454 { China’s Quest
both Chinese and Japanese courts. During Japan’s period of early modern
national isolation (roughly 1600 to 1867), Japanese were banned from travel-
ling abroad, while Chinese, Korean, and Dutch merchants carried on robust
Sino-Japanese trade, obviating the need for contact between the Chinese
and the Japanese imperial courts.^45 But starting with the Meiji Restoration,
Japan challenged and ultimately destroyed the old Sino-centric Asian order.
The 1894–1895 Sino-Japanese war was, in effect, a hegemonic war for pre-
eminence in East Asia.^46 Then, in the 1930s, Japan attempted to build a new,
hierarchical order in East Asia with itself on top and China under it. By
the 1980s and 1990s, Japan was seeking to become “a normal country” with
a political role more commensurate with its powerful economic role—just
as China was beginning to reap accomplishments in its modernization
drive. China’s use of the history issue needs to be seen in the context of this
centuries-old Sino-Japan rivalry for status in Asia, which began to grow
intense again in the 1990s. The unstated crux of Beijing’s use of the history
issue was this: Japan’s moral incapacity disqualified it for contesting China’s
rightful preeminence in Asia.
Millennia of experience suggest to many Chinese that the natural, normal,
and rightful order of things, at least in East Asia, is Chinese preeminence. It
is equally self-evident to Chinese that Japan simply does not have the moral
bona fides to claim leadership in Asia. The history issue proves this, from the
Chinese perspective. For Chinese, it is impossible that a country that com-
mitted such horrible crimes during the first half of the twentieth century,
and which still refuses to fully repent and atone for those crimes, could be
a leader among Asian countries. How can an unrepentant serial aggressor
like Japan assume responsibility for maintaining peace in Asia? That path
would too easily lead again to aggression against other Asian countries. No,
in the common Chinese view, Japan must remain subordinate, either to the
United States or to China. Propagating these views among the Asian coun-
tries that also experienced Japanese brutality—North and South Korea, the
Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore—builds support for a lesser Japanese role
in the region.
From the Japanese perspective, Japan’s generous aid, its Asian Development
Bank (ADB) loans and investment in China, did not seem to be building
friendship. In fact, popular anti-Japan animus in China grew as Japan again
and again demonstrated its friendship toward China. PRC efforts to expand
friendly cooperation with Japan proceeded in tandem with periodic Chinese
lessons about the history issue. Japan could never do enough to satisfy Beijing,
it seemed to more and more Japanese. The history issue in Beijing’s hand was
not really about the past but about the future, about the role of China and
Japan in Asia thirty, forty, or fifty years hence.
Leadership exchanges between China and Japan flourished in the 1980s.^47
Deng stopped in Tokyo in February 1979 on his way home from the United