Chapter 5 is a study of within-firm mobilization during collective action and explains why those with the resources for mobilization have weaker preferences for collective action. Due to high levels of labor turnover, the majority of the workforce lacks strong social ties in the workplace, and those who do have mobilizational resources perceive collective action to be highly costly. Collective action occurs when the workers with mobilizational resources expect a high chance of success.

Wu Yu-Shan, a distinguished Taiwanese political scientist, points out that Western success was based on power, undergirded by technology and organization. In response, Pacific Asia attempted to achieve modernization by four routes. Western liberalism was stillborn in China, as was Meiji-style conservative modernization. Mao’s approach could best be called “confused modernization,” a mix of state socialism and disastrous experiments like the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. What worked in Korea and Taiwan was authoritarian politics and state capitalism, and with Deng Xiaoping this became China’s path as well.

Qin Yaqing, China’s foremost theorist of international relations, concentrates on the complexities of the new multinodal world order. He argues against centrality, pointing out that international relationships are now complex and flat rather than binary and hierarchical. The nodes of the international multinodal complex are internally as well as externally complex. Moreover, the successful regional initiatives of ASEAN demonstrate the capacity of smaller nodes to play leading roles in configuring order.

Prior to the Opium War China was central to Pacific Asia, but it was not in control of its neighborhood. The mobility of the various nomadic groups threatened China’s northern and western frontiers, and Vietnam’s successful resistance to Ming annexation set a southern boundary-stone. While China’s centrality was not hegemonic, its location, demographic preponderance, and artisanal production made China the center of regional attention. Conversely, because of China’s demographic and production centrality, China was more interested in defending what it had than in imperial adventures abroad. Its foreign policy was one of controlling exposure in relationships—thin connectivity. By the Ming Dynasty this evolved into the tribute system, whose core was a ritualized exchange of deference by the neighbor for acknowledgement of autonomy by China.

Chapter 7 argues that law-abiding firms’ concerns for reputation generate discursive resources, which contribute to workers’ expectations of success. Unlike collective action for legal rights, interest-based protests rarely use disruptive tactics that physically expand the scope of conflict. Instead, workers use publicity tactics to attract the attention of third-party allies who exercise direct influence over the target firm’s policies. The main channel examined in this chapter is media exposure. It shows that workers at law-abiding firms have more discursive resources due to their firms newsworthiness and thus are more prone to expect that their protests would succeed. This shows that even in the more favorable environment for atomized protests, not all workers have the resources to engage in collective action. By limiting social mobilization, the regime has been able to manage the frequency and nature of atomized protests. At the same time, workers with the resources to engage in atomized protests are much less likely to hold the central government responsible for the situation they are in.

Evelyn Goh is well known for her emphasis on order transition rather than power transition in world politics, and in her commentary she stresses the compatibility of a multinodal framing that recognizes the continuing significance of power in a post-hegemonic context. While China’s reemergence is a key event for Pacific Asia, she cautions that regional centrality does not preclude global relevance, either for China or for the Pacific Asian region. China is not just regional, and neither is Pacific Asia. But becoming global implies new challenges of global governance and global responsibility. The overall tendency is toward “a multinodal Asia in a multinodal international system.”

While Pacific Asia had China as a “solid center,” a place in the middle where most of the people and production was, the West had a “liquid center,” the Mediterranean. Wealth could be pursued and neighbors conquered in different places in the West, leading to competitive, distinct empires rather than to dynastic cycles.

The chapter introduces the central arguments and main findings of the book.

European imperialism in Pacific Asia not only displaced China as the center of its neighbors’ attention but it splintered the region as well. This was sharp connectivity. France established French Indochina, the Dutch tightened their control of Indonesia, the British took over Malaya and Burma, and all of them had pieces of a disintegrating China. Japan avoided colonization and created its own empire, beginning with Korea and Taiwan. China became the vulnerable edge of a global frame, a frame centered on Europe that included the pieces of Pacific Asia. China’s population was now seen as an impediment to modernization, and its artisanal production was swamped by Western mass production. The US replaced European segmented globalization with a hub-and-spoke globalism rimmed by newly sovereign states. Meanwhile, the People’s Republic of China remained a mostly insignificant other to its neighbors until Deng Xiaoping’s policies took hold. The salience of China’s presence, population, and production began to rise, and China had become a significant other to its region by 1998. But the US remained the center of an unquestioned global order until the financial crisis of 2008.