At Global Voices Online, John Kennedy translates a Chinese-language blog post called “Waiting for Bush to Reciprocate” (等着布什的回礼) The idea is that 33 people die on a pretty regular basis in China, and President Bush doesn’t always send his condolence straight away.

In America, everybody lowers the flag to half-mast for a week, and Mrs. Bush visited the campus where the slayings took place to express condolences in person. If our nation dealt with things this way, I imagine there wouldn’t be many days when the flag in Tiananmen Square would ever rise to the top of the flagpole, and our national leaders wouldn’t ever have much time to leave the country for visits. After these two disasters took place in our country, except for their relatives, how many people expressed sorrow for them? Yet the American government has turned the slayings into national mourning.

The ensuing argument seems to ask the United States to be more personable—that is to say, less statist. The implication is that if the Chinese government doesn’t respond as massively as the U.S. government might for a similar death toll, people should appeal to see how the communities affected are dealing with it. And if the “poor” people are mourning in earnest with little attention from the “rich,” the writer would have the United States show solidarity with the mourners.

If an exceptionally poor family approaches the bereavement of its family members with earnest, people from all corners of the land will come show their respects. To not go would be disrespectful.

I just wonder if this is actually true.

I’m reading Margaret MacMillan’s Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World these days. Here’s a paragraph to consider from page 97.

In the early days of the republic, many Chinese looked to the United States as a model—of government, but also of a society. President Woodrow Wilson’s promises of a new world order founded on justice and peace, his talk of national self-determination, and his evident antipathy to Japanese attempts to dominate China and the rapid expansion of Japanese forces into Siberia in the wake of the Russian Revolution made him, briefly, a hero to nationalistic Chinese. That came to an abrupt end in 1919, when Wilson took a prominent role in the gift of former German posessions in China and Japan. The americans, so many Chinese concluded, were simply imperialists in republican clothing

Sometimes, it’s useful to remember that arrangements of the China–United States–Japan triangle have been so different in the last century as to seem a fantasy hypothetical—something out of a Star Trek: The Next Generation allegory.

Japanese Foreign Minister Aso Taro is in rare form, even for his inflammatory self. Making a case for the potential for Japanese diplomacy in the Middle East, he asserted that skin color would be a major advantage:

“Japan is doing what Americans can’t do,” the Nikkei business daily quoted the gaffe-prone Aso as saying in a speech.

“Japanese are trusted. If (you have) blue eyes and blond hair, it’s probably no good,” he said.

“Luckily, we Japanese have yellow faces.”

Folks on the CNN website posting a Reuters story picked a photo of Aso looking particularly pugnacious, and to add insult to injury, they fought back by spelling his name wrong in the caption!

Photo in context after the jump.

(more…)

The Yasukuni Shrine may be making an exit from the rhetoric of Sino-Japanese tensions. The Chinese ambassador to Japan said in a report published yesterday that China and Japan have “finally overcome this political impediment damaging bilateral relations.”

“The political stalemate has been broken,” the ambassador, Wang Yi, said in an interview with Xinhua. But don’t think this means China will be letting Japan out of the grips of history-infused public diplomacy. If Abe Shinzo decides to visit the shrine—he hasn’t said whether he will—then the Yasukuni rhetoric may make a solid comeback.

Meanwhile, Wang turned to great power competition as a rhetorical frame for China–Japan tensions.

“Many of the conflicts and friction in China–Japan relations in recent years have surfaced over the Yasukuni Shrine issue, but the broader background is that the national strength of both countries has risen to differing degrees,” he said.

Wang also suggested that Tokyo was having trouble accepting China’s emergence as a regional power with trade and political clout.

“A senior Japanese official told me that China’s development and rise is a fact we must face up to, but just as the United States in the 1980s could not adjust to Japan’s rise, now many in Japan are not mentally prepared to accept China’s development,” Wang said.

