Is a US-China Thucydides Trap Unavoidable? With David C. Kang from the ChinaTalk Podcast

How do great power transitions work in East Asia? And what lessons from the foreign relations of imperial China can we take to understanding East Asia today?

To discuss this, we have David C. Kang. He's a professor at USC and recently co-authored, alongside Xinru Ma, who's currently out on maternity leave, Beyond Power Transitions: The Lessons of East Asian History and the Future of U.S.-China Relations.

Continuing on our Imperial China series, Ilari Michaela of the On Humans podcast is co-hosting. Welcome to China Talk, everyone. Professor Kang, what do people who are not familiar with East Asian history get wrong when they think about international relations and war?

The biggest thing that came to us from starting to research this book was how many times great powers stumbled for internal reasons, and not because of great-power war or challenges from the outside. To me, that's the biggest lesson. When we take the history and look to the present, we see both the U.S. and China with considerable internal challenges that are probably more important than their relations to each other.

That's what I'd say is probably the biggest lesson that I would have people take away.

You say that the countries we're familiar with—the proper states of China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam—formed toward the end of the first millennium. From the time that you start having these clear states, it's only a handful of times that there is a kind of land grab, a war, the kind of thing that's so familiar from European history. At least if you look at their dynamics with each other, it's remarkably peaceful.

Well, this is the thing that I've spent my career trying to make that argument about. It doesn't mean that Asian countries don't ever fight. They fight a lot sometimes. But the way that wars worked, and the types of land grabs and, in this case, the type of power transition that we think are universal as part of the inevitable human condition, actually seem to be pretty European in nature.

One of the main points of the book is that we started by asking, what do power transitions look like in Asia? Everybody tries to take the European experience and squish it onto Asia. Is China today like Athens? Is it like Sparta? Is it like Bismarckian Germany? We said, why would we try to figure out what European analogy fits with Asia? Why wouldn't we start with Asian history first and see what lessons we would learn?

If you had actually started studying international relations and didn't start with Europe but started with Asia, you would never come up with a theory of power transitions of rising and falling powers grabbing land and tiny advantages being exploited. You just would never come up with that theory.

Instead, you'd come up with a theory of a bunch of really stable countries that have very clear conceptions of their own, for lack of a better word, national identity. There was some conception that Korea was clearly not China and clearly not Japan. There were clearly differences in their power and how big they were, but also a very clear recognition that they could work out these types of relations that were unequal.

Instead, what you look at is what happened internally. Almost every single dynastic transition in East Asia came from internal reasons, when one of the dynasties collapsed or decayed, or there was a rebellion. Remarkably few changed because of external invasion.

I guess we'll start with the Song, since you decided to start with the Song. How did they drop the ball?

What Xinru and I did was look at the various dynasties. We just tried to see—we didn't necessarily start out trying to make this larger argument. We started out just saying, “I don't think it worked that way. Let's find the power transitions in East Asia.” Then we ended up not finding very many.

What we did then was take the individual ones that might have looked that way and try to figure out whether they actually fit. One of the one times in the last, say, 2,000 years that China has been conquered from the outside was when the Mongols conquered the Song dynasty over the 13th century. It took about 50 years, until about 1279, when the Mongols declared themselves the Yuan dynasty.

We looked at it, and it looks like a classic power transition. You've got all these Mongol hordes, they come over and attack, the Song is falling, and then they end up winning. So it looks like the classic rising power and declining power.

But you don't actually have to look very closely to realize that Song China at its height had around 50 million people and was the richest country. It had 3 million men in its army. It was an incredibly powerful country that had come up with all this flourishing internal development, paper money, a canal system, and all of this. It was an incredibly well-run, dynamic country.

The Mongols at their height had 1 million people, they think—we don't really know. So there's just no way that this was a rising power and a falling power. Instead, what happened was a lot of bad decisions within the Song.

Eventually, the Song, in many ways, were more cozy with the Mongols at one point because they were more focused on reclaiming some territory that the Liao and other countries had grabbed from them: the 16 prefectures to the north. They actually tried to ally with the Mongols to get back what they considered to be old Song-dynasty land, and were totally unprepared for what actually happened.

In many ways, the Song-Mongol transition doesn't look anything like what we would expect a power transition to look like. Instead, what we see is a Song China that was focused on what it believed was its own inherent territory and was not paying attention to the actual threats that were coming toward it.

The fall of the Song, I think, is an interesting example because basically your argument is, these guys had no business losing, but they were just so emotionally bound up in their connection to these northern territories that they made a lot of dumb decisions that opened them up to being rolled by the Yuan.

My first thought there is that Europeans are emotional too, and they make a lot of dumb, not necessarily cold, calculating, strategic balance-of-forces decisions. I think also, to give the Yuan some credit, it wasn't just that the Song were able to defeat them by doing a comparison of adding up how many soldiers you have, when the Yuan are almost more like they're coming to the battlefield with assault rifles and everyone else is playing with bows and arrows. Particularly when you have the other cases of them basically destroying every functional civilization on the planet, it seems like it would make a little—I don't know—it kind of complicates the narrative a little bit.

Yes. No, absolutely. And the argument isn't that the Song just screwed up and the Mongols got lucky, right? I mean, the Mongols—and Genghis Khan—were, what do you say about the greatest general in history, who conquered more land than anyone ever has before or since? So this isn't to take away from the Mongols per se. It's really to think about when we get to the Song dynasty. First of all, did this look like a power transition? No, it probably didn't, right?

The Song had already been divided into 2 because they were so focused on fighting to get back the prefectures that they had lost to the Liao. The Southern Song had already been pushed back. And so, in many ways, when we look at what the Song was doing and their focus, it was still on this internal return, or what did they call it, the honorable reclamation of lost land and stuff like that. They weren't sitting around saying, "What are the external threats? What's going on? How do we prepare for them?"

That's where I say they even tried to ally with the Mongols at first to get those territories back, without realizing they were actually letting the fox into the henhouse and things like that. So even the Song, way, way, way too late, realized that that was the real threat. The Song had decades of evidence that the Mongols were the real threat, but they worked with them because they were trying to get this territory back. And that's what I mean by these internal mistakes.

We can see this. It's not like just one thing; it was over decades that they saw the Mongols getting stronger and conquering everybody else, and they were still like, "Let's use these guys to get that territory." And that's what I mean by a sense of—I forget what we used in the book, because we tried to avoid national identity, because that's way too modern—but there is some conception of what Song China should be, and it was longer and older than the Song itself. That's what they were focused on until way too late, when they were like, "Oh, what's going on?" Then they had to try and adjust, and that's what we think is so important to note, right? How do you resolve this territory, and what is civilization? What does it mean to be Chinese? "Oh, these guys are attacking us." And that's where we focused on it.

I mean, there's another interesting thing about the Mongols, which is that there's a big difference in what happens to the east of China and what happens to the west of China. The Mongols are just one example of trouble on the western frontier.

Yes. One of the things that I find so interesting is how the ways that we think about the world get codified. They become conventional wisdom, and then we stop even questioning it. First of all, the lessons of history are always the gladiators, or Athens, or things like the Crusades. It's always European. I get it, right? But it's still always European.

