Rethinking Sino-Japanese Alienation: History Problems and Historical Opportunities
Barry Buzan and Evelyn Goh
Abstract
Bitterly contested memories of war, colonization and empire among Japan, China, and Korea have increasingly threatened regional order and security over the three decades since the 1980s. 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, by constructing a more balanced and global view of their shared history, and second, by sketching out the possibilities for a great power bargain in ... More
Bitterly contested memories of war, colonization and empire among Japan, China, and Korea have increasingly threatened regional order and security over the three decades since the 1980s. 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, by constructing a more balanced and global view of their shared history, and second, by sketching out the possibilities for a great power bargain in Northeast Asia. The book first puts Northeast Asia’s history since 1840 into both a world historical and a systematic normative context, exposing the parochial nature of the history debate in relation to what is a bigger shared story. It then 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 four future scenarios for the region. The frameworks adopted here consciously blend historical contextualization; 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.
Keywords:
China,
great power bargain,
history problem,
Japan,
modernity,
Northeast Asia,
power,
US,
West,
world history
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2020 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780198851387 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: February 2020 |
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198851387.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Barry Buzan, author
Emeritus Professor of International Relations, LSE Senior Fellow at LSE IDEAS Honorary Professor at the Universities of Copenhagen and Jilin, and at the China Foreign Affairs University and the University of International Relations (Beijing)
Evelyn Goh, author
Shedden Professor of Strategic Policy Studies, The Australian National University
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