China and Japan: Facing History by Ezra F. Vogel (review)

Chinese and Japanese have lived as neighbors for nearly two millennia. They share common cultural roots and yet, as the historian Akira Iriye once observed, they have remained "psychologically remote" from each other. They have learned from each other and yet their patterns of development have been quite different. Their complex and contradictory attitudes toward each other have been characterized historically by "both mutual respect and suspicion, attraction and repulsion, admiration and condescension."¹

Japan was unique among East Asian nations in the degree of its aloofness from the sinocentric world order. The Japanese regarded their emperor no less than the Chinese emperor as "the son of heaven." They maintained an almost religious belief in their country's distinctive identity and for most of premodern history refused to accept a subordinate position in the Chinese world order. In the twentieth century, Japan's more rapid development, together with the institutional backwardness of China, created a scenario that almost inevitably invited Japan to dominate its neighbor. Japanese aggression in the Asia-Pacific War caused more than fifteen million Chinese deaths and left tens of millions homeless, shaping memories of unimaginable suffering and brutal atrocities and leaving a deeply troubled legacy.

While it is not easy for outsiders to plumb the deep-seated emotions and complex psychology of the Sino-Japanese relationship, no one is better qualified to help us than Ezra Vogel. As the author of many important and influential books on both countries and possessing an extraordinary network of contacts among scholars and policy makers in China, Japan, and the United States, he is truly a unique scholar of Asia, and it is no surprise that his new volume is a work of exceptional learning.

Vogel characterizes the China-Japan relationship as "tense, dangerous, deep, and complicated" (p. vii). "As a friend of both China and Japan," he writes, "I fervently hope the two countries can improve their ability to work together for their common interests." His goal "as a bystander sympathetic to both countries" is to help mediate this mutual understanding by giving a balanced account that sees issues from the perspective of both (p. viii). It is a noble mission, but decidedly not an easy one.

Vogel's book is a plea for the Chinese and Japanese to deal openly and honestly with their past, to objectively confront the good and bad parts of their history and thereby lay the foundation for cooperation so that they may contribute to a peaceful world order. It focuses on three transformative periods when one country learned from the other, building a case for the hope that the two peoples can overcome their troubled past by recognizing the times in their history that they were able to work together.

In a brief opening chapter, Vogel describes the first period (600–838), the familiar time in Japan's early history when it pragmatically drew from China the technology and institutions it needed to develop the power of its government. By the time Japan sent its last official mission to China in 838, it had absorbed the organizational learning to centralize its government as well as the philosophical underpinnings, religion, and art that enriched its civilization. For a millennium thereafter "the basic relationship between China and Japan" that Vogel recounts "revolved around trade" (p. 30).

The second period of transformative learning came at the turn of the twentieth century after China's humiliating defeat in the first Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895. The Meiji example of rapid industrialization and national power-building became the inspiration for Chinese reformers. A valuable chapter, coauthored with Paula Harrell, explores how these reformers turned to Japan "as a mediator of modern global culture" (p. 133). In the decade from 1901 to 1911 perhaps as many as two thousand Chinese officials made study tours of Japan. Unlike the Iwakura Mission of 1871–1872, in which the leaders of the Japanese government spent fourteen months...