There is no need to go into detail to appreciate China’s rising power and its influence on the global economy and on global politics. Even a cursory survey of media reports and academic journals will attest to these phenomena. As such, it is not surprising that the following questions occupy our scholarly and policy debate: What will a future hegemonic China look like? And how will regional states respond to it? In international relations, these questions are usually addressed deductively, even while we know that the general answers deduced from IR theories, such as balance of power, power transition, and neoliberal institutionalism, fall short of precise explanation or prediction. To be fair, representational accuracy is not a prime goal of theory in the social sciences, and simplification of the complex reality of international politics is often deemed necessary in IR theorizing. However, this particular issue is so critical and multifaceted that one should not leave it to theoretical conjecture. Rather, we ought to strive for a more accurate understanding of how Chinese hegemony may work and what the future of the East Asian regional order will look like.

This is where an in-depth historical inquiry can be a useful guide, and the two books under review here shine in this regard. Rather than simplification or generalization, both offer intensive historical analyses of East Asian international relations during the period in which imperial China (i.e., the Ming and Qing dynasties) exercised hegemonic power. From their empirically rich and analytically rigorous investigation, we gain a substantial body of new and important evidence about how China and its neighbors interacted with each other and how Chinese hegemony worked in early modern East Asia. This body of historical evidence, if it is developed into explicit theorizing, can in turn serve not only to challenge and complement existing accounts and “mainstream IR theories . . . developed out of the modern Western experience” (Chinese Hegemony, p. 21), but also to envision “the future of East Asian regional order” (China’s Hegemony, p. 179).

More specifically, Feng Zhang’s Chinese Hegemony takes a close look at the interactions and tributary relationships between Ming China, the then—“undisputed regional hegemon” (p. 2), and its neighboring states (i.e., Korea, Japan, and the Mongols). Zhang demonstrates that although tributary diplomacy and hierarchy centered on China was “the most significant” feature of historical East Asian politics (p. 167), China did not completely dominate its neighbors. Drawing on the Gramscian notion of hegemony, he emphasizes that the hierarchical relationship between “superior” Ming China and “inferior” neighbors was not always linear (p. 79), nor was it a result of material and instrumental calculation. A similar set of findings is presented by Ji-Young Lee’s enticing book, China’s Hegemony. On the basis of a painstaking analysis of Asian-language materials, including records written by Chinese and Korean tributary envoys, Lee demonstrates that Chinese hegemony was not just accepted but also defied and even challenged by its less powerful neighboring states. While Zhang focuses analytical attention on early Ming China (1368–1424), Lee includes the period of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) and shows that it was not only Chinese (material) power but also, and more importantly, China’s “smaller” neighbors that “shaped the character of Chinese hegemony” and the “international order” of early modern East Asia (p. 173).

This is a very important set of findings. First, it sheds light on what East Asian international orders were like and how were they formed before Europe imposed its own forms of politics and ideology. This helps rectify the Western parochialism of the IR discipline and guard against the misleading view of “Western” history as “world” history in international studies. Second, and more importantly, the findings challenge the conventional understanding of historical East Asian international relations. The conventional wisdom, advanced by the Harvard historian John K. Fairbank, defines the international order of historical East Asia (especially during the Ming and Qing periods) as Sinocentric, a superordinate—subordinate relationship between China and its neighbors sustained by a tributary system (see Fairbank, “Tributary Trade and China’s Relations with the West,” Far Eastern Quarterly, 1(2), 1942: 129–149). Taking Fairbank’s understanding for granted, IR scholars often point to either China’s material power (e.g., Alastair Iain Johnston, Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History, 1995) or Chinese Confucian culture (e.g., David Kang, East Asia Before the West: Five Centuries of Trade and Tribute, 2010) in order to account for the Sinocentric tributary system. By contrast, both Zhang and Lee demonstrate that international relations in East Asia were much more dynamic and complex than the received wisdom suggests. Other East Asian states were “not passive recipients” of Chinese hegemony (China’s Hegemony, p. 3): instead, “culturally inferior or materially weaker” states in the region (Chinese Hegemony, p. 138) contemplated and practiced clear strategies of denial and defiance, as well as identification and deference.

