Response: Theory and Empirics in the Study of Historical

East Asian International Relations

David C. Kang 강찬웅

Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Volume 77, Number 1, June 2017, pp.
111-122 (Article)

Published by Harvard-Yenching Institute

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jas.2017.0007

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/665717

Access provided by Australian National University (16 Aug 2018 06:26 GMT)
Response: Theory and Empirics
in the Study of Historical
East Asian International Relations
David C. Kang 강찬웅
University of Southern California

I t is a genuine honorthat these wonderful scholars have engaged

critically and thoughtfully with my work, and I am grateful for their
detailed comments on the themes and arguments of East Asia before
the West.1 My main point in that book is that early modern East Asia
had an international system with its own institutions and norms. This
system was neither universal nor inevitable; rather, it was the result of
a series of choices and decisions over centuries. In their articles, Joshua
Van Lieu questions whether it is possible to reify structures and insti-
tutions that existed back in time, and he subjects the issue of whether
there can be such a thing as “historical facts” to scrutiny; Hendrik
Spruyt argues that the historical cultural order was not as central to the
working of the system as I argue; Saeyoung Park writes that explaining
why China wanted status in the first place is a key unexplored issue;
and Sankaran Krishna argues that despite my best attempts, my work
still reflects deeply Eurocentric views. These are all interesting and
important arguments, deserving careful scrutiny and discussion.
In this response, I avoid simply reiterating the arguments made
in East Asia before the West and instead try to move debate forward by
making two main points. First, a number of the critiques are in fact
calls to extend the basic argument and approach presented in East Asia
before the West. These criticisms emphasize the need for even more

1
  David C. Kang, East Asia before the West: Five Centuries of Trade and Tribute (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2010).

Published by the Harvard-Yenching Institute   HJAS 77.1 (2017): 111–122 111

112  David C. Kang

research on the era and the region; they press for even greater atten-
tion to the myriad complex and nuanced ways in which international
relations worked at the time. Second, the fact that East Asian history—
and the study of East Asian history—can be politicized for contempo-
rary political ends does not mean that we should all be political; rather,
the solution to the politicization of scholarship is to redouble scholarly
efforts and reemphasize scholarly methods for evaluating research:
What is the logic of the argument, and what is the evidence presented?
What are we measuring? How well do our causal arguments explain
the observed patterns?

International Systems before Westphalia

Spruyt and Van Lieu argue that East Asia before the West overstates
­China’s role as hegemon in early modern East Asia. However, if we
accept the existence in East Asia of an international system differ-
ent from that of the West, with different norms and institutions, then
debate is largely about the elements of that different system and about
how to more clearly delineate the complex and myriad causal fac-
tors and empirical patterns of that system. In such a debate, the basic
premise of East Asia before the West has already been accepted. Such
critiques, which call for extensions and further nuance, are comple-
mentary in nature.
For example, two common criticisms of my work on historical
East Asia arise from the facts that the international system there was
not called a tributary system at the time, and that the tributary system
was not an all-encompassing, complete set of norms and institutions
that was used everywhere by everyone. Van Lieu’s argument that there
was a lack of knowledge at the time about a tributary system and that it
was not then called a tributary system is similar to an argument Liam
Kelley makes, when he refuses to call historical countries by their con-
temporary names. Thus, Kelley writes about the “northern kingdom”
and the “southern kingdom” instead of China and Vietnam, because
those ideas would have been mystifying to ancient kings five hundred
years ago.2
2
  Liam Kelley, Beyond the Bronze Pillars: Envoy Poetry and the Sino-Vietnamese Relation-
ship (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005).
 Response: Theory and Empirics  113

On the one hand, I agree with Van Lieu—it was not called a trib-
utary system at the time. However, what actors themselves call their
behavior can be completely different from how an outside observer
characterizes it. After all, the “Westphalian” system of international
relations was not so named until the 1970s, even though the system
ostensibly came into existence during the 1600s; similarly, the “balance
of power” system of historical Europe was not so named until Ameri-
can scholars coined the term during the post–World War II era. What
matters is not what the people at the time called a system, but whether
there was, in fact, a system—a set of ideas, institutions, norms, and
practices that endured over time and across space. Using those criteria,
I am quite confident in calling that particular set of practices a tribu-
tary system. I have never called the system a Sinocentric system pre-
cisely because doing so privileges China, whereas calling it a tributary
system focuses on the norms and practices that existed and were used
even when China was not involved.3
Van Lieu points out that tribute was merely one form of interstate
relations during the Ming–Qing period, for relations with Russia and
other political units did not follow the tributary model.4 He is entirely
correct, of course. Yet I would retain the term tributary because we
should expect to find exceptions to the overall institutional and nor-
mative form—no international system has ever been complete and
total. The key question is whether there were consistent enough pat-
terns in the ideas, institutions, norms, and practices to call them a sys-
tem. In examining the Western, Westphalian system, Stephen Krasner
wrote a fascinating and important book that points out the basic non-
existence of a totalizing Westphalian system, despite the fact that those
ideas and institutions affect, funnel, and channel virtually all interna-
tional behavior today.
There are no universal structures that can authoritatively resolve conflicts.
Principles and rules can be logically contradictory. . . . Westphalian
and international legal sovereignty, the major concerns of this study,

