to Taiwan. As China’s economic and military power has increased, the United Nations, the World Bank, and the United States, along with most other countries, agencies, and institutions, have judiciously tiptoed around the issue of whether Taiwan should continue to be treated as an independent country or as a rebellious province of China. Most Taiwanese feel that their country should hold on to its sovereignty (see Figure 9.18C).

Mongolia Seeks Its Own Way For millennia, Mongolia’s nomadic horsemen posed periodic threats to China, so much so that the Great Wall was built, reinforced, and extended to combat them (see Figure 9.12C). China has long been obsessed with both deflecting and controlling its northern neighbor; and China did control Mongolia from 1691 until the 1920s. Revolutionary communism spread to Mongolia soon thereafter, and Mongolia continued as an independent communist country under Soviet, not Chinese, guidance until the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1989. Communism brought education and basic services. Literacy for both men and women rose above 95 percent. Deeply suspicious of both Russia and China, Mongolia has been on a difficult road to a market economy since 1989. In need of cash to participate in the modern world, many families have elected to abandon nomadic herding and permanently locate their portable ger homes near Ulan Bator and search for paid employment. While the economy has developed, the rapid and drastic change in lifestyle has also resulted in broken homes, increasing personal debt, and poverty, in a society that formerly took pride in an egalitarian if not prosperous standard of living.