Q1: How do you assess Sino-Japanese relations, which have been very tense for many years?
Stephen Nagy: I think a good starting point for us to look at where relations are today is to go back to 2010 when a Chinese fisherman rammed some Japanese Coast Guard vessels in the East China Sea. This began the negative spiral of the current cyclops Sino-Japanese relations in that the fisherman was arrested by the Okinawa government. This was an application of local law which meant it reinforced Japan’s claims on the Senkaku islands, which is an area of dispute that China has with Japan. From the Chinese standpoint this was a shift away from the status quo over the Senkaku islands. Later two years, the Senkaku islands were nationalized under the Democratic Party of Japan’s Noda administration and this was further seen by the Chinese side as a breach of the status quo.
Both the Japanese side and the Chinese side I think they both understood the shared interest in ensuring that the Senkaku island issue remained quiet and unpoliticized, and they kept those outside actors that could throw a wrench in the relations under control, but with the nationalization of these islands what we saw is really the worst coming together of many problems we saw a new nationalist leader coming into Japan Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and we saw a confident Xi Jinping came into power in the Chinese context, and this created what we call a negative spiral in bilateral relations really until Prime Minister Abe was determined to normalize relations or bring them back to what we call seikei bunri or the separation of economics and politics which I think has been the traditional model of how Japan and China have dealt with their difficult past to try to create a mutually beneficial relationship based on their comparative advantages in their economy and societies.
Q2: Despite the fact that Xi Jinping hasn’t visited Japan for ages and and the relations personally between him and and Shinzo Abe were also very lukewarm, the economic relations were thriving and Japan had a positive economic balance with China, exporting loads of goods incorporating in many space somehow the economic and political realities were separated in a pretty healthy way. What do you think?
Stephen Nagy: I think these two leaders also understood that their futures are intertwined whether they like it or not. They have comparative advantages that relatively balance both states. Japan still has huge amounts of technology that it sends to China. It has a huge economic footprint in terms of a manufacturing base in China and it hires millions of Chinese citizens and it has very close relations with local governments in the Chinese context. So Abe and Xi came together in 2019 in Beijing and they decided that they needed to move forward and normalize relations and they came together to agree upon 55 shared infrastructure connectivity projects in third countries. There was also a commitment to normalizing relationships and importantly a commitment for Xi Jinping to visit Japan in the spring of 2020 to sign a fifth political document which would outline the next 10 years of the relationship. So these two strong nationalist leaders were probably the right leaders to chart that path forward. But unfortunately Covid-19 has not only affected their bilateral relations but of course it has sent the world into a really difficult period . And I think the casualties of course is the bilateral relations between the two states but also its enhanced nationalism in both countries.
Q3: You talked about the economy, politics, Senkaku islands, but we didn’t actually touch upon history and this is a very important part in assessing and and looking for reasons why the relations are so difficult. So let’s talk a little bit about the second World War and and about how the Chinese and the Japanese perceive the way each other treat the topic connected with war today. Is the Chinese government satisfied with Japanese attitudes connected with admitting the moral responsibility for the second World War
Stephen Nagy: Absolutely not! But I think you use the word attitudes and that’s really really important and I think our Chinese friends over emphasize the views in Japan that perhaps deny Japan’s aggression in the region at large or deny the Nanjing massacre or other events that the Japanese imperial government was very much responsible for. But when we look at views of Japan about the imperial period, we have a real continuum of views we have I guess the left-leaning pacifist views that really are acknowledged very openly about Japan’s aggression and how it invaded China and and the terrible things that happened. And they foster international exchange programs, they bring in Chinese students, they openly discuss the Nanjing massacre and I think this is one side of the spectrum. On the other side of the spectrum we have right-wing conservatives that look at Japan’s wartime behavior through the lens of imperial powers that Japan was not really any different from the Brits or the Germans or other states. So this is the containment that exists. But for the ordinary Japanese citizens, it’s quiet shame in many ways that this thing happened in the past and that they would like to get over it, that they I think the ordinary citizens continue to recognize that Japan is a very changed country and that their country victimized other countries. But on the same hand I think they see contemporary China the People’s Republic of China is always shifting the bar as proactively engaged in historical Amnesia about its own history, whether it’s the Tiananmen Square massacre, what’s happening in Xinjiang with the Uighur people, what’s happened in Hong Kong, Tibet, but also we see historical amnesia about the apologies that Japanese leaders have made and even the Japanese emperor has made apologies. So it’s very complex. It’s politicized, and books like rademitters China’s Great War really is a great read to try and get a good understanding how China is very proactive in rewriting the post-world War II history placing China front and center of the countries that defeated fascism. And I think that we as scholars discussing Sino-Japanese relations should understand that this historical issue is now a politicized issue. It is very very difficult to unravel in the current circumstances.
