Mr. Hu's relentlessly upbeat visit

Chinese President Hu Jintao will leave Japan Saturday after a five-day visit, a visit that the Chinese Communist Party's external relations bureau has described as a "great success."

(Photo from the Office of the Prime Minister)

It is hard to dispute that, as far as symbolism goes, the visit was indeed a success. Mr. Hu and Prime Minister Fukuda Yasuo showed that the relationship is on an even keel, and Mr. Hu, by staying longer in Japan than in any other country (a meaningful statement considering his relentless globe trotting), showed Japan that China still finds value in a close relationship with its wealthier (for now) neighbor. The two leaders reaffirmed the "strategic, reciprocal relationship" approach to Sino-Japanese relations developed during Abe Shinzo's premiership.

In a joint statement, the two leaders agreed to a five-point program to enhance peaceful cooperation between Japan and China: (1) political confidence-building measures, including annual summits between heads of state and government, exchanges between parties and legislatures, and high-level visits and talks in the security realm; (2) cultural and personal exchanges; (3) reciprocal cooperation in the areas of energy and the environment, trade, finance, investment, and other economic sectors, continuation of the high-level economic dialog, and making the East China Sea a sea of "peace, cooperation, and friendship;" (4) cooperation in East Asia, including a commitment to the six-party process, with China welcoming normalization of Japanese-North Korea relations following resolution of "various problems," and the realization of an East Asian region grounded in openness, transparency, and inclusiveness; and (5) cooperation to resolve global problems and combat global warming, energy shortages, and infectious diseases (for China this latter effort starts at home).

As one might expect, there is little of substance in the joint agreement. MOFA has provided a list of concrete steps that will be taken in the coming months, but for the most part these are limited to scheduled summit meetings, visits, and exchanges. I'm certainly not complaining about that — the more interaction between the two governments and peoples, the better — but this week's summitry was more about "agreeing to pursue agreement" and establishing a new framework for Sino-Japanese relations than reaching substantive agreement on the real issues that haunt the bilateral agenda.

Reading the transcript of the joint press conference with Mr. Hu and Mr. Fukuda held on Wednesday, it is clear that both governments worked hard to keep the tone positive. The only reference to bilateral history was Mr. Hu's noting that "there are more than 2,000 years of history of friendly interaction between the peoples of Japan and China." The prevailing, tacit agreement in Sino-Japanese — and now, under President Lee Myung-bak, Japanese-South Korean — relations seems to be that all governments concerned will follow the Basil Fawlty line: "Don't mention the war." Unpleasantness over Tibet and poisoned gyoza was dispatched with ease in questioning; indeed, Mr. Hu, questioned about discussions with the Dalai Lama's representatives before the summit, drew a hard line, stating that it is now the responsibility of the Dalai Lama's "side" to forswear violence, separatist activities, and efforts to wreck the Olympics. The two leaders remained focused largely on enhanced political and economic times.

It is worth noting the difference in Japanese and Chinese visions. Mr. Fukuda spoke largely of the bilateral relationship; Mr. Hu spoke of the bilateral relationship, but embedded it in a regional and global context. In his remarks at the press conference, Mr. Hu spoke frequently of mechanisms for bilateral and regional cooperations. Wannabe dragon slayers may think that talk by Chinese officials about multilateral cooperation is a ploy to disarm potential enemies, but I think that may be overly cynical. China clearly recognizes the value of regional institutions, even with Japanese involvement (that might dilute China's power within said institutions). Judging by this summit, there is an appreciation in Beijing that it is better to placate Japan and have it play a constructive role in the region than to have an embittered Japan drawn to fantasies of containing China. The China on display at the joint press conference was a confident regional leader dedicated to creating a new East Asian order — hence there was no mention of the US (or Taiwan) by either leader.

There is nothing the US can or should do about this: Japan needs stable, cordial relations with both the US and China. Indeed, perhaps the more Japan undertakes initiatives outside the US-Japan alliance, the healthier the alliance will become, as Japan will feel less obligated to do Washington's bidding for lack of other options.

The question now is whether this approach is sustainable within Japan. For months now, the LDP's ideological conservatives and their allies in the media have been hammering Mr. Fukuda for being soft on China, especially in regard to Tibet and the poisoned gyoza issue. The "True Conservative Policy Research Group," the seat of the conservative ideologues within the LDP, has been particularly relentless in its criticism of Mr. Fukuda.

In a Mainichi article reviewing the group's opposition to Mr. Fukuda's China policy, one member is quoted as saying, "China policy will be one important theme in the next party president election. If Mr. Aso enters the presidential election, most of the members will shift their support to him." This last line is not particularly surprising — I've assumed from the beginning that Nakagawa Shoichi's study group is at least in part a committee to elect Aso Taro — but this article as a whole shows that the conservative approach to China remains bankrupt. The conservatives still have nothing constructive to offer. They would still rather harangue China for its failings than outline a way forward.

