China and Japan
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nese occupation officials during World War II, Jiang was more vulnerable
to criticism if he were judged to be soft on Japan. Some say that Jiang had a
scar on his leg from bites by a dog owned by a Japa nese official. What ever
the reason, Jiang did not enjoy close relations with Japa nese leaders, and
unlike Deng, he did not publicly urge that China should maintain good re-
lations with Japan.
After Liao Chengzhi died in 1983, no Chinese leader had comparable
knowledge of Japan and such deep friendships. In the course of negotiating
normalization, Tanaka Kakuei, Ohira Masayoshi, and Sonoda Sunao had
developed personal relationships with their counter parts, but by 1992 they
were no longer available. Tanaka was arrested in 1976, Ohira died in 1980,
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The Deterioration of Sino- Japanese Relations, 1992–2018
and Sonoda died in 1984. Some of their successors endeavored to continue
working with China, but compared with those who built the bridges to nor-
malize relations in 1972 and to negotiate the Treaty of Peace and Friend-
ship in 1978, they lacked the personal connections to Chinese leaders and
the determination to maintain the relationship.
The Collapse of the Soviet Union
From 1969, following clashes between China and the Soviet Union along
their border, until 1991, when the Soviet Union was dissolved, China, Japan,
and the United States had a shared strategic interest in cooperating against
the Soviet Union. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, that shared
interest dis appeared. Thereafter, the inability of the three countries to count
on the cooperation of their former allies created uncertainties, which grew
as both China and Japan expanded their military capacity and began to lay
claim to the islands between them.
The Reduced Importance of Japa nese Assistance
In the early 1980s Japan’s financial and technical assistance was critical in
launching China’s industrial drive. In 1978, China’s GDP was $219 billion,
and by 1993, as China’s growth was spurting forward, it had jumped to
$1,712 billion. The second blast furnace at Baoshan Steelworks, built with
Japa nese assistance, was opened in 1991. China had enough resources by
this point that Japa nese assistance was no longer crucial. From 1989 to
1992 the Japa nese had played a key role in breaking through international
sanctions on business and trade with China, but by 1992 the sanctions had
greatly eased. Furthermore, by 1993 it was clear that the Japa nese economy
was not going to recover its rapid growth after the burst of its economic
bubble in 1989. Japan was no longer such an attractive model for China.
President Lee Teng-hui and Japan’s Links to Taiwanese Localism
When the “locals” took over the leadership of the Taiwan government from
the “mainlanders” in 1992, Beijing’s leaders worried that local re sis tance to a
reunion with the mainland would grow, and that Japan would support the
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re sis tance. Chiang Ching- kuo, who became president of Taiwan after his
father, Chiang Kai- shek, died in 1975, believed that long- term stability on
Taiwan required giving local people a greater role in governance. He chose
a local, Lee Teng- hui, to be vice president, and when Chiang Ching- kuo died
of illness in 1992, Lee became president, despite the efforts by some Nation-
alist Party officials to block his accession. Before Lee’s presidency, elections
were held in Taiwan as if Taiwan represented all of China and as if the
Guomin dang had a chance of retaking the mainland. Representatives of the
diff er ent provinces, nearly all of them mainlanders who had fled to Taiwan
after the Nationalists lost the Civil War, selected the members of the legis-
lature. After becoming president, Lee Teng- hui arranged for direct elections
of the legislature. The first election was held in 1992, and after that the lo-
cals, who made up roughly two- thirds of the population of Taiwan, domi-
nated Taiwan politics.
Chinese leaders in Beijing knew that Japan had earlier supported a two-
China policy and that Lee Teng- hui and other locals had close relations with
Japan. As a child, Lee Teng- hui had learned Japa nese before he had learned
Mandarin Chinese. In 1944 and 1945 he had served in the Japa nese Army,
and his brother died fighting for the Japa nese. He had attended Japa nese
schools in Taiwan and won a scholarship to Kyoto Imperial University,
where he studied briefly. As president, he maintained close ties to Japa nese
leaders, some of whom had worked in Taiwan before 1945. Chinese gov-
ernment officials worried that Japan would support Lee Teng- hui’s efforts
to remain in de pen dent from the mainland.
To maintain pressure on Taiwan to accept mainland rule, Beijing offi-
cials sought to restrict the international space in which Taiwan’s offi-
cials could function. As a condition for normalizing relations, China had
required Japan and the United States to agree that their high officials would
not visit Taiwan and that top Taiwanese officials not be allowed to visit
their countries. Lee Teng- hui sought to break through this constraint. In
1994 he visited several Latin American countries where Taiwan still had
formal diplomatic relations, and he requested permission from U.S. offi-
cials to stop in Hawaii for refueling on his way home. American officials,
trying to balance their agreement with Beijing with Lee’s request to stop
in Hawaii, de cided he could land in Hawaii, but they restricted him to a
military base.
