ABSTRACT
Asia, particularly East Asia, is highly integrated economically. Yet the region remains thinly institutionalized. The contemporary relevance of the ancient China-centric tributary system is debatable and has been questioned by many, both in and outside the region. The U.S. hegemony during the Cold War left little legacy to build on in terms of overarching multilateral institutions. The various initiatives proposed by Tokyo when Japan emerged as Asia’s number one have largely become distant memory. The golden age of Asian multilateralism in the 1990s has since given way to heated geopolitics rivalries, eminently played out through institutional contestation.