  Kenneth R. Robinson, “Organizing Japanese and Jurchens in Tribute Systems in

3

Early Chosŏn Korea,” Journal of East Asian Studies 13.2 (2013): 337–60.
4
  I am self-consciously not calling the units “states,” since the view that international
relations is composed of “nation-states” is itself a recent phenomenon. There was a diver-
sity of political units that existed at the time, only some of which became states as we
know them today.
114  David C. Kang

are examples of organized hypocrisy. They are both defined by widely

understood rules. Yet, these rules have been compromised.5

My aim was to point out the existence in East Asia of a set of insti-
tutions and norms that survived over time, that was widely used to
organize relations between political units, and that was not simply a
reflection of the values or ideas of the individual polities. As ­Kenneth
Waltz points out in emphasizing the importance of a situational or
systemic perspective, “Just as peacemakers may fail to make peace, so
troublemakers may fail to make trouble. From attributes one cannot
predict outcomes if outcomes depend on the situations of the actors as
well as on their attributes.”6
Spruyt argues for a different extension of my work, pointing out
that there is much more to East Asia than the early modern era on
which I focus. Spruyt writes, “an understanding of the interaction of
multiple forces requires greater attention to variations in diachronic
as well as cross-regional, synchronic comparisons.”7 Again, I agree—
almost all scholarship on the tributary system has focused on its most
complete manifestation, which unsurprisingly occurred during the
more recent, as opposed to the distant, past. Scholarship is begin-
ning to engage in just such an exercise as Spruyt advocates—look-
ing beyond the past few centuries to explore different ways in which
the tributary system and hierarchy existed in premodern East Asia.
For example, Ji-Young Lee of American University writes about how
the domestic elites of Korea and Japan used relations with Ming and
Qing China as a key element in legitimating themselves.8 Feng Zhang
also writes about Chinese hegemony during the early modern period,
and Phillips and Sharman write extensively on different international
systems in South Asia during premodern times.9 Yuen Foong Khong

5
  Stephen D. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1999), p. 25.
6
  Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley,
1979), p. 61.
7
  Hendrick Spruyt, “Collective Imaginations and International Order: The Contem-
porary Context of the Chinese Tributary System,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 77.1
(2017): 41.
8
  Ji-Young Lee, “Hegemonic Authority and Domestic Legitimation: Japan and Korea
under the Chinese Hegemonic Order in Early Modern East Asia,” Security Studies 25.2
(2016): 320–52.
9
  Feng Zhang, Chinese Hegemony: Grand Strategy and International Institutions in East
 Response: Theory and Empirics  115

argues that there is actually a contemporary American tributary sys-

tem.10 Brantly Womack argues that asymmetry—his word for hierar-
chy—has characterized China-Vietnam relations both historically and
today.11 These are all important ways in which scholars and scholar-
ship are moving toward a more “international” study of international
systems.
Van Lieu makes a fascinating claim about fifty different states,
arguing that the emergent states of the seventh through tenth centu-
ries CE are not necessarily recognizable in the current states of Korea,
Japan, and China. This point is where, perhaps, social scientists and
historians most clearly diverge in their approaches. Van Lieu is com-
pletely correct, and indeed one argument I make in East Asia before the
West is that early modern political elites would have found the ideas
that animate tensions today to be ridiculous—ownership of rocks so
far in the middle of the ocean they are invisible from land? However, at
the same time, I tend to lean toward Alexander Woodside’s argument
that “modernity” is first located in eighth-century Tang China:
The eighth century, indeed, would make a good choice as the first century in
world history of the politically “early modern.” It was in this century that the
Chinese court first gained what it thought was a capacity to impose massive,
consolidating, central tax reforms from the top down, which few European
monarchies would have thought possible before the French revolution,
given their privileged towns, provinces, nobles, and clergy.12

