Sixty years ago, a newly unified China was established, and its new leaders began to look southwards afresh. What they saw was a region that had been transformed by five centuries of a global maritime trade that eventually spawned several European empires. During that period, and especially in the nineteenth century, the earlier trading empires of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries evolved into national empires as nationstates developed out of feudal and absolute monarchies. Some, like those of Britain and France, were greatly enriched and strengthened by the scientific and industrial revolutions and their large capitalist enterprises spread across the globe. By the first half of the twentieth century, however, the rival empires in Europe had turned on themselves, and this led them to fight two world wars. In the Asia that they had dominated since the early nineteenth century, their destructive conflicts produced many revolutionary changes, for example, the rise of a modern Japanese empire, the destruction of imperial China, new divisions on the Indian subcontinent and, at the end of the Second World War, the emergence of Southeast Asia as a selfconscious region with nationalist leaders who were dedicated to the task of building nation-states out of former colonial territories. The region's newfound self-awareness was enhanced by the common experience, for three and a half years during the Second World War, of having been under the dominance of a single, the Japanese, empire. This was the first time that the various kingdoms and ports and their peoples had ever come more or less under the control of one imperial power.

By the time China was reunified in 1949, some of the leaders of the countries to China's south were beginning to discover that they could together develop a distinctive identity for the region, and that it was in their interest to consider doing so as soon as they could. Spurred by anticolonial movements that embarked on the task of nation building, inspired by modern concepts of sovereignty, freedom, equality, and economic development, their leaders and scholars found new perspectives from which to examine the history of China's relations with the region. For a while, the new countries were divided by the Cold War.