Q4: Here if I may continue with two more questions on this. So first, I think I’ve heard a lot in the Chinese discourse that the Japanese society through education doesn’t really learn a lot about the history of the second World War. You mentioned the sort of feeling of of quiet guilt in the Japanese society, is it common, are the ordinary Japanese are aware of the history of the second World War and the Japanese role in atrocities in Asia?
Stephen Nagy: So yes but I think that we should put Japan’s imperialism in the context of Japan’s historical experience over the past 150 years, and what it means for Japanese identity. And in the same moment we need to understand what Japan’s imperialism means in terms of contemporary Chinese identity for Japan. It’s modern identity stretches from about the 1860s to today. The big events from the Japan’s perspective really was modernization, westernization, being defeated by the United States, the atomic experiences, the economic bubble, and the bubble burst. These are really the identifying characteristics how Japan understands its modern identity and history. Its identity is not being built on China but rather its experience in World War II and and being the the victims of the first and second atomic bombs or the Chinese experience and Mao Zedong said this in his meetings with Tanaka Kakuei, one of the prime ministers that visited China to normalize relations in the 1970s. He said you don’t need to apologize, without you we wouldn’t be a modern China and what he was referring to is that Japan has played a central role in the defining of what modern China is, who they defeated to become a cohesive country, they brought the current Communist Party of China into power and really it plays a much more central position in contemporary Chinese history than in the Japanese context. And thinking about from this point of view, it’s quite interesting to think why we have such a different view about where what the role of history in bilateral relations but also national identity. And this continues to be a challenge for both states because we could jump to Korea. Korea has a very similar view about its contemporary identity compared to China that without the Japanese annexation of the Korean Peninsula, without the Japanese imperial government squashing Korean identity, there would be no modern Korea.
Q5: You mentioned about the whole spectrum of views on Japanese historical role from the left wing to the right wing. Don’t you find that maybe the problem is that the government the politics are very right-wing so even though we have a lot of left-wing historians in Japan people who honestly do research speak the comfort women issue came because of the Japanese research, etc but then if we talk about the political discourse it’s all in denial all very much right-wing, very conservative.
Stephen Nagy: So I would say the discourse about World War II and the Sino – Japanese war would not be a right wing in the extreme sense but I would put it the sense that the Japanese government today believes that the past is the past. They’ve had committees the 2015 they had a cabinet decision on what was the correct understanding of history where again the the former conservative prime minister talked about Japan’s poor decisions that’s a one way to say that they made the wrong decision about how to respond to the west and how to engage with China they’ve released extended reports and there’s been multiple apologies not only from left-leaning politicians but also right-leaning politicians.
So I think that to characterize the current position and the education system as being led by far right is not really representative of the reality but I think they could be much more explicit about Japan’s wartime behavior. I think that there could be much better education but I’m speaking as a Canadian. Right in Canada we debated the right and wrong about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we debated about putting Aboriginal children in school, a hot topic in Canada, but my point is how we think about education and if you go to China and you go to Korea and you go to Japan that kind of critical engagement of history is not the way we learn about history. And I think this is actually probably one of the challenges that these states need to engage in how they understand their own history and I don’t want to be parochial on how I think education should be taught, but I think debating and teaching students how to learn the different sides of history is a really critical first step to finding ways to reconcile between these three states.
Q6: That would be something useful if in education there will be more of that in East Asia definitely and in all three of the states. Let’s leave history because we already talked a lot about this and let’s think about the present and the future how Japan is viewing engagement with China in the areas of of trade or the environment which becomes one of the most important topics now?
Stephen Nagy: What we commonly hear in the Japanese context and this is even within right-leaning political circles is that China is our neighbor, we cannot change our neighbor, we have to develop a functional relationship with our neighbor and we should find ways to benefit from China’s re-emergence as the center economic organizing principle within the region. And with that we see Japan really taking a non-zero-sum approach to China. So let me give you some examples. Japan has signed the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership with China, so this is an important agreement which is basically ASEAN+6 minus India and it’s has also signed the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. One includes China and one excludes China and I think that the excluding agreement the TPP-11 may potentially include China and Taiwan in the future if concrete reforms and commitments were made in the Chinese context. So this is reflective of the zero-sum agreement but we also see continued negotiations and discussions about a trilateral FTA between Japan, South Korea and China, which again is evidence of a non-zero-sum approach and we see Japan pre-pandemic and arguably post pandemic this will come back is on cooperation on climate change cooperation on third country infrastructure through the not officially under the BRI or the Free and Open Indo-Pacific Vision (FOIP). But using these frameworks to find opportunities to cooperate and I think non-traditional security issues will be also really important here. I’m thinking about climate change, I’m thinking about illegal fishing, thinking about piracy and of course in our current era transnational diseases what could be more of an important area of cooperation than dealing with the next COVID-19 because there will be a next COVID-19, so they are definitely thinking about engaging with China.
