East Asia

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East Asia

Area 11,839,074 km²[1]
Population 1,575,784,500[2]
Density 133 per km²
Countries and Territories  China
 Hong Kong
 Japan
 Macau
 Mongolia
 North Korea
 South Korea
 Taiwan
Languages and language families Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and many others
Nominal GDP (2009) $ 11.427 Trillion
GDP per capita (2009) $ 7,300
Time zones UTC +7:00 (Western Mongolia) to UTC +9:00 (Japan and Korean Peninsula)
Capital cities Beijing
Pyongyang
Seoul
Taipei
Tokyo
Ulan Bator
Other major cities Busan
Guangzhou
 Hong Kong
Kaohsiung
 Macau
Osaka
Shanghai
Yokohama
(see list)

East Asia or Eastern Asia (the latter form preferred by the United Nations) is a subregion of Asia that can be defined in either geographical[3] or cultural[4] terms. Geographically and geo-politically, it covers about 12,000,000 km² (4,600,000 sq mi), or about 28 percent of the Asian continent, about 15 percent bigger than the area of Europe.

More than 1.5 billion people, about 38 percent of the population of Asia or 22 percent of all the people in the world, live in geographic East Asia. This is about twice the population that Europe has. The region is one of the world's most populated places, with a population density of 133 inhabitants per square kilometre (340 /sq mi), being about three times the world average of 45 /km² (120 /sq mi).[5] Using the UN subregion definitions, it ranks second in population only to Southern Asia.

Historically, many societies in East Asia have been part of the Chinese cultural sphere, and East Asian vocabulary and scripts are often derived from Classical Chinese and Chinese script. Sometimes Northeast Asia is used to denote Japan, North Korea, and South Korea.[6]

Major religions include Buddhism (mostly Mahayana), Confucianism or Neo-Confucianism, Taoism, Chinese folk religion in China, Shinto in Japan, Shamanism in Korea, Mongolia and other indigenous populations of northern East Asia[7][8], and more recently Christianity[9] in South Korea. The Chinese Calendar is the root from which many other East Asian calendars are derived.

Uses of the term East Asia

The UN subregion of Eastern Asia and other common definitions[3] of East Asia contain the entirety of the People's Republic of China[10] (including all SARs and autonomous regions), Taiwan (officially known as the Republic of China)[11], Japan, North Korea (Democratic People's Republic of Korea), South Korea (Republic of Korea), and Mongolia[3].

Chinese speaking societies (including the cultures of mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan), Japanese society, Korean society, and Vietnamese society are commonly seen as being encompassed by cultural East Asia:[12][13][14][15]

Alternate definitions

Some^[who?] consider the following countries or regions as part of East Asia, while others^[who?] do not.

• The parts of China that are not historically dominated by Han Chinese: Tibet, Xinjiang (considered either East Asia or Central Asia or South Asia in the case of Tibet[16][17][18][19][20][21]—here the primary question is cultural, with geography also at issue)
•  Vietnam^{[citation needed]}(considered either East Asia or Southeast Asia—here the primary question is geographic)
• Siberia, Russia [22](considered either East Asia or North Asia—here the primary question is political, with culture and geography also at issue)
•  Guam

In business and economics, East Asia has been used to refer to a wide geographical area covering ten countries in ASEAN^{[citation needed]}, People's Republic of China, Japan, South Korea, and the Republic of China (commonly known as Taiwan)[11] for the purpose of economic and political regionalism and integration^{[dubious – discuss]}. The tendency of this usage, perhaps, started especially since the publication of World Bank on The East Asian Miracle in 1993 explaining the economic success of the Asian Tiger and emerging Southeast Asian economies (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand).^{[citation needed]}}