China, Japan, and Korea fought only one war in six centuries

Nathan Labenz introduces a ChinaTalk conversation that never mentions artificial intelligence, a first for *The Cognitive Revolution*, and shares it anyway. So much AI analysis, he says, treats a US-China Thucydides Trap as inevitable and therefore treats the AI race as existential. USC international-relations professor David C. Kang, co-author with Xinru Ma of *Beyond Power Transitions*, offers the opposite starting point: things are best understood on their own terms, and analogies lead people astray.

The empirical claim that startled Labenz, who admits he has not studied Asian history in depth, is simple. From around the year 1000 until the nineteenth century, while Europe was locked in near-constant warfare among competing powers, East Asia ran as a unipolar, largely hegemonic system. China was almost always the dominant state. It did not conquer Korea, Japan, or Vietnam. Those neighbors kept the peace through compatible cultures, mutual understanding, and a recognition of China’s centrality — an approach Kang thinks might still be available to Taiwan were Westphalian sovereignty not monopolizing everyone’s imagination.

On ChinaTalk, Jordan Schneider and Ilari Mäkelä of the *On Humans* podcast put the question directly: what do people who do not know East Asian history get wrong about war? Kang’s first answer is not a map of battles. It is a body count of governments. Again and again, great powers stumbled for internal reasons, not because of great-power war. Looking at the present, he sees considerable internal challenges in both the United States and China that are probably more important than their relations with each other.

Kang has spent a career arguing that once China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam became recognizable states toward the end of the first millennium, land-grab wars of the European type were only a handful of events. Asian countries do fight, he says, sometimes a lot. What does not travel is the supposedly universal human condition of rising and falling powers exploiting tiny advantages. If international-relations theory had started in Asia instead of Europe, nobody would have invented power-transition theory. They would have described stable countries with clear senses of who they were, able to live with unequal relationships, and almost always undone from inside.

He and Ma did not set out to prove a grand thesis. They went looking for East Asian power transitions and failed to find many, then tested the cases that looked closest. The one time in roughly two thousand years that China was conquered from outside was the Mongol destruction of the Song, completed around 1279 when the conquerors declared the Yuan dynasty. On a whiteboard it looks classic: hordes, a falling dynasty, a rising winner. Look closer, Kang says, and Song China at its height had some 50 million people, a claimed army of three million, paper money, and a canal system. The Mongols at their height are guessed at a million people. That is not a rising power overtaking a declining one.

What the Song actually did, over decades, was obsess over the Sixteen Prefectures lost to the Liao and try to reclaim what they considered inherent territory — even allying with the Mongols to get it back, “letting the fox into the hen house.” Schneider objects that Europeans are emotional too, and that the Mongols arrived with something closer to assault rifles than bows. Kang does not claim Genghis Khan got lucky. He claims the Song had already been pushed into a Southern Song, still chasing “honorable reclamation of lost land,” with decades of evidence that the Mongols were the real threat and a conception of what Song China should be that was older than the dynasty itself. They adjusted far too late.

Kang’s next move is to split China’s two frontiers, because conventional wisdom only remembers one. Western and even popular history, he notes, treats threats as arriving from the western steppe — Mongols, Xiongnu, the villains in a Disney *Mulan*. That is why China built a wall. Standard IR, the game of Risk, and every bullying-by-the-stronger-state model say it should have been the other way around. A country of 50 million should have terrified the smaller polities on every side. On the east and south it did not. Korea, Japan, and Vietnam were settled, agrarian, bureaucratically administered kingdoms with written language. They should have been building walls against China. Nobody did.

They could, Kang says, literally understand one another. Every Japanese syllabary is borrowed or modified from Chinese characters; Koreans and Vietnamese used the script; 60 to 70 percent of the vocabulary in those countries is Chinese loanwords. They copied governmental form, including six ministries and a written exam for civil servants. In the book this is a “common conjecture”: a shared vocabulary and a shared sense of what mattered and how to interact. It does not mean they always got along. There was plenty of pushing and shoving. It stayed inside a shared understanding of the world, which is not how China or Korea related to steppe peoples who did not want written bureaucratic life in the first place.

