KEVIN G. CAI is Associate Professor and Director of East Asian Studies at Renison College, University of Waterloo, Canada. He has published in a variety of professional journals and elsewhere. His other book in this series is entitled The Politics of Economic Regionalism: Explaining Regional Economic Integration in East Asia.

This book is a systematic study of the political economy of East Asia. A central theme of the book is that the development of the East Asian political economy since the late 19th century has been consistently defined by both regional and national dynamics. Over time, East Asian states have not only achieved economic success by following a similar path of economic development but have also been organized into an integrated regional economy. In this process, Japan has historically played a pivotal role in not only organizing the regional economy around the Japanese economic power but, more significantly, influencing the development path of national economies through its developmental state structure. Since the 1980s, however, while the developmental state model has declined and been adapted to new domestic and external conditions, the East Asian political economy has been increasingly jointly influenced by America, Japan, China and other national and regional players.