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China Rising: Peace, Power, and Order in East Asia, by David C. Kang. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. xiii, 274 pp. $24.95 cloth.
Recently, China's ascent has drawn the attention of many scholars and policy-makers in East Asia and the United States. Current and previous assessments of China's rise follow one of three major frameworks: realism sees China as a revisionist power in the existing (U.S. preponderant) world order; liberalism optimistically predicts Chinese integration into a globalizing world; and, constructivism-and rationalists to some extent -denies any structural determinism since, according to the theory, state interests are constantly being made and re-made. The common problem of these existing frameworks is, however, the ahistoricity of their theoretical foundations: all three theories fail to look into the historical development of the region and account for the ethnocentrism that projects normative views of international relations based on the European experiences of Westphalian sovereignties (p. 18).
It is with this acknowledgement of the limits of mainstream international relations theory that David Kang's new book challenges these frameworks with the intention to interpret East Asian international politics through an innovative perspective that smartly refuses methodological dogmatism. Starting with the clear question, "why have East Asian countries accommodated rather than balanced China's rapid economic, diplomatic, and political emergence over three decades?" (p. 4), he emphasizes the unique constellation of state identities in the region that are deeply informed by the long history of the Sinocentric tributary system in which "the dominant state is essentially benign, the smaller state would prefer an accommodating stance that allows...