Rethinking Sino Japanese Alienation

Bitterly contested memories of war, colonisation, and empire among Japan, China, and Korea have increasingly threatened regional order and security over the past three decades. In Sino-Japanese relations, identity, territory, and power pull together in a particularly lethal direction, generating dangerous tensions in both geopolitical and memory rivalries. Buzan and Goh explore a new approach to dealing with this history problem. First, they construct a more balanced and global view of China and Japan in modern world history. Second, building on this, they sketch out the possibilities for a 21st century great power bargain between them. Buzan puts Northeast Asia's history since 1840 into both a world historical and a systematic normative context, exposing the parochial nature of the China-Japan history debate in relation to what is a bigger shared story about their encounter with modernity and the West, within which their modern encounter with each other took place. Arguing that regional order will ultimately depend substantially on the relationship between these two East Asian great powers, Goh explores the conditions under which China and Japan have been able to reach strategic bargains in the course of their long historical relationship, and uses this to sketch out the main modes of agreement that might underpin a new contemporary great power bargain between them in a variety of future scenarios for the region. The frameworks adopted here consciously blend historical contextualisation, enduring concerns with wealth, power and interest, and the complex relationship between Northeast Asian states' evolving encounters with each other and with global international society.

A Foreign Affairs Book of the Year A Spectator Book of the Year “Insightful...a deft, textured work of intellectual history.” —Foreign Affairs “A timely insight into how memories and ideas about the second world war play a hugely important role in conceptualizations about the past and the present in contemporary China.” —Peter Frankopan, The Spectator For most of its history, China frowned on public discussion of the war against Japan. But as the country has grown more powerful, a wide-ranging reassessment of the war years has been central to new confidence abroad and mounting nationalism at home. Encouraged by reforms under Deng Xiaoping, Chinese scholars began to examine the long-taboo Guomindang war effort, and to investigate collaboration with the Japanese and China’s role in the post-war global order. Today museums, television shows, magazines, and social media present the war as a founding myth for an ascendant China that emerges as victor rather than victim. One narrative positions Beijing as creator and protector of the international order—a virtuous system that many in China now believe to be under threat from the United States. China’s radical reassessment of its own past is a new founding myth for a nation that sees itself as destined to shape the world. “A detailed and fascinating account of how the Chinese leadership’s strategy has evolved across eras...At its most interesting when probing Beijing’s motives for undertaking such an ambitious retooling of its past.” —Wall Street Journal “The range of evidence that Mitter marshals is impressive. The argument he makes about war, memory, and the international order is...original.” —The Economist

Drawing on a wide body of literature on international rivalries, this comprehensive and theoretically grounded work explains the origins and evolution of the Sino-Indian rivalry. Contrary to popular belief, the authors argue that the Sino-Indian rivalry started almost immediately after the emergence of the two countries in the global arena. They demonstrate how the rivalry has systemic implications for both Asia and the global order, intertwining the positional and spatial dimensions that lie at the heart of the Sino-Indian relationship. Showing how this rivalry has evolved from the late 1940s to the present day, the essays in this collection underscore its significance for global politics and highlight how the asymmetries between India and China have the potential to escalate conflict in the future.

This book analyses the ways in which foreign policy actors in Asia have responded to the emerging great power conflict between the US and the People's Republic of China focusing on medium and small states across the Indo-Pacific. The book offers a much-needed counterpoint to existing analyses on the Indo-Pacific and China’s BRI and presents a new perspective by examining how great power politics are locally reinterpreted, conditioned, or at times even contested. It illustrates the policy-level challenges which the US-China rivalry poses for established political and economic practices and outlines how these challenges can be best addressed by smaller states and their societies. A timely assessment of the power play in the Indo-Pacific with the angle of Sino-American rivalry, this book makes an important contribution to the study of Political Science, International Relations, Asian Studies and Security Studies. Chapter 10 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

The Pacific Rim of Asia – Pacific Asia – is now the world's largest and most cohesive economic region, and China has returned to its center. China's global outlook is shaped by its regional experience, first as a pre-modern Asian center, then displaced by Western-oriented modernization, and now returning as a central producer and market in a globalized region. Developments since 2008 have been so rapid that future directions are uncertain, but China's presence, population, and production guarantee it a key role. As a global competitor, China has awakened American anxieties and the US-China rivalry has become a major concern for the rest of the world. However, rather than facing a power transition between hegemons, the US and China are primary nodes in a multi-layered, interconnected global matrix that neither can control. Brantly Womack argues that Pacific Asia is now the key venue for working out a new world order.

Comprising 60.3 percent of the world’s 7.2 billion population, Asia is an enigma to many in the West. Hugely dynamic in its demographic, economic, technological and financial development, its changes are as rapid as they are diverse. The SAGE Handbook of Asian Foreign Policy provides the reader with a clear, balanced and comprehensive overview on Asia’s foreign policy and accompanying theoretical trends. Placing the diverse and dynamic substance of Asia’s international relations first, and bringing together an authoritative assembly of contributors from across the world, this is a reliable introduction to non-Western intellectual traditions in Asia. VOLUME 1: PART 1: Theories PART 2: Themes PART 3: Transnational Politics PART 4: Domestic Politics PART 5; Transnational Economics VOLUME 2: PART 6: Foreign Policies of Asian States Part 6a: East Asia Part 6b: Southeast Asia Part 6c: South & Central Asia Part 7: Offshore Actors Part 8: Bilateral Issues Part 9: Comparison of Asian Sub-Regions

This book is the first of its kind to examine the role of great powers in the international politics of climate change. It develops a novel analytical framework for studying environmental power in international relations, what counts as a great power in the environmental field, and what their special environmental responsibilities are. In doing so, the book connects International Relations (IR) debates on power inequality, great powers and great power management, with global environmental politics (GEP) scholarship. The book brings together leading scholars in IR and GEP whose contributions focus on major environmental powers (United States, China, European Union, India, Brazil, Russia) and international institutions and issue areas (UN Security Council, multilateral environmental agreements, international climate leadership, coal politics). The contributors to this volume examine how individual great powers have responded to the global climate challenge and whether they have accepted a special responsibility for stabilizing the global climate. They place emerging discourses on great power responsibility in the context of wider debates about international environmental leadership and climate change securitization. And they provide new insights into how international power inequality intersects with the global ecological crisis, and what special role great powers could and should play in the international fight against global warming.

Southeast Asia’s growing economic linkages with China have generated political opportunities and strategic concerns in equal measure. This study provides a fuller picture of Chinese investments in Southeast Asia for those seeking to understand its significance and impacts. From their carefully constructed dataset, Goh and Liu provide a regionwide, multi-sectoral analysis quantitative survey and analysis of key changes in Chinese investments in Southeast Asian economies over fifteen years, from 2005 to 2019. Additionally, they provide a qualitative assessment of the geopolitical significance of these trends and patterns. Thus, this study creates a baseline understanding of more recent Chinese investments in the region. In the near future, when a feasible data series can be collated for the years from 2020, it will also allow a sharper analysis of the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on Chinese investments in the region.