Many regional nations, including China, view ASEAN+3 as a core regional institution, and ASEAN+6 as a regional concept originated mainly from the concerns of Japan and the US that China’s rapid economic growth and its huge market was exerting an overwhelming influence on political and economic trends in the region.
Japan attempted to resist China’s growing influence, which was seen as detrimental to the US and Japanese interests such as the promotion of intellectual property rights or human rights in developing economies, by involving Australia and India, seen as nations which shared the same basic democratic values and who were useful counterbalances against China.
The global acknowledgement of the significance of East Asia, especially in the US, has been mainly attributed to the rise of China. Put simply, the rise of China has meant that a traditional political power is now emerging as a potential superpower, whose political influence is now also backed by continuous high economic growth, impacting both political and economic spheres on a global scale. Excluded from a growing East Asian regional institution such as ASEAN+3, which China uses ‘as a shield to avoid other big powers’, the US judged China’s potential ascendancy in the region as being undesirable for its own interests.
The economic diplomacy that China has been executing to frustrate the containment that a US coalition might bring has involved the process of ‘knitting together the ‘spokes’ of the US-centred hub-and-spoke security-alliance system, and connecting them more closely with governments less friendly to Washington’.
China’s FTA initiative with ASEAN – at a time when she had previously been focused on negotiating its accession to the WTO and had opposed discriminatory regional integration – represented a policy turnaround, and symbolized China’s serious commitment to regional commercial diplomacy. The US was worried that China could gain a predominant influence as ASEAN+3 continued to grow, and this fear was shared not only by Japan, but also by other nations such as Indonesia and Singapore, all of which worked together to bring Australia into the first EAS. It was there that fears of a China-centric regional body first emerged.
More recently, China has assumed leadership in regional financial cooperation, a position that used to be occupied by Japan, especially after the 1997 Asian financial crisis.
China’s proposal to eventually replace the US dollar as the reserve currency with the SDR was seen by Japan’s Ministry of Finance (MOF) as an attempt to increase the presence of the renminbi in trade and investment payments in East Asia. MOF responded to this challenge by offering swap arrangements in yen (equivalent to $US60 billion), in a form separate from CMI. This was intended to increase the utilisation of the yen in Asian trade and investment.
When the first official summit between Japan, Korea, and China was held in December 2008, in Fukuoka in Japan, China decided to increase its financial commitment to bilateral swaps with Korea – whose currency had suffered a massive devaluation in the global financial crisis. The issue of who would provide the larger amount was heavily contested. Both eventually agreed to contribute equally; China increased from $4 billion to $30 billion, including the amount to be covered by Hong Kong, while Japan increased from $13 billion to $30 billion.
The battle over ‘who pays more’ was also a factor in the multilateralisation of CMI in May 2009; again, both agreed to provide equal contributions of $38.4 billion, although the Chinese contribution includes a contribution from Hong Kong. As ASEAN+6 is yet to include financial cooperation on its agenda, ASEAN+3 has been emerged as a regional financial institution, triggered by the global financial crisis, in which China’s increasing engagement in the regional financial cooperation met with MOF’s growing sense of competition.
Strengthened financial competition in ASEAN+3 has done two things: in the first place, it has served to weaken the ASEAN+6 framework. Second, it has heightened Japan’s increasing unease about China’s role in regional financial markets.
The China-Japan power struggle in East Asian regionalism illustrates China’s increasingly dominant role in regional structures. Japan’s regionalism policy, ASEAN+6 or otherwise, has quite a task ahead of it.
This is an interesting article to describe Japan’s motives behind its regionalism push.
It provides some supports to the argument that Japan has been unwilling to see other developing nations to improve their living standards and catch up with Japan and be equal with it.
I remember someone blamed that China was ungrateful to Japan’s aid in comments to an article earlier on. If Japan was like this, how and why could China be grateful to it?
It is complex regionalism, international economics and politics. This article can serve as a potential reference.
We need true and sincere international cooperation, not the kind of one undermining another or others.
As a by-product, this article also potentially increases the difficulties of Rudd’s push to establish an Asia Pacific Community, because it could be perceived as another tool to contain China.
All nations need to be rational and mature.
grateful to Japan?
hell no. does this “aid” match up any figure of the potential WWII penalty that has been waivered? with the shadow of the late war looming large you can safely laugh your butt off about notion that the main-land China “grateful” to Japanese aid. …until the propagada machines find some other victims and the elder people die away, with their wartime memories.
