What makes East Asia a region

Where the edges fall

The grouping filed here is the one the United Nations Statistics Division calls Eastern Asia in its M49 standard, which states that its regions are drawn for statistical convenience and carry no political meaning. Other readings move the edges. Mongolia is filed here and is also read as Inner or Central Asia, since it has no coast, lies between China and Russia, and sits on a steppe that runs west without a break. Vietnam falls outside on the M49 reading, which files it under South-Eastern Asia, and inside on a cultural one, because it inherited the Chinese script and the examination bureaucracy that travelled with it. The older English name for the same ground was the Far East, a phrase that measured the distance from London.

What the countries are

Five of the members hold United Nations seats. The People's Republic took China's seat on 25 October 1971, Japan was admitted on 18 December 1956, Mongolia on 27 October 1961, and North Korea and South Korea together on 17 September 1991. Hong Kong and Macau are special administrative regions of China, transferred from British and Portuguese administration on 1 July 1997 and 20 December 1999, and the catalogue files each as a dependency with a page of its own because each keeps its own currency, its own legislature and its own internet domain. Taiwan is recorded as disputed, and the argument is not settled on this page: it is governed from Taipei as the Republic of China, the People's Republic claims it, and both readings stay on the record.

Membership under agreed names

Every member except North Korea belongs to the World Trade Organization, which admits customs territories and not sovereign governments alone. Hong Kong and Macau joined on 1 January 1995, China on 11 December 2001, and Taiwan on 1 January 2002 under the name Separate Customs Territory of Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen and Matsu. Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation seats China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan the same way, as economies rather than as countries, Japan and South Korea from 1989 and the other three from 1991.

The script, and the member outside it

Chinese characters run through most of the group: simplified forms in China, traditional forms in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau, kanji beside two syllabaries in Japan, and hanja behind the hangul of the Koreas, which is why South Korea's official name is recorded both as 대한민국 and as 大韓民國. Mongolian stands outside that inheritance. It has been written in Cyrillic since the 1940s, and a law passed in 2020 provides for the traditional vertical script to be used beside Cyrillic in official documents.

Coasts and clocks

Mongolia is the member without a coastline, and the rest reach the Pacific through a chain of marginal seas. Japan, Hong Kong and Macau drive on the left and the others drive on the right. China keeps one official clock at UTC+08:00 across its whole width, Japan and South Korea keep UTC+09:00, and North Korea moved to UTC+08:30 in August 2015 and back to UTC+09:00 in May 2018. March of the Volunteers is the anthem recorded for China, Hong Kong and Macau alike.