China and Japan in the Global Setting

The relationship between China and Japan remains among the most significant of all the world's bilateral affairs.

Akira Iriye adds clarity to the past century of Chinese-Japanese interactions in this interpretive survey.

Placing the relationship within its global context, he outlines three distinct periods in the history of these Asian giants.

From the 1880s to World War I, the author shows the two nations issuing messages of power.

Armaments, wars, strategies, and security measures played pivotal roles, reflecting the importance of military calculations in a world dominated by Western governments.

In the second period, between the World Wars, issues of culture eclipsed expressions of power.

The relationship of the two countries became the exchange of ideas, technologies, students, tourists, and propaganda.

Iriye illuminates the dominant role of culture during these years, and offers a coherent picture of the violent Sino-Japanese War.

He also explores the rise of mass nationalism in China as well as Japan's hope that China would participate in Asian cultural renewal against the West. The third period reaches from the end of World War II through the 1990s and is characterized by exchanges of an economic nature: trade, shipping, investment, and emigration.

Exploring the roots of this shift, the author discusses the results of China's civil war, the rise and decline of the Cold War, and deeply entrenched issues of culture.

Economic ties, however predominant, remain buttressed by renewed cultural ties, and, as Iriye shows, the greatest challenges for the future rest in the cultural interdependence of what is perhaps the most significant pair of countries in the world today.