A TRIANGULAR RELATIONSHIP: AMERICA, CHINA, AND JAPAN
Some may think that Japan is not so important in Pacific economic and geopolitical calculations but Richard McGregor, the Australian author of Asia’s Reckoning: China, Japan, and the Fate of U.S. Power in the Pacific Century (2017) disagrees. He makes the indispensable point that Japan has great leverage over the United States. “If Tokyo were to lose faith in Washington and downgrade its alliance or trigger a conflict with Beijing, the effect would be the same: to upend the postwar system.” As McGregor also notes, the postwar system based on US hegemony in the Pacific and the world would unravel if any of the three participants in the triangular relationship decided to start a war. Take the case of China starting a war with Japan. Would the US stay on the sidelines or would it honor its security commitment and come to Japan’s defense ?
If McGregor is right, it is puzzling that China has not made greater efforts to entice Japan into its camp. In 2009, a new Japanese center-left government made all the right moves to appease China and attempted to draw closer, but the Chinese government thought that it didn’t need Japan, thinking Japan was in permanent decline. Nationalists ardently disliked Japan while the military was insistent about Chinese sovereignty and unwilling to compromise at all on the islands dispute. In 2012, the confrontations over the islands claimed by both nations got so heated that Japanese political leaders were afraid that war was likely. By refusing to forgive past wrongs and by taking intransigent positions and aggressive actions, China’s message to Japan has been that it must accept China’s dominance in East Asia and the superiority of Chinese civilization.
But does Japan really have much to offer? It has the third largest economy and its military strength has been ranked eighth in the world. Soft power, too, should not be neglected. Japan has achieved much in the design of fashion, furniture, graphic arts, and buildings. Japan’s popular culture has attracted worldwide attention for leading-edge animation, comics, and video games. Impressive individual creativity and innovation has been facilitated by the rich storehouse of ideas in Japanese culture. Also noteworthy are high levels of quality and service, excellent craftsmanship, a healthy and long-lived population, technological advances stemming from strength in science and basic research, a relatively safe society with a considerable middle class, and strong community bonds in the rural areas, enabling resilience in the face of natural and human-created disasters.
There are cycles within the relationships between the West and Japan and the West and China. The general pattern is that first the East Asian nation must decide how to respond to the challenge of the stronger Western nation. When the imbalance of power is great, for example, between a dominant, imperialist Great Britain and Japan and China in the 19th century, resistance to the demands of the stronger is often fleeting, and those demands are accepted, however grudgingly, as in the case of the unequal treaties that both Japan and China signed. But as Japan and China became stronger, there was cultural resistance; Japan and China had once been very open to Western culture, especially, though by no means only to science and technology, but this was followed by a firm rejection of further westernization. Think of the prewar period of ultranationalism in Japan and China’s choice of isolation from the West after the communist revolution.
We can date the beginning of the first cycle of China-West relations from the Macartney Embassy of 1793, the first British mission to China. The most significant event of the initial phase was the Opium War that started in 1839 between China and Great Britain which led to Western nations gaining much greater access to Chinese goods and the China market. This traumatic event also prompted China’s self-strengthening movement from the 1860s to the 1890s. With Japan, the clear start of the cycle was Commodore Perry’s trip on behalf of the US government to Japan in 1853. He threatened military action unless Japan opened itself to foreign trade after more than 200 years of almost total isolation. In 1868, the Meiji Restoration occurred, placing Japan on the path of rapid modernization.
China’s first sustainable reaction against the West took place under Mao, most decisively after the end of the Korean War in 1953, whereas in Japan, the reaction happened in 1931 with the invasion of China, a much shorter cycle. The Japanese cycle even had oscillations within it such as the revival of Confucianism in the 1890s and then the enthusiasm for Western culture in the 1920s. In China there was the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, a brief attempt to drive out the imperialists that was crushed by the Chinese government and the imperialist powers. However China was never strong enough to confront the West until Mao’s time when national unity allowed Mao to assert China politically. He proclaimed that China was not afraid of American nuclear weapons, acting with far more bravado than China’s actual military strength warranted. In addition, skillful diplomacy enabled China in the 1950s to come forward as a leader of the third world, actively resisting Western domination.
The second round of the cycle for Japan took place after its wartime defeat. Until the 1980s, Japan was America’s prized student, valued for its key role in supporting US power in the Pacific and as the model for rapid capitalist development. But then Japan began outcompeting America economically and asserting itself, even attributing its success to its own traditions rather than having faithfully imitated the American example. The trade conflicts of the 1980s at times turned nasty and Japan was forced to mollify the US by signing the Plaza Accords of 1985 to revalue its currency in relation to the US dollar in order to reduce the trade imbalance.
