How did East Asian civilization expand from its origins in what is now Central China?
[The expansion of East Asian “civilization” occurred both within what we think of as “China” today and to Korea, Japan, and Vietnam.] • China was first unified into one empire … by the series of conquests completed by the kingdom of Qin in 221 B.C. … (and even then it was a classic multiethnic conquest empire rather than an ethnically homogeneous nation-state, as modern imagination would have it). [Genesis of EA, p. 2] • These Qin conquests, in turn, set off political, military, and economic repercussions that impacted what we think of today as Vietnam and Korea directly and indirectly reverberated as far as the Japanese islands. [Genesis of EA, p. 2] • The various peoples inhabiting what we now think of as Japan, Korea, and Vietnam were each subsequently transformed over the course of the next roughly 1,000 years from obscure prehistoric societies into members of a broadly (though far from completely) uniform East Asian civilization under the looming shadow of this enormous Chines
