ABSTRACT
East Asian elites read and reacted to enfolding circumstances and the upshot over time was to embed the communities that they led in the modern world. Former colonial authorities sought continued economic trading access, new international organizations were open to the membership of states and intellectually ideas of modernization were available: all pointed new elites towards the goal of effective nation-statehood. New elites in new countries sought security, order and development. The countries of the region also have it in common that they have sought to locate themselves autonomously within the modern industrial capitalist world and this generates the typical preoccupations of national development. The first basic preoccupation is with making post-colonial states; the second is with identity, creating a nation; and the third is with development. Power and authority in contemporary East Asia mix resources from the pre-colonial period, the colonial interlude, the episode of state-empire dissolution and the lessons of the period of independent nation-state development.
