ABSTRACT
Pacific Asia comprises 14 states: four in East Asia (China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan) and ten in South East Asia (Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar (Burma), the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam). As McCargo (2001: 141) notes, ‘unlike the more ambiguous phrase “Asia-Pacific”, “Pacific Asia” clearly excludes Australia and North America’. Several of the world's major religions are commonly found in the Pacific Asia region, including: Buddhism (both Theravada and Mahayana), 1 Confucianism (in various forms, often mixed up with Taoism 2 and/or Buddhism), Islam (Indonesia is the world's most populous predominantly Muslim country, with a population of more than 200 million people), Christianity (often Catholicism, primarily in the Philippines, although both China and South Korea also have significant Catholic minorities), Hinduism (principally in Bali, an Indonesian island), Taoism, Shintoism (Japan), 3 as well as numerous localised traditional religions. In short, the Pacific Asia contains a large number of religious faiths and this complicates our understanding of the relationship between religion, politics and international relations.
