When a party of Japanese men consorted with 500 prostitutes in a luxury hotel in southern China last year, the news made headlines around the world. The strange thing is that, though many of the men worked for a major Japanese corporation and were evidently on an employee jaunt, their employer was never named. Chinese officials professed outrage, yet they carefully hid the company's identity, thereby shielding it from a potential firestorm of criticism in key Western markets.
The episode illustrates a striking peculiarity of Sino-Japanese relations: although Chinese leaders delight in excoriating Japan, their bark is invariably worse than their bite. This pattern has long been obvious in everything from trade negotiations to territorial claims. It is even apparent in attitudes to Japan's World War II atrocities: the same Chinese leaders who publicly lambaste Japan's wartime aggression quietly shield the Japanese corporate and government establishment from vast compensation claims.
Although the American press has long portrayed Sino-Japanese relations as sullenly hostile, this view is at least 25 years out of date. Tokyo and Beijing quietly buried the hatchet in the 1970s, and in recent decades they have entered into an increasingly close alliance. For the moment, however, it suits both Japan and China to keep this alliance sub rosa, not least because any frank acknowledgement of its existence could compromise their advantageous relationships with the United States.
American policymakers variously regard either Japan or China as the odd man out in the U.S.-China-Japan triangle, but, in reality, the odd man out is the United States. Indeed, Sino-Japanese relations have become so friendly that Japan is now actively backing China's bid to displace the United States as the world's leading superpower.
Unlikely though this alliance may appear at first sight, the evidence of its existence runs the gamut. In everything from trade policy and diplomacy to technology-sharing and education, the Japanese and Chinese are co-operating closely.
In making common cause with Beijing, the Japanese are motivated on the one hand by a conviction that the United States is rapidly going the way of the Ottoman Empire. On the other hand, they view China as a superpower with whom in the future, as in the pre-20th-century past, they can achieve a level of empathy they have rarely enjoyed with the United States.
All this notwithstanding, Sino-Japanese relations continue to be seen in the West as strained or even--to quote the New York Times--"icy." And Japanese spokesmen do little to discourage Americans from regarding Japan as a vital bulwark against a fast-rising China (a view propounded a few months ago by former Vice President Dan Quayle). Given that the Japanese economy is still three times larger than China's, Japan's ostensible anti-China stance is regarded in Washington as one of the few bright spots in an otherwise rapidly darkening foreign-policy firmament.
Any attempt to get to the bottom of the Sino-Japanese relationship must begin with some history. Conventional wisdom to the contrary, the Chinese and Japanese did not break off contact at the end of World War II. In reality, they maintained important links, not least in trade. (China had been Japan's largest trade partner in pre-war days.) Only when the Communists seized power in Beijing was the relationship severed, and the initiative came not from China, let alone from Japan, but from the United States. Seeking to pressure the Communist bloc, John Foster Dulles forced Tokyo in 1951 to recognize the Chiang Kai-shek regime on Taiwan as the true government of China and to join with Washington in isolating Beijing.
The estrangement continued until 1972 when, in the wake of President Richard Nixon's historic visit to China, Japanese and Chinese leaders eagerly resumed contacts. Almost immediately, Tokyo agreed to recognize the Beijing regime as the rightful government of China--a lead that Washington did not follow until six years later. The rapprochement gathered pace in 1978 when Japan and China signed a treaty of friendship. Then in early 1979, the new Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping visited Tokyo. Later in the same year, Japanese Prime Minister Masayoshi Ohira visited Beijing. The most obvious outcome was that Tokyo provided vitally needed finance to prop up the then shaky Deng regime. But the full significance of what happened in 1979 only gradually became apparent in later years.For one thing, Tokyo adopted a strong pro-Beijing tilt in diplomacy, sticking its own neck out on China's behalf at several critical junctures. In the wake of the Tiananmen massacre, for instance, Japanese diplomats acted to ward off a threatened Western boycott of China.
They then helped Beijing gain full access to the American market for China's soaring exports. One stumbling block was Washington's traditional insistence that America's trading partners observe certain minimum standards in human rights. Tokyo sided with Beijing in arguing that human rights are a purely domestic matter that should not get in the way of trade. As recounted by former U.S. ambassador to Tokyo Michael Armacost, Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa delighted his hosts in Beijing in 1994 by heaping scorn on American efforts to impose Western concepts of human rights on other countries.
