ABSTRACT
East Asia is a microcosm of world politics, featuring far-reaching diversities and disparities among the regional states in their political, economic and social systems and cultural and religious orientations. Never the less, outstanding dynamics are unfolding in East Asia's transnational space at the turn of the twenty-first century: the rise of China as a contender for regional and global hegemony and a set of collective initiatives to integrate the region into a harmonious community. The theory of hegemonic stability contends that the rise of a single hegemonic power is most conducive to the formation of stable economic or political relations between the hegemon and those on the bandwagon. The concepts of hegemony and community are used at once to explicate the modalities of regional cooperation and to posit the range of the emergent institutional possibilities. The specific institutional features of regional cooperation are determined by the interaction between a hegemonic state and a core state in a given region.
