1 Rivalry in Sino-Japanese relations
Between September 2010 and late 2013, the dispute between China and Japan over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands escalated to dangerous heights. The dispute initially heated up on September 7, 2010, when the Japanese Coast Guard arrested a Chinese fishing boat captain and his crew in the East China Sea waters surrounding the islands after he steered his trawler into collisions with two coast guard vessels. China denounced the detentions and demanded their release. Though the crew and the trawler were released in the following week, prosecutors announced that the captain’s detention would be extended ten days, leading to stronger denunciations from Beijing and large anti-Japanese protests on the streets. China finally retaliated by arresting four Japanese nationals working in China and by unofficially blocking the export to Japan of rare earth minerals, the production of which China monopolizes. Tokyo at this point gave in, repatriating the captain to Chinese authorities on September 24. Throughout much of 2012, tensions slowly built up again over the prospect of either the metropolitan city government or the national government in Tokyo purchasing three of the five Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands from their private Japanese owners, who were looking to dump the resource-barren rocks. The debate over buying the islands led to large-scale anti-Japanese protests in China and damage to Japanese-owned businesses. Beijing denounced any such purchase as provocative, warning it would have repercussions on Sino-Japanese relations. The Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) cabinet went ahead with the purchase anyway in September 2012, to stop the right-wing governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, from doing the same. The decision was the lesser of two evils for the DPJ, but it infuriated China nonetheless (Drifte 2014; Weiss 2014). This led to the most dangerous part of the escalated dispute. In December 2012, Chinese surveillance aircraft began flights over the islands. Then, on separate occasions in January 2013, Chinese frigates locked their fire-control radar onto a Japanese Maritime Self-Defense forces (MSDF) helicopter and an MSDF destroyer in the vicinity of the islands. This brought the two states closer to conflict than probably at any point since 1945. Finally, in November 2013, China announced the introduction of an Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) in the East China Sea, covering an area that includes the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands and requiring all foreign aircraft to report their flight paths to China or risk being shot down.
Yet by 2018, the situation between China and Japan had seemingly taken a 180-degree turn. Though Chinese intrusions into territorial waters around the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands still continued, China and Japan began to hold high-level communications and meetings between officials on improving relations, starting in 2014. These encouraging signs led to the first (albeit awkward) meeting between Japan’s Prime Minister Abe Shinzō and China’s President Xi Jinping at an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference in November 2014 (Takahara 2014). The maritime intrusions around the disputed islands continue, including even armed Chinese naval vessels and fleets of over 200 fishing vessels, but warm relations between the two governments have continued to grow. At the most recent bilateral meeting in October 2018, a summit between Abe and Xi in Beijing, the two leaders expressed their belief that Sino-Japanese relations had made a new start (Qiuyu 2018). The summit also produced concrete results: China and Japan signed several agreements pertaining to maritime cooperation and business dealings. Now is this how rivals with a bitter, ongoing territorial dispute and unresolved historical issues behave?
Here is another example of counterintuitive behavior in Sino-Japanese relations. We typically think of Japan’s foreign policy in the first half of the 20th century as a period of unrequited imperial expansion. Yet during the Chinese (Xinhai) Revolution of 1911, in which the long-in-decline Qing Dynasty finally fell from power, and in the fragmented state that followed, Japan did not take advantage of its neighbor in her weakened state. Japan of course administered two Chinese territories as a result of the First Sino-Japanese War – Taiwan and the Liaodong Peninsula (the Kwantung Leased Territory). However, Japan refrained from further expansion, despite several interventions (Boxer Rebellion, Shandong, Shanghai, Jiandao), until the 1930s. In the mid 1920s, after returning Shandong to China, Japan even embarked on a policy of nonintervention in China. The Japanese Imperial Army started expanding out of its toehold in southern Manchuria after Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang brought more of China under his control with the completion of the Northern Expedition. Why did Japan not take greater advantage of its weakened rival?
These examples show the ever-changing nature of the Sino-Japanese rivalry. Many rivalries do not feature a constant escalation to greater and greater levels of conflict. They ebb and flow as each rival chooses to escalate, de-escalate, or maintain the status quo. The goal of this book is to provide an explanation of why rival states choose one of these options. The argument is a revised version of a model of rivalry behavior developed by Michael Colaresi in his 2005 book, Scare Tactics: The Politics of International Rivalry.