What, then, gave rise to such diversity in these states’ interactions and relationships? The answers offered by Zhang and Lee help us gain a firmer grasp of the complexity of historical East Asian international relations. First, Zhang draws our attention to “Confucian relationalism” and “expressive” relationships, which are “rooted in the cultural tradition” of East Asia (ibid., p. 43). According to Confucian relationalism, social actions and relationships are determined by the conjunction of an “instrumental” principle that aims to maximize individual actors’ self-interests and an “expressive” principle that involves “affection and obligation” between the actors involved (p. 34). Zhang emphasizes that contra the assumption common to Western-centric IR theory, instrumental rationality and self-interest were not always the dominant principles in the interplay between China and its neighbors. Rather, “expressive” logic, the “psychological, emotional, and ethical foundation” of Confucianism (p. 27), was also an essential, though not predominant, feature of international relations in East Asia history.

While endorsing the argument that Confucian culture had a great impact on traditional relations in East Asia, Lee focuses on the roles of less powerful states in shaping the specific character of regional relations and “the variations in receptivity” to the hegemony of imperial China (China’s Hegemony, p. 2). Comparing Korea’s behavior toward the Ming and Qing dynasties (overall compliance) with that of Japan (overall defiance), Lee shows that this difference was due to the two countries’ “domestic power struggles” (p. 171). Korean and Japanese leaders used imperial China’s “symbolic” recognition in ways that enhanced “their political legitimacy . . . against domestic rivals” (p. 2), as was particularly apparent when their countries experienced “domestic legitimacy deficits or crises” (p. 169). In this context, Lee highlights that Chinese hegemony and its repercussions were not a simple by-product of Chinese material power or Confucian culture, but rather were constructed through the strategic choices driven by weaker states’ domestic political needs.

Despite these strengths, the two books are not without limitations. A look back over imperial China’s hegemony and the dynamics of tributary diplomacy in East Asia may be a necessary undertaking, but it is not sufficient on its own to answer what Zhang himself calls a “central question,” “what will China do with its new power,” and how will regional states respond to it (Chinese Hegemony, p. 1)? To be fair, Zhang (and Lee as well) does not pretend to offer clear answers to these questions. But neither Zhang nor Lee, as social scientists, shy away from offering “theoretical insights” (Lee’s phrase) or “normative” arguments (Zhang’s phrase) with respect to the future of East Asian international relations. This is where the obvious limitations of the two books lie. Lee’s “theoretical insights” in her concluding chapter do not match the sophistication of her earlier empirical chapters. For her “theoretical” insights to be useful, her “historical” findings and interpretations need to be converted into a systemic analytical framework couched in terms of theoretical variables.

Relatedly, more specific causal relationships between a dominant state’s hegemony and weak states’ domestic political needs should be identified so as to judge the theory’s external validity, draw out more generalizable propositions across time and space outside of early modern East Asia, and foster new hypotheses about the future of a rising China. Likewise, the theoretical discussion in Zhang’s book does not support the weight it is intended to bear. The “central” question of what China and East Asia will do, raised at the outset of his book, ends up being answered with what they ought to do. To be sure, normative discussions are useful in the practice and study of IR, particularly for heuristic purposes. Yet Zhang’s normative statements are question begging. When he calls for “ethical relationalism” as the basis of contemporary East Asian international relations, his rationales rest on Chinese “Confucian ethics,” which emphasize “commitment, empathy, affection, and obligation” (Chinese Hegemony, p. 181). The problem is that things have changed, at both the domestic and international levels. Western liberal individualism has already permeated, and become inseparable from, East Asian states, especially Korea and Japan. Although in many cases the West imposed, often violently, the notion of equal sovereignty among nation-states, this notion has now become the principle of Asian international relations. Given this shift, Zhang’s normative claims seem to ring hollow. Hence, the question remains unanswered. To paraphrase Mark Twain, will East Asia’s future “rhyme” with its past?