(ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON JERICHO ONLINE, 9/26/2018)
It was supposedly a quiet conversation that kicked off a diplomatic thaw.
On the sidelines of the 2017 Asia Pacific Economic Corporation meeting in Da Nang, Vietnam, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe met with Chinese President Xi Jinping, reportedly promising a “fresh start” to one of the continent’s deepest rivalries.
“At the end of the meeting, President Xi said this is a meeting that marks a fresh start of relations between Japan and China,” Abe told reporters. “I totally feel the same way.”
While that “fresh start” hasn’t promised much on Japan and China’s more irreconcilable differences, the two longtime competitors have undergone a diplomatic thaw of sorts, reaffirming economic and political ties in the shadow of a protectionist America and high politics on the Korean peninsula.
Sino-Japanese relations are usually lukewarm at the best of times, however, and the two nations face a rapprochement weighed down heavily by history and ongoing territorial disputes.
National memory
In July 1937, Imperial Japan began its full-scale invasion of China, igniting an eight-year war that would only end with Japan’s surrender in World War II. By the first week of December 1937, Japan’s military reached China’s capitol in Nanjing and, following a two-week siege, Nanjing’s defenses collapsed. Emboldened by their victory, the occupying Japanese began a campaign of terror that would result in the death of somewhere between tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians.
While the Nanjing Massacre – or “Rape of Nanking” – has become the defining atrocity of Japan’s 1937 invasion, many of China’s largest cities have their own stories to tell of human rights violations suffered under Japanese rule. Historic markers enshrining wartime martyrs dot many of China’s largest cities and national museums regularly champion China’s struggle against Japanese imperialism.
Even China’s entertainment industry has fallen in love with the war. In 2012 alone, 200 anti-Japanese historical dramas were produced in China, according to a 2013 Reuters article.
Japanese abuses are often filtered into the grander narrative of “national humiliation,” a Chinese narrative highlighting the abuses of foreign powers from the conclusion of the First Opium War in 1842 to the succession of the Communists in 1949. The “century of humiliation” has become national curriculum, emphasized at the school level to raise new generations on the belief that, under the Communists, China’s humiliation was corrected.
That narrative frequently bleeds into contemporary Sino-Japanese relations, with more nationalist interests in China regularly accosting Japan for its violent past and demanding that Japan apologize for crimes committed during the Second World War. While Japanese leaders have issued apologies for those crimes in the past, the Chinese government, stoked by nationalist sentiments that accompanied China’s rise, have never considered those apologies enough.
Meanwhile, an increased prevalence of Japanese nationalism, fed by both Japan’s decline and China’s growth, has made “forgive and forget” a difficult sell in Japan and, in some cases, those sentiments have been actively encouraged by Japanese politicians looking for a nationalist boost.
More than half of the current Japanese Diet, as well as Abe and a large part of his cabinet, are affiliated with Nippon Kaigi, a conservative Japanese lobby that favors presenting Japan’s imperialism as “liberating much of East Asia from Western colonial powers” and downplays war crimes like the Nanjing Massacre, according to a 2014 Congressional Research Service report.
While Abe hasn’t vocally supported some of Nippon Kaigi’s more controversial platforms, he’s become a champion of Nippon Kaigi’s campaign to amend Japan’s constitutional restraints on the Japanese Defense Force, a position that’s earned criticism from countries historically abused by the Japanese military.
Most Japanese acknowledge atrocities like the Nanjing Massacre, but younger voters with no memory of World War II have expressed exhaustion and frustration with continued demands for Japanese apologies over a war that ended 70 years ago. Economic frustrations have also found convenient scapegoats in Japan’s ethnic Chinese.
In light of a current diplomatic thaw, cultural impressions have somewhat improved, though they remain relatively dour. A 2017 survey conducted by Genron NPO, a Japanese think tank, found that 80 percent of Japanese surveyed held a negative opinion of China, and 60 percent of Chinese felt the same about Japan.
That same survey noted that this was an improvement from the previous year.
Senkaku/Diaoyu
Japan, in 2012, decided to formally nationalize the Senkaku Islands, an islet chain in the East China Sea governed by Japan since the 1970s. Their previous owners, a wealthy family from Saitama Prefecture, sold the islands to the Japanese government for 2 billion yen – approximately $17.5 million USD.
