The Future of Sino-Japanese Relations
No geopolitical issue has the potential to shape global security and politics in the 21st century more than the return of China as one of the world’s leading powers. Nowhere is the return of Chinese power having a greater impact than in East Asia, where China’s huge potential power is unsettling nearly all of the countries in that region, particularly as China asserts its claim to disputed territories and political hegemony in that region. Meanwhile, it is Japan, the last East Asian country to seek to dominate the region, which feels particularly threatened by a revanchist China.
Since the end of the Second World War, relations between China and Japan have been poisoned by the war that the two countries fought between 1937 and 1945 and the brutal Japanese occupation of much of China during those years. However, the balance of power until the late 20th century was clearly in favor of Japan, thanks to China’s relative weakness and Japan’s alliance with the United States. However, China’s dramatic economic transformation in recent decades has significantly boosted Chinese military, political and economic power and given China the impetus to seek to return to the dominant position in East Asia that it has enjoyed for most of its history. Meanwhile, Japan’s economic stagnation of the past two decades, coupled with its drastic demographic decline, has allowed China to overtake it as the region’s dominant local power, and the power gap between the two countries is widening rapidly.
To offset China’s growing relative power, Japan has sought to enhance its security and economic ties with other regional powers, as well as with its backer of the past 70 years, the United States. This has resulted in Japan developing strong ties with other countries in the region that fear China’s rising power, including India and Vietnam. For Tokyo, this system of strengthening alliances is viewed as a means of constraining China from using its dramatic potential power from overwhelming individual countries in the region. For Beijing, these efforts by Japan, with the clear support of the United States, is viewed as an effort to encircle China and prevent it from extending its power beyond its shores. As a result, a rivalry such as the alliance system that operated in Europe in the early 20th century or during the Cold War is emerging in Asia, pitting China on one side and Japan, the United States and a host of regional countries on the other side. With so many flashpoints located in the region, this rivalry has the potential to dramatically escalate in the coming years.
The recent bilateral meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe highlighted just how deep the distrust is between these two countries, as the handshake between the two leaders ranked as one of the most awkward handshakes in recent years. On one hand, President Xi is determined to establish China as the pre-eminent power in East Asia and he views Japan’s gradual abandonment of pacifism and its close ties with the United States and India as a threat to is country’s ambitions. In contrast, Prime Minister Abe is determined to resist China’s efforts to redraw the maritime borders of the East China Sea. With nationalists on both sides pressing their governments not to compromise on this dispute in the East China Sea, this could be the flashpoint that sparks what could be the most significant conflict of the coming decades.