Geostrategy and Great Power Relations: A Reanalysis of the Basic Trends of Sino-Japanese Relations

Abstract

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, China and Japan have fought against the epidemic through high-level contacts, donation and so on. The Chinese proverb “mountains and rivers on foreign land, wind and moon under the same sky” gave warmth of friendship to the bilateral relations. However, since Yoshihide Suga won the election, the Sino-Japanese relations have taken a worsening turn. The current Prime Minister Fumio Kishida further takes counterbalancing China as top priority. The “anti-COVID-19 diplomacy” in 2020 had very limited improvement on Sino-Japanese relations. It is clear that since the implementation of the U.S. strategic competition policy against China, Japan, without hesitation, turns to the “national interest theory” and “international contribution theory” by positioning to counterbalance China. Japan has become one of the few Asian countries that have completely sided with US in the China–US strategic competition. Since the normalization of Sino-Japanese relations, the principle of “good-neighborhood” has been totally replaced by the seemingly determined approach of “counterbalance” proposed by Japanese politicians. Japan has gone beyond the issue of its neighboring areas, trying to assist the United States’ strategic containment of China, which has added a new variable to China’s neighboring diplomacy.