Introduction: Are Asia’s Thinkers Accommodating China’s Rise?

Abstract

In 1998, Professor Lucian Pye made famous scathing remarks about East Asia’s chronic memory-blockage and the consequent identity malaise muting any East Asian claims to global leadership. At the height of the Asian Financial Crisis and merely a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Pye deemed neither China nor Japan capable of rising above their own parochialisms and cultural self-absorption to find an appropriate global idiom with which to envision an alternative East Asian world order. Pye was not even sure China, despite its economic promise, fitted at all into the dominant nation-state world order, being as it was a ‘civilisation pretending to be a nation state’.¹