236 Part IV: East Asia
administrative institutions (Barnes 2015). This “East Asian civilization” now
includes two billion people, a third of the population of the entire planet.
From those earliest states came three nations, which became five nations
after World War II: China—the People’s Republic of China and Republic of
China (Taiwan), Korea—North Korea and South Korea, and Japan. China
claims “Taiwan” is only a renegade province of China, which has always been
Chinese and most of whose population is Chinese. North and South Korea are
remnants of an unresolved war fought by the United States to keep Korea from
“going Communist” when North Korea (with support from China and Russia)
attempted to incorporate the South in 1950. In 1953 an armistice was signed,
establishing the status quo more or less to the present (though the two coun-
tries are still technically at war). Since then, North and South Korea have
diverged drastically, the North to a totalitarian state with nuclear arms, and the
South to a capitalist powerhouse, but they are still indubitably the “Korea” that
shares thousands of years of common history.
Geographic barriers ensured that whatever commonalties of culture East
Asian countries shared, they would also remain isolated to a great degree,
allowing cultural innovations to grow internally, working and reworking what-
ever they shared from across water and mountain barriers. On the peninsula
(North and South Korea) and the islands (Japan) there was a great deal of eth-
nic homogeneity, despite the fact that regular cultural transactions took place
among the three around the Sea of Japan and the Yellow Sea between China
and Korea. On the mainland (China) there was very little ethnic homogeneity,
despite a national narrative evolving over centuries asserting more homogene-
ity than was ever the case (Rawski 2012).
For all three of the pre-World War II nations, the west was the source of
new ideas, new peoples, and trade. But “the West” was not Europe until the
nineteenth century. Through most of history, “the West” for Japan was Korea
and China; for China “the West” was northern and central Asia and India.
China’s great sixteenth-century epic, Journey to the West, describing the incredi-
ble journey west of a monk, a monkey, and a pig, captures the exotic mystery
that the West held for north Asian peoples (reversing the exoticism that the
East has had for peoples of the West). More often, the West came to China;
new ideas and new people arriving in the central plain of the Chinese heartland
were non-Han (nonethnic Chinese) conquerors, and China was ruled by non-
Han peoples for over half of its recorded history (Rawski 2012). The most
important of all ideas coming westward across deserts and through trading
towns was Buddhism, which reached China in the first or second century C.E.,
Korea in 372 C.E., and Japan in 538 C.E. Korea—the one in the middle—has
often been on the defensive from China or Japan. From those early Han
Dynasty military outposts to the ancient Korean state of Koguryo (37 B.C.E. to
668 B.C.E.) which stretched from about the location of modern Pyongyang to
the Songhua River in China’s Jilin Province, Korea has had Chinese claims on
its territory. Can China claim those early outposts, or are they Korean? Was