China's Hegemony: Four Hundred Years of East Asian Domination

CHINA’S HEGEMONY

CHINA’S HEGEMONY

Four Hundred Years of East Asian Domination

JI-YOUNG LEE

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

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Columbia University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lee, Ji-Young (Professor of East Asian studies), author.

Title: China’s hegemony : four hundred years of East Asian domination / Ji-Young Lee.

Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016008191 | ISBN 9780231179744 (cloth : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Hegemony—China—History. | China—Foreign relations—East Asia. | East Asia—Foreign relations—China. | China—Foreign economic relations—East Asia. | East Asia—Foreign economic relations—China. | East Asia—Politics and government.

Classification: LCC DS518.15 .L44 2016 | DDC 327.5105—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016008191

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To my parents with love

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Understanding the Tribute System

2. Chinese Hegemonic Authority: A Domestic Politics Explanation

3. The Making of Ming Hegemony

4. The Imjin War (1592–1598)

5. The Making of Qing Hegemony

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Someone reminded me recently that the two Chinese characters that denote scholarship ( 學 問 ) are to study and to question. It is only with many debts of gratitude, which I have incurred over many years, that this book has been written. At Georgetown University, I was extraordinarily fortunate to work with remarkable scholars of international relations (IR). Kathleen McNamara has shown unwavering support for and faith in this project. I am deeply grateful that she always inspires me to think more clearly and never to lose sight of the big IR picture. Daniel Nexon’s scholarship on early modern Europe was an invaluable resource for me as I explored the international system of early modern East Asia. It is thanks to Andrew Bennett’s steadfast encouragement and training that the book highlights the importance of the rigor of social science methods as it explains the evasive phenomena of authority and hierarchy often buried in numerous historical details. Victor Cha’s research and expertise on Asian IR have shaped my thinking on Asia in important ways. Simply put, his guidance and mentorship have been indispensable.

Outside of Georgetown, this project has benefited from advice from David Kang and Patrick Jackson—the two scholars whose intellectual influence on this project significantly improved the ways in which I asked and approached my questions. I still remember the excitement I felt when I first read David Kang’s article Getting Asia Wrong—perhaps the topic of this book had been decided at that very moment. Patrick Jackson’s sociological approach to big IR questions helped sharpen my own thinking on the notions of hegemony, political order, and legitimacy. For that, I owe him special thanks.

My thanks also go to several historians on the Asian history front. Without their kind suggestions and insights, any remaining shortcomings of the historical detail in this work might have been greater. Since the initial stages of the project, Kirk Larsen has generously offered guidance on multiple occasions exactly when I needed it. As I was swimming through rich historical details, Gari Ledyard and John Wills carefully read my conference paper and shared valuable suggestions, which proved consequential for this book. For example, I have cited the original classical Chinese texts as well as their Korean translations, for other researchers who read Chinese but not Korean. Young-sun Ha, Myŏng-gi Han, Christine Kim, Tae-yŏl Ku, Sŭng-bŏm Kye, James Millward, T’ae-gyun Pak, Wŏn-ho Pak, Sŭng-ch’ŏl Son, and Kŭn-ho Yu all took the time to talk to me in person, which has been very helpful. I also wish to thank historian Han-gyu Kim for translating Chinese tributary envoys’ reports and essays—Shi Chaoxian lu (Beijing: Beijing Tushuguan Chubanshe, 2003)—into Korean. Reading this multivolume publication in 2012, and using Korean tributary envoys’ writings, was a turning point in grounding my analysis of the concept of hegemony more firmly in empirical evidence. Deborah Solomon has generously taught me how to deal with the historical documents, for which I am very thankful.

Many of my colleagues kindly read portions of this project at different stages. For their comments and suggestions, I am grateful to Celeste Arrington, Boaz Atzili, Michael Green, Todd Hall, Pek Koon Heng, John Owen, Gilbert Rozman, Kaya Sahin, Hendrik Spruyt, Matthew Taylor, Yuan-Kang Wang, Andrew Yeo, and the anonymous reviewers at Columbia University Press. In particular, I would like to acknowledge Julia Lau for her feedback and constant support. I am also grateful to colleagues at Oberlin College’s Politics Department and East Asian Studies Program for warmly welcoming me as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and a Visiting Assistant Professor. It was during my time at Oberlin that I began seriously looking into primary source documents of Asian history. My arrival at American University’s School of International Service, where much of the work for this project was done, meant that I was part of a vibrant intellectual community. It is not an exaggeration when I say that I could not have come to the publication of this book without my colleagues’ kind support, help, and advice. My appreciation goes to Amitav Acharya, Chuck Call, Christine Chin, Ken Conca, Michelle Egan, Carole Gallaher, Miles Kahler, Randy Persaud, Rachel Robinson, Cathy Schneider, Sarah Snyder, Jordan Tama, Paul Wapner, Sharon Weiner, and John Zhao, among many others. I wish to thank Dean Jim Goldgeier for encouraging me to focus on my research during the writing of this book.

