Opportunities for a Great Power Bargain between China and Japan

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.

Conclusions to Part II

During the nineteenth century, China, Japan, and Korea shared a common crisis defined by a dual encounter, not only with an overwhelmingly powerful West, but also with the profoundly disruptive idea set of modernity. This dual encounter profoundly threatened the traditional forms of society and relationship in Northeast Asia (NEA). That the local responses to this were fraught, differentiated, and conflictual is hardly surprising. What is perhaps more surprising is how shared, and in many ways similar, their responses to the Western challenge have become. Japan led the way, but South Korea, Taiwan, and increasingly China have now caught up, and NEA’s place in global international society is largely restored. From an outsider perspective, there is more that unites these countries in both the Asian tragedy of the nineteenth and early-mid twentieth centuries, and the new Asia emerging over the last several decades, than divides them. As noted in ...

Conclusions to the Book

This concluding chapter to the whole volume returns to the overarching purpose of trying to stimulate rethinking of Sino-Japanese alienation. It pulls together the three Parts of the book, showing how the first two Parts provide a wider base of empirical evidence for rethinking how the history problem in Northeast Asia is currently understood and pursued, and how the third Part unpacks the ‘history problem’ variable in its broader geopolitical/historical order contexts. This chapter explains how the book provides ways to conceptually, politically, and normatively debate and reconceive the Northeast Asian history problem and Japan and China’s vital roles in the regional order.

Unpacking the Contemporary Strategic Problem in Northeast Asia

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.

China and Japan

Chapter 1 explores how deeply connected, and in many ways similar, China and Japan are. Part of this involves their shared cultural roots, but a world historical perspective on Northeast Asia also shows how Japan and China have often followed similar trajectories, albeit sometimes at different times, in their attempts to come to terms with their regions, modernity, and the Western-dominated global power structure. Their similarity makes their mutual alienation something of a puzzle, not least because there are other, potentially more constructive ways of seeing the relationship between the two than that embodied in the history problem perspective. There are opportunities as well as problems in the shared histories of China and Japan. If the relationship between China and Japan is in some important ways defined by the narcissism of small differences, then the key to changing it is to change the historical perspectives that support such a view.

Introduction to the Book

This chapter consists of three sections. The first section introduces the book’s overarching aims and scope, and it outlines the key concepts used in the analysis, explaining why the focus is on China and Japan. It explains how the three Parts of the book relate to each other and how the book amounts to more than the sum of its parts. The second section provides brief summaries of the chapters in the rest of the book, and the third section gives the authors’ justification for two outsiders to engage in what is a highly political and personal relationship in this way.

Re-visiting the Historical Context of Sino-Japanese Strategic Relations, 1400–1900

Chapter 6 tackles the question of whether these two troubled neighbours have ever been able to reach strategic bargains to allow peaceful coexistence. It re-visits the longer history of bilateral relations since 1400, the point in the modern era when there was a recognizably ‘Japanese’ state alongside its Chinese imperial counterpart. Befitting the evolving contexts of state formation, regional international society, and patterns of socio-economic exchange, there are four episodes that include mutual agreements about official relations between the two polities and regularized interactions between state and private actors from each side, as well as formal diplomatic accords or treaties. These episodes demonstrate that China and Japan were able to negotiate strategic bargains in very different historical contexts in their relatively long shared history. They are: (1) the establishment of official tributary relations at the beginning of the fifteenth century between the Ming dynasty and the Ashikaga Shogunate; (2) Tokugawa Ieyasu’s attempts to re-open relations with late-Ming China at the beginning of the seventeenth century (c. 1598–1616); (3) the semi-official revival of trade relations and regulations between the Qing dynasty and Tokugawa Japan between 1655 and 1800; and (4) the creation of modern, formal treaty relations between China, Japan, and Korea in the second half of the nineteenth century. It concludes by probing for continuities and disjunctures across the historical record from 1400 to 1900, asking what ‘lessons’ might be kept in mind, and what the significant socio-normative transformations have been in this strategic relationship.

Evaluating Northeast Asian History Collectively

Chapter 3 conducts a detailed historical survey of who did what to whom in Northeast Asia since 1840. The focus is on China, Japan, and the West, and the discussion is organized around the explicit set of normative criteria set up in chapter 2. These are applied systematically to both the local and the global stories. The normative framework aims to be broadly acceptable to the peoples in NEA and consists of five criteria: ridding NEA of Western imperialism/hegemony; increasing the absolute and relative wealth and power of NEA states and societies; restoring respect for NEA nations and their rightful place in global international society; promoting respectful relationships with their neighbours on the basis of sovereign and racial equality; and promoting the broadly Confucian ideal of an orderly, peaceful, and harmonious domestic society. The conclusion is that when NEA’s history is seen through these lenses, there are no obvious heroes or villains. Instead, there is a complex and densely connected joint story in which both countries (and also the West and Korea) have deeply mixed records, making positive contributions in some ways and negative ones in others. NEA’s shared story in its dual encounter is much more important than the stories of the individual countries and the local relationships.

No Bargains

Chapter 5 extends the application of the great power bargain framework to provide a new account of post-Cold War Sino-Japanese relations. It examines the steady breakdown of the partial Cold War constitutive and regulative bargains between Japan and China in the post-Cold War period. In capturing the state of their shared understandings, expectations, and agreed norms of conduct, it shows that these two East Asian great powers have not directly negotiated mutual strategic agreements in their recent history, and probes for the systemic, domestic, and ideational reasons for this state of affairs. The analysis demonstrates the extent to which they fall short of even a minimalist bargain and how this failure deeply impacts regional order. This analysis also suggests that Japan and China are stymied by a deeper socio-normative and socio-political estrangement.

Confronting the China–Japan History Problem in Northeast Asia

Chapter 2 looks at the general nature of the history problem in Northeast Asia, and sets up the analytical framework used to put the problem into a wider context. This framework takes the form of a historical accounting that puts NEA’s history since 1840 into a world historical perspective, seeing it not only as a collective encounter with the West, but also as a dual encounter. From the nineteenth century, China, Japan, and Korea faced not just overwhelming Western power, but also had to deal with the existential challenge to their social orders posed by the nineteenth-century revolutions of modernity that underpinned Western power. These twin challenges took much the same form for both China and Japan, and the starting positions from which they had to make their responses shared many similarities. This perspective exposes two layers of history problem: a global one between NEA and the West, and a regional one within NEA. Focusing on the narrowness and selectivity of the history problem discourse between China and Japan, the chapter sets out the case for constructing a much broader, more globally situated, story of their relationship. The local histories are the main focus of the history problem, and are understandably imbued with intense emotion, both personal and national. The collective global history is colder and more remote, and has largely been left out of the history problem discourse. The two sides of this equation need to be put back together.