Secondly, even when conventional or mainstream historians talk about China, again and again they talk about the threats to China coming from the western steppe, from the seminomadic peoples that lived along the great plains, whether it was the Mongols or the Xiongnu thousands of years ago. We just take that for granted. That's why they built the Great Wall. All these threats to China—I mean, even people who know Chinese history just from Disney films will know that there are some really wicked people in the west who want to attack, and Mulan has to go and fight, right? The one thing we know about Chinese history is Mulan protecting China from the barbarians, right?

But what's so fascinating when you start with that is that any Western IR theory, the game of Risk, all of the ways that we think about international relations say that the bigger countries threaten and bully the smaller countries. But we simply talk about, "Oh, China was facing threats from these tiny seminomadic peoples." There's no way that should work. If you just started with a massive country with 50 million people and a bunch of smaller polities to its side, whether east or west, they're the ones who should be afraid of China. China shouldn't be building walls. Everyone else should be building walls against China. But this is not the way that it should work.

Especially if we look to the east and to the south, these were recognizably kingdoms. These were recognizably nascent states, right? They were governments. They had territory. They were bureaucratically administered. These weren't seminomadic tribes moving around from various agrarian regions, up the mountains and into the depths. These were settled agrarian states, bureaucratically administered, with long-standing bureaucracies. They had written language. They used Chinese script. These were clearly governments.

Korea, Japan, and Vietnam should have been terrified of China. And yet, nobody's building walls to defend themselves against any of this. On the eastern and southern sides, these countries managed to craft remarkably stable relationships with each other.

Now, in a way, this shouldn't be surprising. If we can move away from what we think should happen from Europe and just start with, well, there's a bunch of countries—some are bigger, some are smaller—but all of these countries are trying to do the same things and could literally understand each other. Literally. When I say that, I mean they used Sinitic script. Every character in Japanese is borrowed or modified from Chinese characters; the Koreans use it, and the Vietnamese use it. 60% to 70% of the vocabulary in these countries is made up of Chinese-derived words. They were consciously trying to be like the Chinese.

The Chinese could literally recognize them, see something they understood. They could talk, and they crafted relations. These smaller countries, in many ways, tried to emulate the Chinese experience. They often even borrowed the same governmental form—6 ministries, etc.—and a written examination to hire civil servants. So, in a way, if we start from that, it's not surprising that these countries could craft stable relations with each other.

They had what we call in the book a common conjecture. Both sides—the Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, and Chinese—had a common vocabulary and an understanding of what mattered, what didn't matter, and how to interact with each other. It doesn't mean they always got along. There's a lot of pushing and shoving, but it was within a shared understanding of what the world meant and how we should handle it.

And that's very different from Chinese or even Korean relations with the seminomadic peoples, whether they be Mongols or the Xiongnu or whatever else, to their west, who didn't want those same things. The Mongols didn't necessarily want to have written bureaucratic systems, etc., until the part of them that conquered China did. Then they did for about 100 years, but it fell apart because that culture was very, very different and it never really became settled.

So you have very different types of patterns here between countries that understand each other, that literally use the same vocabulary and talk to each other, and then peoples that don't want the same things. What we came back to was this: when we talk about international relations, it's not simply power differentials. It's not simply who's stronger and bullies everyone else. It's, "Do we understand each other? Do we have a common culture or vocabulary? Are we part of a great conversation where we're like, 'Okay, we should do this. We shouldn't do that'?" And you see very different patterns of stability and war in East Asia than you did in Europe or other places.

And I think one really interesting thing to notice in the history is that it's not that this case was always just rolling along with them having bureaucracies, etc. Actually, with Jordan, we interviewed Yuen Yuen Ang earlier for a whole thing where we talked a lot about the way that the civil service exam shapes China. And it's really, I think, a nice link to your work, where you show not only China, but also Japan, Korea, and Vietnam emulating that civil service exam.

Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but it's the Sui dynasty that really institutionalizes it, right?

I mean, they attacked Korea several times. There were skirmishes between them and Korea, but it's really after that kind of civil service era, especially when it reaches all the places, that you start seeing this peace.

And I think what's so important is the case of Vietnam, because a lot of Vietnamese would say, "Hold on a second. China was constantly bullying." Your pushback, if I'm right, is that, well, there was a time when there was a lot happening, but if you look at Vietnam with the civil service exams and a proper state from the year 1000 roughly onwards, you don't have that anymore.

And so there really is a kind of time before and a time after. It is once these cultures start to really work in roughly similar ways that you get this remarkable stability.

Absolutely.

I mean, one of the ways in which Vietnam, for example, maintained its independence was by immediately engaging in tribute relations with China at the time of the Song, right when they became independent around 1079. They entered into tributary relationships. I’m currently doing some research where I’m trying to go back through the Ming Shilu and the Qing Shilu, the Veritable Records of the Ming and Qing dynasties in China, which cover roughly 1400 to 1900.

I’m really interested to see how the elites in Beijing in the Ming government talked about Vietnam, because the Vietnamese would tell you—and this is very much a 20th-century perspective projected back onto the past, which didn’t exist at the time—“They were always bullying us. They were always trying to invade us.” But if you look back at what the Vietnamese were actually saying to the Chinese, often they were saying things like this: There would be a debate in Vietnam over some rebellion and a faction, and both sides would appeal to the Ming court or the Qing court and say, “We’re the legitimate rulers. Recognize us.”

In the Chinese records, you can see these debates among the elites, where they say, “We’ve got to figure out whom we recognize here.” But there is almost no discussion in the Qing historical records about, “Should we invade this time? Is this our chance to take over Vietnam?” It’s all, “Who’s the legitimate ruler? How do we stabilize our relationship?” On the Vietnamese side, often it was, “If we have recognition from China, then we’re the legitimate rulers. We’re the ones.” It was very much an aspirational type of relationship.

That border between Vietnam and China was formally negotiated. I think it was 1079 when it was formally negotiated, and that border is literally in the same place today.

What? That’s almost 1,000 years, right? That border has not changed, right?

They put down 2 bronze pillars. There’s a great book by Liam Kelley called Beyond the Bronze Pillars. They put down these gates: Here’s where Vietnam starts, and here’s where China starts. That’s what it’s been ever since. That’s remarkable stability.

Let’s push back a little bit. I think the key difference that Ilari and I came to in comparing the East Asian experience with the European experience is, as you pointed out, at the end of the day, there’s China and there are some gnats. Some of the gnats figure out how not to get squished, and some of the gnats don’t.

We don’t have any kingdoms in Yunnan anymore. Tibet had a rough time of it. Xinjiang had a rough time of it. I mean, all these ethnic minorities who used to do their own thing get sort of eliminated. You also go north with China taking over big chunks of the northeast.

It just so happened that there was enough historical happenstance that Vietnam, Korea, and Japan woke up early enough, were far enough away, and were not important enough to create this sort of understanding where there wasn’t enough of a payoff from a Chinese leader’s perspective. If they’re already basically getting all that they want and they get to feel good that these foreigners are bringing them cows and inscriptions or whatever, then why do anything else?

The thing that really brought this home to me was a quote from a scholar you have that said, “Over the centuries, Korean elites, as stakeholders rather than outsiders, helped shape the imperial transition. The palpable irony of all of this is that the myth of China’s moral empire persisted even until today, partly because generations of diplomats had been repeating it to China’s imperial forefathers for centuries.”

“To come away with this conclusion is to forget why Korean envoys and memorial drafters used this notion of the moral empire in the first place. It was to convince empires and their agents that behaving according to Korean expectations was the best way to be imperial.”

