HYLAND
For its part, President Xi Jinping's government is calling
for a new type of great power relations with the US,
and although it's not clear yet exactly what this means
in practice, Beijing seems to want to improve relations
with Washington.
Yet tension in East Asia is rising – especially between
China and Japan.Unlike relations between Germany
and Britain a hundred years ago, the present-day
tension between China and Japan has its roots in past
conflicts between the two countries.
Many Chinese do not think the Japanese leadership
has fully accepted the country's responsibility for the
invasion of China in the 1930s and 1940s. Chinese
students learn about the widespread atrocities
committed by Japanese forces in gory detail, while
Japanese nationalists play down the details and China
says many Japanese textbooks whitewash the invasion
– all of which means there's been no real reconciliation.
China and Japan also have a long-running territorial
dispute over control of the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands in
the East China Sea arising out of the first Sino-Japanese
war of the modern era in the 1890s. The islands were
annexed by Japan after that war in 1895, but 50 years
later, after the Second World War, unlike other territories
conquered by the Japanese, they were not returned to
China, but instead occupied by the Americans. By the
time the United States decided it didn't need the islands
in the early 1970s, China was ruled by the Communist
Party and Japan was a US ally, so Washington returned
the islands to Japanese control.