Q7: Do the Japanese play the proactive sign? Do they reach out to China or is it a rather waiting for maybe Chinese activity? Is Japan more active in in trying to find areas for corporations?
Stephen Nagy: So this is a great question and I think that it’s led to different areas. Japan is a democratic society so the Japanese business federation reaches out outside the government and that is a possibility. But we also have party to party ways to engage, so the Liberal Democratic Party and the Chinese Communist Party reach out to find areas of cooperation. This is you know it goes but we have to go back to history but party to party relations have traditionally been the area where Japan and China solve many of their difficult issues. Prior to 2010 the party party relations were quite thick so somebody from the Japanese side could call up somebody in the party on the job on the Chinese side and they’d find ways to deal through backdoor diplomacy with some of the difficult issues. Now this has become really really more difficult and explains why I think there’s a divergence in bilateral relations that the people with direct experience with um World War II have all passed and the people with those strong relationships in each party are no longer influential in the same way that they used to be. This is creating huge challenges. So prior to the Tiananmen Square massacre of course the huyabong which was a very connected politician in the Chinese Communist Party but also had very strong ties with the former prime minister of Japan Prime Minister Nakazone and they used their party to party network to deal with many of the prickly issues that exist between these two states today. They’re not as close party to party and this I think is partly explaining some of the challenges that they’re facing.
Q8: You talked about reaching out in cooperation but then there is one area where Japan definitely shows how different it is from China that’s the area of security where Japan is very closely cooperating with the US and the more the U.S is pressing China the more Japan is maybe closer to the US and working hand hand in hand. How does this influence a Chinese Japanese relations?
Stephen Nagy: So geography and proximity are the key words that I would use again it goes back to my point Japan’s a next-door neighbor of China. So what happens in the region will immediately affect Japan much differently than the United States and as a result Japan takes an approach where it strengthens its alliance with the United States because it views that as the final guarantor of its security but the domestic divisions in the United States have made that security guarantee more questionable in some ways especially with the election of the former president of the United States and what we’ve seen over the past 10 years or 15 years is Japan start to diversify its partnerships within the region. So we call them strategic partnerships and the strategic partnerships are not military alliances. They’re economic development infrastructure connectivity, development where they provide aid to countries in Southeast Asia for example to help build their security capabilities to deal with the challenges in the South China Sea. Recently they’ve signed the so-called reciprocal access agreements with Australia and the UK. These are meant to help build some of the deterrence capabilities that Japan would like to invest in to push back against how the Japanese understand China pushing into its territorial waters and territories but also thinking about areas like Taiwan. We should get into Taiwan but from the Japanese point of view, Taiwan is individual indivisible in terms of security it’s a critical nexus for sea lines of communication but also as a trade partner and most importantly is those semiconductor supply chains. That really go into many of the signature products of Japan. Toyota cars, Suzuki cars, phones, etc. So Japan is building deterrence capabilities to constrain Chinese behavior. But I think it’s really really important to understand that Japan’s approach is not primarily through military tools but embedding itself in the broader Indo-Pacific economy, institution building, helping countries develop and really shaping the region’s development so that it’s transparent rules-based and rules don’t mean that they’re concrete rule but rules that are based that evolve through negotiation and compromise and that they continue to be transparent. And this continues to be Japan’s vision and it’s articulated through this idea of a Free and Open Indo-Pacific Vision.
Q9: How do you think if we change the perspective and we look at China how do you think China views its coexistence with Japan on both the rhetoric side and the pragmatic side.
Stephen Nagy: I’ve just been finishing a book on this and it’s really looking at how Chinese perspectives uh Scholars perspectives and policy perspectives we’re looking at Chinese or Japanese foreign policy under Prime Minister Abe. So I did quite a few interviews in China before the pandemic in Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing and Guangzhou. And what was interesting about this is that there’s you know at least five schools of thought about how Chinese scholars are thinking about Japan and that they see Japan either as you know a secondary partner to the United States or as a state that’s really interested in more autonomy and charting out a vision that is more linking Japan security to the broader security, and that China is actually not the target but rather the the FOIP to restore Japan’s position within the region not just the dominant country but as a an influential country.
