China and Her Neighbours: Asian Diplomacy from Ancient History to the Present

- Blurb -

For centuries, China was confident in its role as the `Middle Kingdom', the undisputed cultural, economic and political powerhouse of Asia. Now, with China once again a leading player on the world stage, countries across the continent are facing an uncertain future. Does China's rise threaten its neighbours? And what, ultimately, is its end goal? Nowhere are these questions more pressing than in the Pacific, where China's maritime neighbours find themselves directly in the path of the countries' expanding territorial claims.In China and Her Neighbours, Michael Tai finds answers to these questions through an in-depth exploration of China's past. Spanning thousands of years of Chinese and Asian history, it looks at China's evolving relations with Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Malaysia. It considers the Chinese state and her overseas subjects, Southeast Asian peoples and overseas Chinese, the Chinese state and colonial powers, the state and its relationship with Japan and the US revealing how this history has shaped the current regime's views of regional integration and global governance, and what this can tell us about its ambitions on the continent. While the disputes in the Pacific have attracted widespread attention, few works have considered the wider historical context of these tensions.An essential and distinctive perspective on one of the key confrontations of the 21st century.