When China pushed to join the World Trade Organization, Tokyo could hardly have been more helpful. Writing in 1996, the Japanologist Christopher B. Johnstone reported that Tokyo "earned Beijing's goodwill with its consistent support" for China's WTO bid. To the open disgust of American trade negotiators, Tokyo left it to other nations, principally the United States, to play the bad cop with China. As U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky tartly remarked at the time, "By and large, the Japanese have not contributed to the creation of a commercially meaningful agreement."
In the end, Japan granted final approval to China's WTO entry in July 1999, fully four months before the United States and nearly a year before the European Union. Such promptness is atypical. In fact, Japan's normal style is to keep pressing hard for further concessions down to the wire. Japan's favorable attitude put pressure on the United States to settle for a less than satisfactory deal. It also helped to quell U.S. concerns. After all, American policymakers reasoned, if Japan, which they (utterly wrongly) took to have the most to lose from China's rise, saw no need to press China harder on the terms of membership, why should the United States?
Perhaps Tokyo's most remarkable contribution has been in technology. In contrast to its niggardly stance towards other nations, Tokyo has been open-handed in transferring key Japanese technologies to China, in everything from steel and shipbuilding to copiers and plasma displays. Tokyo's help in building China's semiconductor industry has been particularly important. The pattern began in the late 1970s, when Toshiba helped China make memory chips for the first time. During the 1980s, further chip technology transfers came from such Japanese high-tech companies as Matsushita and Fujitsu. Then in 1996, NEC partnered with the Beijing government in Project 909, an ambitious effort to propel China to the leading edge in semiconductors. The result, according to the American Sinologist Michael Klaus, was that in six years the Chinese industry shot from three generations behind state-of-the-art production to less than one generation behind.
Japan's indulgence of China's superpower ambitions has even extended to transferring nuclear energy technologies to China. This is "atoms-for-peace," of course, but Tokyo wouldn�t dream of making similar transfers to, say, India or Pakistan, let alone North Korea. Indeed, whereas Tokyo has zealously punished both India and Pakistan for testing nuclear weapons, its response to similar testing by China has been little more than a slap on the wrist.
That Japan welcomes China's rise is also apparent in the way it has allowed Chinese exports to take an ever greater share of its markets. All official denials to the contrary, Japan still carefully controls its imports, which is why its overall trade surpluses are still three times larger than China's. Yet China is the only major industrial nation with which Japan has consistently run large trade deficits in recent years--as much as $22 billion as of 2003. By contrast, Japan consistently earns huge surpluses with almost every other industrial nation, not least such highly competitive export powerhouses as South Korea and Taiwan, which face significant trade barriers in many areas of the Japanese market.
In its aid policy also, Japan has long adopted a strong pro-Chinese line. Japan's aid budget is now the world's largest, and according to the political scientist David Arase, it accounted for two-thirds of all China's receipts of bilateral aid in the last two decades of the 20th century. By contrast, for all the talk of a U.S.-China "strategic partnership," China's aid receipts from the United States were zero. In the wake of the Tiananmen massacre, Japanese officials resisted pressure to cut aid as a sanction. The program was suspended for about a year, but the gap was more than made up by huge increases in subventions in subsequent years.
Tokyo has concentrated much of its aid on funding "muscle-building" projects that have greatly speeded China's emergence as an export powerhouse. Tokyo has forked over massive amounts in particular for improvements in China's antiquated transportation infrastructure, thereby providing Chinese export industries with the modern roads, railroads, and ports needed to serve world markets. In addition, Tokyo has supported Chinese investments in telecommunications equipment, air control systems, and other high-tech infrastructural improvements.
The Sino-Japanese rapprochement has also been remarkably apparent even at the level of ordinary citizens. Take tourist travel. Although the pattern in the last few years has been disrupted by the War on Terror and the SARS scare, China was one of the fastest growing destinations for Japanese tourists in the 1980s and 1990s. This in turn reflected high-level policy decisions in Tokyo: in particular, Japanese bureaucrats manipulated airline landing rights and airport slots to stimulate tourist travel to China. In 2000, 1.5 million Japanese tourists visited China, up 41 percent in three years. While Japan's tourist travel to China multiplied 3.5 times between 1987 and 2000, travel to Taiwan increased by less than 5 percent.
