The book intents to locate the process and effectiveness of cooperation in East Asia, to regard the construction of East Asian community as the ideal, the contradictions and difficulties in construction as the reality, and the actual development and achievement as the choice and effort between the two.

The year of 1997 saw the Asian Financial Crisis which turned out to be a disaster, but also opened up an opportunity for East Asia to establish cooperation mechanism. Starting with the crisis, this book examines the origin and development of the East Asian cooperation movement. More importantly, it investigates the obstacles and resistance, and provides insights into the cooperation within East Asia in the context of unstable political environment. Specifically, it expounds on East Asian Free Trade Area, monetary cooperation, as well as the cooperation within Northeast Asian and Asia-Pacific regions.

Instead of the East Asian Community, various functional mechanisms have come into being in the development of East Asian cooperation because of complicated historical and economic relations among the countries. This book examines the roles played by ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), Japan, U.S., and China in the cooperation respectively. More importantly, China’s strategic orientation in regional cooperation is studied in the last chapter. It observes that China, as a rising power, is re-establishing regional relations and order with the geographically neighbouring countries as the basis.