In this chapter, the historiography of international law in East Asia is approached and critiqued as a tale of two centrisms, i.e. Sinocentrism and Eurocentrism. The historiography of international law in the region prior to the ‘encounter’ between East Asia and Europe has been largely Sinocentric. It is suggested that the traditional East Asian order be reinterpreted through the concept of ‘asymmetrical mutuality’ under which the regional actors of differentiated subjectivity were able to reconcile and manage their diverging interests through the crucial intermediary of diplomatic rituals. The historiography of the post-‘encounter’ period can be characterised as Eurocentric, being premised on the overwhelming positional superiority of Europe over East Asia. This traditional narrative is critically revisited (again) through the prism of ‘asymmetrical mutuality’. Despite Europe’s overwhelming dominance, East Asians articulated a wide variety of responses to the onset of a new normative discourse claiming universal validity, demonstrating their agency (if restricted). Critical engagement with Eurocentrism in the historiography of international law, one of the core questions of today’s historiography of international law, inevitably gives rise to the question of how to view universality. As a cautionary tale from this region, an attempt in interwar Japan to construct its own historiography of international law and relations by rejecting the universality articulated by the West (a ‘historiography of Sonderweg’) is investigated. By way of conclusion, it is suggested that the history of international law be reconceived as the fusing together of diverse normative voices through an intersubjective dialogue based on mutual recognition, rather than as the self-realisation of a certain universalistic normative discourse.

After the suspension of tribute missions, Japanese pilgrim monks actively sought assistance from Chinese merchants for their travel and for acquiring scriptures and objects from the continent. Using two sets of private records written by merchants, which have never been explored in Western scholarship, this chapter shows how the pilgrim monks and sea merchants started to build a network both for transmitting Buddhist teaching and for profit-making. Correspondence between monks and merchants suggests that certain Chinese merchants traveled on a regular basis between the continent and the archipelago, and they therefore formed a close relationship with monks in Japan. The monks designated the merchants as their envoys, sending gifts and letters containing Buddhist-teaching inquiries to Chinese monks, while the merchants hoped to gain access to Japanese authorities via the monks’ introductions.

This chapter examines some Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian thinkers who argued that religious values and civilizational discourse needed to be front and center in discussions of political economy. The Pan-Islamic thinkers called for new kinds of economic solidarity among a transnational Islamic community that could promote its interests and values within the world economy. Their proposals included Iranian-born Jamal al-Din al-Afghani’s calls for the collective economic modernization of the Islamic world, the endorsement of specific joint economic projects such as the Hejaz railway by Ottoman sultan Abdulhamid II, and India’s Sayyid Abul A’la Mawdudi’s focus on the need for all Muslims to embrace a new kind of Islamic Economics. By contrast, the Pan-Asian thinker Sun Yat-sen focused on the interests and values of a transnational community that he conceptualized in civilizational terms. Sun argued that Asian countries’ interests and values could be promoted by development-oriented economic cooperation amongst themselves, their collective pursuit of neomercantilist goals, and an alternative tributary model of international economic governance centered on the principle of the “rule of Right.”

The Silk Road trade, which involved mostly prestige goods, started from the Han dynasty, around the second century bce, under the protection of Han imperial expansion into Central Asia. The economy of the Han Empire was mainly based on agriculture. Taxes in the form of agricultural products – such as food grains, silk yarn and floss, and bast-weave cloths such as ramie and hemp – in addition to corvée labor provided the major revenue for the state. Although commerce flourished in cities and connected both rural and urban residents into a nationwide market, traders held the lowest status in the social hierarchy. The impetus for trade with foreign countries, therefore, was initiated by the Han ruling elite, who, like aristocrats in ancient regimes around the world, had always been looking for rare and expensive goods to mark their distinguished status. Meanwhile, the Han Empire engaged in warfare with pastoral nomads of the Central Asian steppe grasslands from the founding of the dynasty. The perennial wars with the Xiongnu nomad confederation extended the horizon of the Han rulers, north to the steppe and west to Central and South Asia, reaching as far as the Mediterranean.

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.

Chapter 4 discusses the logic of order of the Chinese tributary system. It demonstrates that a shared set of collective beliefs, revolving around Confucian principles, and other norms, played an integral role in this political system. Understood as a complex of shared understanding and meaning, tributary relations acted as a lingua franca by creating a shared script, a common knowledge, that facilitated mutual understanding, which could entail benign or less benign relations but overall provided actors with a common frame of reference. The tributary system is an analytical framework for the historical study of Asian international relations, a concept that should be understood as a script that allowed for multiple and diverse interpretations by the participants themselves. The chapter further demonstrates how the Sinocentric system could accommodate great heterogeneity and multiple ethnicities and religions.

This chapter compares the diversity regimes of the Qing Empire and twentieth-century Chinese republics to argue that evocations of 'traditional' Chinese diversity regime and interpolity relations frequent in the literature are based on a mistaken model of the Chinese past, one involving the 'tributary system' and 'Confucian peace' or tianxia concepts, largely derived from John King Fairbank’s descriptions of the 'traditional Chinese world order.'After critiquing the Fairbankian model, the chapter introduces the findings of more recent scholarship on the Qing period which reveal the flexible Qing approach to domestic diversity and interpolity relations, here called 'imperial pluralism.' The formal diversity regime of the People’s Republic of China towards its 56 minzu (nationalities, ethnicities) echoes Qing imperial pluralism as well as the nationalities system of the Soviet Union. Since the 2010s, however, the PRC has shifted from centralized pluralism towards a Han assimilationist approach. The author cautiously suggests that aspects of Chinese centralized pluralism – and not a vain quest for a homogeneous national population – would provide a more successful model, while remaining true to Chinese traditions.

The introduction discusses the core issues and organization of the book. It argues that despite long-standing stereotypes about Chinese isolation, the Ming court was fully engaged in foreign relations in Eurasia and that relations with Mongol nobles in particular figure prominently in the perception and representation of Ming emperors’ identity and style of rulership.