I argue that domestic politics and expected costs largely determine the actions that rivals choose to take. Rivalry behavior is thus not determined entirely at the interstate level, as with many theories of conflict, but is two-level in nature. That is to say, the relative capabilities between the two rivals and the potential involvement of any third parties (which determine expected costs) interact with the relationship between each state’s leadership and its domestic political opposition to influence the action each rival takes. Variables coming from domestic politics are often overlooked in international relations due to the strong influence of structural realism (Waltz 1979). The domestic political independent variable is called rivalry outbidding (Colaresi 2005, 29–34). This describes the situation in which a domestic political opposition can outflank the leadership by calling for stronger policies vis-à-vis the rival. This ability to outflank the leadership draws the leader’s policies more toward escalation with the rival, to avoid being replaced by the opposition. I believe that rivalry outbidding takes priority in the interaction between the two variables. When rivalry outbidding is high – when a domestic political opponent is attempting to outflank the leader on policy toward the rival – then the model predicts escalation, no matter what the expected costs. The argument is rationalist. The central decision-makers are state leaders who are assumed to prioritize remaining in power (or helping their party to victory if term-limited) over all other goals.
The other independent variable is the expected costs of continuing the rivalry. Judging the costs of decisions is naturally a part of many rationalist arguments. Here, the expected future costs of the rivalry are simplified as being “high” or “low.” When the expected costs are high, then there is pressure to de-escalate the rivalry. When the expected costs are low, then costs are not a worry and the state may simply maintain the status quo. In both of these cases, rivalry outbidding is presumed to be low. Escalation of the rivalry is predicted to occur only when rivalry outbidding is high, and, in that scenario, I argue that expected costs do not matter. A 2x2 matrix capturing the two values (high and low) of the two variables and the resulting predictions is presented in the next chapter.
Using this brief description of the argument, we can return to the two empirical examples described previously for a brief explanation of the turn of events in each case (see the relevant chapters for a longer explanation). The potential for rivalry outbidding started to decline in the mid-2010s as Xi Jinping began his Anti-Corruption Campaign, which he used to remove all of his rivals for power in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In this way he was able to consolidate power in Beijing in the run-up to the 19th Party Congress in 2017. With no potential opponents in the CCP to outflank him on China’s Japan policy, Xi was able to calm the tensions with Japan. The trade war with the U.S. in 2018 raised expected costs for continuing the rivalry with Japan, handing Xi a firm incentive to sign agreements with Japan and making their detente official. In Tokyo, Abe Shinzō faces low or no rivalry outbidding because he has placed himself ideologically on the far right with regard to China relations. There is practically no room to outflank Abe. So when he sits down to reciprocate China’s conciliatory moves, it is reminiscent of Nixon going to China.
Likewise, in the first three decades of the 20th century, it could be argued that Japan refrained from preying further on China (keep in mind they still held Taiwan and Liaodong Peninsula) because, after the successful prosecution of the First Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War, the army generally came to agree with the policies of the civilian government, at least until the late 1920s. There were a series of Seiyūkai prime ministers (Seiyūkai being the more conservative political party of the prewar era) as well as retired generals and admirals serving as prime ministers, which helped remove the gap between government and military preferences as well as any rivalry outbidding political opponents. Expected costs of continuing the rivalry with China were very low, since China had fragmented into a warlord system, so Japan could just maintain the rivalry status quo and protect its conquered territories. This overall period of status quo maintenance only came to an end when the civilian government moved more to the center and the army’s preferences moved more to the right, leading to their outbidding (not to mention several coup attempts and assassinations).
This book provides support for the theoretical argument through three empirical chapters (Chapter 3–5), which together cover the two periods of Sino-Japanese rivalry. China and Japan have been engaged in a rivalry since the mid-1990s, but they were also engaged in a rivalry from the 1870s until the end of the Pacific War in 1945. The evidence provided in the empirical chapters finds support for the theoretical argument. The model’s predictions are accurate in most, but not all, instances of state reactions to events. The results are shown by tables in the empirical chapters that summarize the predicted actions based on the independent variables and the actual actions taken. The results are positive – the model is found to have a respectable level of support from the empirical evidence. Since the theoretical argument is generalizable and finds support in the Sino-Japanese case, it should be tested with other rivalries in future research. The rest of this introductory chapter reviews the literature on interstate rivalry.
