The discourse on East Asia that has become popular since the 1990s was not a product of globalization. This paper first problematizes the rhetoric of post-Cold War to argue that East Asia did not exist under Cold War. To trace the origin of East Asia, this paper identified two related strategies: pre-WWII Japanese imperialism that confronted the West and colonial Taiwan's hybrid composition of both China and Japan. Tsai Peihuo's provocative promotion of an East Asian solution to Sino-Japanese War represented the latter approach. Echoing Tsai, contemporary narratives by those East Asian writers who look away from statist for an epistemic ground to engage in non-resistant identity formation have yet to acknowledge their predecessor in colonial Taiwan. They could learn from Tsai and his context to remain sufficiently alerted to the danger of returning to statism hidden behind globalization.