At first glance, the political economy of the East Asian international order seems to readily offer a ‘home’ for regulatory theories of international political economy (IPE), particularly the realist version of hegemonic stability theory, where the order is primarily interpreted as an expression of China's hegemonic interests. East Asia was long dominated by China, and the norms and rules of the regional international order – often (misleadingly) called the ‘Chinese world order’ – were hegemonic constructs shaped by Confucian philosophy (Fairbank 1968b; Zhang 2001). According to this story, official trade between its member states took the form of ‘tributary trade’, where goods were presented to the Chinese emperor in the form of tribute, and the emperor dispensed ‘official favours’ of trading rights and gifts. Furthermore, the order remained remarkably stable; its final collapse only came about in the wake of China's defeat by Japan in 1895, when China's last ‘tributary’, Korea, was declared an independent, sovereign state in the Treaty of Shimonoseki.

There are two ways of interpreting this international political order. First, it can be interpreted, in similar fashion to Barry Buzan and Richard Little, as a form of a command model of international relations in which ‘vassal kingdoms or tribes paid tribute to imperial suzerains or, depending on the balance of power, imperial suzerains paid appeasement bribes to supposed vassals in return for not being attacked by them’ (Buzan and Little 2000: 234).