Sino-Japanese Relations After The Cold War

By Phar Kim Beng
Founder/Chair
Strategic Pan Indo-Pacific Arena
Strategicpipa.com
Twitter: @indo_pan
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The importance of Sino Japanese relations is often lost on scholars in the West. Many tend to study China and Japan in separation. Edward Reischauer was one of the few exceptions. He knew Japan and China, as did Allen Whitting and Caroline Rose at the University of Leeds. Michael Yahuda, an expert on Asian Pacific issues, has joined the fray. Instead of focusing on the entire region, as he was wont to do during his former days at the London School of Economics, Michael Yahuda has used several theories to explain the thrust and ballast of the Sino Japanese relations. Among them are liberalism, realism and constructivism.

In this sense, Michael Yahuda believes in ‘analytical eclecticism”, where all theories are deployed to explain a complex phenomenon, an approach first pioneered by Peter Katzenstein and Nobuo Okawara in the pages of the journal of International Security in 2000. But can these three theories alone explain the spurts and growth of the Sino Japanese relations? Indeed, the key lies with the description “spurts and growth”.

There have been times when Sino Japanese relations have been exceptionally peaceful and durable, as was the case during the Tang Dynasty and the Heian Period in China and Japan respectively. But by the end of the 19th century, China was looked down by Japan. When China lost to Japan in the 1898 Sino Japanese war, the Treaty of Shimonoseki literally ceded Taiwan to Japan’s colonial control over the next fifty years. The far-right in Japan, of course, wanted to conquer and civilize China, ideally from the Manchuria on-down. But the fetish about conquering and colonizing China also came from the ethos of trying to upend the Western imperialist game, which Meiji Japan knew, was occurring at an aggressive, almost cancerous, pace.

Japan’s unfortunate emulation of the West could not have been based on constructivism alone. It was also due to the primal instinct to be perpetually above an ancient civilization like China, followed by Korea.
To the Japanese far-right, acquiring and conquering China and Korea by deceit and violence, was its own form of “Orientalism”. The acquisitions, in a tangible form, gave them a “kick”, a feeling of being able to “chase the dragon”, so to speak. Invariably, as Michael Yahuda admitted, it was also a feeling and a process that went terribly wrong, leading to pogroms, ethnic cleansing and genocidal and germ warfare against the Chinese and Koreans.

Michael Yahuda could not capture the moral complexities of the Sino Japan relations. But he was able to understand the security dilemma faced by the two countries in the East China Sea. The issue now is: Will Sino Japanese animosity also boil over in the South China Sea? No one knows the answer, granted that Sino Japanese relations also rest on the third leg, especially the Sino-US relations. The US has every interest to keep the South China Sea an open area that has maximum freedom of navigation. China, on the other hand, has already declared the entire area under its Nine-Dashed Lines. Frictions are inevitable, especially when the US pushes to the fore of China’s exclusive economic zones (EEZ) to collect signals and other intelligence, especially to counter China’s submarine warfare in the future.

Michael Yahuda, who now serves as a Senior Fellow in the Sigur Center in George Washington University, is increasingly adept with the political dynamics in Washington DC. In the years to come, one should not be surprised to see another book on the trilateral diplomacy of the US, China and Japan. As things are, he has done the academia a great service by cataloging the key incidents in the Sino Japanese relations since the end of the Cold War.