Worsening Sino-Japan relations centered on the dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands is more about domestic Chinese politics and international geo-politics than history. A powerful nationalistic China feels it deserves a China-centric Asia, but the US-Japan alliance constitutes a major obstacle. The islands dispute is provides China with leverage to re-orient Japan's security thinking toward the accommodation of Chinese power as well as to sow discord in the US-Japan alliance.
David Arase has authored Buying power: the political economy of Japan's foreign aid (1995), edited three books, and published many articles and book chapters on East Asia focusing mainly on Japan. His last book (co-edited with T. Akaha) The US-Japan alliance: balancing soft and hard power in East Asia (Nissan Institute/Routledge, 2010), won the 2011 Ohira Memorial Foundation (in Tokyo, Japan) Special Prize for work advancing the idea of Pacific community. After teaching at Pomona College for 22 years, he took his present position at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center located at Nanjing University to pursue his interest in studying China and its ongoing rise.
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