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The Deterioration of Sino- Japanese Relations, 1992–2018
Lee Teng- hui publicized his confinement to the Hawaiian military base
and this aroused many Americans, who complained that their country had
coddled dictators during the Cold War and said it was time to support
demo cratic princi ples. Why, they asked, should the United States follow the
wishes of China, which had shot students protesting near Tian anmen
Square, and not allow the visit of a leader of Taiwan, a demo cratic nation— a
leader who had also spent many years in the United States earning a Ph.D.
degree from Cornell? The following year, in 1995, Cornell University invited
Lee Teng- hui to speak at alumni events. The U.S. House of Representa-
tives voted 398 to 0 and the Senate 97 to 1 that Lee should be allowed to
come to the United States to speak at Cornell. Given this popu lar support,
President Bill Clinton felt he had no choice but to suspend the agreement
with the mainland that did not allow high- level Taiwan officials to visit the
United States. Lee was granted entry and he made full use of the visit that
June, attracting a large audience and positive international opinion. Cornell
University treated him as a heroic freedom fighter.
Mainland officials were furious with the United States and Canada for
granting Lee Teng- hui a visa, and with the Japa nese, who were sympathetic
to the invitation. In July, shortly after Lee’s visit to Cornell, China issued a
“warning” to Taiwan about trying to seek in d
e pen dence by conducting mis-
sile tests that landed very close to the small Japanese- held island of Yo-
naguni at the southern end of the Ryukyu chain. In August, Chinese offi-
cials conducted a second series of missile tests in the East China Sea, an
area 80 to 100 miles north of Taiwan. China also began conducting mili-
tary exercises in Fujian province, situated opposite Taiwan across the Taiwan
Strait. In November, China conducted amphibious assault exercises, and
in March 1996, China fired missiles some 25 to 35 miles from Keelung
and Kaohsiung, ports on Taiwan’s southwest coast, disrupting nearby air
and sea traffic. The United States had taken the position that it did not op-
pose the reunification of Taiwan with the mainland, but it did oppose the
use of force to achieve that end. Officials in the United States worried that
China was preparing to invade Taiwan. Following the March missile firing,
U.S. officials announced that the United States was sending two carrier
groups to the vicinity of Taiwan, thus staging the biggest display of U.S.
military might in Asia since the Vietnam War. Shortly thereafter, China
conducted more amphibious landing exercises and purchased additional
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military equipment from Rus sia. Many feared a military confrontation.
Jiang Zemin, acutely aware of how weak the Chinese military had become
since Deng’s 1978 decision to promote economic development instead of in-
vesting heavi ly in military modernization, de cided to increase military ex-
penditures. Deng, in contrast, had advocated a policy of taoguang yanghui
(“avoid the limelight, never take the lead”).
In the 1980s Taiwanese locals had begun to develop closer relations with
the mainland, but by the early twenty- first century, feeling overwhelmed by
the mainland’s influence and pressure on Taiwan, many people in Taiwan
began to identify themselves as Taiwanese rather than Chinese. In the de-
cades after 1949, because children of mainlanders and children of locals had
now grown up and attended schools together, hostilities between the two
groups gradually eased, although they did not dis appear. And although
Taiwanese relations with Japan grew weaker over time, they too did not dis-
appear. Chinese officials continued to worry about the Japa nese, who were
close to Taiwan locals who wanted to maintain their in de pen dence from
the mainland.
Growing Chinese Fears of a Japa nese Military Revival after the
Gulf War
Ever since Japan was defeated in 1945, Chinese leaders had been concerned
about the return of Japa nese militarism. In the eyes of many Chinese as far
back as the Ming dynasty, the true nature of the Japa nese people was re-
vealed in the be hav ior of blood- thirsty Japa nese pirates. In the late six-
teenth century, violent Japa nese troops under Toyotomi Hideyoshi advanced
through Korea on their way to China. In 1894–1895, aggressive Japa nese
troops invaded Korea and China. And many Chinese adults still remem-
bered the cruel Japa nese military occupation from 1937 to 1945, while those
who had not personally experienced it had heard about it. Following World
War II the Chinese public had no contact with the Japa nese after they left
China, and therefore they had no opportunity to see how firmly the vast
majority of Japan’s citizens had turned their back on militarism.