Mäkelä links the peace to the civil-service exam that China institutionalized under the Sui, then exported. Vietnam is the test. Many Vietnamese, he says, would answer that China was constantly bullying them. Kang’s reply is that the violent earlier period is the wrong sample. From roughly the year 1000, once those societies were working in similar ways, the pattern changes. Vietnam maintained independence by entering tributary relations with Song China almost as soon as it became independent, around 1079 by Kang’s dating. The Sino-Vietnamese border was formally negotiated around then, marked with bronze pillars — Liam Kelley’s *Beyond the Bronze Pillars* is the book he recommends — and it is, he says, still in the same place almost a thousand years later.

Kang is now reading the *Ming Shilu* and *Qing Shilu*, the veritable records from about 1400 to 1900, to see how Beijing’s elites talked about Vietnam. The twentieth-century Vietnamese story is that China was always invading. In the records, factions in a Vietnamese rebellion appeal to the Ming or Qing court to be recognized as the legitimate ruler. Chinese officials debate whom to recognize and how to stabilize the relationship. Kang says he finds almost no discussion of whether this is the moment to take Vietnam. On the Vietnamese side, Chinese recognition was often what made a ruler legitimate. The relationship was aspirational, not a constant annexation plot.

Schneider is the show’s most persistent skeptic, and Labenz flagged him in the introduction as both more China-literate and more convinced that the United States needs a containment-style policy. His first cut is structural. East Asian peace, he says, is China plus some gnats. Some gnats learned not to get squished; some did not. There are no kingdoms in Yunnan anymore. Tibet and Xinjiang had a rough time of it. Vietnam, Korea, and Japan happened to wake up early enough, sit far enough away, and matter just little enough that Chinese leaders were already getting what they wanted — tribute, inscriptions, the feeling of centrality — without a conquest that paid.

The line that crystallized it for him comes from historian Sixiang Wang: over the centuries Korean elites, as stakeholders rather than outsiders, helped shape the imperial tradition, and the myth of China’s moral empire persisted partly because generations of Korean diplomats had been repeating it to China’s emperors. The point of the rhetoric, Schneider stresses, was to convince empires that behaving according to Korean expectations was the best way to be imperial. Recording a few weeks after Yom Kippur, he compares it to Jewish prayer that quotes God’s own promises back at him. Small-state flattery is a survival technology, not proof of harmony among equals.

Schneider’s deeper claim is that the conversation could happen at all only because the power ratio never changed: China a thousand times stronger, three polities trying to survive, from about 500 to 1870. Kang agrees that Europe was and is a multipolar balance-of-power system and that Asia was and is hegemonic — one massive power and a cluster of smaller ones. Those systems should not be expected to behave the same way. From the first unification of China, the problem for everyone else was not how to expand. It was how to exist in the shadow of a central power that was not leaving. Then he offers the closest thing in the episode to a prediction. Every time someone in the “DC blob” says Asia will balance China, Kang says no. Asian countries are not going to join a US containment coalition. They have to live with China. They do not have to like it.

Mäkelä’s contrast is a billiard table of similarly sized European states versus East Asian polities that more often crumbled from inside, plus a violent western frontier. Korea is the poster child of the stable relationship; many Vietnamese would protest; Japan looks more European, with the late-nineteenth-century wars and, earlier, a late-1500s explosion most listeners have never heard of. Kang’s father, from north of Pyongyang, used to talk about turtle boats. That was all Kang knew of Korean history until he became a scholar. Admiral Yi Sun-sin, he says, belongs in every international-relations textbook: at one point 13 of his ships against 300 Japanese ones.

Everyone has heard of the Spanish Armada. In 1588 Spain sent, by Kang’s figures, about 130 ships and 20,000 troops toward England, the largest force Renaissance Europe had seen. Four years later, in 1592, Toyotomi Hideyoshi tried to conquer China by invading Korea first: some 300,000 troops and 700 ships, a scale Kang estimates at five to ten times what Europe could even imagine. The organizational gap is older than the war. Around 700 AD the Japanese ministry already had about 7,000 people; five centuries later the Catholic Curia, the most organized institution in Europe, had around 500. Japan, often treated as the barbarian of the Sinic world, used a civil-service exam for some 400 years. These states could fight at that scale. Most of the time they chose not to.

