Opportunities for a Great Power Bargain between China and Japan

2020 ◽  
pp. 238-293
Author(s):  
Barry Buzan ◽  
Evelyn Goh
Keyword(s):  
Northeast Asia ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Power Transition ◽  
China And Japan ◽  
Historical Trajectory

Chapter 7 reiterates the authors’ argument that present-day tensions in Northeast Asia stem from an interrupted, partial power transition between China and Japan. It justifies the perspective that there is a longer historical trajectory to this transition, and that there remain opportunities for a great power bargain between them. Using the historical ‘lessons’, the chapter develops four key scenarios for strategic relations between China and Japan in the decades ahead, with explicit attention to their associated socio-normative contexts and distributive and regulative bargains. The scenarios sketch a historically informed evaluation of the prospects for the region, the circumstances under which a new great power bargain between China and Japan might be possible or necessary, and how the history problem plays into these scenarios.

Rethinking Sino-Japanese Alienation

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Buzan ◽  
Evelyn Goh
Keyword(s):  
Northeast Asia ◽  
Great Power ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Shared History ◽  
Global View ◽  
Historical Contextualization ◽  
Regional Order ◽  
Historical Relationship ◽  
China And Japan ◽  
Northeast Asian

Bitterly contested memories of war, colonization and empire among Japan, China, and Korea have increasingly threatened regional order and security over the three decades since the 1980s. In Sino-Japanese relations, identity, territory, and power pull together in a particularly lethal direction, generating dangerous tensions in both geopolitical and memory rivalries. Buzan and Goh explore a new approach to dealing with this history problem, first, by constructing a more balanced and global view of their shared history, and second, by sketching out the possibilities for a great power bargain in Northeast Asia. The book first puts Northeast Asia’s history since 1840 into both a world historical and a systematic normative context, exposing the parochial nature of the history debate in relation to what is a bigger shared story. It then explores the conditions under which China and Japan have been able to reach strategic bargains in the course of their long historical relationship, and uses this to sketch out the main modes of agreement that might underpin a new contemporary great power bargain between them in four future scenarios for the region. The frameworks adopted here consciously blend historical contextualization; enduring concerns with wealth, power, and interest; and the complex relationship between Northeast Asian states’ evolving encounters with each other and with global international society.

The Struggle for Recognition in International Relations

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Murray
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
International Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Power Transition ◽  
Rising Powers ◽  
Peaceful Rise ◽  
Rising Power ◽  
Struggle For Recognition ◽  
Power Transitions

How can established powers manage the peaceful rise of new great powers? With The Struggle for Recognition in International Relations, the author offers a new answer to this perennial question in international relations, arguing that power transitions are principally social phenomena whereby rising powers struggle to obtain recognition of their identity as a great power. At the center of great power identity formation is the acquisition of particular symbolic capabilities—such as battlesheips, aircraft carriers, or nuclear weapons—that are representative of great power status and that allow rising powers to experience their uncertain social status as a brute fact. When a rising power is recognized, this power acquisition is considered legitimate and its status in the international order secured, leading to a peaceful power transition. If a rising power is misrecognized, its assertive foreign policy is perceived to be for revisionist purposes, which must be contained by the established powers. Revisionism—rather than the product of a material power structure that encourages aggression or domestic political struggles—is a social construct that emerges through a rising power’s social interactions with the established powers as it attempts to gain recognition of its identity. The question of peaceful power transition has taken on increased salience in recent years with the emergence of China as an economic and military rival of the United States. Highlighting the social dynamics of power transitions, this book offers a powerful new framework through which to understand the rise of China and how the United States can facilitate its peaceful rise.

Where Great Powers Meet

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Shambaugh
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Soft Power ◽  
The United States ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Stable Region ◽  
Power Transition ◽  
Global Power ◽  
Sphere Of Influence ◽  
The Cold War

After the end of the Cold War, it seemed as if Southeast Asia would remain a geopolitically stable region within the American imperious for the foreseeable future. In the last two decades, however, the re-emergence of China as a major great power has called into question the geopolitical future of the region and raised the specter of renewed great power competition. As this book shows, the United States and China are engaged in a broad-gauged and global competition for power. While this competition ranges across the entire world, it is centered in Asia, and here this text focuses on the ten countries that comprise Southeast Asia. The United States and China constantly vie for position and influence in this enormously significant region, and the outcome of this contest will do much to determine whether Asia leaves the American orbit after seven decades and falls into a new Chinese sphere of influence. Just as important, to the extent that there is a global “power transition” occurring from the United States to China, the fate of Southeast Asia will be a good indicator. Presently, both powers bring important assets to bear. The United States continues to possess a depth and breadth of security ties, soft power, and direct investment across the region that empirically outweigh China’s. For its part, China has more diplomatic influence, much greater trade, and geographic proximity. In assessing the likelihood of a regional power transition, the book looks at how ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) and the countries within it maneuver between the United States and China and the degree to which they align with one or the other power.