In 1969, when U.S. president Richard Nixon announced at a press con-
ference in Guam that while the United States would help, nations should
be responsible for their own security, the Chinese began to worry that an
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The Deterioration of Sino- Japanese Relations, 1992–2018
in de pen dent Japa nese military would rise again. In the mid-1980s the Chi-
nese became concerned that Prime Minister Nakasone was reviving the
Japa nese military, and they saw his visit to the Yasukuni Shrine as a sign
that Japan was again honoring its military past. In the late 1980s, as the
Japa nese economy grew rapidly and tensions between Japan and the United
States increased, Chinese leaders worried that Japan might push to increase
its in de pen dence from the United States. If so, would not Japan use the new
military technology it had acquired through the U.S.- Japan Alliance to
strengthen its own military? After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Chi-
na’s leaders wondered whether the U.S.- Japan Alliance, the cork that was
keeping Japa nese militarism under control, could last.
After the Gulf War ended in 1991, the United States was deeply critical
of Japan, which imported so much oil from the Middle East, for not con-
tributing more to the war effort. The United States pressed Japan to make
a bigger contribution to global peacekeeping by getting “boots on the ground”
when trou bles appeared around the world. To the Chinese, this increased
the danger that the cork was getting out of the bottle.
Over the next several years Japa nese officials agreed to take on added
international and financial responsibility, not only in covering the expenses
for U.S. bases in Japan but also in sharing more military technology and
playing a larger role in international peacekeeping activities. By 1996 Japan
had agreed to provide logistical support if contingencies should arise in the
areas around Japan.
In the 1990s the Japa nese media were filled with stories of North Korea’s
nuclear developments and North Korean abductions of Japa nese citizens.
When North Korea fired a rocket not far from Japan in 1993, Japan’s anx i-
eties increased and Japa nese voices calling for strengthening their own mili-
tary grew stronger. President Jimmy Car ter, before coming to office, had
proposed that U.S. troops should be pulled out of South Korea. Was the
period of U.S dominance over Japan’s security policies that had begun with
the Allied Occupation now coming to an end? Some in Japan wondered if
they could depend on the United States for support against North Korea,
and if they could not, why would Japan not expand its military? In short,
with the end of the Cold War the Chinese had reason to fear that the U.S.-
Japan Alliance would not last and that the United States could no longer
keep the “cork in the bottle.”
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Growing Japa nese Concern about China’s Military Power
After the Tian anmen Square Incident in 1989, the Japa nese grew more wor-
ried about the nature of the Chinese po liti cal system, and Japa nese media
were filled with items critical of China. The Japa nese also wondered how
the Chinese, expressing anti- Japanese rhe toric, would behave as China’s eco-
nomic and military power grew.
China’s economy did not yet compare with Japan’s, but China was a
rising power that could one day challenge Japan for dominance in East Asia.
Although foreign sanctions on China following the government’s clash with
protesters near Tian anmen Square had slowed economic growth, by 1993,
following Deng Xiaoping’s southern journey in 1992 and the easing of in-
ternational sanctions, C
hina’s economic growth rate suddenly increased to
14 percent that year and was poised to continue. Deng Xiaoping had kept
down military expenditures in the 1980s to concentrate on economic growth,
but by the 1990s the economic base was much stronger than when he took
power in 1978, and his successors were putting a higher percentage of the
national bud get into the military. In the tensions after Taiwan president Lee
Teng- hui’s visit to Cornell in 1995, when China fired a missile over Taiwan
and the United States sent two carrier groups to the region, Chinese mili-
tary expenditures grew even faster than the economy, which was continuing
to grow at an average of roughly 10 percent a year.
The friction over the Senkaku / Diaoyu Islands that began to intensify
in the mid-1990s reflected Japan’s increasing concern about China’s inten-
tions. For the previous hundred years, Japa nese defense officials had been
concerned about threats from two fronts: the northern front— that is, the
Soviet Union— and the western front, the Korean Peninsula. Now they had
to deal with a third front in the southwest: the threat from China over
Taiwan and the Senkaku / Diaoyu Islands.
China’s Concern about the Weakening of the U.S.- Japan Alliance
Chas Freeman, an American diplomat who was assigned to the Pentagon
from 1993 to 1994, observed that after the Soviet Union collapsed, U.S. mil-
itary planners suffered from what he called an “ enemy deficit syndrome.”
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The Deterioration of Sino- Japanese Relations, 1992–2018
U.S. military officials, backed by defense industries that sought congres-
sional support for a large military bud get, transferred their concern from
the Soviet Union to China, and the United States continued advancing its
military technology. The Chinese were worried not only that advances in
U.S. military weapons would be passed on to the Japa nese, but also that
Japan, after acquiring those new capacities, might then begin to act more
in de pen dently.
From 1991 to 1996, following the end of the Gulf War and the collapse
of the Soviet Union, uncertainties about the future of the U.S.- Japan Alli-
ance increased Chinese worries about Japan becoming an in de pen dent mili-
tary power. On April 17, 1996, however, when President Clinton and Prime