If anyone should have been invading, China should have been invading Japan. Hideyoshi had just reunified a country after a century of broken central rule. Kang has not heard a definitive reason he then went for China — ego and hubris, or domestic politics that sent potentially rebellious daimyo overseas for gold. What is missing from the record is the balance-of-power arithmetic textbooks require. There is almost no evidence that Hideyoshi sat down and concluded that China or Korea was weaker. IR theory also says that in a one-big, two-small neighborhood the two small states should ally against the large one. Instead Japan invaded Korea. Koreans had years of warning and refused to believe it. The Ming court at first treated the plea as a joke.

Once China did send troops, and once Yi cut the supply lines, the Japanese advance was pushed back to Busan. After years of negotiation Hideyoshi died; a second invasion was crushed; the army went home in 1598. The Korean government would not have survived without China. Ming forces were completely in charge of the peninsula. All they had to do was stay and call it another province. Within about a year they left, saying this was not their country. Koreans actually tried to keep them, fearing a third Japanese attack. Japan then formed the Tokugawa shogunate and, for nearly 300 years, did nothing of the kind. From about 1200 to 1800 it is the only war among Japan, Korea, and China — states with massive capacity that simply chose not to fight. Mäkelä calls it the weird exception that almost proves the rule: the first reaction on every side was that this could not be happening.

The harder objection, which Mäkelä had prepared with Schneider, is Graham Allison’s famous ledger: in 12 of 16 power transitions, war. Maybe East Asia looks peaceful only because nobody could challenge the hegemon. The moment industrialization gave Japan the ability, it moved — the Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War, the invasion of China. Sample size of one genuine challenge, and the challenger behaved exactly as Western theory predicts. If the book is called *Beyond Power Transitions*, Mäkelä will not let Kang off the hook.

Kang’s first reply is that the nineteenth-century arrival of Western imperial powers blew the old East Asian order apart, and that this change of world orders is what IR scholars should be studying. In 1879 Japanese diplomats, working in French and in contracts, argued with Chinese officials who were still speaking the tribute system’s language over the status of Taiwan. They no longer understood one another. China, as hegemon, asked why it should change; Japan borrowed German military training and English business practices. Kang’s “quick and dirty” reading of Japanese motives is less a Thucydides grab at a declining China than a question of survival and recognition: how to become a great power the Europeans would accept. He describes two photographs of the Meiji emperor about two years apart, one in traditional dress and one looking like Bismarck, sword, mustache, and medals. Half of what Japan did, from the 1919 racial-equality clause at the League of Nations to taking colonies, was aimed at the West as much as at China.

Mäkelä presses again. Even if Kang can explain that one war another way, East Asian history still does not show that a genuine power transition can happen without war. Traditional scholars will say that for US-China we are back to 12 out of 16. Kang grants the force of the point, then turns it. The live question is how deeply the whole world became Westphalian — nation-states, balance of power, a flag. His own answer is that the transition is extremely thin and superficial. Power-transition theory claims universality. He and Ma are trying to regionalize it to Europe, as a pattern built on particular ideas and beliefs that showed up there and not elsewhere.

On the Japanese case itself he still doubts the conditions fit. Measurable Japanese power in the nineteenth century, he thinks, never overtook China’s; it only looks like a transition because Japan was writing and China was called the sick man of Asia. Asked whether Japan would have beaten China without the United States, he reaches for *The Princess Bride*: never get involved in a land war in Asia. He thinks Japanese forces were already bogged down long before deep US involvement, and he reads the war more as an imperial project to protect the homeland than as “China is weak, let’s go.” He will not diminish the accomplishment. Japan was the first non-Western country to industrialize and, in 1904, the first to beat a European power in war.