We’re recording this a few weeks after Yom Kippur, and this resonated really dramatically with me. I was reading the Jewish prayer book, where basically all of the prayers are, “God, please let me live another year.” What it does is quote different parts of the Bible where God promises the Israelite people, “I’m going to be nice to you, and I forgive you.”

It feels like the same thing. They’re just saying, “All right, we have no choice, because from your national-power calculation perspective, China is 100 times bigger than we are.” This is not the sort of thing where you’ve got a Holy Roman Empire, a French king, and some city-states in Italy trying to work out who’s top dog or whatever. I don’t know. Thoughts? Reflections?

No, absolutely. You’ve said, in a different way, one of the key arguments about the book, which is that it’s not about relative power. It’s about the shared understanding of how you should behave and how you should interact with each other.

Almost none of us actually go through life always ready with a shiv to push back when people do something. No, we have a basic understanding: You should do this, you should do that. That’s what I mean about the great conversation, right?

I love that book, by the way. Shout-out to Sixiang Wang. We should put links to all these books there.

Oh, good.

Right.

But this is the conversation. It’s not that somehow, under the Sui dynasty in 500 AD, they came up with a bunch of rules and then everybody just followed them for the next 1,500 years. No, it’s constantly being adjudicated and adjusted. Things change.

The difference in the Korean state—you know, the Silla dynasty in 600 versus 1600—is 1,000 years of history and stuff like that, right?

Yeah, my argument would be that the only reason you can have this conversation in the first place is because that relative balance of power doesn’t change: China is just a thousand times more powerful than everyone else, and these other 3 polities are just trying to survive. That is the constant you see from 500 to, I don’t know, 1870, which allows this to even manifest in the first place.

You’re absolutely right. One of the other things that I probably should have said, if I give a talk, is: Look, Europe was a balance-of-power system. It was a multipolar system, and it still is today. Asia has been and is a hegemonic system. It’s got 1 massive power and a bunch of smaller countries. They’re not going to behave the same way.

The way that we think multipolar balance-of-power systems behave doesn't track or analogize to East Asia. It's a very different system, and it's developed that way over 1,500 years or so. Actually, from the first time China unified, let's call it 2,000 years, everybody had to figure out not how do we expand and become stronger, but how do we survive and exist and grow and pursue what we want in the shadow of an enormously central power that is not going away. You're not moving away. They're not moving away. Right? You are stuck. You have to work out this unequal relationship.

To just hint about the future a little bit, that is what's going on today. The one thing I do want to say is, every aspirational quote I hear, or every time I read something from somebody in the D.C. blob about Asia balancing China, I say, “No. No, they're not. No, they're not. That is never going to happen.” The countries in Asia are not going to join a U.S. containment coalition against China. That's not how it's going to work. They have to live with China. They don't have to like it, but they have to craft a relationship with this massive country. And that's what they did back then.

So, I think, would it be right then to say that, in the European model, you assume a kind of billiard-ball table? You have these equally sized balls, very hard in themselves, but then they bump into each other, bounce off each other, and when you look at East Asia, what you see instead is things crumbling from the inside. It's not that there's no violence: there are internal rebellions, and there is the western frontier with the steppe nomads. But the logic of Europe is not the logic that you would see, especially not between these 4 countries.

I think Korea is kind of a poster boy for that kind of relationship with China. Vietnam—many Vietnamese would push back and say, “No, no, no, no. The Chinese were always trying to come,” and then they talk about the incursions, and you say, “Yeah, but the incursions were before this whole Sinicization of Vietnamese culture.” What about Japan? Japan not only, of course, has the famous wars in the late 1800s and early 20th century, but even when things really go wild in East Asia in the late 1500s—the Imjin War, which I think most listeners won't even have heard about. I literally didn't register that this war ever happened before I read your book, and it sounds like things really went wild. Why don't you tell the quick story of the Imjin War, and also, how much do you think that Japan is actually a little bit more Europe-like than the rest of these examples?

What's made this so fun over what has been almost 2 decades now that I've been doing this stuff has been how many things I think we should do differently when we teach international relations in the United States or in Europe. I grew up—my father's from northern Korea. He actually is from north of Pyongyang. When I was growing up, I wasn't paying attention. You know how your parents always say it: he's telling me some story about, “Oh, well, the Japanese tried to invade. They kept trying to invade Korea all the time, and we fought them off on these turtle ships.” I heard about this turtle-ship guy. That's all I knew about Korean history until I started this.

Yay for the turtle guy, who's Admiral Yi Sun-sin, who, by the way, should be studied in every international relations book, of course, because he's an extraordinary admiral—an unbelievable admiral—who won these phenomenal battles with 13 of his ships against 300 Japanese ships during this war. The other thing that I thought we should all learn is we should be studying the Imjin War, because it doesn't work the way we think it works.

Who's heard of the Spanish Armada? Everybody's heard of that. I'm going to contrast that, because in 1588, the Spanish Armada—the Spaniards—tried to invade London, and they sent, I think it was, about 130 ships and 20,000 troops, the biggest force Renaissance Europe had ever seen. 4 years later, on the other side of the globe, in 1592, the Japanese tried to conquer China, and they started by invading Korea to get to China.

So, exactly contemporaneous with the Spanish Armada: 300,000 Japanese troops and 700 ships. The scale of the war was 5 to 10 times what you could even think of. You couldn't even think of that in Europe at that time. That's the ability of these countries to fight wars when they wanted to. The scale at which they could fight, and the logistical and organizational capacity of these East Asian countries, dwarfed anything you could imagine.

By the way, why is that? It's because their civil service and bureaucracy were more centralized and more complicated. And this will get back, briefly, to what Japan is or is not. In 700 AD, the Japanese ministry had 7,000 people working in its bureaucracy. 500 years later, the Catholic Curia had around 500 people working in it, and it was the most organized thing in all of Europe, right?

The Japanese, who are widely considered less organized, less sophisticated, less educated, et cetera, than Koreans, Chinese, and Vietnamese—Japan was considered the barbarian, with a less-developed bureaucracy. Its organization, its bureaucrats, and its civil service exam, which they used for about 400 years, dwarfed what you could imagine in Europe.

All these countries had the capacity to do that. They just didn't choose to do it that way. China did, because China always had a big army, because they had, again, the western steppe and all those kinds of things, right? So when they decided to fight, the capacity of these countries to create a massive army, ships, organization, logistics, and supply was unthinkable in Europe at the time. So that's the context for why we should study this war. It's one of the great wars, and it doesn't work the way we think it should work, because, 1st, China was always bigger.

As we pointed out, China was bigger than Japan. If anybody should have been invading, China should have been invading Japan. But this Japanese general, Hideyoshi, had unified Japan after a breakdown of central rule that had lasted about 100 years. Nobody—I have not yet heard a definitive argument for why he decided to invade China. Ego and hubris is certainly one. There's a large argument that it was domestic politics, because he had united a bunch of warring factions, daimyo and stuff like that, in order both to get their soldiers out of Japan so they couldn't revolt against him and to keep them happy and get them more gold and stuff like that by sending them out.

What's pretty clear, though, is that he didn't actually do a whole lot of scouting or measuring of the relative balance of power between him and China, or even between him and Korea. There's almost no record that they were sitting there saying, “They're weaker; we're stronger,” or making any of these calculations of balance of power that we say occur when wars start. There's almost no evidence that he did any of that.