In short, I make a generalizing claim that China, Vietnam, Korea, and

Japan were—or attempted to be—territorially organized, central-
ized bureaucratic political systems by at least the eleventh century CE.
These are recognizable as the goals of states today. Indeed, the reason
­premodern-era East Asian states were more modern than ­European
states of the same period derives from the fact that Korea, China,

Asian History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015); Andrew Phillips and J.C.
Sharman, “Explaining Durable Diversity in International Systems: State, Company, and
the Empire in the Indian Ocean,” International Studies Quarterly 59.3 (2015): 436–48.
10
  Yuen Foong Khong, “The American Tributary System,” Chinese Journal of Interna-
tional Politics 6.1 (2013): 1–47.
11
  Brantly Womack, China and Vietnam: The Politics of Asymmetry (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2006).
12
  Alexander Woodside, Lost Modernities: China, Vietnam, Korea, and the Hazards of
World History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 1.
116  David C. Kang

Japan, and Vietnam all attempted at one time or another to create a

bureaucracy run by merit, not heredity.
Perhaps the key theoretical argument in East Asia before the West is
that there was no obvious single political unit of analysis in early mod-
ern East Asia that dominated all others. Even though nascent nation-
states were emerging, it is also clear that similar political units were
not identical. Rather, the existence of different types of units of analy-
sis renders many of the most basic theories of international relations
difficult to apply to premodern times. Even when confining our atten-
tion to only nascent, Sinicized states, it is clear that these units did not
view each other as equals or as identical. Rather, even state-like units
saw far more differentiation than similarity. For example, China was
able to create long-lasting and stable borders with political units that
it, literally, recognized: these political units recognized each other as
Sinicized states that in many ways attempted to become like China.
Although relations were occasionally troubled, both Korea and Viet-
nam demarcated a clear border with China by the eleventh century. As
Womack, notes, however, China remained the civilizational center of
East Asia:
To say China was “among equals” would be missing a key element of the
regional situation. Even to Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Japan’s second “great
unifier,” the (unachieved) ultimate glory would have been to rule China.
China was at the center of a set of regional relationships that it could not
force, but were not transposable.13

This point leads to Saeyoung Park’s wonderful exploration of the

social, cultural, economic, and domestic political bases of how China
viewed the tributary system. Park writes that scholars “seem mark-
edly uncurious about why China would have needed such recogni-
tion in the first place . . . [Without that information] how can we claim
to understand the value of a Chinese world order?” Later, Park also
writes that East Asia before the West fails to account for “how a system
of unequal relations with a single hegemon . . . can produce long peri-
ods of peace.”14 Yet these two issues are linked, and in fact the single
13
  Brantly Womack, China Among Unequals: Asymmetric Foreign Relationships in Asia
(Singapore: World Scientific, 2010), p. 155.
14
  Saeyoung Park, “Me, Myself, and My Hegemony: The Work of Making the Chinese
World Order a Reality,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 77.1 (2017): 56–57, 64.
 Response: Theory and Empirics  117

most important reason I wrote East Asia before the West was to account
for that peacefulness.
The key to understanding the tributary system is that it was an
international system that arose to deal with unequal relations between
the units. I have been careful not to refer to the tributary system as a
“Sinocentric” system or a “Chinese world order.” Those are terms used
by other people. I deliberately avoid those terms because they make
the system about China, and not about the institutions and norms that
were widely held throughout the region. As I note above, this tributary
system is the opposite of the Westphalian system, which assumes and
validates only equal units. Given the diversity of units in premodern
East Asia, the set of norms, institutions, and ideas for how to deal with
unequal relations worked remarkably well.
In short, China did not necessarily “desire” status or position, but
given the way the system developed over many centuries, China came
to occupy the central place in that hierarchy. The tributary system itself
was designed precisely to mitigate conflict and allow flexible response
across the hierarchy and between different units. So the question of
how inequality can produce centuries of peace was exactly the single
most important question driving the entire project behind East Asia
before the West. That such stability could exist flies directly in the face
of our taken-for-granted Westphalian view of the world, and exploring
why and how East Asian polities managed their relations is the point
of the book. In that way, Park’s contribution widens and deepens our
understanding of how the tributary system worked, and is a welcome
addition.

