The China-Japan Relationship Continues in the Spirit of Abe Shinzo

The relationship between China and Japan goes back to antiquity, not surprisingly given the geographical proximity of the two countries. And in the view of most Chinese, the Japanese were always the beneficiaries of China’s more developed civilization. Japan absorbed China’s architecture and clothing styles, Buddhism and civil service examinations, even the writing system of Chinese characters.

Fast forward through the centuries, however, and Japan caught up, and surpassed, China’s development. By the mid-1930s, Japan’s industrial needs, its militarization, and growing national sentiment combined in lethal form to create a war machine that first took aim at China, with catastrophic consequences. The Japanese attacked and occupied large swaths of China. The butchery in Nanjing, in particular, will live in Chinese memory for centuries. Along with the devastation of the war came the psychological damage of being so brutally victimized by a country many Chinese saw – and still continue to see – as an inferior “little brother.”

After the war, Japan’s utter defeat left the country in ruins. Meanwhile, China's civil war continued to rage on for another four years. China, though victorious in World War II along with its Western allies, found itself devastated, poverty-stricken, and under new management.

One would not have expected that the relationship between China and Japan could have been repaired in a thousand years. Surprisingly, it took less than three decades for relations between the two to be normalized in 1972. China sent pandas to Japan the following year as a sign of goodwill.

Then, in perhaps one of the more stunning diplomatic visits of all time, China’s paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, made a state visit to Japan in October of 1978. Deng met not only with senior members of the Japanese government, but also with Hirohito, the emperor of Japan who had allowed his nation to unleash almighty hell on China 40 years earlier.

Throughout the postwar period and well into the 21st century, Japan ambled on with a pacifist constitution and a set of policies designed to keep the country from ever becoming an aggressor in war again. In the meantime, however, China, exploring the benefits of its new wealth, began an assertive drive to upgrade and expand its military capabilities, resulting in increasing concern not only from China’s Asian neighbors but from nations around the world.

Enter Abe Shinzo, scion of one of Japan’s great political families. Abe's grandfather was prime minister in the late 1950s; Abe's father served as foreign minister in the 1980s. Abe Shinzo himself served as prime minister from 2006 to 2007, and again for eight years from 2012 to 2020, years during which he made a lasting impact that informs the Sino-Japanese relationship until today. Even after his shocking assassination in July 2022, Abe’s influence still shapes China-Japan relations.  

Abe's tenure and track record provided the foundation for contradictory assessments of his policies. Depending on one's point of view, Abe might be called hawkish, pragmatic, a globalist, and a nationalist on any given day. What he was not, however, was blind.

Abe’s genius was to recognize early on – even during his first stint in office, well before such views had become the mainstream – that China had started down a path of intense “competition.” Beijing is striving to achieve dominance in both civilian and defense technologies that would make China immune and impermeable to the efforts of other nations to repress it. The belief, whether true or not, that the West and her allies around the world want to “contain” China has long been a sore spot for the Chinese leadership.

All of this is important because today Prime Minister Kishida Fumio of Japan finds himself following in Abe’s footsteps – whether he originally intended to or not. Kishida inherited from Abe the premise that Japanese security is being challenged by China, a plank that Abe included in his 2013 National Security Strategy. That view did not change in the revised version of the NSS, issued in late 2022 by Kishida’s administration.

Abe then coined the concept that has been the gold standard for the last 10 years of how to describe his – and Japan’s – mission: a “Free and Open Indo-Pacific,” now known as FOIP. Without naming China as the cause or culprit, Abe stated in five simple words the terms by which Japan would go forward to create and defend its foreign and military policies. Abe’s successors have made tweaks around the edges but kept the core framing; Kishida himself unveiled his “New Plan for a ‘Free and Open Indo-Pacific’” in March.

In the United States, the former Trump administration also embraced Abe’s emphasis on maintaining freedom of the seas in the international waters of the Indo-Pacific, a vast area of the globe that includes all of China, Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand, the South Pacific, much of India, and for some also includes the Indian Ocean waters and land masses that go right up to the east coast of Africa.

Moving forward to today, the Kishida platform looks suspiciously similar to the one that Abe brought forth 10 years ago. This is despite Kishida’s reputation as a “dove,” including a history of being more friendly toward China. When he took office, some expected Kishida to break from Abe’s relentless focus on the threats posed by China’s rise – even if Japanese officials were always careful to speak of the general principles at stake instead of “naming and shaming” Beijing.

That has not happened. If anything, Kishida has leaned even more fully into positioning Japan as a direct counter to China, by drawing parallels between Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the potential for an unnamed aggressor to do the same in the Asia-Pacific (very obviously China, even if it is never named). “Ukraine today could be East Asia tomorrow,” has become the mantra of the Kishida administration to justify its own efforts to bolster Japan’s defense capabilities.

Somewhat surprisingly, while Japan clung firmly to the “China threat” thesis, it has been China that changed. Beijing officially and pointedly shunned Abe for the first few years of his tenure. But as time wore on, China realized that a perpetual deep-freeze with one of its close neighbors – and a valuable source of technological trade and investment to boot – was not in Beijing’s interests. The result was an uneasy thaw, whereby China and Japan continue to trade barbs in press conferences but keep diplomatic channels open – a feat, it should be noted, that the United States has not managed to replicate.

This, too, has continued under Kishida. Foreign Minister Hayashi Yoshimasa visited China on April 1 and 2, and China and Japan continue to hold confidence-building talks on maritime issues, with the latest round convening in April 2023.

Both of these are exchanges the Biden administration in the U.S. would be keen on replicating with China, but it has not been so lucky. Beijing has expressed little interest in rescheduling Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s trip to China, which was canceled amid the “spy balloon” furor of February 2023. Meanwhile, the United States often complains about the lack of confidence-building mechanisms and routine exchanges that can prevent unintended escalation on flashpoint issues. Yet Japan, which has an active territorial dispute with China in the East China Sea, is able to convene such talks with Beijing, while Washington is not.

Japan has found a balance between competition and engagement with China in a way that the United States has not been able to manage. In that sense, the pragmatic but unequivocal vision of Abe Shinzo continues to be imbued in Japan’s positions on China today. In the end, those positions may serve everyone well – including, first and foremost, the two nations that have a relationship going back to the mists of time.