What Is Asia?

Asia is viewed as the congregation of some of the world’s most primitive civilisa­tions. In recent past, this region was also viewed by few as a region of backwardness; however, this conceptualisation was not entirely true. This continent constitutes more than 60% of the Earth’s population and around 30% of land area. The region has people with different religions, languages and cultures. The concept of Asia needs to be viewed at two distinct levels. At one level, Asia needs to be viewed beyond a meagre geographic identity because it represents much more. While at other more practical level, it becomes important to ‘quantify’ Asia by identifying the nation-states forming a part of this region.

The word Asia was probably invented by the Europeans and its concept has been propagated by European geographers, politicians and encyclopedia writers. Naturally, there could be regional and extra-regional biases to ‘define’ Asia in strict geographical sense. In simple sense, Asia is the region which encompasses the Europe [1]. The definition and boundaries of Asia at times vary when viewed from a physical geography and political geography perspective. The best option to identify the states from Asia could be use the United Nations (UN) geoscheme for Asia. As per this, Asia is subdivided to four broad categories: Eastern Asia, Southern Asia, Southeastern Asia and Western Asia.1 Even part of Russia is sometimes been referred falling in the Asian continent. It is referred as North Asia or Northern Asia (Asian portion of Russia). However, experts view that Russia sees itself more of a European and Western nation with critical interests in Asia. Probably, in the twenty-first century, the Russians see themselves culturally and ethnically more as Europeans rather than Asians [2]. For the purpose of this study, Russia is excluded from Asia both because of geographical and technical reasons. This is mainly because Russia is one of the most developed spacefaring nation and it would not be accurate to bracket it with the other developing Asian space powers. Also, Central Asian region has not been included in this study basically because presently very minimal investments in space arena are being made over there and states like Kazakhstan are mainly catering for the Russian interests in space arena (launch station Baikonur has been leased by the Kazakhstan government to Russia).

Considering various historical, geopolitical and technological realities, for the purpose of this work Asia has been subdivided into four regions. These regions along with the few of their important states (mainly from the point of interest for this study) are as follows:

1. West Asia: Israel, Iran, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey (it is partially in Europe)

2. East Asia: China, Japan, Taiwan, North and South Korea

3. Southeast Asia: Myanmar, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam

4. South Asia: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka