‘Getting Asia right’: de-essentializing China's hegemony in historical Asia

Abstract

International Relations (IR) scholars have taken China's presumed hegemony in pre-modern East Asia as an ideal case to ‘undermine’ the field's Eurocentrism. If Eurocentric IR is guilty of ‘getting Asia wrong’, do students of historical Asia ‘get Asia right’? Analysts should avoid exotifying differences between the West and the East and ‘exchanging Eurocentrism for Sinocentrism’. This article tries to ‘get Asia [more] right’ by ‘disaggregating’ and then ‘reassembling’ taken-for-granted concepts by time, space, and relationality. When ‘Confucianism’ is understood to justify both war and peace in competition with other thoughts, it does not dictate peace among East Asian states or conflicts across the Confucian–nomadic divide. When ‘China’ is unpacked, it does not sit on top of an Asian hierarchy. When Korea's, Vietnam's, and Japan's views of their relations with China are examined rather than presumed, cultural legitimacy is thinned out. When ‘Asia’ is broadened to cover webs of relations beyond East Asia to Central Asia, Confucianism recedes in centrality and pan-Asian phenomena including Buddhism and the steppe tradition come to the fore. The article concludes that a better challenge to Eurocentrism is not to search for cultural differences but to locate Eurasian similarities that erase European superiority.