Sinosphere

The Sinosphere, also called the Chinese cultural sphere, the East Asian cultural sphere or the Sinic world, is a grouping of East Asian and Southeast Asian countries that were long shaped by Chinese culture. It is generally taken to comprise Greater China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam, and it once included the Ryukyu Kingdom. Singapore and Malaysia are sometimes added because of modern overseas Chinese migration. Imperial China acted as the regional power and influenced its tributary and neighbouring states through Confucianism, Taoism and East Asian Buddhism, and through a Confucian-based examination system that shaped bureaucracy in Korea and Vietnam. Literary Chinese became the shared written language of administration, and Chinese characters were adapted locally as kanji in Japan, hanja in Korea and chu Han in Vietnam. Each country later developed its own phonetic scripts, such as kana, hangul and the Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet. The term differs from the Sinophone world, which means the places where Chinese is spoken.