Politicization of Scholarship
All four authors also, in one way or another, note that my scholarship
could be used to support one particular position about the P ­ eople’s
Republic of China (PRC) that arises in contemporary debates. Krishna,
Spruyt, and Van Lieu criticize me for insufficiently criticizing the PRC
and for writing scholarship that could be used to support one partic-
ular vision about contemporary China. For example, Krishna argues
that East Asia before the West is both Eurocentric at its core and also
“runs the danger of legitimating China’s emerging hegemonic use of
118  David C. Kang

soft power . . . history looks very different from the perspective of con-
temporary Uyghurs or Tibetans . . . [who] can . . . plausibly argue that
the current violence against them is the latest in a centuries-long effort
to annex their territory.”15
Few reviewers of my work note that I have explicitly written—
again and again—that what is possible in the world today is different
from what was possible five centuries ago: “A century of chaos and
change, and the growing influence of the rest of the world (in partic-
ular the United States), would lead one to conclude that a Chinese-led
regional system would not look like its historical predecessor.”16 In East
Asia before the West, the entire concluding chapter—titled “Lessons:
History Forwards and Backwards”—directly discusses the ways in
which history and historiography are debated and politicized today.
That concluding chapter argues that the history about which I was
writing is now deeply contested and manipulated for political ends
by elites and states and indeed common citizens in every country in
East Asia. Rather than repeat that chapter here, I use one quote to
show that I am fully aware of the politicization of scholarship and
history:
The states studied here—in particular China, Korea, Vietnam, and Japan—
all have long, glorious histories. But they are also in the process of defining
and crafting those national histories and beliefs and visions about their
place in the world.17

Indeed, I completely agree with everything Krishna writes. The

contemporary era began with the rise of the modern nation-state that
led to those states expanding control over aspects of people’s lives
that would have been unthinkable a few centuries ago. But Krishna
conflates observation and description with normative approval. It is
quite clear that the Qing state expanded westward and “obliterated the
nomads,” as I write in East Asia before the West. By describing what hap-
pened, I do not necessarily approve of it.
The solution to politicized scholarship is not to engage in even

15
  Sankaran Krishna, “China is China, Not the Non-West: David Kang, Eurocentrism,
and Global Politics,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 77.1 (2017): 108.
16
  David C. Kang, “Getting Asia Wrong: The Need for New Analytical Frameworks,”
International Security 27.4 (Spring 2003): 67.
17
  David C. Kang, East Asia before the West, p. 165.
 Response: Theory and Empirics  119

more politicization of scholarship. I cannot fathom how jarring it

would have been for me to conclude a scholarly book about an ancient
international system by making a withering attack on the contempo-
rary PRC’s actions and policies. How contemporary Chinese elites and
citizens determine their own national identity and nationalism is not
the focus of my research. Involving myself in a debate about which his-
torical narratives will ultimately define Chinese popular and national
identity is also beyond the scope of my research.
The question of politicized history is much more complex than
simply one’s political position on the PRC—all countries in the region
are to a greater or lesser degree engaged in writing and rewriting narra­
tives about their history. In Japan, for example, the Abe ­administration
in 2014 removed from the website of the prime minister the 1995
Murayama Statement, apologizing for the suffering Japan caused its
neighbors during WWII. The Abe administration initiated a govern-
ment study group to examine the Kono Statement, admitting that the
Japanese Imperial Army had forced women to work in military-run
brothels during WWII, and removed from the foreign ministry website
the appeal for the Asia Women’s Fund, providing monetary compen-
sation to these former “comfort women.” And the Abe administration
initiated study groups within the Liberal Democratic Party to counter
“lies” about how Japan is portrayed, especially its history abroad, and
to examine the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal indictments of imperial
Japan’s leadership for war crimes.
The solution to politicized research is not to become even more
political but rather to become even more scholarly. We must therefore
ask: How do we define and measure states, wars, and their relations?
How do we define a region and a time period—what are the scope
and boundary conditions of these classifications? What is the causal
logic that explains the observed patterns? Approaching scholarship in
this manner allows for actual cumulation of research to occur; one can
debate—as between Van Lieu and myself—whether or not the histori-
cal political units were “states” and how the conclusion to this ques-
tion affects both our understanding of the time and our more general
theories. One can debate whether simply borrowing the Correlates of
War definition (1,000 battle deaths in a calendar year) is appropriate
for defining wars in early modern East Asia. And one can debate how
to define the region of East Asia and which units should be included in
120  David C. Kang

the East Asian tributary system. Such issues promote scholarly discus-
sion over politicization.
The key issues in East Asia before the West are whether there was
in fact less war among the Sinicized states than between those states
and the Central Asian peoples who rejected Sinicization; whether
countries at the time used the norms and institutions of the tributary
system as I have described them; and whether key political units of an
international system are inevitably equal and identical—as is assumed
without question by the vast majority of contemporary International
Relations (IR) scholars and their theories—or whether there is much
wider variation in how political units organize themselves, often
involving explicit hierarchies. To quote myself again:
East Asia has changed as much as any other part of the world: some
traits have historical roots, others do not, and all are constantly evolving
depending on the circumstance, situation, institutional constraints, political
and economic exigencies, and a host of other factors. We should avoid
making sweeping claims that present either an unbroken chronological
continuity or an encompassing geographic component.18

