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.

With some fundamental changes taking place in the late twentieth and the early twenty-first century in an increasingly globalized world, especially the rapid growth of Asian economy and the rise of China, many of the old paradigms originated in the nineteenth century in social sciences and the humanities are losing their explanatory power and need to be modified and updated. Global history, for example, puts emphasis on the connectedness of the world from a broader perspective than the nineteenth-century norm of national histories, and world literature examines literary and cultural traditions far beyond the Eurocentric concentration and the Western canon. East Asia with its traditional Sinosphere and the Chinese scriptworld are getting more attention in recent scholarship as a regional cultural concept, which may offer some constructive ideas and insights into the multiplicity of cultural centers rather than the monolithic nucleus of a national model. This essay will discuss East Asia as a potential paradigm for the comparative study of literatures and cultures not just in East Asia, but for the idea of world literature as well.