EAST ASIA: From Chinese Predominance to the Rise of the Pacific Rim By Arthur Cotterell (John Murray, $340) ARTHUR Cotterell has written another masterly book following the success of his First Emperor of China. His latest book surveys a vast historical period of 3,600 years and, though necessarily dominated by China, includes all the nations of East Asia.
To achieve this daunting task the author has neatly parcelled his subject into three convenient packages.
First, he reviews the events of the first Chinese supremacy which lasted about 2,800 years from the Shang era to the Mongol invasions of the 13th century. His second period tackles the ascendancy of the Mongols and Manchus whose dominion swayed southwardfrom their northern home, and whose control lasted through the Ming and Ching dynasties and on until 1941. A third and final section maps out the region's renaissance since the end of the Pacific War in 1945.
China's civilisation may have been always aloof and somewhat removed but that has not prevented the country from being the single greatest influence in regional history.
As Mr Cotterell correctly says China played the roles of both Greece and Rome in the early development of East Asia, being the centre of learning, culture, technology, and the military crafts. When the Chinese found themselves the recipients of foreign ideas, they were remarkably adept at transforming them so that they fitted hand-in-glove with China's own.
Such was the case with Buddhism, the individualism of which seemed destined to conflict with the much earlier Confucian emphasis on centralisation. Yet China absorbed Buddhism, so adapting it until it became almost quintessentially Chinese in the popularimagination. Communist China's present adoption of Western capitalism under the slogan of market socialism is just the latest example of this most attractive Chinese trait.