This project has been presented at several institutions, including Beijing University, Fudan University, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Keio University, the East Asia Institute, the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) Inter-Asian Connections, the University of British Columbia, the University of Southern California, and the annual meetings of the American Political Science Association and the International Studies Association. I am very grateful for the comments from the seminar and conference participants. In addition to support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which funded my position at Oberlin, the project received generous support from the Academy of Korean Studies under grant AKS-2013-R74, the Social Science Research Council, and the East–West Center. I would like to thank the EAI Fellows Program on Peace, Governance, and Development in East Asia supported by the Japan Foundation, the Chiang Ching–kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, and YBM/KIS for supporting travel and research. I have also been very lucky to enjoy great research assistance from several brilliant graduate students: Eleni Ekmektsioglou, Sarah Flewelling, Ji Young Kwon, Weini Li, and Brendon Thornton.

I am delighted that my book found its home at Columbia University Press. I appreciate Anne Routon’s kind support and help throughout the whole process. My sincere thanks also go to Nigel Quinney for his help with edits for the manuscript. A version of parts of the book’s argument has appeared in my article Hegemonic Authority and Domestic Legitimation, published in the June 2016 issue of Security Studies. I thank Taylor & Francis for granting permission to use the material and reproduce figure 2.1 and table 2.1 here in the same artice.

My last expressions of appreciation are personal. The book is dedicated to my parents, Ok-sun Chŏng and Pang-gŭn Lee, for their love and faith in me. I would not have been able to write this book without the immense support from my sister Ji-sun and my brother Ho-tan. To Sang-min Lee, Sŏn-u Lee, Hye-jŏng Yu, Andrea Martinez, and Chi-hyŏn Yoon, for their untiring support for me—thank you.

INTRODUCTION

In the early modern period, China was the sole great power in East Asia, far stronger than any of its neighbors. However, consider the following episodes. In 1388, Korea, a tributary of the Ming empire of China since 1370, ¹ sent armed forces against the Ming. In 1592, Japan invaded Korea in an attempt to conquer the Ming and build a Japanocentric world order. ² A few decades later, during the Ming to Qing transition in seventeenth-century China, Korea supported Ming war efforts against the more powerful, rising Qing at the risk of its own survival, despite having been invaded by the Qing not long before. Japan created a self-proclaimed tributary order centered on itself, treating Qing tributaries Korea and Ryukyu as its own. ³ Why did these less powerful East Asian actors accept, defy, or challenge China?

As scholars, policymakers, and pundits try to predict how a rising China will use its newly acquired power in the twenty-first century, the likely advent of a new Chinese hegemony has become a popular topic of discussion.⁴ In 2010, China surpassed Japan to become the world’s second-largest economy, trailing only the United States. For more than two decades, China has increased its military spending against the backdrop of a relative decline in U.S. economic power. To some observers, China’s growing military power and the invocation of its imperial past in territorial disputes in the South China Sea might herald a new Chinese hegemony. Little attention, however, has been given to the question of how other Asian regional powers might react to a reassertion of hegemony and how those actions might affect the future of regional order itself.

In mainstream international relations (IR) theories, hegemony is typically understood as an outcome of a single actor and its activities.⁵ According to hegemonic stability theory, for example, the concentration of power in the hands of one actor is a creator of order, namely hegemonic order. But how do we make sense of the rise of China in the context of East Asia IR history, in which China’s smaller neighbors shaped the character of the Chinese hegemonic order in important ways? More to the point, why was Chinese hegemony accepted to varying degrees? In this book, I argue that neighboring actors’ pursuit of political legitimation in domestic power struggles was at the heart of Chinese hegemony and variations in its receptivity. To understand the specific character of Chinese hegemony, one must consider the various ways in which savvy political leaders of China’s neighboring states manipulated external recognition from the hegemon in a form of symbolic politics but in ways that enhanced their legitimacy at home against domestic rivals.

