Chinese-Japanese Competition and the East Asian Security Complex

Vying for Influence

Jeffrey Reeves, Jeffrey Hornung, Kerry Lynn Nankivell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138219069
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315436319
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

This volume examines contemporary diplomatic, economic, and security competition between China and Japan in the Asia-Pacific region.

The book outlines the role that Sino-Japanese competition plays in East Asian security, an area of study largely overlooked in contemporary writing on Asian security, which tends to focus on US–China relations and/or US hegemony in Asia. The volume focuses on Chinese and Japanese foreign policy under President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Shinz? Abe, and regional security dynamics within and between Asian states/institutions since 2012. It employs regional security complex theory as a theoretical framework to view Chinese and Japanese competition in the Asian region. In doing so, the volume draws on a "levels of analysis" approach to demonstrate the value in looking at security in the Asia-Pacific from a regional rather than global perspective. The vast majority of existing research on the region's security tends to focus on great power relations and treats Asia as a sub-region within the larger global security architecture. In contrast, this volume shows how competition between the two largest Asian economies shapes East Asia's security environment and drives security priorities across Asia's sub-regions. As such, this collection provides an important contribution to discussion on security in Asia; one with potential to influence both political and military policy makers, security practitioners, and scholars.

This book will be of much interest to students of Asian politics, regional security, diplomacy, and international relations.

1 Sino-Japanese competition in East Asia’s emerging security complex

Jeffrey Reeves

Looking at East Asia in early 2017, one gets the sense that the peace and stability that has defined the region for the past two decades is no longer a certainty.¹ Tensions between some East Asian states are growing in tandem with their military capabilities and their capacity to harm one another both directly and indirectly. Nationalism and identity politics have become more pronounced in East Asian states’ foreign affairs, increasing the overall difficulty for state-sponsored compromise and diplomatic solutions. At the same time, the US – a pivotal lead agent in the region for the past five decades – is no longer as capable, reliable, or predictable a security actor as it once was. President Trump’s approach to the region (as understood from his piecemeal policy pronouncements at the time of writing) raises worrying questions among the US’s Asian allies and partners about its willingness to remain engaged. Uncertainty over the US commitment to Asia, in turn, has led regional states to consider the possibility of US abandonment at the very moment when a rising China is reshaping regional order.

In light of these developing trends, there is a pressing need for new thinking on Asian security of a kind that takes these changing dynamics into consideration. There is, unfortunately, a proclivity among security scholars and analysts, particularly those from the US, to take a parochial view of the Asian region as a whole and to relegate regional actors to secondary roles with a US-dominated landscape. More specifically, a substantial majority of analysts tend to treat Asia as a sub-region of the global system where security remains contingent on US involvement and/or US–China relations, and where states are nothing more than “middle powers” forced to react to US and/or Chinese initiatives. For these writers, Asian security exists as a consequence of global-level great power spillover, not as a regional commodity in and of itself. One can see this tendency in the high-profile titles such as “Between the Eagle and the Dragon”, The Pivot: The Future of American Statecraft in Asia, and The Improbable War: China, the United States and Logic of Great Power Conflict that dominate reading lists on Asian security in university courses and within policy communities. While valuable in highlighting certain characteristics of Asian security, such as global-level/great power influence in the region, this type of writing almost always either assumes continued US hegemony or a US–Chinese “dual hierarchy” in Asia, both of which preclude agency among the Asian states themselves.² In turn, the proliferation of such texts has led to an unnecessarily myopic focus on the US and/or US–China relations to the detriment of more nuanced study, resulting in a lopsided representation of Asia’s regional security dynamics as a whole.

There are, in fact, a myriad of regional and sub-regional factors that contribute to East Asia’s security environment exclusive of global-level security and US hegemony. Foremost among these is security competition between China and Japan. While routinely referenced as subversive to US–Chinese relations (if, indeed, referenced at all), Sino-Japanese rivalry in East Asia plays a central role in shaping and influencing regional security institutions, regional security affairs, and regional-level securitization of threats, exclusive of US involvement. Over the past five years in particular, the two states’ conflicting security agendas and competing foreign policies have influenced and shaped security partnerships, security norms and values, and security poles in ways that have fundamentally altered East Asian security dynamics. Even more, Sino-Japanese security competition has consolidated, and is consolidating, East Asian security at the regional level, fundamentally reshaping security relations and patterns in the process. More specifically, the Sino-Japanese rivalry is forcing a “thickening” of security ties between East Asian states and forging a regional security complex independent of global-level security.

