Unlike other locally-driven sub-national economic blocs in East Asia – such as the Southern China Growth Triangle (SCG T) and SI JORI  – the Pan Yellow Sea Region (PYSR ), spanning the coastal areas of the Yellow Sea in Northeast Asia, has a relatively short history. Its spontaneous process of economic integration only began in the early 1990s, when the Chinese economy opened up and began functioning as the world’s factory. In this short period, however, the PYSR has made significant progress in pursuing trans-border economic exchange. Intra-regional trade amongst the three PYSR countries (hereafter, China, Japan and Korea) has exploded, almost doubling from 12.7% of total trade volume of all three countries in 1990, to 23.9% in 2005. In terms of intra-regional investment, as of 2006, Korea and Japan were the world’s largest and second largest providers of foreign direct investment (FDI ) to China respectively, excluding Hong Kong. In addition, these three countries have jointly forged an extensive and dense production network to become a leading global manufacturing base. In 2007, the three countries’ global share in the output of their key industries of shipbuilding, electronics and automobiles was 85.2%, 41.6% and 33.6% respectively (see Section 2.1 for more).