East Asian Security

East Asian Security examines some of the most important strategic questions about the future of East Asia. It includes provocative essays that explore the overall prospects for war, peace, and stability in the region. Other essays focus on the likely strategies that China and Japan will pursue at the dawn of the next millennium. Students, scholars, and analysts of contemporary issues will find East Asian Security to be a stimulating and valuable overview of these questions.

David C. Kang tells an often overlooked story about East Asia's 'comprehensive security', arguing that American policy towards Asia should be based on economic and diplomatic initiatives rather than military strength.

Is East Asia heading towards war? This text makes a case for a new theoretical approach (called 'analytical eclecticism' by the authors) to the study of Asian security.

This volume examines contemporary diplomatic, economic, and security competition between China and Japan in the Asia-Pacific region. The book outlines the role that Sino-Japanese competition plays in East Asian security, an area of study largely overlooked in contemporary writing on Asian security, which tends to focus on US–China relations and/or US hegemony in Asia. The volume focuses on Chinese and Japanese foreign policy under President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Shinzō Abe, and regional security dynamics within and between Asian states/institutions since 2012. It employs regional security complex theory as a theoretical framework to view Chinese and Japanese competition in the Asian region. In doing so, the volume draws on a "levels of analysis" approach to demonstrate the value in looking at security in the Asia-Pacific from a regional rather than global perspective. The vast majority of existing research on the region’s security tends to focus on great power relations and treats Asia as a sub-region within the larger global security architecture. In contrast, this volume shows how competition between the two largest Asian economies shapes East Asia’s security environment and drives security priorities across Asia’s sub-regions. As such, this collection provides an important contribution to discussion on security in Asia; one with potential to influence both political and military policy makers, security practitioners, and scholars. This book will be of much interest to students of Asian politics, regional security, diplomacy, and international relations.

The topic of this book deals with a highly relevant empirical issue: East asian security and the dynamics of the respective governance structure or architecture are not only of regional but of global concern. Since the pivot of the American pivot to East Asia and other external actor ́s responses to it the security architecture has changed in form, size and function. In order to analyze and explain these changes, hypotheses derived from IR middle range theories (i.e. soft and hard balancing) will be applied to cases of bilateral and multilateral security governance in East Asia.

This edition adds chapters on Burma and Vietnam, and updated material throughout reflects the current economic crisis in the region.

This volume provides a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of the security discourse of Chinese policy elites on the major powers in East Asia in relation to China’s self-perception as a rising power. It is the first book-length study that utilizes International Relations theories systematically to analyze Chinese security perceptions of the United States, Japan and Russia, and the debate among Chinese international relations specialists on how China should respond to the perceived challenge from the major powers to its rise to a global status. Rex Li argues that the security discourse of Chinese policy analysts is closely linked to their conception of China’s identity and their desire and endeavour to construct a great power identity for China. Drawing on extensive and up-to-date Chinese-language sources, the study demonstrates that Chinese elites perceive the power, aspirations and security strategies of other East Asian powers primarily in terms of their implications for China’s pursuit of great power status. This new work will contribute significantly to the on-going academic and policy debate on the nature and repercussions of China’s rise. This book will be essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students and scholars of Asian security, China’s foreign relations, security studies and international relations.