The islands are central to a territorial dispute between China and Japan, who share dueling territorial claims over the islands. Taiwan also maintains a historic claim to the Senkaku Islands, called “Diaoyu” in Chinese.
Japan’s claim extends only as far back as the end of the 1800s, when Japan was ceded the islands after the First Sino-Japanese War. Under the Japanese, the islands saw the establishment of a fish processing plant that, until its failure in the 1940s, provided the islands’ only modern settlement.
China’s claim, and by extension Taiwan’s, stretches back hundreds of years, claiming that fishing records and maps clearly identify the Diaoyu Islands as a navigational marker and historic staging area for Chinese fishermen.
Japan’s 2012 nationalization of the Senkaku Islands stirred protests across China. Those protests quickly turned violent, as protesters trashed Japanese stores and overturned imported Japanese cars. Bottles were tossed at the Japanese embassy in Beijing, accompanied by calls for war.
Under Xi Jinping, China’s only become more aggressive in its assertions of sovereignty over the Diaoyu, with its coast guard maintaining a regular presence in nearby waters. Japanese fishing boats near the islands have also reportedly faced harassment from their Chinese counterparts.
Experts point to the Senkaku/Diaoyu territorial dispute as the catalyst for today’s frayed relations.
A lukewarm thaw
Together, China and Japan form one of the largest economic relationships in the world. As the respective second- and third-largest economies, China and Japan see each other as two of their largest markets. More Japanese goods travel to China than anywhere else in the world, and, likewise, Japan imports more from China than it does from anywhere else. Aside from the United States and Hong Kong, Japan is also China’s single largest market.
Japan’s economy remains sluggish, struggling with, among other problems, an aging population. “Abenomics” have only been a piecemeal success for some, with widening wealth gaps and a constrictive business infrastructure muddying its waters.
An export-oriented economy, Japan has largely relied on demand from markets in Asia and the West as an economic engine, making American tariffs a palpable threat to Japan’s slow recovery. In light of those tariffs, Japan can’t afford allowing stagnant diplomacy to stonewall its Chinese markets.
Japan may also have an opportunity to expand its markets along China’s One Belt, One Road (OBOR) plan, a Chinese policy of massive infrastructure investments physically linking China to the rest of the world.
Though Japan has its own competing investment policies, already Japanese companies like Nippon Express are taking advantage of OBOR infrastructure in places like Kazakhstan, Nikkei Asian Review reported last year.
China is also threatened by American trade pressures. U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum have spiraled into a tit-for-tat trade war between the U.S. and China. The U.S. has long served as China’s largest overseas market, and experts predict a deepening trade war will eventually sever those ties, meaning China will likely need to realign its economy with new markets.
Mending ties with Japan secures China’s second largest market, and with President Xi clearly solidifying his hold on Chinese politics earlier this year with the abolition of presidential term limits, a Xi-led détente with Japan might be more palatable domestically.
Both nations are very conscious of events happening between the Koreas, and a partnership between Japan and China better situates both in deciding the diplomatic outcomes on the Korean Peninsula. Japan largely needs China, North Korea’s most prominent ally, for promoting denuclearization, and China can’t afford to dispute with Japan while trying to also negotiate with the Koreas and the U.S.
A geopolitical thaw isn’t a guarantee for the two nations, however, as both nations remain absolute in their territorial claims over the Senkaku Islands, and calls for Japanese militarization, largely framed in reference to China’s rise, leave China wary of their neighbor. The Japanese, in turn, have a harder time trusting a regionally and globally aggressive China.
Diplomacy appears to remain the course for both nations, however.
Abe, now guaranteed another term as Prime Minister with the conclusion of elections earlier this week, reportedly plans on a diplomatic visit to Beijing sometime in October, ahead of a trilateral summit with South Korea intended for the end of the year.
A late October visit would overlap with the 40th anniversary of the Treaty of Peace and Friendship between China and Japan, a 1978 treaty whose signature spurred then-Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping’s to remark, “in these turbulent times, China needs friendship with Japan and vice versa.”
Michael Frett 