With the goal of continuing to engage in careful empirical schol-

arship about historical East Asia and in collaboration with coauthors
Meredith Shaw and Ronan Tse-min Fu, I continue to explore a central
question that arises when discussing historical East Asia: How much
war was there really?19 We introduce an extensive dataset of over 1,100
entries that measures war and other violence in early modern East
Asia from 1368 to 1841, which relies principally on both Chinese- and
Korean-language sources. We address questions of the extent, range,
and patterns of war in early modern East Asia. Our findings empirically
corroborate characterizations of relations between Sinic East Asian
polities as being unusually peaceful and stable—a result that we attri-
bute to the participating units’ shared subscription to a common and
accepted hierarchy framed by a Confucian worldview. More broadly,

18
  David C. Kang, East Asia before the West, pp. 14–15. Iain Johnston makes a similar
point; Alastair Iain Johnston, Social States: China in International Institutions, 1980–2000
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), p. xviii.
19
  David C. Kang, Meredith Shaw, and Ronan Tse-min Fu, “Measuring War in Early
Modern East Asia, 1368–1841: Introducing Chinese and Korean Language Sources,” Inter-
national Studies Quarterly 60.4 (2017): 766–77.
 Response: Theory and Empirics  121

we provide direct empirical evidence supporting the view that interna-

tional hierarchies derive their stability from cultural consensus rather
than simply asymmetries in material power. East Asia was comprised
of many more polities than simply China; by bringing in scholarship
from other areas of early modern East Asia, our work reflects a trend of
moving past national studies to research the region more holistically.
We are pushing this research forward in other ways, as well, by
coding a key mid-nineteenth-century source in both Vietnamese and
Chinese: Khâm định Việt sử Thông giám cương mục 欽定越史通鑑綱
目 (Outline and details of the comprehensive mirror of Vietnamese
history, by imperial command).20 The introduction of this Vietnam-
ese source not only forms the basis of a unique dataset that is unprec-
edented in its granular attention to internal and external violence in
early modern East Asia; it also widens scholarship about East Asian
warfare beyond the typical focus on China, Korea, and Japan.21 Schol-
arship moves forward with careful measurement and clear discussion
of the logic of an argument; we hope that both of these articles will
contribute to more rigorous scholarship about historical East Asia.

Conclusion: Future Research

The contributions to this special issue of HJAS are productive because
they identify numerous areas for further research, which can extend,
refine, and move the debate about historical East Asian international
relations forward. Two areas in particular stand out. The first is empiri-
cal: to become much more directly engaged with the granular variation
that existed in premodern East Asia, across time and space in the polit-
ical units as well as in their behavior and interactions with each other.
Given East Asia’s global importance, we still have a surprisingly super-
ficial view of how premodern “international” relations worked and how
international and domestic politics, economics, and society interacted
and functioned within the region. Scholars need to more confidently
be able to address the questions that Van Lieu in particular raises about

20
  Khâm định Việt sử Thông giám cương mục (Ch. Qinding Yueshi tongjian gangmu), 25
vols. (n.p., between 1879 and 1911).
21
  David C. Kang, Dat Nguyen, Ronan Tse-min Fu, and Meredith Shaw, “War, Vietnam,
and the Tributary System: Introducing Vietnamese Language Sources” (unpublished man-
uscript, April 21, 2016), Microsoft Word file.
122  David C. Kang

the nature of the premodern East Asian politics and the ways in which
East Asian peoples viewed themselves and their relationships.
The second area of contribution that stands out is theoretical: to
be more sensitive to the complex questions of whether—and if so,
to what extent—we can project concepts and ideas from the mod-
ern Western experience onto historical East Asia. How did hierarchy,
hegemony, diffusion, and emulation operate in historical East Asia?
How do those concepts operate today? Does either the contemporary
or historical existence of these types of ideas challenge unquestioned
contemporary social science ideas and expectations? How would we
know? What kind of evidence would allow us to adjudicate between
competing claims? Good scholarship should ask whether what hap-
pened in East Asia is sui generis or whether it is part of a global pattern
of state building, violence, and identity formation.