362 { China’s Quest
supremely important. But in the realm of PRC foreign relations, “emancipat-
ing the minds” of a substantial cohort of leading cadres by giving them a
glimpse of China’s future as a modern, technologically advanced, and indus-
trialized country, the foreign investigation missions that began in 1978 were
important. As Deng told his comrades in December 1978 as he was about
to be chosen as the CCP’s paramount leader: “We must acknowledge we are
backward, that many of our ways of doing things are inappropriate, and that
we need to change.”^17Opening China’s Door to JapanJapan was a natural and essential partner in the Four Modernizations. By
1978, Japan’s economy had become the third largest in the world (after only
the United States and the USSR), and had a per capita income ranking be-
tween Britain and France. Japan was a leading export power and a world
technological leader in electronic appliances, microelectronics, automa-
tion, ship building, steel, and heavy equipment. Japan was arguably the only
non-Western country to have closed the economic and technological gap be-
tween the West and the non-Western countries. The importance of Japanese
capital, technology, and managerial know-how to economic development in
East Asia had already been demonstrated by the powerful symbiosis that de-
veloped in the 1960s and 1970s between Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong
Kong, and Singapore (the latter four dubbed the “Four Tigers” by the media).
The same logic that welded together Japan and the Four Tigers—the combi-
nation of cheap labor and land in the Four Tigers with advanced Japanese
technology to produce sophisticated, high-quality, but cheap goods for global
markets—could tie together Japan and the PRC in the 1980s, if an appropriate
political framework for a new Sino-Japanese economic partnership could be
arranged.
No treaty existed between the PRC and Japan in 1978 to provide a frame-
work for broad economic exchanges. The Joint Declaration of 1972, the reader
will recall, had declared an end to the “abnormal situation” that had existed
between the two countries up to that point and established diplomatic re-
lations, but had only expressed a desire to terminate the state of war that
still technically existed. After the 1972 breakthrough, several transportation,
communications, and fisheries agreements between the two countries were
signed, but a peace treaty providing, inter alia, for consular relations was still
lacking. Talks on a treaty of peace and cooperation had been underway since
1972, but without much progress.
The key obstacle to such a treaty was China’s insistence that it contain
an anti-hegemony clause identical to the one in the 1972 Sino-Japan Joint
Declaration and modeled after the anti-hegemony clause in the Sino-US