Schneider asks the question hanging over every “common conjecture” story: what about the peoples who did not run the Korea-Vietnam playbook? Xinjiang, Tibet, Yunnan, Sichuan — a thousand years of little kingdoms, looking west, that are no longer able to do their own thing. Kang leans cultural rather than material. Nomads and Chinese, in a line he quotes from a steppe specialist, had clear conceptions of who they were; nomads did not want to change their way of life. Incompatible worldviews, and both sides knew it. He is not a steppe scholar, he admits. He has been trying to explain the understudied stability on the eastern side, because that is the outcome nobody expects.

Mäkelä offers a middle account from energy history. Life on the steppe is life on grass. Humans do not eat grass; animals convert it, and grass is not energy-dense, so people have to move. Once that is the ledger, a culture of horses and large claims follows, and you cannot cram Confucian classics for an exam that runs granaries of rice against famine. Kang does not reject the material story. He still wants room for the claim that people liked how they lived and did not want the half-bargain of becoming a little more like Korea.

Yunnan and Sichuan, Schneider says, are not dramatic landscape. They are ordinary country that imperial China washed over. Kang’s comparison is meant to stop the moral exceptionalism. Imagine a country that starts with a populated, urbanized eastern seaboard and slowly moves into a largely unorganized western frontier, tending to slaughter indigenous peoples until it cannot expand farther. Two countries did that: China and the United States. His one-sentence history of the world is that it is the process of turning frontiers into borders. China tried the wall, then bribery with goods, then incorporation as nomads were pushed back. He does not want to put a moral judgment on it. “We did this in the United States as well.”

Schneider finally asks what any of this has to do with ships bumping in the Taiwan Strait. Kang’s first lesson is to ask, rather than assume, whether a power-transition dynamic is the most important one. In Washington it is taken for granted that a declining United States and a rising, newly ambitious China are the key to Asia. The book, he says, should cause a pause. Look at Korean dynasties next to China: Silla, Goryeo, each fell for internal reasons; Joseon is the twentieth-century exception. Japanese regimes, Vietnamese ones, Chinese ones — Tang internal, Ming internal, Qing internal. Song is the conquest outlier. He borrows a line he cannot attribute: empires die from suicide, not murder.

The contemporary China debate, in his telling, is split between “will they take over the world” and “will they collapse.” He has spent an adult life hearing about an impending Chinese real-estate crash. When Xi Jinping wakes up, is he more concerned with what is going on internally, or itching to make land grabs? Kang’s wager is that East Asian dynamics will again be much more internal than external. Along the long arc, from the Opium Wars through 1949 or 1979, China spent about a hundred years in one of its periodic internal chaoses. What neighbors are dealing with now is not a rise. It is a return. Every country in the region has lived with a huge China before and has to craft a working relationship again, because nobody is going away.

The American policy mistake, as he sees it, is trying to make Asian states choose in a very American “with us or against us” style. Vietnam joining BRICS, Thailand’s similar moves, are not evidence of decoupling. Nobody gets along with China on everything; the United States argues with Mexico. He sees no evidence that these countries will unequivocally contain, derisk, and move away. A still-shared conjecture, the one that matters for policy, is that he does not think any realistic Korean, Vietnamese, or frankly Japanese policymaker believes China wants to invade and conquer their country. They do not love Beijing. They are not heading for the trenches.

Schneider will grant geography and script. He will not grant continuity without a fight. Imperial Japan went from robes to cosplaying Bismarck in a photographic blink. The PRC’s poster boys are Marx, Lenin, and Engels, not Han Feizi. Mao wanted global revolution, funded fights in South America and Angola, and threatened nuclear war with the Soviet Union. In a sample of a handful of top CCP leaders, that is at least one dramatic case that does not look like peaceful harmony under a system dating to 500. Kang says this is the question scholars do not ask enough. Many of his sinologist friends answer without thinking that of course it is different: it is the CCP, it is Xi, it is a one-party authoritarian system, and that is the main driver of foreign policy. He is not so sure.

