ABSTRACT
This chapter sketches the East Asian economic and cultural context for an understanding of the region's contemporary migration flows and describes these migrations in considerable detail, and explains their causes and consequences. The chapter provides an overview, necessarily a highly generalized one, of the East Asian economy, selecting those features that are most significant for an understanding of the region's migrations. The East Asian region has one dominant characteristic - its amazing diversity. Rural landscapes that are about as open and empty as any on Earth are to be found in western China and Mongolia, while in other areas, such as parts of eastern China, lowland Japan, Java and the Philippines, there are agricultural landscapes renowned for their density of settlement and intensity of land use. The chapter sets out an overview and typology of East Asian migrations from 1960 to 2010 and presents simplified representations of their geography.