To demonstrate the centrality of the Sino-Japanese rivalry in East Asian security, this volume examines the two states’ competition across three sectors: security institutions, security issues, and security relations. To provide a working theoretical framework for analysis, the volume employs regional security complex theory (RSCT), which prioritizes a regional approach to the study of security interconnectedness, security nodes, relations of amity and enmity, and regional-level balance-of-power dynamics aimed at combating “the tendency to overstress the role of the great powers, and to ensure that the local factors are given their proper weight in security analysis.”³ In so doing, the volume makes three essential arguments.

First, while US engagement in Asia remains of paramount important to the study of Asian security, the Sino-Japanese rivalry has widespread influence on Asian security exclusive of US activity and/or involvement. Examination of the patterns, approaches, and relationships inherent in the Sino-Japanese rivalry, therefore, provide important insight into the nature of East Asian security that one cannot get from a US-centric frame of reference. Second, the region is the most appropriate level of analysis for East Asian security as it allows for greater analytical attention to geographic adjacency, shared historic, commercial, cultural, and ethnic ties, and security linkages between states with shared security priorities. Such essential components of security analysis are often overlooked in writing that privileges the international level and global great power dynamics. Third, regional order in East Asia is far more complicated than the majority of contemporary analysis would suggest and failure to understanding its complexities is failure to understand the region’s true nature. The idea of a “dual hierarchy”, for instance, fails to capture Japan’s influence on security and economic relations (which are closely intertwined in the region, as Ramon Pacheco Pardo’s chapter on economic security demonstrates) and accords both China and the US with more influence than is perhaps warranted.

Global focus and great power relations: deficiencies in contemporary Asian security studies

Central to this volume’s approach is the contention that a gap exists in writing on Asian security with regard to regional-level security dynamics. One can see this deficiency in both Western and Asian writings as well as historical and contemporary works. During the twentieth century, for instance, Western scholars viewed Asia as a peripheral area with importance only in proportion to their respective state’s global interests.⁴ During the Cold War, scholars of strategic studies took a narrow view of Asia, treating it as one of many geographic areas in which competition between the US and the Soviet Union defined local-level security.⁵ Valuable in part as it addressed a defining security characteristic of the time, this common theoretical approach also became an obstacle for more nuanced treatment of Asia’s regional-level security drivers and state relations.

Contemporary scholarship identifies a number of variables that contributed to Western scholarships’ myopic approach to Asian security studies and international relations (IR). Western cultural chauvinism, for instance, led analysts to misread Asian states and Asian peoples as somehow inferior and incapable of cooperating without Western powers’ involvement.⁶ Lack of exposure to Asian states resulted in antiquated, even fictitious, views among some scholars as to the contemporary realities of these states’ positions.⁷ Post-colonial thinking influenced Western perceptions of Asian states’ abilities, often in a largely paternalistic and negative way, well into the 1990s and, in some respects, beyond.⁸ Lack of appropriate language skills among those working on security in Asia further contributed to bias and underdeveloped thinking on Asian-specific dynamics. The dichotomous viewpoint that dominated Western scholarship during the Cold War pervaded analyst communities to the point where they naturally gravitated towards the more simplistic “us versus them” framework inherent in great power discourse.⁹

Incidentally, scholarship in Asia over the same period closely mirrored Western scholarship’s focus on Asia as a sub-region within the larger global system, albeit for largely different reasons. Until the 1990s, Asian scholars (and policy makers) viewed security in Asia largely as a byproduct of global-level competition, first between the US and the Soviet Union, and later between the Soviet Union and China.¹⁰ Conflict between and within Asian states, such as Vietnam and Cambodia, were treated as secondary effects of global-level great power competition. Where Asian scholars did attempt to treat Asia as a distinct region, they adopted structurally determinant paradigms such as the “periphery” or “third world” to describe Asia’s place within the global system.¹¹ Ostensibly an effort to differentiate Asia from the West and/or colonial states, self-reference of the region as a periphery or third world inadvertently reinforced the perception of Asia as a subset of global great power relations, insignificant in itself to constitute a regional analytic approach.

