Japan S Initiatives Towards Us China And Russia

Drawing on the most up-to-date sources, this book provides an in-depth examination of Russia’s relations with China and Japan, the two Asia-Pacific superpowers-in-waiting. For Russia there has always been more than one ‘Asia’: after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there were those in the Russian elite who saw Asia as implying the economic dynamism of the Asia-Pacific, with Japan as the main player. However there were others who saw the chance for Russia to reassert its claim to be a great power, based on Russia’s geopolitical and geoeconomic position as a Eurasian power. For these, China was the power to engage with: together China and Russia could control both Heartland and Rim, both Eurasia and Asia-Pacific, whereas accepting Japan’s conception of Asia implied regional fragmentation and shared sovereignty. This book argues that this strand of thinking, mainly confined to nationalists in the El’tsin years, has now, under Putin, become the dominant discourse among Russian policymakers. Despite opportunities for convergence presented by energy resources, even for trilateral cooperation, traditional anxiety regarding loss of control over key resource areas in the Russian Far East is now used to inform regional policy, leading to a new resource nationalism. In light of Russia’s new assertiveness in global affairs and its increasing use of the so-called ‘energy weapon’ in foreign policy, this book will appeal not only to specialists on Russian politics and foreign policy, but also to international relations scholars.

Robert Legvold, surveying the sweeping changes that have taken place in Russia and the rest of the former Soviet Union, contends that genuine integration into East Asia requires the kind of economic changes that have just begun in Russia and will take years to complete. David Lampton, in his chapter on China, examines the Chinese leadership's policy of military detente and economic cooperation with the other three powers in order to sustain the remarkable economic performance of the last two decades. In his chapter on Japan, Michael Mochizuki discusses the uncertainty that the end of the Soviet-American rivalry has produced in Japan's domestic politics and foreign policy. Michael Mandelbaum discusses the bilateral relationships between the United States and the three other countries and the differing issues that loom large for each: security, economics, and human rights.

This book examines the careers of Liao Chengzhi and Takasaki Tatsunosuke, who were not only the architects of Sino-Japanese economic relations, but also pioneers of contemporary Sino-Japanese relations. Their visions and initiatives offer many insights into the current contentious relations among China, Japan, Russia, and the United States.

This book presents a comprehensive survey of Japanese-Russian relations from the end of the Russo-Japanese War until the present. Based on extensive original research in Japanese and Russian sources, it shows how the hopeful period of the late 1990s – when acrimonious relations between the two briefly ceased – was not in fact unique.

Is Japan Really Going To Do This? by Michael Billington May 21 (EIRNS)-New initiatives emerged in East Asia this month, largely through the efforts of Russian President Vladimir Putin, with consequences that have greatly damaged the ongoing Anglo-American war drive, while opening up the potential for the integration of all East Asia into a "zone of peace," defined by the economic development perspective of the New Silk Road and China's "One Road, One Belt" policy. On May 6, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe held an extremely successful summit with Putin in Sochi on the Black Sea, despite intense pressure from the Obama White House to cancel the visit. Sources close to the negotiations have informed EIR that Abe and Putin agreed on a path towards solving the territorial dispute that has prevented the signing of a peace treaty to end World War II between Russia and Japan. The two leaders also discussed a wide range of potential Japanese investments, mostly in the Russian Far East, in oil and gas production, energy generation, medical facilities, transportation, ports, and more. The launching of such extensive joint development will also have significant implications for the Korean Peninsula, because the potential for joint China-Japan-South Korea-Russia projects in the Russian Far East, involving skilled North Korean labor, is a necessary basis for resolving the other crisis spot left over from World War II. Then, on May 19-20, President Putin hosted the summit of Russia and the Association of Southeast Asia Nations (ASEAN), also in Sochi. The title of the summit, "Towards Strategic Partnership for the Sake of the Common Good," is, in and of itself, a strategic statement of the utmost importance, and it makes clear that Russia's intention is not to turn ASEAN against the United States, but against geopolitics itself. Before the summit, the government leaders of nearly all of the ASEAN nations issued strong endorsements of Russia's crucial role in Asia, calling for expanding Russia's relatively low level of trade and investment in the region. U.S. President Barack Obama will be in Asia from May 21 to 28, visiting Vietnam and Japan. As a result of Putin's initiatives, this trip will now take place in an environment in which his carefully nurtured anti-China alliance is beginning to fracture and collapse. It was in October 2011 that his anti-China policy, which Obama dubbed his Pivot to Asia, was first announced by his sister-in-war Hillary Clinton, in an article in Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), entitled, "America's Pacific Century." Obama's approach is that of the British Empire-imperial geopolitics- based on the notion that nations function in the same manner as the Hobbesian view of individual men and women: bellum omnium contra omnes, "the war of all against all," or each against all. This bestial view of man is the bedrock of the imperial strategy of divide and conquer. As a result of Vladimir Putin's flanking initiatives, Obama's intentions have been dealt a huge blow over these recent days. Russia, in conjunction with China's leaders, has moved decisively to defeat not only Obama's war plans, but geopolitics itself. The ability to manipulate nations against each other depends on convincing those nations that the degraded imperial view of man and nations is true, that a nation's self-interest requires the forming of military and economic blocs to protect against stronger neighbors, that there is no such thing as the common aims of mankind.

1. Japanese-Chinese relations under Cold War conditions -- 2. The rise of traditional and non-traditional security concerns -- 3. Between power balancing and enmeshment policies -- 4. The dynamics of engagement.