Oh, the other interesting thing about this is, if you just have 1 big country and 2 small countries—Korea and Japan and China: 1 big country, China; 2 small countries—all IR theory would say the 2 small countries should ally together and form an alliance against the big country. And it's very modern, by the way, with those 2 countries. There's a lot of people who think, “Why are they not more friendly with each other?” And they're still saying that, right?

I mean, there's so much that tracks to today as well. Anyone who says the small countries should ally together and huddle together against the big country—but that's not what happened. Instead, Japan invaded Korea, which was not expecting it, because it was—again—it was like, “You must be kidding.” The Koreans had word that there was a buildup for a couple of years, and they refused to believe it.

They went to the Chinese and said, “We need help.” Even the Chinese didn't believe it at first, like, “You're kidding me.” So it took a while for the Chinese to actually take it seriously. Then the Chinese sent troops, while Admiral Yi Sun-sin cut the Japanese supply lines, because he was a great admiral. The Japanese advance got pushed all the way back to Busan. They spent a couple of years negotiating.

Hideyoshi died, and then they invaded again a second time. They were crushed and went back to Japan in 1598.

The other amazing thing about this is that obviously the Korean government would not have survived if the Chinese weren't there. The Chinese troops were completely in charge of the Korean Peninsula after this war in 1598. All they had to do was say, “Okay, we're in charge. This is now the 33rd province or whatever.” All the Chinese had to do was stay. But within about a year, they all went home. They were like, “This isn't our country. This is Korea. Okay, good luck with that.” And then they took off.

The Koreans were actually trying to get them to stay because they thought the Japanese might come a third time. None of this tracks with the way we think it should happen. The Chinese could have just stayed, but they were like, “This isn't our country.” That goes to not power. That goes to a conception of who we are and who we aren't, and whether we care about this or not.

It's not a simple, endless expansion, like gas that expands to fill the space available. Countries don't—empirically, they don't simply expand as much as they can. So much of this war doesn't act at all the way we think that war should act.

Interestingly enough, the Japanese slink home. The Tokugawa shogunate lasts for 200 years, and they don't do anything—actually, almost 300 years, from 1598 to 18-whatever. For 300 years, these countries then just sort of interacted with each other. So it's a very interesting war, and it doesn't track at all with the way we expect wars should track.

But it does track with the fact that China is a big country, Korea had good relations with it, and Japan had this one guy who, for very interesting domestic reasons, decided he was going to try and invade everyone else. The system sort of snaps back to stability in ways that we simply do not see in the European experience.

It's the only war between Japan, Korea, and China in 600 years—from, like, 1200 to 1800. It's the only war in 600 years between these countries, and they clearly had the capacity to fight, which is the thing. It's not that they weren't able to. It's not that there were just tribes running around. These were countries with massive capacities that simply chose not to fight.

I think it is easy to see the Imjin War as the kind of weird exception that almost proves the rule of stability because, like you said, the reaction was, “You've got to be kidding. That's obviously not going to happen.” Then: “Oh, okay, it is happening.”

But the same does not hold for the much more familiar case of Japan attacking China in the late 1800s, and then, of course, with the World Wars. I think that's one of the key things that we wanted to push back on, talking with Jordan earlier: one of the major international relations theories that you feel is based in the book is too Eurocentric. It's the so-called Thucydides trap, which is: you have a rising power and a declining power, and whenever that happens—or what was the famous number?—in 12 out of 16 cases where you have this, there's a war.

There's a war. Then you say that you just don't see that in East Asian history, which is fair enough. But there is a much more facile way of reading that, which is that you just don't have any power able to challenge China. I think this is also what Jordan was getting at earlier. Lo and behold, the moment when Japan, due to industrialization, is able to challenge the hegemon, they immediately do.

In what sense do you think that East Asia is a counterexample to the Thucydides trap, which excites a lot of attention nowadays because of the China-U.S. dynamic, versus actually being one of those cases where you have a sample size of 1 in the whole of East Asian history? Japan behaves exactly like the Western international relations theorists would predict Japan to behave.

That's great, right? I mean, this is where I think it's so interesting, because you have a traditional—or whatever you want to call it—East Asian world order. That world order had its own set of principles, values, and expectations, and it was, as we've been talking about, remarkably stable.

The arrival of the Western imperial powers in the 19th century blew that all apart. I haven't done research on this. I'm still going farther back in time, as opposed to coming closer to the present. But to me, this era is—if there are international relations scholars out there who want to talk about how we understand a change of world orders, this is the time people should be studying.

There are examples of the Japanese first learning Western theory. They learned French or spoke French, and they came to argue with the Chinese in 1879 over Taiwan and its status. The Chinese wanted to use the tribute-system way of interacting, speaking in Chinese and using the same principles and norms. The Japanese were like, “What are you talking about? We write in French. We write down a contract.” And the Chinese were like, “What's a contract?”

I mean, literally, these were different worldviews. How do you sort that out? What does it mean? There are as many questions about what modernity is, or what it means to have an international system, as there are about simply who's stronger or not. They didn't understand each other anymore. They were using different languages to argue about things.

Some of the most fascinating research is on why Japan responded better than China. In many ways, it makes sense. My quick-and-dirty explanation is that China was the hegemon. They were like, “Why should we change?” Whereas the Japanese were happy to, and so they rapidly learned, borrowed German military training, English business practices, and everything else.

You get a very different set of worldviews. When we get back to the actual war, the way I would call it is that I'm not so sure I would call it a power-transition war per se, because this was as much about Japan defending its own survival as it was about expanding into China.

The Japanese were lucky in some ways because they weren't as valuable a resource as China, so they had more time to adjust. The question for the Japanese was, “How do we become a great power?” I think it was more that question that was motivating the Japanese than a Thucydides power transition. It was: How do we become recognized and survive as a country?

What do great powers do? They have a flag. I mean, we'll get to the other stuff, but this is not superficial. They have a flag. I have this great photo of the Japanese emperor two years apart, around 1870. In one, he's dressed in the traditional garb, and in the other, he's dressed like Bismarck. He's got a sword and a mustache and a bunch of medals.

They're like, “This isn't how we do it if we're going to survive.” In a similar way, how do we make ourselves recognizable? On top of that, we get a military, we become a colonial power, we take possessions, and then we say, “We're just like you.”

Half of what Japan was doing—from the racial equality clause at the League of Nations in 1919 to simply being an imperial power—was aimed at the European countries, as well as half of it being focused on China and readjusting that relationship. It sort of fits again if you don't look too closely. But if I look at the Japanese motivations, I see as much survival compared to the Western powers as I do a simple transition of power with respect to China itself.

Okay, fair enough. But because your whole book is titled Beyond Power Transitions, I think we can't let you off the hook so easily. Go ahead.

Yes. Keep my feet to the fire.

It might be the case that you have an alternative explanation to the power-transition explanation. But it's another thing to say that East Asia does not support a kind of power-transition theory, because again, the pushback will be that it either positively supports it or is neutral, because you just don't have a normal moment with any power transition happening in East Asia.

The traditional international relations scholars would say, “Well, if we do have a genuine power transition happening somewhere—for example, with the U.S. and China—we have to look at the only cases where this has happened.” Whether we exclude the Japan case or not, it still looks like we're back in the classical 12 out of 16 cases, because the whole of East Asian history, although it's fascinating and shows this remarkable capacity of countries to live peacefully with each other, doesn't show that you can have a power transition without war.