The literature on interstate rivalries and the Sino-Japanese relationship
Before proceeding any further, we should ask ourselves: Are we sure that Japan and China are actually rivals? Many scholars over the past two decades have called the Sino-Japanese relationship a rivalry and several books and articles have focused specifically on the rivalry relationship (Rose 1998; Rozman 2002; Hsiung 2007; Chan 2013; Inoguchi and Ikenberry 2013; Lai 2014; Takeuchi 2014; Yahuda 2014). Other authors writing about Chinese or Japanese foreign policy have devoted discussion to the topic (e.g., Drifte 2003; Sutter 2005; Gill 2007; Mochizuki 2007; Pyle 2007; Samuels 2007; Shirk 2007; Deng 2008; Ross and Feng 2008). One of the first works to point to the possibility of a rivalry was Friedberg (1993–94), who pointed to nationalism, friction over history, and lingering territorial disputes in East Asia as indicators of a relationship that was ripe for rivalry (Friedberg 1993–94, 17–19). In both private conversations and conference presentations, many of my fellow Asia watchers have been quick to state their belief that China and Japan are rivals.
So there are strong indications that a rivalry exists or at least that the potential for one exists. Yet there is virtually no engagement between this literature from East Asian experts and the broader theoretical and empirical work on rivalries in international relations (e.g., Wayman 1983, 2000; Vasquez 1996; Bennett 1998; Thompson 1999, 2001; Diehl and Goertz 2001; Vasquez and Leskiw 2001; Maoz and Mor 2002; Hewitt 2005; Thies 2005; Colaresi, Rasler, and Thompson 2007; Rasler, Thompson, and Ganguly 2013; Valeriano 2013). That is to say, all those East Asian experts who frame the Sino-Japanese relationship as a rivalry do not actually cite any theoretical definitions of rivalry. This is a large gap between the East Asian IR/foreign policy and interstate rivalry scholarship that needs to be filled. Since many East Asianists believe that a rivalry exists between China and Japan, it behooves us to confirm that a state of rivalry exists according to the most common definitions of rivalry from the interstate rivalry literature.
One prominent exception to the lack of engagement between the two literatures is the excellent book by Steve Chan, Enduring Rivalries in the Asia-Pacific (2013). In his book, Chan uses the terminology of the IR rivalry literature (“enduring rivalries” is a term used by Diehl, Goertz, and their co-authors) and cites the rivalry scholars. But Chan is critical of the explanatory value of the rivalry concept. Using a neoliberal institutionalist theoretical perspective (Axelrod 1984; Keohane and Nye 1989), Chan argues that East Asian states, including its many rivalries, will be constrained from escalating their disputes because their leaders prioritize economic growth and interdependence (Chan 2013, xi–xii). Chan also covers broadly and in general terms the rivalries in East Asia rather than focus specifically on the Sino-Japanese relationship (Chan 2013, xiv). My argument stays within the confines of the rivalry literature.
It should be noted that rivalry scholars reference different types of rivalry in the literature. There are enduring, isolated, proto, and strategic rivalries, among others. My conception of rivalry in the context of the Sino-Japanese relationship is closest to what Diehl and Goertz call enduring rivalries and what Thompson et al. call strategic and positional rivalries. These terms are not mutually exclusive, but they are different due to the concerns of the two main approaches in rivalry research, as explained in what follows. The Sino-Japanese relationship fits these two categories because it is a prolonged rivalry (i.e., it is enduring) over spatial and positional issues (Diehl and Goertz 2001, 22; Colaresi, Rasler, and Thompson 2007, 79). To keep things simple, I do not utilize these terms in the following chapters, since they can obscure and abstract for readers not familiar with the rivalry literature. I will plainly refer to “rivals” and “rivalry” without any qualifiers in front.
It is probably not unusual that many authors writing about the Sino-Japanese relationship have described China and Japan as rivals without actually linking their books and articles to the academic literature of interstate rivalries. To those that use the word “rivalry,” it’s rather obvious. They point to China and Japan’s competition over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands and fossil fuel resources in the East China Sea, defense spending, and their respective geopolitical positions. It seems that whenever one of the two states launches talks with another country or an intergovernmental organization, the other sees the need to keep up and does the same. We can see this in the opening of their military bases in the Horn of Africa country of Djibouti. Japan opened theirs in 2011; China followed with theirs in 2017. We can also see it in the two states chasing free trade agreements with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). China opened negotiations first in 2000; Japan followed two years later. One geopolitical issue that looms large is the respective economic power of China and Japan. The Japanese prided themselves on becoming the world’s second largest economy during the Cold War years. By the late 1980s, talk even turned toward the possibility that Japan might one day supplant the United States as the top economic power. But since the burst of the bubble economy, Japan’s economy has languished with two decades of stagnant growth marked by frequent recessions and d...
