WASHINGTON - Despite the friction between
China and Japan, some Asian scholars believe that
the two nations are slowly building a framework
for economic and political cooperation that could
provide the underpinnings for long-term stability
in the Asia-Pacific region.
In particular,
scholars say, the rapid expansion of Sino-Japanese
trade and the surprising evolution of cultural
ties between Japan and the Asian mainland are
softening anti-Japanese feelings within China and
convincing many Japanese that closer ties with
China
may work to their benefit.
In an important
milestone last year, Japanese trade with China
reached US$168 billion, allowing China to replace
the United States as Japan's largest trading
partner for the first time since World War II.
Also in 2004, Beijing hosted the world
"manga summit", an annual event that draws
hundreds of people involved in this popular
Japanese art form. Moreover, the universal draw of
manga has made the study of Japanese
language increasingly popular in Chinese colleges
and universities.
"I now sense that the
bedrock of pro-Japanese sentiment has been formed
in China, especially in the urban society," said
Takahara Akio, a professor of Chinese politics at
the University of Tokyo and a visiting scholar at
the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at
Harvard University.
As for Japanese
sentiment toward China, "I can safely say that the
common sense in Japan now is that the Japanese
economy has been more or less lifted by the rise
of China and the so-called Chinese economic threat
is hardly perceived any more," Akio added. He
noted that 1 million Chinese workers were directly
employed by Japanese companies in China, and
another 9.2 million employed by Japanese
sub-contractors.
Yang Bojiang, a visiting
fellow at the Brookings Institution who follows
Sino-Japanese relations as a director of the China
Institute of Contemporary International Relations,
agreed that a thaw in bilateral relations was
coming. But he argued that, in both countries, the
public had been pushing their respective
governments to take more confrontational stands
while their leaders had been acting behind the
scenes to ease tensions.
"China is trying
hard to improve relations," he said, particularly
in regard to North Korea. In recent years, after
Japanese diplomats told their counterparts in
China that they wanted more understanding of North
Korea's admitted abduction of Japanese citizens,
Beijing responded, he said, and "Japan is getting
more and more cooperation" on this issue. "For
those reasons, I'm cautiously optimistic."
Akio and Yang spoke recently at a
Washington forum sponsored by the Sasakawa Peace
Foundation USA.
Some events over the past
year seem to contradict their sentiments. They
include a wave of anti-Japanese demonstrations in
Chinese cities, the repeated and controversial
visits to Tokyo's Yasukuni shrine by Japanese
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, and the buzz
among Chinese and Japanese security specialists
about the perceived military threat from each
other's growing armed forces.
Beijing was
also offended this year when the Japanese
government joined the US administration in
identifying security in the Taiwan Strait as a
"common strategic objective" that fell under the
terms of the US-Japan Security Treaty. Tensions
between Beijing and Tokyo reached boiling point in
October, when the Chinese government canceled a
visit to Beijing by Japanese Foreign Minister
Nobutaka Machimura over the Yasukuni visits.
High-level talks between Tokyo and Beijing
have yet to resume.
The problem posed to
the region by Sino-Japanese tensions has also been
a key topic of discussion at this week's East Asia
summit in Kuala Lumpur. The summit, which at
China's initiative has pointedly rejected the
participation of the US, is attempting to create a
new framework for East Asian economic and
political cooperation.
Still, there were
signs at the summit that China and Japan are
taking steps to ease the tension. Speaking at a
news conference before the meeting began, Chinese
Premier Wen Jiaboa reiterated China's view that
the "root cause" for the downturn in ties with
Japan was Koizumi's failure to face up to history
by visiting Yasukuni, where Japan's war dead are
commemorated along with scores of war criminals.
But Wen also said building stable ties
between China and Japan remained Beijing's
"unswerving policy" and reflected the fundamental
interests of both nations. "This policy has never
changed, even in the most difficult times," he
said.
As Wen was in Malaysia, Seiji
Maehara, the president of the opposition
Democratic Party of Japan, was visiting Beijing to
discuss ways to improve bilateral ties he said had
been damaged by Koizumi's actions.
Maehara, who was invited to China by the
ruling Communist Party, described Sino-Japanese
relations as "the basis for peace and stability of
Asia" and proposed that both governments establish
a panel to improve ties and discuss mutual issues,
including the environment, energy and epidemics.
In a speech, he urged Koizumi to stop
visiting Yasukuni and observed that the prime
minister's insistence that these were only
"personal" visits had made Japan's relationship to
China "abnormal".
Back at the Washington
forum, Steven Clemons, a senior fellow at the New
America Foundation and an expert on US-Japan
relations, argued that a serious easing of
tensions between Japan and China would be
difficult until Tokyo became more independent of
the US.
Japan's reliance on Washington, he
said, was underscored by the joint US-Japanese
declaration on Taiwan, which was announced the
same month that Japan emerged as China's largest
trading partner. "So it was almost a declaration
that, despite the high level of economic
engagement with China, Japan was still in the
American camp."
In what Clemons called a
welcome break from the past, Japanese politicians
no longer claimed their legitimacy by proclaiming
their pacifism against potential enemies, but by
embracing a "new nationalism" that included a
military role for Japan, albeit within the
confines of its bilateral treaty with the US.
But Clemons added that he was "worried
about a Japan that continues to identify itself,
its character and constraints entirely in terms of
what the US does and does not do".
That
could prove destabilizing, both to the US and
China, he said. "In the long run that sense of
being a supplicant or a vessel to American
interests could backfire very badly on American
interests, where the source of [Japanese]
legitimacy would depend on how anti-American they
are," he said.
