Reassuring and Unnerving Japan } 715
be turned to aggression. Yet it was also the case that Beijing’s heavy-handed
treatment of the history issue alienated many Japanese. Why did China’s
media and leaders refuse to recognize that the Japan of the 1990s was pro-
foundly different from the Japan of the 1930s? Japanese asked themselves.
Was it because the CCP regime fostered anti-Japanese animus to legitimize
itself, or because of an inveterate hatred of Japan and Japanese? Neither
answer was reassuring. Whatever the reason, Japan’s twenty years of effort
to win Chinese friendship had apparently failed. The history issue was
not really about the past, more and more Japanese concluded, but about
the future status of Japan and China in Asia. China was using the history
issue to pressure Japan into accepting a position subordinate to China in
the emerging East Asian order. Beijing’s continual bludgeoning of Japan
with the history issue also conveyed a threat. If this was the way China
behaved now, how would it behave in the future when it was even stron-
ger? Japanese asked themselves. China’s nuclear weapons programs plus its
large post-6-4 investment in military modernization indicated that China
was determined to become a major military power. How would China deal
with Japan then? Jiang’s 1998 visit to Japan was a turning point for Sino-
Japan relations, and not one that reassured Japan.
Following Jiang’s disastrous Japan visit, China’s leaders took stock and
recognized the sharp deterioration of Japanese views of China. The result
was another period of smile diplomacy designed to repair the damage done
to Sino-Japan relations by the previous several years of Chinese harsh-
ness. US-Japanese negotiation of new guidelines for defense cooperation
were under way, raising the danger of closer US-Japanese military coopera-
tion implicitly targeted against China. NATO was expanding into Eastern
Europe; Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic would join in 1999, the
first East European states since East Germany entered via unification with
West Germany in 1990. These developments raised for Beijing the specter
of Japanese association with NATO. Deteriorating political ties could also
adversely affect economic cooperation. Consequently, the tenor of China’s
media coverage of Japan shifted, becoming much more objective and less
negative. Many articles now stressed the importance of friendship with Japan
for China’s development drive. Chinese media also began expressing appre-
ciation of Japanese ODA.^15
Over the next several years, China’s media advanced several arguments
to convince the Chinese people that cooperation with Japan was advanta-
geous to China. Japan’s power and the chances of it being used aggressively
had been exaggerated, the Chinese people were now informed. It followed
that China did not need to block Japan’s rise as a political power, but should
attempt to channel Japan’s influence to create a balance of power favorable to
China. It was to China’s advantage for Tokyo to believe that it, Japan, could