In China’s case, the second phase came when economic reform under Deng Xiaoping led to a market economy. China appeared to be following the rules of global capitalism and kept a low profile but its increasing economic strength and military capacity began to stimulate latent pride and nationalism. The result was cultural and political self-assertion: putting forward the China model and the China dream. It became clear that China was going its own way, no longer content to follow the American lead. Under Xi Jinping’s rule, an aggressive foreign policy has been practiced intensifying conflict with the US over Taiwan and with other Asian nations over sovereignty issues and territorial disputes.
Today, we are right in the middle of another American confrontation with a rising East Asian country. Only this time the threat to American and white preeminence comes from a much more formidable adversary, one with far more military hardware and much greater self-assurance. But there is an eerie resemblance between the US accusations against Japan in the 1980s and those leveled against China in recent years. Let us recall that some influential American writers thought that Japan was trying to destroy many of its manufacturing industries and asserted the need to contain Japan.
Most Americans now believe that China’s rise is not peaceful, it systematically deceives others, and it intends to get the US out of Asia by any means necessary. Like Japan in the 1980s, China’s plan is to achieve economic dominance. The American government also believes that China’s economic policies are nationalist, featuring export drives led by industries benefiting from government subsidies while domestic markets are closed to foreign competition. The exact same charges were made against Japan during the years of intense trade conflicts, not to mention currency manipulation as well. In so many ways, for me it is deja vu.
I also group Japan and China together because they are economic competitors and although their racial difference matters to many Western people, religious and class differences are not the source of prejudice or stereotypes. But similar to the way Jews were once viewed in the United States, they are seen as clannish, devious, scheming, overachieving, and narrowly focused, not well-rounded. As a result, they are not suitable for world leadership. There is also a tendency to lump East Asians together, partially due to their somewhat similar physical appearance, and in 1982 Vincent Chin, a Chinese American, was beaten to death by two American auto workers who were angry at losing their jobs due to Japanese competition. The hate crimes against East Asian Americans have increased recently because of anti-Asian images and rhetoric during the pandemic. At that time, President Trump called it the “Chinese virus.”
Rather than thinking of East Asian peoples as inherently different from the Western version of human beings, it is important to recognize that Japanese and Chinese have the same desires to be happy and to avoid suffering, the same feelings, fears, and hopes. Their values, too, are basically the same: instead of the French Revolution’s liberty, equality, and fraternity, in East Asia there is liberty, equality, and order. But the priorities are often different, and Japan’s ranking of values, although similar to China’s in some ways due to Buddhist and Confucian influences, has been by no means the same; this divergence is the result of long periods of isolation in which Japan developed a distinctive culture. What’s more, Japan experienced quite different historical circumstances as a small island nation at the edge of the Asian continent.
In Japan, order has taken center stage since the era of frequent wars among feudal domains in the 16th century. During the 1960s and afterwards, a focus on national unity was believed to be a necessary condition for Japan’s recovery from wartime devastation and demoralization and the foundation of Japan’s national power. Japanese have seen themselves as homogeneous, an advantage over the racially heterogeneous United States and a communal people in contrast to the individualistic and freedom-loving West. Equality is considered an adjunct to social harmony, and Japan has been a far more equal society than the United States since the postwar period.
In China, the great local diversity and the need to hold a vast civilization together made order a major concern. And today, a smoothly functioning social order is seen as the road to national strength, which makes resistance to US hegemony possible. Under Mao, socialist equality was a national goal and in the current rule of Xi Jinping, it is regaining importance as an ideal, whereas freedom of thought and expression encounter significant government obstacles, more than in Japan where the barriers are more subtle and less onerous.
It is also worth underscoring that China and Japan have alternated as allies and adversaries of the United States since the 1930s. For nearly 100 years, the relationship has clearly been triangular among the three nations. And US perceptions of China and Japan have largely followed the political lead. The views of a group of people depend on the ways they relate to us: What do we want from them and do they give us what we want? After the war, Japan gave the United States access to military bases and produced materials for the Korean War; it also became the showpiece for what capitalism and democracy could do for an Asian nation. As long as Japanese knew their place and followed the US lead, Japan was generally liked, although in a somewhat condescending way, for being a bright student. When Japan began to challenge the US economically, some American opinion leaders called for the containment of Japan because it didn’t play by the international rules that had been devised by their own country.
As trade friction intensified between Japan and the US, the American image of Japan turned more negative, whereas China was welcomed as an emerging member of the capitalist elite headed by the United States. Americans cannot claim there is an intrinsically “bad” quality about either country since their own judgment of their merits has varied over time. Mainstream Americans might say that both countries make bad political choices, using prewar Japan and China under Mao and Xi as examples. But there are historical circumstances underlying such choices in which the United States was a major actor and the lessons of the past influence the present. Nobody’s hands are clean.