Well, okay. Two other things. In some ways, I would say, fair enough. We're getting to the question that we get to today. We're getting to the question: Is the entire world now Westphalian? Has the European Westphalian model of international relations—nation-states, balance of power, and, as I said, a flag—become the model for all of us? Are we all that way now, so none of the other stuff has any impact?

In some ways, if that's the case—if we are all Westphalian—then we do have a debate about whether this applies, whether it doesn't apply, et cetera. The question, though, is how deeply did we actually make this transition to a Western country, so to speak?

My argument there is that I think it's extremely thin. I think it's very superficial. One of my big critiques of power-transition theory is that it should be universal. That's what they claim: this is a universal argument. We are trying to regionalize power transitions to Europe, so to speak, right? It wasn't simply inevitable. It was based on some ideas and beliefs about how we behave, et cetera, that happened in Europe and not anywhere else.

If we go to Asia, we don't see those same beliefs, and we also don't see that same behavior. The argument then is: If it is this same set of ideas—if the entire world is now that way—do we still see power transitions or not? Our question is how much Asia has really changed.

Two things I would say about that. Actually, back to Japan, and then we can talk more broadly: The thing about Japan is, number 1, I don't think they were ever as strong as China, measurably, in the 19th century anyway. So I'm not sure the conditions fit. It sort of looks like they fit because Japan was rising and China was falling.

But the minute we try to actually say, "Okay, they have to be getting bigger. What is the percentage? When does the war start?" I think you lose that, because I don't think Japan was ever as strong as China was. So I'm still not convinced you had a power transition. It might have been a war, but I'm not sure it was a power-transition war at all.

It looks sort of that way again because we said, "Oh, the sick man of Asia is China." But China was never as weak or as small as Japan was. China always had more people and more guns and stuff.

Yeah, but hold on a second. Without U.S. support, do you think that they would have won a war against Japan?

Here's what I think. In The Princess Bride, what's the first law of whatever? Never get involved in a land war in Asia. I think you missed one of the fundamental errors: Never get involved in a land war in Asia.

I think the Japanese were already bogged down long before the U.S. got deeply involved in the war, right? I'm not sure that they ever were going to be able to conquer China—1930, 1937, et cetera. But even more than that, the question would be: Was that actually, in some ways, a disproving case? I'm not sure that it was.

I see this much more as an imperial project aimed at protecting, or surviving, the Japanese homeland than as a "China's weak, let's go for it" kind of thing. But I will say—and this is true—what's amazing about Japan is that it is the first non-Western country to industrialize and the first non-Western country to beat a European power in a war, in 1904.

So I don't want to diminish their accomplishments or how strong this country was, how dangerous it was.

I know that might not be a satisfying answer. So, for all those civilizations out there who didn't sinicize fast enough, how do you think about Western expansion and imperial expansion over the course of the 1,000 years we're talking about?

It's hard to generalize over 1,000 years of history. There are lots of different particularities, like Xinjiang versus Tibet versus Yunnan and whatnot. But basically, did they just decide not to run the South Korea–Vietnam playbook? Or was the farmland too good? What's the explanatory variable here?

There are 2 possible explanations, and I lean toward the cultural one as opposed to the material one. The material one would be, well, the farmland was better and the horses were better suited to this way of life, et cetera. So they just thought that way, and they couldn't agree on what they wanted to do and things like that.

I suspect—and I have a great quote in one of the books from somebody who does much more on the western steppes than I do—that the nomads and the Chinese had very clear conceptions of who they were and what they wanted, and the nomads did not want to change their way of life.

Sometimes you even see it now, with some Mongolian guy every now and then on Twitter or whatever showing people living in yurts and riding horses, moving up into the hills during the summer, then moving back down and moving back up. Part of the answer is that they didn't want what the Chinese wanted. These are incompatible worldviews, and they knew it.

Let me try to push back on that. There is a third, or an in-between, explanation: There are actually 2 western frontiers. One is the Himalayas, and you do see some stability in Tibetan statehood, et cetera. The other one is this famous steppe.

If you live on the steppe, you basically decided to live on grass. Humans don't eat grass. You need to have animals that eat grass and transform it into an energy that humans can use. But grass is a very non-energy-dense thing, which means that you have to move around a large area.

So immediately, if you've decided on this lifestyle—which is that you're going to live from grass energy—you're just fundamentally going to want to have a nomadic lifestyle. And once you have a nomadic lifestyle, it's almost like the energy demands will dictate the culture to be one where riding horses around a large plain is cool, and that's what you do to survive.

You can't have people cramming Confucian classics for a civil service exam, which then runs large granaries where you have rice stored for a famine, because that's just not how life on the steppe works. So I think that if you just look at the steppe experience, it's quite understandable why they don't suddenly become Korean.

I think it is quite materialistic in a sense, even if, of course, culture funnels that material demand. So that's my suggestion on the energy history of the steppe. But either one of you, take it down.

I'll say one thing, which again is that there are material explanations for it. I think there's also a way in which they liked the way they lived, and you could imagine a bargain if they were willing to play the game halfway, where they could figure out something where they traded for this, they did that, et cetera, et cetera.

They did that a little bit, but they didn't fundamentally want to change their way of life. And I think that's what it came down to, which isn't necessarily to push back on the cultural explanation.

I've been more focused on the eastern side, which is relatively understudied, and so I will admit I am not a steppe scholar. I have not been spending a lot of time thinking about China–steppe relations as much as I've been trying to explain the stability on the eastern side, because everybody focused on that. That's where all the fighting was. I'm trying to explain the stability on the eastern side, which is not an excuse for not knowing it.

Yeah. But to me, in many ways, the stability on the eastern side is more interesting, because we don't ever expect that to happen. The thing I'm thinking about in particular is less Tibet and less the steppe, and more that swath of Yunnan and Sichuan that got taken over from 1,000 to 1,500.

Fair enough. Fair enough.

Yeah, that kind of has a normal landscape. It's not a particularly dramatic place that Imperial China, for whatever reason, was able to just wash over. You had dozens of these little kingdoms and cultures, and the vast majority—I mean, basically every single one of them, if you're looking west—is no longer able to do their own thing.

Well, imagine a country that starts out with a populated, urbanized, sophisticated eastern seaboard that slowly moves out to a largely unorganized, uninstitutionalized frontier to its west, expanding outward and tending to slaughter all of the Indigenous peoples who were there as they pushed until they couldn't expand any longer. You have 2 countries that did that: China and the United States.

To me, that's very simple, because those are frontiers. What happened is that China expanded as we turned frontiers into borders, up until they met Russia, the Himalayas, or whatever else. That's a very similar project to what goes on around the world.

My 1-sentence history of the world is: It's turning frontiers into borders. Over 20,000 years and 10,000 years, that's what we've done.

And so those peoples had been sort of sparring with Tibet for 1,000 years. I mean, the first Chinese dynasty that took over was the Tang, and it was fighting and sparring with the Tibetans. Then they got free, then they got taken over. They had these constant troubles, which is why the Chinese expanded westward, right?

They tried defense with the Great Wall. They tried bribery, trying to give goods and stuff like that. Eventually, they incorporated these areas as they moved farther and farther out, and the nomads retreated farther and farther back until there was nowhere to go.

That is, in some ways, absolutely what happened. I'm not sure I want to put a moral judgment on it. We did this in the United States as well. That's sort of what happened.

