The just-completed East Asian Summit should remind us of just how little political commonality is to be found in a diffuse historical notion of a "Confucian Commonwealth."  Usually that notion, or something like it, is deployed to represent the cultural similarity among states of East Asia – China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam.  But when sharing a pen between the leaders of China and Japan is a news-making event (it was one of the few moments of something like contact and comity between the two at the meeting), we should realize that current political dynamics easily and obviously overwhelm supposedly deep historical ties.

      
    
     And we should especially keep in mind how history is mobilized for particular national interests and identities, and how that nationalism is certainly more powerful than some putative regional identity or union.  After all, yesterday was the commemoration day of the Nanjing Massacre, a memory that separates China and Japan much more than any "Confucian" cultural similarity might bring them together.

    
     The slogan on this banner at Nanjing reads: "Don’t forget history." 

    Perhaps the more interesting question is: which history is being remembered and which forgotten?