Ni hao and greetings and welcome to the East Asian region lecture series. East Asia is kind of a unique one for the world regions that I talk about throughout this course for several aspects. One, It is a region, right, we're always looking for some homogeneous traits which define certain areas of the planet which are different once you go outside of the boundaries of that region and in that respect, this region's unique because I'm gonna take one singular sovereign state, and that is China, and divide it kind of into two. We're gonna look at the eastern and western halves of China, and I'm mostly gonna focus on eastern China as the core foundational component of this East Asian region. So we're gonna take a super powerful awesome big entity on planet Earth that is China and kind of divide it into halves and only look at one half. Okay, that's unique. Two, we are mostly going to focus on this powerhouse that we call China for our East Asian region because it is so important not just in defining the region, but honestly because China has a significantly huge place on planet Earth, the whole world not just this one region. And in that respect, it's not very different than say looking at the North American region and mostly lecturing about the United States, the powerhouse of that particular region. Or if we go over to say Europe And we focus a lot more on say Germany and France versus the other states of that region, so it's not terribly unique. But we're going to spend most of this lecture looking at China specifically. Okay, so we're looking at mostly at one singular sovereign state. But we're gonna divide that state into two and mostly just look at the eastern side of it. But we're also going to be telling the story of a couple other questionable geographic entities on planet Earth that a lot of folks don't understand even here in the modern context, and that is we're gonna focus for at least part of the lecture on something called Tibet and another place called Taiwan. Geographic entities that some people think are sovereign states, but they ain't. Most of us consider them part of China proper already. The Chinese certainly consider both these entities part of China But maybe you've had question marks about it. Is Taiwan a sovereign state? Some other states on planet earth think that they are. Why is that? What's that all about? And then we're also going to look at some geographic entities on the fringe of China that are also very mysterious to us here in the 21st century namely North and South Korea. And these are two places that actually are full-fledged sovereign states. There's a North Korea sovereign state and a South Korea sovereign state. We all recognize that, but why does it exist? It's very confusing because there are two sides of what historically has been just the state of Korea. So for our East Asian regional lecture we're gonna focus mostly on China. We're gonna kind of divide it into half and focus mostly on the eastern side and then we're gonna pull in some of these fringe geographic entities that are really a component of the regional concept as a whole in East Asia and that is North in South Korea, and Tibet and Taiwan. Is that cool? The last thing I'll say about this before we get to the lecture itself is there are quite a few reasons if not a million reasons that we don't consider Japan as part of the East Asian region. Ah And if you've already watched the Japanese lecture, you know most of these reasons. Even though they are geographically close, they're in proximity to the East Asian region. And if you were simply looking at the globe as a Martian and you know a visitor from outer space, you look at it and say well, you know I'm just quantifying it. Japan is part of East Asia. Technically it is, but for our regional definition, no it's not. So the places I've now mentioned China, the Koreas, Taiwan, they have a very good, tight regional definition that we can look at, but once we cross a little bit of water, the Korean Strait and get over to Japan nope all of those definitions go out the window. So we don't consider Japan nor even Southeast Asia as part of this East Asian region. Ae we good? Okay, so let's get to it. Let's talk about some of these concepts. Let's talk about the regional definition. What is so unique about this particular place that's different when you get into other places? And we are mostly going to focus on China, I can't lie, for most of this lecture, so let's make like Bruce Lee and "Enter the Dragon".