So many people have talked about the rise of China and the “lost decades” of Japan. I suggest we set a time table on this subject. We can start from 1945, 1949, 1976-78, 1989, or just this year 2009, but I think the best start is 1989 to compare China’s rise and Japan’s stagnation, politically as well as economically. The June 4th Tiananmen Incident gave Japan a rare historical opportunity to establish its leading role in political regionalism besides its economic superpower. However, Japan missed the chance by betraying democracy (see my article THE BETRAYAL OF DEMOCRACY: TIANANMEN’S SHADOW OVER JAPAN at http://www.historia-actual.com/hao/Volumes/Volume1/Issue4/esp/v1i4c7.pdf or Asahi’s recent interview of me at http://www.asahi.com/special/kajin/TKY200906080132.html). Japan must respect Asian people’s human/civil rights to have a role in Asia’s political regionalism.
Japan, in a sense, may have always been a deformed giant of dwarfs, largely due to its actions in the War time and as its defeat in that War and under the US occupation and influence.
It had few friends in Asia after the War, although it rose very rapidly economically. Others may have loved Japanese money, they don’t have the same attitude towards it people. The sentiments in Gao’s comments reflect something of that kind.
Could Japan be different and more forceful to China following June the 4th? Yes, it could. But could that change anything, either in terms of Japan’s international standing, or its subsequent economically lost decade? I doubt it.
I understand Jing Zhao’s sentiment, given what happened back then. But I am sorry to say that I am not sure his arguments are correct.
The rise of China economically and the relative decline of Japan, irrespectively whether it could or cold not avoid the lost decade, has been, is and will be inevitable, similar as Japan’s rapid rise and the change of its relative economic position internationally from the 1950s to the 1980s. Developing countries, or at least some of them will catch up and move to the production frontier of human technologies where the industrialised countries are.
Japan’s lost decade, just like the current financial and economic crisis, had its own domestic causes. But it had nothing to do with its attitude towards China at that time. To say otherwise is a bit far-reach.
Jing Zhao seemed to argue that could be averted by Japan’s actions and attitudes along. It is far from convincing logically.
If we do not specify a methodology of the study of China and Japan, we end up with repeating well known mainstream views.
There are many reasons for June 4th of 1989 as a start point to review China’s rise. Perhaps the most important reason is that few people know the truth of the incident until today. For example, if the 4000 students refused to leave Tiananmen Square that night, the PLA troops either could kill them or could fight themslves each other. That would lead to a civil war. Until now the regime had 20 years of “peace” staying in the power, but the Chinese society is not stable. There is no logic that the CCP can stay in power for another 20 years.
Thus we can know what we need to watch of Japan, and it becomes clear that(unfortunately) Japan’s ruling class made a vital mistake since 1989. Compared with the post-war 1950s-1970s politicians (the first rate in Japan’s history mainly because they knew their limitation well), the Japanese politics after 1989 is the worst rate. This is also the lost decades of the Japanese politics.
Jing, I take your point that the 1990s is also the lost decades of the Japanese politics, although I don’t understand politics much.
From economic point of view, the Japan’s lost decade should have a deep cause noly in its policy makers and their abilities, but in my view also and perhaps more importantly in the US-centric economics and its failure in providing theories to deal with the sort of economic problems that Japan had at that time.
Now the world, or the west major ecoomies are having the similar sort of economic problems as Japan had in the 1990s. Hopefully the economic profession will do something useful and relevant for this sort of problems. This time it involves the US.
So far, policy makers have avoided teh total collapse of the international banking system. That was a huge success. Hope more of this nature is coming.
I am sorry that my earlier posted comments (a reply to Jing Zhao’s second comments) have some typos, so I’d replace them with the following:
Jing, I take your point that the 1990s is also a lost decade of the Japanese politics, although I don’t understand politics much.
From economic point of view, the Japan’s lost decade should have a deep cause not noly in its policy makers and their abilities, but in my view also and perhaps more importantly in the US-centric economics and its failure in providing theories to deal with that sort of economic problems that Japan had at that time.
Now the world, or the west major economies are having a similar sort of economic problems as Japan had in the 1990s. Hopefully the economic profession will do something useful and relevant for this sort of problems. For at least, this time it involves the US.
So far, policy makers have avoided the total collapse of the international banking system and the worst of the global financial crisis appears to be behind us. That was a huge success and the world can breath a collective sigh of relief. Hope more of this nature is coming.
Terada-san’s article is interesting, although I would also like to see a longer one with more minute details and references. Perhaps it exists somewhere. Competition between a status quo power and a rising power is quite logical, and I am happy that it takes place largely at the fields of monetary aid and building of supporter networks. When Chinese rapid economic expansion ends 10-20 years from now, a history of relatively polite and peaceful competition will be very useful. Competition increases mutual knowledge of the parties; it is not a bad thing. Looking at the two states now reminds one of the situation during the later half of the nineteenth century, when there was an amount of discussion of mutual cooperation, with Korea included, but these opportunities were missed by differing speeds of national modernization and domestic integration. Nowadays all relevant actors – except North Korea – are capable, and not too belligerent towards each other.