As China’s power in the world today has grown, many observers have invoked what China once was: an imperial power. Whether this historical reminder comes from those who predict Chinese behavior on the basis of an imperial mind⁶ or from IR scholars who view China’s growing power as the most important force that will lead to a new order in East Asia, there seems to be a belief that a strong China can establish a regional hegemony based on its own image of the old East Asia. For example, Charles Kupchan argues that China might attempt to exercise a brand of regional hegemony modeled on the tributary system.⁷ Aaron Friedberg notes that for a nation with China’s history, China’s hegemonic strategy is the restoration of a Sinocentric system, which is an essential precondition for continued growth, security, and quite possibly survival.⁸ However, such a view rests on a misunderstanding of the tribute system; that is, on a mistaken belief that the tribute system was imperial China’s tool for projecting its power or culture onto others in the East Asian states system. As this book shows, theoretical insights and empirical evidence from Asia’s past experiences of Chinese hegemony challenge predictions that China alone can establish a new regional hegemony.

Scholars have in fact long associated the tribute system with Sino-centric hierarchical order and, more recently, with Chinese hegemony.⁹ However, even a cursory look at the episodes mentioned at the outset of this chapter makes it clear that East Asian actors were not passive recipients of Chinese influence or domination. The workings of the tribute system required the actions of other actors, not just China. Contrary to popular images of an all-powerful Chinese empire, Chinese hegemony was shaped to a significant degree by the extent to which and the manner in which the tribute system was accepted, ignored, and challenged by China’s East Asian neighbors. In the following six chapters, I show that the Chinese hegemonic order was not as Sinocentric as many people believe¹⁰ and that the key to understanding the workings of the tribute system lies in examining variations in its acceptance and asking why some actors complied with tribute practices whereas others did not, and why they complied at certain times and not at others.

Despite the weighty presence of the tribute system in the diplomatic history of East Asia and the substantial potential contribution to IR theorizing, there is little work that systematically explores why Chinese neighbors accepted the tribute system to varying degrees. This is perhaps understandable, given the enormous empirical details that go into examining the notion of a tribute system systematically. In this book, I carefully delimit the temporal and geographic scope of my study of the tribute system to early modern and East Asia, with an eye toward investigating varying degrees of receptivity to Chinese hegemony. More specifically, my strategy is to compare two pairs of relationships between China and two major East Asian powers that represent the spectrum of compliance, defiance, and challenge to Chinese hegemonic authority. Korea and Japan were two of the most powerful states in East Asia in terms of the capacities of their armed forces and their systems of taxation, policing, and government administration.¹¹ They had embraced the influence of ancient Chinese civilization and the Confucian state institutions by sending tribute missions to ancient China, especially during the Tang period (618–907). Yet, by the fifteenth century, Korea exhibited a consistently higher level of compliance with and participation in the Chinese hegemonic order. In contrast, Japan tended to keep its distance and assert its independence from China. Korea acquired a reputation for being the model tributary, whereas Japan was seen as a closed country.¹²

The puzzle of these contrasting trajectories cannot be solved if we simply follow the IR field’s dominant approach to hegemony, in which less powerful states are seen as mere recipients of a hegemon’s power or culture. Realists will be quick to point out that Korea was more vulnerable to Chinese power than Japan was. Korea shared a land border with China, whereas Japan enjoyed the protective power of the seas. However, empirical records of Korean and Japanese compliance patterns over time show that the power differential and the impact of geography facilitated these states’ behaviors but were not the primary drivers of those behaviors. Similarly, the argument that links Korea’s higher level of compliance to its tighter embrace of Chinese Confucian culture and norms than Japan’s is problematic. Although there is no denying that culture played an important role, one must understand the domestic politics in each state to explain why the levels of Korean and Japanese acceptance of Chinese hegemony varied markedly over time even when their cultures did not.

In this book, I show that Korea complied with Chinese hegemony not simply because Korea was too weak and geographically close to counter the hegemon next door but because Korean contenders for power needed to legitimate their rule through reference to Chinese symbolic authorization. In contrast, Japanese contenders for power needed to legitimate their rule through reference to Japan’s own imperial institution and its symbolic authorization. In fact, the historical evidence shows that a Japanese leader could hurt his legitimacy by identifying with Chinese symbolic authority. Therefore, Japan defied and challenged Chinese hegemony throughout most of the early modern period for domestic political reasons, not because Japanese leaders felt themselves sufficiently distant from China to be safe from Chinese power.