Okay. Well, I think it's time to make this all about our time. You meet someone who's like, "Oh, this is all cool. I like history, but what the heck does this have to do with whether there's an American ship bumping into a Chinese ship in the Taiwan Strait and all hell breaks loose?"

Yeah. Yeah. To me, the first—the most important lesson from looking at all this history is that we should ask, and not simply assume, whether this power-transition dynamic is the most important dynamic to be looking at.

In other words, it is just taken for granted now in Washington, D.C., and probably around the world, that rising and declining power—the U.S. is declining and it's going to get weak, and China's rising, so they have rising ambitions.

That’s the key dynamic that’s going on today in Asia. If anything, our book should cause us to pause and ask: Is that really the most important dynamic? Our answer would be no. It’s not at all.

What do we mean by that? The most important dynamic is the other lesson we’ve avoided. We haven’t really talked about it that much, right? If you look at the Korean dynasties right next to China, every single one of them fell for internal reasons. The Silla dynasty, the Goryeo dynasty, and then Joseon—which was in the 20th century, so that’s different—all fell internally.

Every one of the Japanese dynasties or shogunates—you know, Kamakura, whatever—they all fell internally. Same thing in Vietnam. Even the Chinese all fell. The Song was conquered, but the Tang was internal, the Ming was internal, and the Qing was internal, frankly. These internal dynamics are, in many ways, way more consequential than external ones.

I read somewhere—and I’m probably stealing this quote, so I forget who said it—that empires die from suicide, not murder. That’s a way to think about it, right? If we look at the big debate about China today, one question is: Is there going to be a power transition? Do they want to take over the world? But the other question is: At the same time, are they going to collapse? Do they have so many problems internally?

I have spent my adult life hearing about the impending real estate crash in China. When Xi Jinping wakes up in the morning, is he more concerned with what’s going on internally, or is he itching to make land grabs and things like that? To me, the biggest point of the book would be to ask that question, and we would probably come down on the idea that the dynamics of what goes on in East Asia are going to be much more internal than external.

Then there’s a second point. Let me just say the second one, and then let’s talk about whatever you want. The second one is this question of the shared understanding, or the common conjecture.

If you view the long arc of history, from, let’s call it, 1841—the Opium Wars, sometime in the mid-19th century—up until 1979 or 1949, whatever, for about 100 years China was going through one of its periodic periods of internal chaos. It’s not a rise; it’s a return. Every country in Asia has dealt with a large, huge China, and now they’re doing it again.

Every country in the region has to craft some type of working, living relationship with China, because nobody’s going away. I think one of the biggest mistakes that American policymakers, in particular, are making is trying to get these countries to choose the United States completely, in a very American style. I’m not even sure if it’s European; it’s certainly American: “You’re with us or against us. You’re in our alliance,” and so on.

Asian countries do not want to do that. Vietnam just joined BRICS. Thailand just joined. They don’t get along with China on everything. Nobody does. We’re always arguing with Mexico about stuff. But are these countries going to unequivocally contain and move away from China, derisk, and decouple? There’s no evidence that I see of that.

They have to live with China, and they have, in some ways, a shared conjecture about what China is. The most important one, for our purposes, is that I don’t think any realistic Korean, Vietnamese, or, frankly, Japanese responsible policymaker or scholar says, “I think China wants to invade and conquer our country.” So they’re not acting as if it did.

That doesn’t mean they love China. That doesn’t mean they get along well. But I do not think Koreans or Vietnamese wake up saying, “Do we need to go to the trenches to fight China? They’re going to come over the border.” I don’t think that’s the case.

So, I guess the modern PRC has some imperial legacies. Clearly, it’s on roughly the same geography and roughly the same landmass. The script has changed, but it’s still basically the same.

We were talking earlier about just how much Imperial Japan changed. One day you’re wearing robes, and the next day you’re cosplaying as Bismarck. We’ve got a Marxist-Leninist system that has Marx, Lenin, and Engels as its 3 poster boys—not Han Feizi or whatever.

How do you interpret this question of the extent to which the modern PRC is cueing off of, versus going off, this? Because, of course, Mao wanted global revolution—funding revolutions in South America and Angola and what have you, threatening nuclear war with the Soviet Union. So we have at least 1 really dramatic case study in our sample size of, like, 4 CCP leaders who are very much out there on the spectrum of, “Let’s just live in peaceful harmony under this old system that we had a great time under since 500.”

This is the question, and I don’t think we answer this question enough. Is China today still the China of 2 centuries ago? A lot of my scholar friends who are Sinologists, who know way more about China than I do, answer the question without thinking: Of course it’s different. It’s the CCP. It’s Xi Jinping. They’ll use modern contemporary social science phrases, like, “It’s a one-party authoritarian system,” and so on, as if that is the main driver of how Chinese foreign policy will go, perceptions and foreign relations and everything else.

It’s the Communist Party that’s trying to maintain power—the Xi Jinping dynasty. I’m not so sure, but this is the question we should ask. There are some ways in which, of course, we’re all modern.

I do this not as a joke but as a fun thing when I’m teaching introductory international relations. I have a bunch of international students as well as Americans, and I’ll say, “How many of us have a passport?” Everybody raises their hand. To the Americans who don’t have a passport, I yell at them and say, “Shame!” But I’ll say, “Look, nobody in China is questioning that this is what matters: that you are a nation-state, that this little book tells you who you belong to.” That’s all modernity. That’s all the modern world, whether we call it failure or whatever. Nobody questions that.

If you listen to the Chinese national anthem—and I’m making a joke now, so please nobody get mad at me; it’s a joke—it sounds like it was written in 1870s Vienna. It’s like oom-pah. It’s not Beijing opera, right? You’d think if it’s Chinese, it would have Beijing opera music or something else. But no, it’s a Western thing.

In many ways, China, like everybody else, is living in a modern world. The main thing that I would say is not modernity, that is not new—and I’m actually working on this as well, and hopefully at some point I’ll get it to a point where I can try and publish it—is that I think almost every single main Chinese foreign policy interest, agenda, or purpose is what I’m calling transdynastic.

None of it is new, and that is what I think is really important. Mao had this sort of thing about global stuff, and he devoted some money to it. But in general, if we go through the Chinese interests, what we see is that they’re not even just Xi Jinping’s interests. They’re not even CCP interests from the 1940s. Most of them were inherited from the KMT in the 1930s and go back to the Qing dynasty, if not further.

The clearest example that I give is Taiwan. This is not a new interest. It’s not a KMT interest. The Qing were explicitly saying, “Don’t let Japan take this, or else our relations will be poisoned forever.” This is not new. This is old. It goes back to 1841—or, you know, 1839, let’s say. These are not new interests in unifying what is China.

As of yet, I have not seen evidence of new interests. We have important scholarly books written in English by top Sinologists, or people who study China relations, who claim that Taiwan is just the starting point, and then after that it’ll be a nice jump to the Philippines or a nice jump to Vietnam. I’m just flabbergasted, because that’s how you can make that argument if you have a one-sided perspective.

But I have never seen evidence of that. That’s one reason I’m going back to see what the Vietnamese and Chinese wrote and what the Vietnamese talked about with each other 500 years ago. You do not see that now. Vietnam and China now conduct joint naval patrols in the Gulf of Tonkin and stuff like that. They do this. They disagree about some things, but they cooperate on everything else.