In intro IR he has students raise passports and tells them that nobody in China is questioning nation-state modernity. Listen to the Chinese national anthem, he jokes, and it sounds like 1870s Vienna, not Beijing opera. Almost every main Chinese foreign-policy interest, in a paper he hopes to publish, he is calling transdynastic. None of it is new. Mao spent some money on global revolution, but the agenda is not even just Xi’s, or the CCP’s from the 1940s. Most of it was inherited from the KMT in the 1930s and goes back to the Qing if not earlier. Taiwan is the clearest example. The Qing were already saying, do not take this, Japan, or relations will be poisoned forever. Unifying what is China is not a Communist invention.

What Kang has not seen is a new, expansionary list. Important English-language books claim Taiwan is a starting point, then the Philippines, then not-Vietnam. He is flabbergasted. Vietnam and China now run joint naval patrols in Haiphong Bay, disagree about some things, and cooperate on everything else. As Chinese power has grown he sees a greater ability to pursue long-enduring interests, not a lot of thought that once Taiwan is settled it will be time to take Japan.

The rub, Schneider says, is that in Westphalian terms Taiwan is about as close to a state as a polity can be, sitting among US treaties with Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, and the Philippines. After 1945, taking over states has been defined as not cool; Ukraine is the exception, and the response has been dramatic, down to South Korean artillery shells. Kang agrees, then points at the map of where the old European model is actually running: Ukraine, massive armies and tanks, in Europe, not in Asia. Taiwan, for him, encapsulates the whole argument. If the world were not Westphalian — if the only legitimate polity were not a nation-state with a seat at the table — Taiwan would be easier to sort out. Historically Europe had kingdoms, principalities, duchies; Asia had nomadic and centralized Confucian kingdoms. That older menu is not coming back. Everyone is stuck with an incompatible way of thinking.

He does not think the Chinese talk about 2027 the way Washington does, with war-game money sloshing around DC. Everything he knows about the CCP and Xi is a reserved right to use force because “it’s ours,” not a timetable to invade. Kicking the can has been, in his view, really successful, and he does not understand why anyone is trying to change the status quo. Americans say they understand China’s claim without agreeing with it, and tell Beijing not to use force. China is glad they understand and still reserves force. Taiwan keeps a flag, a currency, a government, a capitalist system, and does not call itself independent. That arrangement let Taiwan go from a brutal authoritarian government to a thriving democracy while China got rich and the world bought well-made cheap goods. It is not perfect. It works.

After Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, Kang notes, every Asian country he lists — ASEAN, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia — publicly reaffirmed a one-China policy within a week. South Korea did not. Yoon Suk Yeol would not have a single official meet her at the airport after she came from Taipei, and there was a domestic furor over photos of him on vacation. A senior Korean national-security official later told Kang, in the presidential office, that the policy was set when Seoul normalized with Beijing in 1992, that Korea will not reaffirm it every time China asks, and that US bases will not be allowed for a Taiwan war. If there is a war, Kang thinks many Asian countries will back slowly away. Ilari hears in one-China a weird living version of the old imperial common understanding: nobody is happy, and you do not get a war.

Schneider’s fear is Hong Kong and Xinjiang: the fudge of respect-and-leave-us-alone may not be enough, and the “She dynasty” is a warning. Kang’s distinction is internal versus external. Beijing calls Xinjiang and Hong Kong internal, and that is different from Vietnam or Korea. Taiwan is rare and unclear. Koreans, Filipinos, Vietnamese, and Japanese do not claim it as theirs; they treat it as a Chinese-civilizational issue broadly defined. He also notes three nineteenth-century island takeovers — Ryukyu in 1879, Hawaii around 1899, and Taiwan — of which only Taiwan is still debated, even though the island’s peoples historically never organized a government capable of formal diplomacy, unlike the Ryukyus. Mäkelä quotes Kang’s own line that East Asian states are not forming a balancing coalition, and that military spending as a share of GDP has been declining across the region, allies or not. The American counter is that the US fleet is the reason. Kang is unconvinced. Vietnam and Malaysia have no US guarantee and sit closer to China than the Philippines, and you do not see the difference fear would predict. Korea and Japan are not becoming “natural allies.” The lesson he draws from Ukraine is not what China learned. It is what Taiwan should learn: the United States is very cautious about a shooting war with a nuclear-armed superpower, far from US borders, on that superpower’s doorstep, over something not central to American survival.