This book, then, is about the role of domestic politics, especially leaders’ domestic legitimation strategies, in the workings of Chinese hegemonic order in early modern East Asia. Although I focus on Chinese hegemony in a specific time and cultural context, this book may have broader theoretical implications for the literature on hegemony. The early modern East Asian experience suggests that hegemony can be understood as a domestic, as well as an international, phenomenon. That is, the symbolic power of the dominant state, in this case China, is a resource for its neighboring states’ ruling elites engaged in the domestic political struggles, in this case Korea and Japan, which in turn filter responses to hegemony. Rather than relying on the standard power-based explanation, I argue that Chinese hegemony was accepted by other actors based on a combination of domestic political needs and Chinese ideological and symbolic resonance.

The remainder of this chapter proceeds as follows. First, I describe the emerging body of research that addresses the theme of Chinese hegemony in early modern East Asia and explain why the focus of my work is on the less powerful actors of that period. Second, I put forward the book’s argument that more attention should be given to the role of domestic politics in explaining the varying degrees of receptivity to Chinese hegemony. I then provide a brief illustration of the Chinese hegemonic order under the Ming and Qing empires before presenting the structure of the book as a whole.

THE ROLE OF DOMESTIC POLITICS IN EAST ASIA IR HISTORY

This book speaks to the concept of hegemony and the IR literature surrounding it. It does not aim to offer a new theory on the origins and maintenance of hegemony or hegemonic order, and instead, it seeks to contribute to the literature in two more limited but nonetheless illuminating ways. The first of these is to present in-depth empirical details about the related concepts of authority, hegemony, and hierarchy in the context of early modern East Asia. In particular, comparative analyses of two pairs of hierarchical relationships (the Korean attitude toward China versus the Japanese attitude toward China) over four centuries generate a new hypothesis about the role of domestic politics in the workings of hegemony, an understudied area in the hegemony literature.

The concept of hegemony is notoriously hard to grasp.¹³ That being said, according to Robert Gilpin, hegemony is a structure in which a single powerful state controls or dominates the lesser states in the system.¹⁴ Michael Mastanduno suggests that ingredients for hegemony include a preponderance of material power, a sense of social purpose, the ability to control international outcomes of importance to the dominant state, and some degree of consent and acceptance from other states in the system.¹⁵ The concepts of authority and hierarchy are no less elusive. According to David Lake’s widely held definitions, authority is rightful rule, whereas hierarchy is defined by the extent of the authority exercised by the ruler over the ruled.¹⁶ Hegemony is at least implicitly about hierarchy,¹⁷ or a form of hierarchy.¹⁸ The value added by my analysis is to offer rich empirical details animating these concepts by using non-Western empirical data drawing on Asian diplomatic history and to show the role of domestic legitimation in understanding these concepts. Throughout this book, I use the definitions given earlier, but I suggest that we view them in a more sociological way, following Adam Watson’s important reminder that authority is determined not by those who wield it but by the attitudes of those who obey it.¹⁹

The second way in which this book contributes to the literature is by joining the debate that has arisen from the new wave of research on East Asia IR history, to use Alastair Iain Johnston’s term.²⁰ Propelled by the current rise of China, scholars problematize how IR theorizing draws mostly on European history and its security dynamic, resulting in getting Asia wrong, as David Kang has famously claimed.²¹ At the heart of this debate is whether the Confucian Chinese culture affected strategic outcomes such as war and peace—in other words, a debate on the character of Chinese hegemony.²² From a liberal-constructivist synthesis perspective, advocates of the benign Chinese hegemony thesis, such as Kang and Robert Kelly, argue that most actors in early modern East Asia accepted the cultural norms associated with China’s superiority embodied in the tribute system, creating an East Asian states system that was more peaceful than its European counterpart.²³ Skeptics such as Yuan-Kang Wang challenge the view that Confucian culture constrained China’s use of force and dispute the idea that coercion and the threat of violence were unnecessary because of the tribute system.²⁴ Like Kang, Johnston places the role of culture at the center of his study of Chinese strategy, but he comes to a realist conclusion similar to that of Wang, arguing that the realpolitik parabellum paradigm was dominant in China’s strategic behavior.²⁵