scholarly journals Making Modern Knowledge of Traditional Carpentry in China and Japan: Myth, Reality and Transmission

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 34-62
Author(s):  
Ren Congcong
Keyword(s):  
New Technologies ◽  
Modern Technology ◽  
Building Industry ◽  
Heritage Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
China And Japan ◽  
Yingzao Fashi ◽  
Historical Trajectory ◽  
Building Practice ◽  
Building Standards

Abstract Carpentry skills were among the most important elements of building practice in premodern China and Japan, and traditional carpentry skills continue in use in both countries to the present day. Although their importance has been greatly marginalised in building practice, in both countries some master carpenters have gained public recognition. This paper compares the modernisation of traditional building knowledge in China and Japan, and the fate of carpentry knowledge as the building industry and the formal discipline of architecture evolved. It distinguishes three phases in this historical trajectory: the period during the introduction of Western architecture as a discipline, when traditional knowledge was rejected or used selectively in the construction of national histories of building; the period when modern technology took over the main building industry and traditional craftsmen had to confront the realities of new technologies of production; and the period, still unfolding today, where heritage movements are promoting the recuperation and development of traditional craft knowledge. For each country, the paper traces how the nation’s history of building was selectively fashioned into an orthodox narrative; explores the content of key early technical works (for China, the official handbook Yingzao fashi [Building standards] and the craftsman’s manual Lu Ban jing [Carpenters’ Canon], and for Japan kikujutsu [literally, “compass and ruler techniques”] books); and shows how a talented master carpenter succeeded in creating a niche for himself within the contemporary heritage culture. It concludes that differences in the cultural respect accorded to carpentry knowledge in the two countries are rooted in the contrasting status of craftsmen in the premodern era.

Balances of Power and European Great Power War, 1815–1939: A Suggestion and Some Evidence

1985 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 481-528 ◽  
Author(s):  
William B. Moul
Keyword(s):  
Balance Of Power ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Power Transition ◽  
Power Theory ◽  
The Third ◽  
Basic Proposition ◽  
The Common ◽  
Common Balance

AbstractThree contrary theories of great power war are examined. The first is the common balance of power argument that parity preserves peace. The second is Organski's oft-cited alternative, “the power transition.” The third is a conflation of the first and second. Like the first, the inherent inability to measure power precisely is the basis of the conflated balance of power theory. Like the second, the conclusion is that parity encourages war. Unlike either the first or second theory, the third provides an explanation of the incidence and extent of warfare between great powers. The basic proposition tested is that nonseparated great powers fight as they approach parity in power capabilities. The evidence is from the relations between the European great powers during 1815–1939.

Unpacking the Contemporary Strategic Problem in Northeast Asia

2020 ◽  
pp. 137-160
Author(s):  
Barry Buzan ◽  
Evelyn Goh
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Contemporary Problem ◽  
Northeast Asia ◽  
The United States ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
China And Japan ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Political Understanding ◽  
Second World

Chapter 4 begins in present-day NEA, and unpacks its core strategic problem of uncertainty associated with an apparent power transition, relating it squarely to the enforced alienation between the two indigenous great powers, China and Japan. It argues that neither a purely power-political understanding nor one that overly emphasizes nationalism and domestic impediments has been especially helpful to advancing our understanding of how Sino-Japanese alienation serves to constrain the development of East Asia’s post-Cold War order. Instead, one should understand the contemporary problem as resulting from the disintegration of the region’s post-Second World War settlement that centred on the United States acting as a ring-holder between China and Japan. Introducing the great power bargain framework, it shows how we might usefully distinguish between the constitutive and regulative aspects of such bargains. It then employs this framework to analyse Sino-Japanese alienation after the long nineteenth century, examining how efforts to create a partial new bargain between 1945 and 1989 were eventually undermined by the two countries’ changing characters and politics after the Cold War.

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