ABSTRACT
No other region in the world seems to have entered modernity in a more diverse way than East Asia. 2 The region gave birth to an aggressive capitalist imperial state (i.e. Japan), fervent revolutionary socialist states (i.e. China, Mongolia, North Korea, Vietnam), and dynamic late-developing capitalist economies (i.e. South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong). Although these countries have commonly entered the late capitalist era as global neoliberal actors, their economic, political, social, and even cultural diversities are still quite large.