Even more startling is the evidence of Sino-Japanese educational ties. In the 1970s and 1980s, most Chinese students headed for the United States, but in the 1990s they increasingly preferred Japan. So much so that, utterly overlooked by the American press, Japan in 2003 passed the United States to become the top destination for Chinese students. The total of Chinese students studying at Japanese universities came to nearly 71,000--well ahead of a total of 65,000 at American universities. The Japanese total had more than tripled since 1993, whereas the American total had risen by a mere 44 percent. All this is the more remarkable for the fact that the United States has had a longer tradition than Japan of providing quality education to foreign students. It also enjoys a strong advantage in the English language. Not only is English the world's second language, it is easier for Chinese people to learn than Japanese because English resembles the Chinese language in structure, whereas Japanese is radically different.
One factor that has helped tip the balance is money. As far back as the mid-1980s, Tokyo launched a well-funded program to attract foreign students to Japanese universities. There is also a far more controversial factor at work: an increasing perception in China that Japan has displaced the United States as the world's technological leader. Chinese students know something most Americans do not: that such apparently world-beating American companies as IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, and even Boeing now depend heavily on Japan for much of their most advanced manufacturing technologies.
It may seem amazing that the Japan-China alliance has not come to light sooner. Part of the explanation is that leaders on both sides see no advantage in informing their own people, let alone correcting misperceptions abroad. It helps that ordinary people in both nations continue to view the other side negatively (highly negatively in the case of the Chinese view of Japan). It also helps that, for various reasons, Americans want to believe that the two nations remain estranged.In any case, Americans are remarkably na�ve in their efforts to understand East Asia. The record shows this repeatedly, even on matters far more obvious than the Japan-China relationship.
It is worth reflecting on the monumental problems Americans have had in understanding, for instance, Japan's true trade policies. For decades, publications like the Wall Street Journal have presented the Japanese market as opening up rapidly or even as already having become "one of the most open markets in the world." Such reporting has accurately reflected what Japanese spokesmen say. But in retrospect, such statements have proved to be far from the truth. Japanese leaders have inadvertently admitted as much. A top official of the Mitsubishi group, for instance, acknowledged in 2000 that as recently as the 1980s the Japanese market was "closed and tightly protected." Of course, he went on to claim that the Japanese market was open as of 2000--but even that claim is hard to reconcile with the facts. It requires no more than a glance at Japan's roads to see that even today Japan's crucial automobile market remains highly protected.
A key reason for American misunderstandings is not only that Japanese spokesmen feel no compunction in misstating the facts but that important figures in Japan act out highly misleading, elaborately choreographed pantomimes to throw Washington off the scent. A classic case in point was in 1993 when Washington leaned heavily on Tokyo to open the Japanese market to American rice exports. The final days of the negotiations were stage-managed to lead the American press to report--completely erroneously--that Japan had finally agreed to open the rice market. Within 24 hours it became apparent that the story was a hoax. But few American media organizations ever corrected the record. To this day, well over 90 percent of rice sold in Japanese supermarkets is Japan-grown and, except for a token presence in a few Tokyo supermarkets catering to American diplomats, American rice is rarely seen. Its market share is probably less than 1 percent.
Clearly the American press is exceptionally dysfunctional in East Asia. American correspondents typically take five to ten years to eliminate the many ideological and cultural blind spots they bring to the region. Few top correspondents stay that long, and those who do often become so thoroughly assimilated that they no longer identify with their home nation.
This phenomenon has long been a particular problem in coverage of Japan. Thus many of the most knowledgeable correspondents writing for the American press from Tokyo become--to put it politely--Japanized. They adopt a Japanese view of their ethical responsibilities and in common with Japanese journalists come to see as their proper role to act as mouthpieces of the Japanese establishment. Hence a pattern for the American press to project much Japanese propaganda into the American policy-making process over the years. America's comprehension problems are not helped by the notable weakness of U.S. diplomacy in East Asia. Again the problem seems particularly acute in the case of Japan, where the American embassy often appears compromised by conflicts of interest. A notable illustration of the problem is that for many years, under Ambassador Foley, the deputy head of mission (the effective head of the embassy bureaucracy) was Christopher LaFleur, the son-in-law of Kiichi Miyazawa, one of the wealthiest and most formidable exponents of Japan's system of "money politics."