Most East Asia IR history scholars primarily use case study methods, focusing mostly on the Ming-Qing period in Asian history.²⁶ According to Alexander George, one of the tasks before these scholars is to convert a specific description of historical experience into a more general explanation base on variables and the variance in each of them.²⁷ Working within an explicit theoretical framework, they tend to focus on certain theoretically specified aspects of historical East Asia, leading them to different interpretations of the Chinese hegemonic order and its character. In all the works just mentioned, the aspects of early modern East Asian history that received the most attention were China and its attributes (such as power or culture) and activities. But be reminded that authority is in the eye of the beholder. If the goal is to understand Chinese hegemony and its workings, what is missing in this debate is how other actors viewed and responded to Chinese hegemonic authority. What is the character of Chinese hegemony when one also considers the actions of other, less powerful actors?

My answer to this question begins by examining these scholars’ answers to two follow-up questions. First, how did imperial China act as the most powerful state in the East Asian states system? Taking seriously the actions of other East Asian powers suggests that we limit the scope conditions of the existing arguments in the East Asia IR history literature.²⁸ The objective of Johnston’s work on the Ming, for example, is to test a hypothesis about the peaceful effect of Confucian culture on strategic behavior. His in-depth research on the Chinese classics subsequently disproves the initial expectation and shows the causal effects of the parabellum paradigm—not the Confucian-Mencian paradigm—on the Ming empire’s strategic choices. But note the geographic scope of his study that is Chinese relations with the Mongols, an example of the Inner Asian dynamic, rather than a study from East Asia. When it comes to China’s day-to-day dealings with states in East Asia—Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Ryukyu, and other Southeast Asian polities—the norm was the peaceful Confucian-Mencian paradigm, not the realpolitik parabellum paradigm.

Kang argues that China was a benign hegemon whose hegemonic status rested not on military power but on other actors’ recognition of China, thus forming the Confucian society.²⁹ Kang looks at the international system of early modern East Asia as a whole to generate a hypothesis about Chinese hegemony, but leaving his culture-based argument without testing. The empirical chapters of this book show that his argument holds to the extent that China did not feel threatened from the activities by other neighboring actors with whom it shared border security concerns. In other words, under the condition of vulnerability,³⁰ imperial China did act more opportunistically and coercively, and exploited the less powerful in East Asia—a finding in line with Johnston’s argument above. Further, the argument that other East Asian actors’ admiration for Chinese Confucian culture led them to comply with Chinese hegemony needs to be qualified. An in-depth examination of multiple Asian powers’ responses to the rise of the Qing empire, for example, shows that admiration for the Confucian culture caused neighboring states to defy Chinese hegemony under the Qing empire, while leading Korea, Japan, and Vietnam to assert themselves as the true, small centers of a Confucian world order.³¹ Their varying responses suggest that Kang’s culture-based argument has to be filtered through domestic political conditions consideration.

The objective of Wang’s research is to test offensive realist theory using imperial China as a case. Contrary to Kang, he argues that China pursued the domination of the Asian states system by maximizing its power, like any other great power would have done, its grand strategy correlating with its rise and fall in material power. There is no denying that power was always in the backdrop of actors’ responses to China. The broad pattern of Korea’s higher level of compliance than that of Japan may be consistent with the realist explanations that Korea had more reasons than Japan to be fearful of China’s use of force. However, Korean and Japanese responses varied over time. Korea attempted to strike at the Ming empire when that newly founded empire was reaching the height of its military strength in the late fourteenth century.³² About two centuries later, however, when Ming power was visibly in decline, Korea assisted Ming war efforts against much more powerful Manchu Qing forces. In Japan, too, power-only considerations do not hold. The only occasion where Japan showed a high level of compliance with Chinese hegemony coincided with the peak of Japan’s power vis-à-vis China throughout the Muromachi period (1336–1573). Generally speaking, an in-depth look at empirical evidence of other actors’ actions suggests that the structural realist claims are useful in explaining some cases of compliance but not others. Wang’s logic drawing on offensive realism fails to explain why the behaviors of a single actor varied across different time periods despite facing more or less the same Chinese power and threat perceptions. I show in this book that top leaders’ pursuit of domestic power politics goals often trumped power-balance considerations at the international level.