Predictably, such mis- and preconceptions resulted in impoverished writing on Asian security within mainstream Western scholarship. Paul Cohen argues, for instance, that Western writing on China and Asia in the decades after the Second World War uniformly applied Western biases to their studies, some of which were based in imperialistic conceptions.¹² These approaches resulted in factually incorrect conclusions about historical cause and effect and inherently paternalistic accounts of Asian historical development. Martin W. Lewis and Kären Wigen similarly argue that early Western scholarship employed overly simplistic geographic accounts of “west” and “east” to the study of Asia, resulting in diminutive assumption of Asian states’ distinctness and historical origins.¹³ Lewis and Wigen note that re-conceptualizing these meta-regions into more precise world regions was the starting point for more informed scholarship. Most damning, perhaps, is Edward Said’s critique of Western scholarship on non-Western countries and civilizations, which argues that cultural chauvinism and bigotry among Western scholars resulted in Asian states being relegated to the periphery. States like China, Japan, the Koreas, Indonesia, and Vietnam were seen as too exotic or different from Western states to justify anything more than a secondary status in a Western-dominated international system.¹⁴

As with Western scholarship, Asian scholars’ focus on the global level and great power dynamics was an obstacle to the development of a more nuanced study of regional-level security dynamics. Reliance on strategic-level great power politics to understand conflict in the region, for instance, overshadowed local-level sources of insecurity between states like China, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, and Indonesia.¹⁵ Neither did such analysis pay appropriate attention to the development of regional norms and institutions in Asia that affected security relations and security dynamics.¹⁶ Singular focus on the global-level great power competition also obfuscated the developing multipolarity within Asia, particularly the dynamics between China and Japan – the two states with the capacity to affect regional-level security developments irrespective of great power involvement.

Western and Asian scholarship on IR and security studies in Asia has improved markedly over the past several decades. Western scholarship now demonstrates greater understanding of Asian politics, economics, cultures, and languages that allow for more substantive writings. Asian scholars, conversely, have undertaken Asia-specific theory building in line with the region’s historical and contemporary dynamics. Yet Western scholars’ tendency to view Asian security as a sub-section of global security relations and as a byproduct of great power competition persists. Such writing commonly treats Asia as a sub-region within the Western-dominated international system, not as a self-contained region with specific economic, political, and, most importantly, security characteristics. While not confined to a single theoretical IR approach, contemporary scholarship on Asian security is most closely aligned with a Realist approach, which holds the anarchic systemic level as the appropriate reference point and great power politics as the fundamental force determining “global” security.¹⁷ Prominent examples of Western and Asian writers of this type include Henry Kissinger, Thomas Christensen, Aaron Friedberg, Robert Kaplan, Michael Pillsbury, Michael Swaine, and John Mearsheimer, among others. All accomplished and talented academics and policy thinkers in their own right, these scholars share the tendency to view Asian security through the lens of US interests, China’s rise, global-level security dilemmas and geopolitics, great power transitions, and system-level hegemonic power. Consequently, none of them offer a balanced understanding of Asian regional dynamics.

Kissinger, for example, writes that US–China competition in Asia closely resembles that between England and Germany preceding the First World War.¹⁸ Inherent in this interpretation of Asian security dynamics is that the region’s future hinges solely on US–China relations. Christensen presents a similar view of Asian security as held hostage by US–China relations and argues that the US must manage China through engagement and exchange to avoid conflict in Asia.¹⁹ Conversely, Friedberg, Kaplan, Pillsbury, Mearsheimer, and Swaine employ power transition theory in the study of Asian IR and security, and argue, to different effect, that global-level great power competition between the declining US and rising China is the defining feature of Asian order and security.²⁰

Authors including John Ikenberry and Martin Jacques identify US and/or Chinese “dominance” of Asia as the region’s defining security characteristic. Ikenberry, for instance, argues that the US has developed international institutions within Asia that support its position as a security provider to such a degree that China will have little ability to shift the existing security status quo.²¹ Jacques argues the adverse point, stating that China will achieve global hegemony through its economic rise and, as such, will fundamentally transform Asia’s security environment.²² Despite their conflicting interpretation of which state has or will achieve hegemonic status, both scholars follow the typical Western pattern of prioritizing the global level and great power competition in theorizing about Asian security outcomes.

Notably, one can observe a similar tendency to privilege US–China relations and US hegemony over regional-level dynamics in Chinese scholars writing on Asian security. One can see these tendencies clearly in writings by Yan Xuetong, Jia Qingguo, and Shi Yinhong, three of China’s most well-known and widely cited IR scholars. Yan Xuetong’s work on IR and Asian security, for example, largely follows a Realist conception of global power politics, particularly in relation to US–Chinese competition. Yan writes, for instances, that Asian security is defined by China’s rise and the US’s simultaneous decline, and that global-level conflict between the two states is inevitable.²³ Jia Qingguo similarly writes that US–Chinese relations are the primary source of global order, largely downplaying ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Notes on contributors
• 1 Sino-Japanese competition in East Asia’s emerging security complex
• 2 Framing Sino-Japan competition: drivers and responses across the military, economic, and diplomatic sectors
• PART I Security institutions
• PART II Security issues
• PART III Security relations
• Selected bibliography
• Index