Chinese diaspora cultural ties, not states, drove East Asian economic integration.

Evidence

While ASEAN moved slowly, the yen bloc remained a dream, Japan wavered, and the EAEC did not get off the ground, economic interaction in East Asia nonetheless increased dramatically. This expansion was rooted in the cultural ties among East Asian Chinese communities. These ties gave rise to “continuing informal integration” of a Chinese-based international economy, comparable in many respects to the Hanseatic League, and “perhaps leading to a de facto Chinese common market” (see pp. 168-74). In East Asia, as elsewhere, cultural commonality has been the prerequisite to meaningful economic integration. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 363

Categorization

• XREF: The Hanseatic League comparison echoes the Milgrom law-merchant material on reputation networks sustaining trade without state institutions; the de facto Chinese common market parallels diaspora trade network scholarship. — connects to: Globalisation’s anti-poverty record mostly reflects state-directed East Asian growth. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 986
• SEED: Apossible essay angle: how informal diaspora kinship networks (Chinese, Hanseatic) outperform formal regional institutions at enabling trade integration — when do networks beat treaties?