While Mr. Abe's overtures to China suggest that a conservative prime minister can still pursue a positive relationship with China, I fear that an Aso government — particularly an Aso government accompanied by a McCain administration calling for a League of Nations Democracies — would be considerably less forward-looking in its China policy. Mr. Aso might not necessarily return Sino-Japanese relations to the Koizumi-era deep freeze, although a glance at this speech he gave in 2006 on Yasukuni, in which he fails to mention the enshrined Class-A war criminals, suggests that Mr. Aso might have a devastating impact on the latest Sino-Japanese rapprochement; Mr. Aso and his comrades will most likely not embrace the Fawlty line. With Mr. Fukuda enfeebled and Mr. Aso positioning himself to take the premiership, there may yet be bumps ahead, sooner rather than later.

That said, I suspect that over the long term, the ability of China hawks in both Japan and the US to freeze or rollback cooperative ventures with China will be limited, provided that Beijing continues to talk about cooperative mechanisms and regional order. The challenge is making it to the long term with the least amount of backsliding due to agitation by conservatives.

UPDATE: Perhaps as part of the ongoing process of reinventing himself, Mr. Aso praised the talks as being effective on the tainted gyoza problem.

The US in Asia and the world

Princeton's G. John Ikenberry has a long guest post at the Washington Note addressing Kishore Mahbubani's arguments in The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East. Not having read Mr. Mahbubani's book yet, I can't speak directly to his argument, but I do want to address the points raised by Professor Ikenberry.

The crux of Professor Ikenberry's argument is that the rise of Asia does not necessarily mean the decline of the West, or, more specifically, the decline of the US. He does not deny Asia's growing influence, but he suggests that while power is flowing Asia's way, the Asian powers have not proposed new organizing principles for world order. He suggests that what might happen — and what will probably be the best possible outcome — is a modified version of the American-led postwar system, a postwar system with an Asian flavor in which China and the other Asian powers recognize that maintaining the system is in their interests. As Professor Ikenberry writes:

China may well be tomorrow's greatest supporter of the American-led postwar system. That system provides rules and institutions for openness and nondiscrimination. These are features of order that China will want going forward as its growing economic weight will be greeted by efforts by others (including some governments in the West) to close and discriminate. Rule-based international order is not a Western fixation. It is a system of governance that all states - East and West - have some interest in maintaining, China not least.

There is considerable value in this argument. Given that China most likely will not have the opportunity to remake the international order anew in the manner that the US and its allies did in the aftermath of the World War II, China, India, and the other rising powers will have little choice but to jury-rig preexisting institutions to reflect their power and their interests.

It's also possible to overstate US decline, both in Asia and globally. As an "Asian" power — the US unmistakably is a great power in Asia — the US will have a stake in shaping the "Asian" world order. Washington will have to reconsider how it exercises its power regionally and globally, of course, becoming less reliant on its military power and more willing to listen to others, but the US has not begun its Recessional yet.

The emphasis needs to change, however. Since the US expanded its role in Asia at the end of the war, its Asia policy has been schizophrenic, divided between a crusading, transformational tendency and a stabilizing tendency. This schizophrenia persists up to today, with the crusaders keen to paint China as the next great threat to the US. But the time for US crusades in Asia is past. For the first time in nearly two centuries, Asian powers are in a position to manage the region's affairs themselves. That doesn't mean there is no role for the US; in fact, it means the US role as stabilizer and pacifier is more important than ever. I think, for example, that the presence of the US military, especially the US Navy, has ensured that political tensions have risen inexorably despite the ongoing Asian arms race. In short, US power should be used less for dictating terms and more for underwriting the efforts of others to create international order. The US should participate in the latter process, but only as one country among many. Its alliances in the region should shift accordingly, measured more in terms of how the support this US role. Transformational ideas, like Abe Shinzo's and Aso Taro's "arc of freedom and democracy" have little place in this order. Asian countries are in no hurry to see the US evacuate Asia; if anything, they want the US to be more involved, to be less obsessed with terrorism and more willing to listen to their concerns. It is imperative that the US start thinking seriously about how it will play this stabilizing role in Asia over the long term.

The US role globally will be more central than in Asia, but the question will be the same: as Professor Ikenberry writes, "...the United States should be asking itself: what sort of international order do we want to have in place in 2040 or 2050 when we are relatively less powerful?" Extending US influence, if not predominance, will depend on developing foreign policy tools other than military power (and with it, a shift in attitude that acknowledges that the US is less able to dictate terms to other countries).

Meanwhile, it is a mistake to refer casually to "Asia" in this discussion. Whose Asia? Is Asia a codeword for China? For India? For ASEAN? Each of these players has a different vision for the region, which redounds to the advantage of the US. Just as the Asian regional future is unknown, so to is the future of an Asia-centered world order unknown. The US is still in a position to shape the Asian and global orders.

Recommended Book: In The Ruins of Empire, Ronald Spector

My apologies for not recommending a new book sooner, but blame it on a hectic few weeks in Japanese politics.

This book, though, is well worth reading. A sequel of sorts to Eagle Against the Sun, his account of the Pacific War, Ronald Spector outdoes his earlier effort in providing a comprehensive record of the bloody aftermath of the war in In the Ruins of Empire, a subject that may be as important for understanding Asia today as the war itself.