The problems of American diplomacy in Japan are not helped by the fact that for decades Tokyo has been allowed by the State Department to nominate whom it wants as U.S. ambassador. Tokyo generally selects someone who has long been a key "friend" of the Japan lobby in Washington.
As for the hostile rhetoric that often characterizes the surface of Sino-Japanese relations, it is important to note that in East Asia more than in other parts of the world, political rhetoric is merely rhetoric. The truth is revealed only behind closed doors. Expressing mutual hostility assuages various domestic interest groups, such as the far Right in Japan and the anti-Japanese masses in China.
One thing in particular they both want to keep a lid on is the nature of the settlement they came to on war reparations. In sharp contrast with Germany, which paid more than $80 billion to victims of Nazi atrocities, Japan has never paid compensation to millions of Chinese victims of its aggression from the 1930s and 1940s. Beijing has not wanted it to. Instead Beijing has negotiated a deal in which Japan has been paying large amounts of foreign aid in lieu of compensation to war victims. The deal has suited top Chinese officials because they largely control how the Japanese money is spent. But it means they have had to keep the deal secret from millions of victims and their families. For Tokyo, the deal seems like a remarkably cheap solution since a German-style program of individual compensation could easily cost four times as much.
There is often a lot of humbug in Sino-Japanese spats. Take, for instance, a cluster of bilateral Japan-China agricultural disputes that broke out in 2001. The goods concerned--long-stem onions, fresh shiitake mushrooms, and tatami rushes--accounted for less than 0.2 percent of bilateral trade. While Japanese and Chinese officials were busy talking up the prospects of a "trade war," trade between the two nations was growing by more than 20 percent a year. Predictably the disputes were quickly resolved.
As for Japan's pattern of periodically provoking the Chinese over its past military aggression, one thing is certain: perpetuating the impression of hostility disguises the depth of Sino-Japanese co-operation from the United States, which would clearly find it threatening.
Certainly the so-called Yasukuni issue --the highly contrived row over Japan's honoring of war criminals--surfaces at times when Sino-Japanese relations are otherwise burgeoning. It first made news in 1979, just weeks after a highly successful visit to Tokyo by Deng Xiaoping. It returned in 1985, just as Japan agreed to transfer important nuclear technologies to China. It has resurfaced in the last three years just as evidence in everything from trade to student exchanges suggests the U.S. is being elbowed out of the U.S.-Japan-China triangle.
While it is clear what Beijing gains from this special Sino-Japanese alliance, the benefits to Tokyo are not immediately obvious--but they are nonetheless substantial. Certainly the downside of Japan's relationship with China is far less troubling than is generally understood. Pace the American press, China has not been hollowing out the Japanese economy, as a glance at Japan's huge overall trade surpluses makes clear.
Less obvious to Westerners but probably decisive in Japanese terms is that China is a nation with whom the Japanese share an enormous amount of culture--not just relatively superficial things such as their writing system and their traditional medicine but their whole philosophy of life. A shared way of thinking has, of course, not always ensured peace between nations in the past. But for two nations as xenophobic as Japan and China, similar thinking leads them to see the world outside East Asia very similarly. This in turn suggests that there are advantages to making common cause in diplomatic relations, particularly with the West.
Meanwhile, the Japanese see increasing dangers in perpetuating their "special relationship" with the United States. The Japanese take a very long view of history. In five centuries of interacting with the West, they have already seen four empires come and go--the Portuguese, the Spanish, the French, and the British. Why should the American empire be different? After all, judging by key measures such as trade (America's current account trade deficit last year exceeded 5 percent of GDP), the United States is losing position more rapidly than almost any empire in history.
Japan's traditional pattern has always been to link with the reigning or coming superpower. For Americans to imagine that a past history of bad blood represents an impossible impediment to a Japan-China alliance is to miss the point. Both China and Japan are pragmatic nations that live more in the future than in the past, and it is not necessary for them to engage in a love-in for them to work well together.
Eamonn Fingleton is the author of Unsustainable: How Economic Dogma is Destroying American Prosperity (Nation Books, 2003). He writes from Tokyo.