Book review: China's Japan Policy: Adjusting to New Challenges, by Joseph Cheng Yu-shek
When Shinzo Abe met Xi Jinping in Beijing earlier this month, the pictures told a thousand words: the Japanese prime minister was looking at Xi from an angle as the Chinese president shuffled forward with a pout.
by Joseph Cheng Yu-shek
World Scientific Publishing Co
When Shinzo Abe met Xi Jinping in Beijing earlier this month, the pictures told a thousand words: the Japanese prime minister was looking at Xi from an angle as the Chinese president shuffled forward with a pout.
Neither man came close to anything that could be described as a smile.
Sino-Japanese relations have often been fraught with difficulties and confrontation, but never in the postwar period has the situation been this chilly. And while editorial writers may have acclaimed the handshake as a new breakthrough that will lead to the relationship being rekindled, that sounds awfully like wishful thinking.
Professor Joseph Cheng Yu-shek's examination of the rocky road that characterises ties between the two most important nations in the Asia-Pacific region comes at an opportune time. At 458 pages of densely packed text, footnotes and bibliography, China's Japan Policy is an exhaustive dissection of the Tokyo-Beijing relationship since the end of the second world war.
Cheng, a political scientist with City University of Hong Kong, catalogues the improvements in ties under different governments, including the normalisation of relations in 1972, the vast volume of trade between them, and the interlacing of the two economies.