That’s no joke when you look at recent numbers from the Pew Global Attitudes Project that show populations of Asian states aren’t exactly warm toward their neighbors. Foreign Policy’s Passport blog interprets the numbers to mean Asians aren’t buying China’s “peaceful rise” narrative (as enunciated primarily by Zheng Bijian). I think that might be a leap of logic, but either way, 70 percent of Japanese and 71 percent of Chinese have unfavorable views of each other. There is no shortage of minds to be changed.

It’s actually been two months since the last time I posted an obvious headline, but this one warrants reviving the tradition. From the ever-insightful Agence France Presse:

China, India, Japan to power Asian economy in 2007

Sure, I mean, there may be something to the story that Asian economies and not the United States are projected to fuel Asia’s largest economies. But is anyone really surprised that two countries with 1 billion-plus populations and one with the second largest economy in the world will power a continent?

“After two decades of on-the-ground experience investing billions of dollars and employing millions of people in China, the U.S. business community is far ahead of politicians in understanding the Chinese government and people,” writes James McGregor in a column someone posted on Danwei. It’s a bit of a polemic, and it claims knowledge of what a monolithic “they” (Chinese) think, but two anecdotes of U.S. media and political misunderstanding of China are worth repeating.

From the political side, Henry Kissinger, who is said to be generally respected in China because he has respected China since the Nixon years, seems to believe in the unilinear ascent of all countries toward democracy. McGregor writes:

At a lunch I hosted to bring Henry Kissinger together with young Chinese entrepreneurs, he looked around the table and asked: “Now that we have such impressive economic progress in China when and how do you envision democracy developing?” They looked at him, aghast. Finally, one answered for the group: “Do we want to destroy all the progress China has made?”

To the extent that Kissinger is still an influential figure in Washington, this doesn’t bode well for U.S. understanding of China. It puts China in a category with all non-democratic states and seems to gloss over the subtleties that Kissinger most likely understands—this in favor of a democracy-without-understanding principle that shares roots with the Bush administration’s neo-conservatism.

The other anecdote is perhaps unsurprising for people who know how media organizations work, but it’s consistently aggravating for people who chase truth outside of three-minute segments. He writes:

During a book tour that took me to many American broadcast outlets in the past year the producers invariably asked: “Are you our anti-China or our pro-China guest?” They were baffled when I answered that I was the “let’s-try-to-understand-China guest.” Our TV screens may be in color, but discussions of China are exclusively in black and white.

“Challenges to Bilateralism,” T. J. Pempel’s wide-ranging introduction to 2004’s Beyond Bilateralism (which he edited with Ellis S. Krauss) lays out a compelling narrative for post-WWII U.S.–Japan relations. One of modern history’s strongest and most enduring bilateral relationships, he writes, is giving way to a complex network of ties involving other actors: in short, moving “beyond bilateralism.”

The story goes like this: From occupation through the 1980s, the relationship was characterized by common priorities, established means for negotiations in important policy areas (which were kept separate by a tacit “non-linkage rule”), all in an overtly asymmetrical relationship. The countries were on the “same side in the bipolar international arena,” their economies were intimately related, and they shared a commitment to democracy, albeit in different forms.

Since the mid- to late 1980s, Pempel writes, these strictly bilateral relationships have been increasing in complexity and ambiguity. Among the causes for this change are (1) the end of Cold War geopolitics, (2) the development of other Asian economies, coinciding with a huge growth in cross-border capital flow, (3) the rise of regional and global multilateral institutions, and most recently (4) the effects of 9/11 on global politics.

This frame for the book starkly coincides with the perspective of my current line of thinking when Pempel takes on the issue of China as an element of the changed U.S.–Japan arena.

For the three countries, the relationship has clearly become trilateral, as Mochizuki’s analysis in Chapter 3 shows [I will address this soon]. U.S. unilateralism pushes Japan and China closer together, while any warming of ties between either Japan or China on the one hand and the United States on the other forces a re-calibration of interests by the party left out. Japan fears that closer U.S. ties to China may come at Japan’s expense. Japan–China ties remain the triangle’s weakest link, but American policymakers have long worried that closer links between those two countries would come at the expense of American influence in Asia. And as China grows economically, some people in Japan feel similarly threatened, despite the short-term profitability to many Japanese corporations derived from investment in and trade with China. (17, emphasis mine)

This is the most concise statement I have yet seen on the significance of the U.S.–Japan–China triangle as grounds for analysis. (It also courteously underlines the importance of the thesis work I did, phew.) The chapter also demonstrates the importance of taking other actors into account in any set of relations, whether bilateral, trilateral, or multilateral. I look forward to the remainder of this book.

