Theoretical Exploration Of The East Asian Community And The Path Choice

East Asia Commmunity (EAC) is a brand new field that dominates the development momentum of East Asian regionalism. The concept proposal, theoretical support and construction are the major concerns of this thesis.From an IR theoretical perspective, Community is the relization of regional integration. Theoretical construction of community is based on classic theory of regional integration. Community theory can be well defined by mixture of functionalism and intergovernmentalism. An ideal community construction should have six key factors。From a historical perspective, I first trace the defintion of East Asia and find that the EAC initiatives can be catorgrised into 3 periods. Propelled by these ideas, East Asia cooperation instutional building has taken shape at multi-levels, which is a major path leading to EAC.EAC has been designed by EAVG (EASG), Japanese government and Asean with distinguished features respectively. A survey into them can make it it clear their advantages and disvanteges, thus helping giving a new framwork of EAC in Chinese perspective. The paper concludes that: an ideal EAC framwork is a pluralistic complex one with political and security community built upon political mutual confidence and cooperative security, economic community built upon economic integration, social and cultural community built upon shared East Asian value, cultural change through steady process.since EAC building is both benefical to China as well as the rest of East Aisa, It has become an inevitable alternative of Chinese foreign policy decision.