So, I have a very different perspective on how much China’s interests have expanded as its power has grown. I don’t see that. I see its ability to try to advance its historic—or its very long-enduring—interests, its ability to try to affect those interests, as having improved. But I don’t see a whole lot of thought along the lines of, “Well, once we get Taiwan, then let’s take Japan.”

So, we’ll grant you that. But I think this is the rub, right? Taiwan, in a sort of Westphalian sense, is basically as close to a state as you can possibly be. You have these treaties with the United States and Japan, with the United States and South Korea, with the United States and Vietnam, and with the United States and the Philippines.

However much you want to say, “Yes, they have to understand that they need to live with China,” you don’t see politicians in Japan running around saying, “We need to let go of our treaty with the United States.” Maybe Trump is president and those treaties just disappear or something, but the fact of the matter is that the world has decided it is not cool to invade and take over states.

After 1945, there have been a lot of awful, terrible conflicts, but by and large they’ve been civil wars or civil-war-adjacent, and Ukraine is an exception. You’ve seen a really dramatic response from a lot of countries around the world that have said this is not the sort of universe we want to live in, where countries can just take over countries.

All of a sudden, half the world is giving them artillery. South Korea is giving them artillery shells. I don’t know—what do we do? Here’s the question, and this is why it’s such a rub.

I agree with you 100%.

Right. One thing I point out is that when we all start saying, “China’s getting bigger, so it’s going to try and take Taiwan, then it’s going to try and take the Philippines,” and so on, I say that’s the European model of the last 500 years, if not more. Do you know where they’re doing it right now? In Europe—Ukraine. They’re not doing it in Asia.

That’s happening still in Europe, right? All these massive armies, entrenched warfare, and thousands of tanks and stuff like that are going on in Europe. It’s not going on in Asia. So I think the Taiwan issue is, in so many ways, an exact encapsulation of what I’m talking about, because the first question is: if it wasn’t a Westphalian world, the issue of Taiwan would be very easy to figure out.

The only reason Taiwan is an issue is that we have decided that there’s only 1 legitimate type of polity, which is called a nation-state, that gets recognition and has a seat at the United Nations. That is a very unique way of thinking about the world. Even in Europe historically, there were kingdoms and principalities, duchies, and stuff like that. Certainly, historically in Asia, there were nomadic kingdoms, centralized Confucian kingdoms, and all these other kinds of things.

So the easiest way to sort this out is to simply not be Westphalian and say, “They can be this thing,” right? But that’s not going to happen, because the world doesn’t exist that way, and we are stuck with this very incompatible way of thinking about the world.

So I have 2 thoughts about this. Look, if there were an answer, we would have found it by now. The first one is that when we talk about China taking over Taiwan, I don’t think the Chinese talk about it this way. Everyone in America is talking about it, and the amount of money being made in D.C. right now as people run these war-gaming simulations again and again is enormous. We’re all salivating over it: “Okay, if they do this by 2027, they’re going to invade.”

I don’t think anyone in China is actually thinking that way. Everything I know about the CCP and what Xi Jinping says is, “We reserve the right to use force because it’s ours.” But it’s not a “we will invade” kind of thing.

I think the answer so far has been to kick the can down the road. You know what? The answer has been really successful. I do not understand why we are trying to change the status quo in Taiwan, because the status quo actually works. The Americans are not saying, “We agree with you, China, that it’s Chinese.” We say, “We understand that you think that.” That’s very different, isn’t it? We’re not saying we agree with the One China policy; we’re saying we understand that the Chinese think that.

We’re saying, “Just don’t use force to change it.” And the Chinese are saying, “I’m glad you understand it. We reserve the right to use force.” Taiwan is being told, “Don’t change your status.” And the Taiwanese are basically saying, “Okay, sort of. We’ll have a flag, we’ll have our own currency, we can have our own government, we can have a capitalist system, et cetera, et cetera, but we just won’t call ourselves independent.”

That has allowed Taiwan to make a transition from being a brutal authoritarian government to a flourishing, thriving democracy. Taiwan has gotten rich. China has gotten rich. We have bought lots of cheap, really well-produced goods. So the status quo actually works. It’s not perfect, but it works. That’s point number 1.

Point number 2 is that when we talk about the Asian countries, they’re not saying, “We’re going to abandon the alliance with the United States.” You’re absolutely right. But you know what I say? Do you remember when Pelosi visited 2 years ago, in the summer? Within a week, every single Asian country, including the ASEAN countries—the Philippines, Vietnam, and Malaysia—came out and publicly endorsed the One China policy. They all reaffirmed it.

You know who didn’t? South Korea. But do you remember? Do you guys know that there was a kerfuffle in South Korea after Pelosi visited? Pelosi went to Korea after Taiwan, and not a single government official met her at the airport. President Yoon didn’t even talk to her, even on a phone call. It was a massive kerfuffle in Korea, because he was like, “I’m on vacation,” and there were photos of him drinking beer and stuff like that. He did not want to get anywhere near this.

When I was in—and this is going to sound like name-dropping, but it’s not—I was in the Yongsan Presidential Office, the YPO, the new presidential office. I was talking to 1 of the top national security advisers last year in Korea. So we’re in the presidential office, and I say to him, “Does Korea still—what’s Korea’s stance on the One China policy?”

And he said, “We made our policy when we normalized relations with China back in 1992. It’s the One China policy. We haven’t changed it. What we won’t do is reaffirm it every time China wants us to reaffirm it.”

They did affirm that they’re not going to allow U.S. bases to be used in the event of a war over Taiwan. So I think if there is some kind of war, many Asian countries are going to back slowly away.

Well, you know what’s fascinating, right? The One China policy is basically a weird version of this imperial common-understanding thing where no one’s super happy with it, but it means you don’t get war. I think the scary thing is what the CCP has done with autonomous regions and with Hong Kong, right? The question is whether or not this sort of fudge—“Okay, we’ll give you respect, we won’t embarrass you, and you leave us alone”—is going to be enough going forward.

You saw what Mao did to Tibet and Xinjiang. Then you had 30 years of it being kind of okay. Since 2008, really, we’ve had a different story, obviously with Hong Kong, where that was going to be the poster child of what a sort of enlightened imperial-style ruler relationship with Beijing would look like. That didn’t end to anyone’s satisfaction.

So do you want to play this out a little more—the parallels between the One China policy and Korea writing nice letters to Beijing?

Well, I think there are 2. The main distinction would be what’s internal and what’s external. To me, that’s the main distinction right now. Again, as you said, we don’t have to like it, and we don’t even necessarily have to agree with it.

But the Chinese say this, and I think they’ve got a point: Xinjiang and Hong Kong, they consider that to be internal. And that’s very different from their relations with Vietnam or Korea or whatever else. I think we too easily say that how they act here would be the same as how they act elsewhere. But I think there’s not—yeah, do you want to say something?

Yeah, but what I mean is, was Korea internal in, like, 1100? I don’t think so.

They had formal tribute relations, right? In fact, that’s how—do you know, here’s something interesting. Did we put this in the book? I can’t remember. But the Goryeo dynasty, the Korean dynasty at the time, was never conquered by the Mongols.

They suffered unbelievably, but they never gave in, and the Mongols were unable to actually conquer them. The king survived; he had to keep moving and stuff like that. Do you know how they actually sorted out the relations? When Kublai Khan decided he was going to use these Chinese ways of doing things, they entered into tribute relations.

Yes, the Koreans had to give princesses and all this kind of stuff, but Korea remained an independent country under a tribute relationship with the Mongols, under the Yuan dynasty.

