East Asia is a highly integrated economic space, criss-crossed by networks of Korean, Chinese and Japanese firms, all of which increasing buy and sell from/to each other, rather than the US. This became very apparent during the 1997-98 crisis, when financial contagion spread from one SE Asian credit infrastructure to another. Today the reverse is happening: those vicious linkages are turning virtuous.
> As I'm sure Ulhas (et al.) will point out, India is nobody's "periphery"
Sure it is. That's not a moral judgement, just an economic fact. India has a huge agricultural sector, lots of primary commodity production, and a comparatively small industrial base. Uneven development is making a thin slice of India very wealthy indeed, and spawning a new professional class in the cities, but that's not the same thing as climbing the global socio-economic food chain.
-- DRR