Two Tigers Living on the Same Mountain: Sino-Japanese Relations since the End of the Cold War

The Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University presents a talk with Michael Yahuda on Sino-Japanese relations and their politicized histories, conflicting identities, and economic interdependency.

Contrary to the Chinese saying, these two tigers of East Asia can co-exist on the same mountain despite many contradictory indications. From a strategic perspective their rivalry is structural as China’s only access to the Pacific is through straits in the Japanese archipelago. They are divided by politicized histories, conflicting identities, and antagonistic views of each other. Japan’s alliance with the United States is both a stabilizing and potentially divisive instrument. Despite their mutual antipathy, China and Japan are bound together by the political consequences of economic interdependence and by their fears of the potentially devastating costs of war.

Michael Yahuda professor emeritus at the London School of Economics, is a visiting scholar at the Sigur Center for Asian Studies, the Elliott School, George Washington University. He taught at the LSE for 30 years and retired in 2003. He has been a visiting professor at universities in Australia, the US, Singapore, and most recently in China where he taught a course on Chinese foreign policy. He enjoys an international reputation as a specialist on the international politics of the Asia-Pacific and on China's foreign relations. He has contributed to the international media in several countries and is the author and editor of eight books and over 200 scholarly articles and chapters in edited books. His most recent publication is The International Politics of the Asia Pacific: Third and Revised Edition (2011).

Cosponsored with the Weatherhead Center Program on U.S.-Japan Relations, Harvard University