Spector, a professor of history at George Washington University, focuses on the aftermath of the war in Korea, China, Indochina, and Indonesia and the problems of reconstructing the domestic political orders faced by the US and its allies throughout the region (while trying to get stranded Japanese forces back to Japan).

There are a few points that struck me as particularly relevant. First, the US in 1945 was wholly unprepared for life as a superpower. Responsibility for postwar Asia — China especially — fell into Washington's lap, and for the most part the US government failed to forge a postwar settlement for the region. It was not for want of talent, at least on the spot; indeed, Spector is full of praise for individual OSS agents, military officers, and diplomats who worked with local political leaders and allied counterparts to set up new regimes. The fault, to Spector, was in Washington and other allied capitals, where senior leaders were inept in the face of considerable uncertainty. As he writes in the book's concluding paragraph, "The most deleterious effects of the Allied military presence developed not through blunders or misjudgments of those charged with carrying out the occupations, but when the highest levels of government acted indecisively, had mistaken notions or no notion at all about what was actually happening on the scene, and neglected or ignored reports from the field."

In the first months following the war, the US had no plans for Korea or Indochina, and its plans for China amounted to little more than pushing for a ceasefire between the Guomintang and the Communists, even as it assisted in moving Chiang's forces to northern China and providing Chiang with arms. The strategic vacuum in the early months of the postwar period made it all the more likely that US Asia policy would be viewed solely through the prism of anti-communism as the cold war unfolded. The consequences for US policy in Indochina, Korea, and China up to the present day require no further explanation.

If Washington suffered from a failure of imagination in its postwar Asia policy, the policies of Britain, France, and the Netherlands were almost impervious to the reality on the ground, especially the latter two. It was absurd to think that France and the Netherlands, broken nations reemerging from German occupation, could reassert imperial control over distant colonies whose peoples saw the mystique of the empires crumble as the imperialists were in turn conquered and whose national consciousnesses emerged during the war (not unlike the national movements that followed in the wake of Napoleon's conquests in Europe). The Dutch, lacking sufficient force to reassert control over Indonesia, actually had to rely on the British to do much of their fighting for them. Despite the fact that their empires were on the edge of oblivion, the European empires were determined to restore their empires to their former glory. They failed to appreciate both the political awakening among Asian peoples and their own attenuated statures.

A final interesting thread that ran throughout the book is the variegated roles played by stranded Japanese forces throughout Asia. While waiting to be repatriated to Japan, Japanese forces were present on all sides of the conflicts in the immediate aftermath of the war — in some cases helping to preserve order for the allied powers, in others working with opposition movements.

Spector's book ultimately provides an excellent reminder that history is messier than the textbooks would have us believe. Wars don't end when peace treaties are signed. Especially for wars in the modern period, the end of war presents a whole new set of challenges for the restoration of political and economic order (not to mention the lingering remnants of wartime hatred, which result at least in part from the need to mobilize whole populations and mar postwar relations between former adversaries).

North Korea as schoolyard bully

North Korea has demanded that Japan be excluded from the next round of six-party talks, to be held in Beijing sometime before the end of the year. What did Japan do to deserve Pyongyang's scorn? Well, aside from colonizing Korea during the first half of the twentieth century, Japan is guilty of having questions about whether the DPRK's return to the table should be celebrated (see here and here).

Reports the Japan Times:

"But it is only Japan that expressed its wicked intention, letting loose a spate of balderdashes," the Foreign Ministry said, referring to comments that Tokyo won't accept a nuclear North Korea. "The Japanese authorities have thus clearly proved themselves that they are political imbeciles incapable of judging the trend of the situation and their deplorable position."

Heh. Spate of balderdashes.

North Korea also said that Japan shouldn't participate because "it is no more than a state of the US and it is enough for Tokyo just to be informed of the results of the talks by Washington."

This bizarre tirade reveals something important about North Korea, namely that Pyongyang is just like the schoolyard bully who may not be the toughest kid around, but he's certainly the meanest -- and he is just as apt to use words as force to hurt others. This comment about Japan's being a "fifty-first state" goes straight to the jugular. It's the kind of concept that Japanese intellectuals are constantly debating as it encapsulates all the feelings of inferiority that come with Japan being the junior partner in the US-Japan alliance, "forced" to accommodate the presence of US forces on Japanese soil and all the spillover costs, material and psychological, that come with it.

As with any bully, Japan can either ignore the taunting or it can (theoretically) react violently; Japan will, of course, choose the former course of action. But the time may come when North Korea's even bigger neighbors may decide that they've had enough of its thuggery and act to end the DPRK's bullying once and for all.

This all goes to say that while international relations is a sophisticated discipline with its own jargon and cardinal concepts, it is important to remember that it is a social science -- concerned at heart with studying the behavior of humans in groups. Therefore its conclusions reflect not just state behavior but human behavior, particularly human behavior in settings that involve measurements of relative power and status and ego (whether individual or national).

It's not so much a matter of "everything I need to know I learned in kindergarten" but rather human beings in groups -- whether around a conference table in Beijing or in a children's playground -- act in similar (often similarly immature) ways.