The second follow-up question is: what is the relationship between the tribute system and the hierarchical international order? Kang interprets the tribute system as the organizing principle, norms, and institutions. For Kang, a normative social order was created and maintained through the tribute system, in which China made a credible commitment not to exploit its less powerful neighbors, who in return agreed to accept China’s hegemonic authority. Wang views the tribute system as a strategic tool used by China in its expansion of material power, with the goal of preserving dominance. Johnston does not examine the tribute system per se but views tribute relations as an example of China’s ji mi (羈縻 loose rein) policies, one type of Chinese grand strategy.³³

To understand whether there was actually a hierarchy—the extent of the authority exercised by the ruler over the ruled³⁴—in early modern East Asia, one must examine not just China’s interests and preferences but also the responses and attitudes of other East Asian states. Wang suggests three reasons for other actors’ participation in the tribute system: security guarantees from the threat of Chinese force, trading opportunities, and the utility of Chinese recognition for establishing the legitimacy of local rulers.³⁵ He points toward important insights, especially on the link between China’s recognition and domestic legitimacy. However, for Wang, the question of Chinese hegemonic authority is reduced to smaller states jumping on the bandwagon because they did not have better alternatives.³⁶ But less powerful actors responded to China’s superior material power in various creative ways rather than simply being forced to accept Chinese dominance.³⁷ Wang’s reliance on neorealist theoretical assumptions makes it impossible for him to explain why China’s recognition, essentially social in nature, is linked to the notion of legitimacy in other countries.

Kang’s work pioneered the notion of Asian hierarchy.³⁸ According to Kang, Chinese hegemony involves consensual acceptance of a leading state’s legitimate authority. He rightly notes that China’s smaller neighboring states complied with the tribute system because they accepted China as legitimate based on admiration for its culture, while calculating that such acceptance would serve their interests in consolidating their rule. This important insight that acceptance depends on social recognition is echoed by other scholars who work in the English school tradition. For example, Yongjin Zhang and Barry Buzan argue that the tribute system is an articulation of the existence of international society in historical East Asia, in which actors’ participation is regarded as acceptance of the rules of the game, rules that were shared between China and its neighboring states.³⁹As it stands, however, this line of argument calls for systemic empirical testing to examine the mechanisms through which these less powerful actors came to accept hegemony. The case studies of this book, for example, show that Kang has placed too much causal weight on Chinese Confucian culture, resulting in the problem of overdetermination, missing the domestic politics component.⁴⁰

More recently, Feng Zhang’s analysis on Chinese grand strategy signals that East Asia IR history is heading toward capturing the strategic interaction between China’s interests and those of other East Asian powers.⁴¹ Although his focus on interaction pushes the literature forward, his thesis gives no clear explanation as to what drives these actors to interact in the first place. This is in part because his approach, in a manner somewhat similar to Zhou Fangyin’s equilibrium analysis of the tribute system,⁴² rests on the assumption that actors’ motives are externally given.

International relations scholars are now paying greater attention to how the East Asian states system operated and how Chinese hegemonic order was sustained. Despite these encouraging developments, little research explores why some Chinese neighbors accepted the tribute system whereas others did not, and why, when they did so, at certain times and not at others.⁴³ No research has systematically compared the contrasting responses of Japan and Korea to imperial China in the context of international order. More broadly, most IR scholars continue to rely on the existing interpretations of the tribute system produced by historians whose research focuses on Chinese history. But the tribute system requires an understanding of the history of East Asia, not just that of China.

As I show in the next chapter, historians have pointed out the persistent problem of Sinocentrism in the existing literature⁴⁴ but have not yet researched a historically contingent nature of the tribute system that explains why other actors accepted it to varying degrees. A theory of Chinese hegemony must consider a causal argument that can coherently explain why other East Asian actors responded to the tribute system in the way that they did. In trying to bridge the gap between the history of early modern East Asia and IR concepts and theories, this book has built on the work of East Asia IR history scholars and historians while drawing insights from various empirical records—those that have largely been ignored by scholars, especially Western ones—of the actions of East Asian powers within the framework of the tribute system.

THE ARGUMENT IN BRIEF

My explanation of Chinese hegemony is based on domestic politics and denies the dichotomy of either the realist or the liberal logics. In early modern East Asia, systematic differences in patterns of compliance with Chinese hegemony can be observed between actors whose top leaders needed Chinese recognition for domestic political reasons and leaders who rejected it. Considerations of Chinese power and culture were filtered through the lens of domestic politics, within which compliance decisions were made.

The book bases this conclusion about the role of less powerful actors’ domestic legitimation strategies on