While I get ready to read the rest of this book, here is a brief summary of some other key points:

• Pempel alludes to a U.S. idea that helping Japan to develop economically “was all calculated to assist Japan in becoming an economic success story that could be projected as a model for much of the rest of Asian development.” (7) I wonder whose rhetoric this was.
• There was little unofficial influence on pre-”beyond” U.S.–Japan ties. Non-governmental actors had little pull. (8) Additionally, “Functionally specific agencies in both countries worked with their counterparts on matters within their joint domains relatively independently of agencies dealing with issues in other areas,” (9) meaning that issues were kept separate in negotiations—”a non-linkage rule.”
• Similarly, when disputes arose, the U.S. president or Japanese prime minister rarely engaged in negotiations, instead depending on counterpart bureaucratic organizations, representing “a network of connectors [running] from one country’s government to that of the other.” (11)
• Japan being concerned about increased U.S. engagement with China in the ’90s, 9/11 escalated those concerns. “Japanese concerns were enhanced by the American warming toward China and its SCO [Shanghai Cooperative Organization] allies [Russia and four Central Asian states] as a result of the U.S. post-September 11 antiterrorism campaign, as well as by China’s willingness to utilize the antiterrorism label to justify actions against dissidents.” (16) (The latter concern refers to China’s defining Muslim separatists in Xinjiang Province as terrorists. That may be, but the Uighurs in northwest China are not aligned with any strains of the much feared “global Islam.”)
• President Clinton “personally took the initiative to upgrade the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) to include a national leaders’ meeting,” yet the Bush administration has opposed multilateral arrangements. (27)
• Japan has supported regionalism because “after the many trade frictions of the mid- to late 1980s, Japan was anxious to reduce its dependence on the United States and also on those global multilateral organizations in which U.S. influence was overwhelming.” (29) This last point relates to a recent proposal by Japan to study the creation of a massive free trade area that would exclude the United States, which I will examine later.

Just as I set out to open this blog as an ongoing discussion of the international relationship between China, Japan, and the United States, I am reminded by current news that there is another important trilateral relationship: China-Japan-Russia.

(Russian border guards shot a Japanese fisherman in waters surrounding disputed islands called the Kurils in Russia and the Northern Territories in Japan. Russia claims the sailor and his mates were poaching and had illegally crossed a border. Japan insists that Russia release the prisoners and the dead sailor’s body.)

The recent conventional wisdom is that Russia became less important to the East Asian equation since the fall of the Soviet Union. Before 1989, the argument goes, Japan couldn’t afford to alienate China, lest the CCP ally closer with the Kremlin. Since Japan fell solidly on the U.S. side of the Cold War divisions, this was a global strategic problem.

Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro of Japan enflamed Chinese sensibilities with his visit to Yasukuni Shrine on August 15, 1985, the 40th anniversary of the Japanese surrender in World War II. One possible reason that he made no later visits is the strategic importance of strong ties with China. Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro faces no such concerns, and has publicly alienated China with his six yearly shrine visits—even if on the whole economic relations were healthy.

Given the history of Japan-China-Russia trilateral ties and Japan-China-United States relations, it is reasonable to discuss implications of a Russo-Japanese dispute for Chinese and U.S. relations with others in the region. So here we have a quadrilateral relationship. Add the Koreas and that’s hexagonal. Toss in ASEAN’s 10 members and, well, that’s a region! At any rate, I have a lot of reading to do.

Also: An interesting question on the Kurils/Northern Territories incident is what if any implications will this have for the China-Japan Pinnacle Islands dispute or the Korea-Japan Tokto/Takeshima dispute.