But back to contemporary—yeah. I guess what I’m saying is, that’s the rub, right? If you can get to a tributary relationship where you basically get to live like Korea did for 1,000 years and do whatever you want, but you have to, on an international stage, play nice and send some gifts and call your Olympic team “Chinese Taipei,” or maybe have a joint Olympic team—I mean, whatever, who cares?—that’s a trade-off that Taiwan and Taiwan’s allies would be open to accepting, right?

But if Taiwan is just Xinjiang or just Tibet, then things get a lot more complicated.

Yeah, no, absolutely right. Part of the rub is what’s internal and what’s external. Do we think they’re going to do the same to Korea as they would in Xinjiang?

Taiwan is this interesting case because it is very rare, and it’s not clear what it is. The Chinese say, “Well, we took it over in 1683 or whatever. It’s always been part of China,” and everyone else says, “Well, no, it’s not.” But this is the question: what is very clear about Taiwan—and I’m not fudging this—is that nobody has a good answer to these questions. So it’s not just me; nobody else has a better answer.

What is very clear is that the Koreans don’t think it’s Korean. The Filipinos and the Vietnamese, and the Japanese, don’t think it’s theirs. It might not be Chinese, but certainly nobody is saying, “Well, this is also ours.” And that’s 1 reason they say, “Well, this is all some kind of a Chinese issue, broadly defined as civilization. That’s you guys’ issue.”

The other interesting thing about Taiwan that’s very important to note is this: there are 3 islands in the 19th century that got taken over, of which there’s only 1 where there’s a debate. And it’s interesting, because the 1 where it’s debated probably has the least historical claim to it, let me tell you.

The peoples on the island of Taiwan historically never organized themselves into the kind of government or political system that was capable of engaging in formal diplomatic relations with China or other states.

They just didn’t do it, right? The peoples of the Ryukyus did. They had formal tribute relations with China, Japan, and Korea. They were conquered in 1879, and it’s never going back. There was a kingdom in Hawaii that got taken over in 1899 or something like that, and it’s never going back. There are a lot of these types of issue areas.

What is clear about Taiwan is that it was one of them, and the argument there has as much to do with the larger political situation as it does with the details of whether they have a legitimate claim or not. I would make an argument that the people in Okinawa are talking about, “We should be independent.” There’s a sort of rump Hawaiian independence faction that’ll never work, but people are saying, “We should be independent,” and everyone laughs and says, “That’s never happening.” The people in Taiwan are independent, but it’s much more because of the larger political context than because of their argument—their claim that they should have a legitimate government. And I’m not saying it’s right or wrong. That’s politics. That’s the world, right?

I mean, you have a great line in the book: “Despite decades of Western predictions to the contrary, it is by now widely admitted that East Asian states are not forming a balancing coalition against China out of fear of its rise.” There are 2 ways to read that. One is, well, they don’t see a need. You point out that military spending as a percentage of GDP has just been declining and declining and declining in all East Asian and Southeast Asian states, whether they are U.S. allies or not.

But there’s another way of reading this, which is that the U.S. is the gray eminence, the elephant in the room or whatever. A lot of people in the U.S. would want to believe that it is only because of their benevolence and their fleet that such reductions in military spending can happen, and that people don’t feel like they have to really worry about China.

I’ve heard that argument for decades, and I’m not quite convinced it’s true. I’ll tell you why, for a couple of reasons. We mentioned it briefly at the beginning. I think you said Korea and Japan should be natural allies. The amount of bleating I’ve heard over the decades—“Come on, Koreans, stop being dumb. Don’t you realize Japan’s your friend and China is your enemy?”—it doesn’t work. It does not play. Those are not arguments that are going to work.

Koreans don’t love China. They don’t hate Japan as much as we think they do. But most of the region is not functioning the way we think it should, in any good realist sense. So a lot of American policymakers—or, you know, policy-hectoring Asians—say, “Don’t you realize you’re supposed to balance China?” And they’re like, “What are you talking about?”

I want to start with that notion that it’s not acting the same way. You already hinted at one of the first things I want to say. Sure, the U.S. is keeping the peace, but if you’re Vietnam or Malaysia, the U.S. isn’t defending you, and you’re closer to China than, say, the Philippines is, which is a U.S. ally. So you should see a difference if the U.S. is the cause of why countries aren’t afraid. You should see a difference in the countries that do not have a U.S. guarantee, and you don’t see that. That’s number 1.

The second thing I would say is, in terms of the U.S., what we want to see is: What is the type of commitment? In the last couple of years, I’ve often been asked, “What is China learning from the Ukraine war?” My answer is usually, I actually think the lesson should be: What is Taiwan learning from the Ukraine war? The United States, for all of its might, is very, very, very cautious about getting involved in a war—in an actual shooting war—with a nuclear-armed superpower far from U.S. borders, on the border of the superpower, which is not central to U.S. survival.

To me, that’s the lesson of the Ukraine war. Are we really going to get into a war over the Philippines or something like that? We might. I really think that’s a hard argument to make to the American people. Are we really going to be involved? That is one of the key questions that all these countries constantly ask themselves: Can we trust the United States if we get into a war? I don’t think necessarily that answer is yes, per se, despite what’s written on paper about the alliance.

Professor David Kang, thank you so much for your time today. The final question I always ask my guests is: How has your research shaped your outlook on humanity?

First of all, thank you for having me. It’s an honor to be part of this, truly. Probably the biggest way that my research has changed the way I think about the world and my view on humanity is that the more scholarship I’ve done—whether it’s the original work I was doing on economic growth, political economy, and corruption in East Asia, or now, obviously, decades of work on history—it’s shown me that our values and our beliefs are far more central to our behavior than simply some kind of cost-benefit analysis.

I see this again and again and again, and I think we as scholars, as social scientists, are much more comfortable with cost-benefit analysis: “Well, they’re doing it for this reason.” But I think people are motivated by what their values are and what they believe in so much more than just whether they’re going to benefit or not. I see that across individual behavior and then in the way countries behave.

Less exciting. All right, thank you, by the way. Not quite as profound a question, but the Imjin War—are there any good books about it?

In no particular order, Liam Kelley’s Beyond the Bronze Pillars, about China-Vietnam historical relations, is eye-opening—eye-opening in how Vietnam viewed China. I would say Sixiang Wang’s book, which is the one that you quoted, Boundless Winds of Empire: Rhetoric and Ritual in Early Chosŏn Diplomacy with Ming China, that just came out. That’s a great book.

I really like Yuhua Wang’s book. I don’t agree with everything at all, but I like it. Yuhua Wang wrote a book about state formation in China. It’s much more material and cost-benefit-oriented than my work, but he’s getting to questions of how China grew and how it became centralized.

There’s a book by Bin Wong—I can’t find it now—but it’s also about China over the centuries and how the Chinese experience of growth is very different from the European one.

Is it China Transformed?

Yes, China Transformed. Yes, that’s the one. Elizabeth Barry wrote a biography of Hiroshi, which is really insightful. And since we brought up Hawaii, I just want to shout out The Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian Islands, by Gavan Daws.

Oh, awesome.

It is. It’s one of the more beautifully written books I’ve ever come across. I’ve probably read 10 Hawaii books at this point, and it’s far and away the best one. In particular, it does a great job of telling the story of the transition between being this kingdom and having America ultimately end up in possession.