Q10: This is what I wanted to ask you are there concerns among Chinese theoreticians and researchers about Japan being too powerful in the region?
Stephen Nagy: Yes but I think these the hawkish scholars and the scholars that aren’t Japanese those that haven’t spent a lot of time looking at Japan I think that the general understanding is shallow. They overplay the strengths and underplay the weaknesses of Japanese society but if you look at the Japanese they’ll look at Japan’s demographic challenges, they’ll look at the general inclination towards pacifism, you know declining interest in being hungry, ambitious power and they don’t really see it as a reality. So I don’t really like the idea of painting the Chinese world view with one brush. I think there’s actually a lot of diversity but you need to drill down into you know who are the ones speaking to the government and the one speaking to the government I think are generally much more pessimistic and overplay the position of Japan and you need to talk to other Chinese scholars that have a deep understanding of its history, its relationships with countries within the region and it’s of course its identity so it’s always useful to have a speak to many people and move away from dominant government position and try to get a better sense of which positions are not being are not so representative in at the government level but are discussed in intellectual communities and that capacity you’ll see a lot more diversity and these are linked also to the think tanks of the Chinese Communist Party and there is I’m sure a lot of flow of ideas different ideas that reach to decision makers in China well there’s incentive in the Chinese context to write about the triangular relations between Japan and the United States and China from the viewpoint that I think reinforces the Party doctrine and this creates challenges in terms of what is the appropriate understanding of other countries within the region. And again this is a systemic challenge within the the Chinese context. Are they getting the right information and how does this affect policy formation but at any rate Japan is the second largest or third largest economy you know it spends about 55 billion dollars on its self-defense forces a year. It is a significant technological industrial power and importantly and I think indexes like the Asia power index is a really great tool to see how Japan you know really hits above its belt in terms of diplomatic power in terms of development in terms of trust within the region. So there’s a lot of ways to measure but I do think we need to disaggregate within the Chinese context the hawks and the scholars and area specialists and how they’re interpreting this relationship.
Q11: One last question and one one area that we haven’t covered that much are the structural realities that might make it difficult to pursue plans of closer cooperation between China and Japan. What other challenges what other dangers?
Stephen Nagy: Well leadership is one leadership is always an issue I think the current pandemic is also making. I’ll break it down so leadership I think these black swan events like the pandemic but I also think we need to look at the regional economy and how it’s evolving in different directions. So let’s start at the leadership level I think within the Chinese context President Xi will likely consolidate his power at the upcoming 20th Party Congress and the following spring National People’s Congress likely but this is not for certain. There are so many rapid changes that we never know, so I really think that this is one particular area and if he consolidates his power you know there’s two choices does he want to um recalibrate China’s position after he’s consolidated his position to tilt towards the West in Japan so that they can concentrate on economic development and really pivot back to Dang Xiaoping’s focus on social economic stability and development is the primary goal of the Chinese Communist Party that is one choice but of course there’s the other choice and you know Kevin Rodden his recent essay on Project Syndicate wrote about Xi wanted to end or complete Mao’s legacy of reunifying Taiwan with China. It sounds terrifying because frankly I think it will result in a regional war and potentially much worse it will destroy the regional economy that has brought prosperity and stability to the entire region and it could become kinetic in a nuclear way very quickly so this is potentially two pathways if he consolidates his rule and we need to drill down into the central committee the poly bureau and the standing committees composition following these two important meetings if he comes out weaker. This suggests that there’s a lot of discontent with the direction he’s taken China over the past 10 years and that the different stakeholders within the party and within the Chinese political sphere would like a different approach to the West. This is also for impossibility. So out of those three scenarios two potentially means that China could tilt again to the West. I’m not saying open up completely but start to think about more productive and cooperative relationships on regional and global issues. One of those scenarios is deeply disturbing and it’s something that we need to be cautious and we need to continue to send the strongest of signals to Xi Jinping and the Chinese leadership that this is not an acceptable outcome. Personally I think Taiwan is a global public good but we need to stand by the one China policy but we continue to send the message to the leaders of Taipei and Beijing that the status quo is the best situation to ensure we have stability in the region that we continue to have economic integration that does bring social economic development to the entire region that seems to be the best option but leadership is a big issue is change of leadership possible in Japan will deliver a democratic party evolution. They lost power a couple times in the past 70 years twice.
