Far East
Quigley's term for East Asia — China, Japan, Korea, and adjacent zones
Also known as: Far East
Quigley's term for East Asia — China, Japan, Korea, and adjacent zones — used throughout T&H to denote the Sinic civilizational area and the eastern theatre of twentieth-century great-power politics (T&H 21).
Quigley's Framing
For Quigley the Far East is, in civilizational terms, the home of Sinic and (offshoot) Japanese civilization — a long-stable cultural complex centered on China that resisted Western penetration longer than any other major civilization. The mid-nineteenth-century opening of China and the parallel Meiji opening of Japan are read as the two great civilizational impacts of expanding Western Civilization on the Sinic zone, with very different outcomes in the two cases.
Strategic Role
In twentieth-century geopolitics the Far East is the second great theatre of the World Wars (after Europe) and the principal hot front of the early Cold War — the Korean War, the Chinese revolution, the Indochina conflict, and the long American attempt to construct a Pacific containment perimeter. Quigley reads American Far East policy from the Open Door through Vietnam as a half-century miscalculation, anchored on the assumption that the United States could substitute itself for the receding European colonial powers without absorbing their colonial liabilities.
Cited in
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 21 Quigley
The Far East — China, Japan, Korea, and adjacent zones — resisted Western penetration longer than any other major civilization.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 1198 Quigley
American Far East policy from the Open Door through Vietnam was a half-century miscalculation.