I think only when we look at the Liberal Democratic Party it is an umbrella party we have conservative wings and liberal wings if we were to think about the current party and the Canadian context we would call it a liberal party liberal in terms of social government intervention or government intervention into the economy support for families the support for culture. We would not consider it a conservative nationalist party which is fascinating because I think the narrative is very very different um I think we’ll likely see political stability in Japan for the coming years. And I think this is great for a sino-japanese relations Prime Minister Kishida is facing an election this summer in July he’s likely to strengthen his position within the diet and that means he can start to take a more nuanced approach with the Chinese in terms of stabilizing relations post-pandemic and post the two meetings in China nothing will change until those two meetings are finished in the Chinese context and that will really help gauge the direction we’re going to go I mentioned leadership and I mentioned COVID-19. This pandemic came out as a shock it has enhanced many of the divisions that existed we’ve seen some politicians racialize the covid-19 pandemic which I think has created huge problems. This is not a Chinese disease. This is human disease and this has really created challenges. Will another pandemic come or a large natural disaster and how can this disrupt relations is an important thing to be thinking about. Lastly I think is the direction of economic integration and here I think that the Chinese are moving towards the Dual circulation model which is pulling away from the international market so that they feel more secure and the west and their Partners such as Japan, South Korea, India are starting to selectively diversify away from China not decouple selectively diversify on sensitive technologies. So if this continues to happen what we might see is the balkanization or the bifurcation of the global economy into a Chinese sphere and a non-chinese sphere .
Now this has many problems for prices for under mutual understanding for how we engage with each other and I think this is a really big risk so we need to watch this carefully. There was one other point that I wanted to mention on this particular point is that you know trade and has been the primary vehicle of building understanding and creating non-government actors that keep our societies binded and whether we look at the amcham the American Chamber of Commerce or the Japanese Chambers of Commerce, European Chambers of Commerce, they’ve all been advocates for can you continue to trade with China yes even though Donald Trump advocated uh decoupling American Investments increased in China so they were very explicit they disagreed with Mr Trump but on the same hand they want the Chinese government to change some of their practices they want an equal trading field they want to ensure that some of the Chinese local laws at least are more transparent, for example, data localization and what does the National Intelligence law of 2017 mean in the Chinese context or the 2018 cyber security law.
There’s a lot of implications for these laws on foreign businesses and I think they would like some clarity so that they can maintain those relationships so the direction of China Japan relations and China let’s say West relations really are dependent at least on those three levels and I think we need to watch really really and we need to find crosswalks to de-escalate relations create opportunities for cooperation through education and business but also be conscious of the realities of what does Xi Jinping want for China and you know what cost will that come for other countries and the current direction from my standpoint is not as optimistic as I would like it to be and I think it’s a deviation from Dang Xiaoping’s 24 character guide for the direction of China and I think those worries are broadly shared in the region and look at the Institute of Southeast Asian studies annual report from Southeast Asia 2017, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22 countries are worried about Chinese hegemony within the region countries are worried about China dominating the South China Sea there’s serious trust issues so I think we really need to have a reality check that the how we think about China shouldn’t just be through the lens of Japan China or U.S China but rather all of its regional neighbors and those other countries because there seems to be some a lot of commonality of concern. And that needs to be addressed on the Chinese side but equally so the Chinese side has many concerns of their own in terms of U.S military presence within the region and the use of their market to shape China.
Last thing I think importantly thinking about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine . What is the messages that this is sending to China and to the regional countries and I think from the Chinese standpoint, they’ve understood clearly that the United States and the EU and other countries really have hegemonic power over the financial system, and this is something that they will need to address if they really would like to take Taiwan by force which I don’t think they do that if they would like to manage the current international order or tweak it in the way that we were talking today in your presentation which I agree with that they’re going to have to take a much more cautious approach to how they engage with Taiwan, and there’s also the lesson of how to take Taiwan by force and this will require overwhelming power, power to defeat not only the United States but Japan Taiwan and its allies. From the regional country standpoint they’re watching what the Ukrainians are doing with limited resources and they’re building their deterrence capabilities and selectively diversified from China. So it’s interesting to think that the Japan-China relationship that we started our discussion with now is linked to the fate of Ukraine in this part of the world and that states in the region that I live in are looking at security very differently they’re looking at China very differently and China’s looking at the region in a way that it is being pushed towards securitorization rather than building platforms for cooperation that I think are based on transparency and a common state of rules okay well a lot of concerns for the future but also some positive views and I think we covered a lot from history to modernity and I really hope that the positive scenarios will be the ones that will be actually happening thank you very much for our conversation for all the insights all the information.
Stephen R. Nagy 
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