ABSTRACT
Reduced to its barest essentials, the history of modern East Asian international relations is the history of Sino-Japanese relations. The superpowers still play a crucial role in East Asia, but as we near the 1990s it grows increasingly clear that the ability of the United States or the Soviet Union to alter the Sino-Japanese relationship is diminishing. This chapter analyzes current Sino-Japanese relations and to explore the factors that might maintain or disrupt these links into the early 1990s. The framework for analysis centers on the positive and negative aspects of three types of relations—military-strategic, political-normative, and economic. The broad political-normative relations between Beijing and Tokyo are certainly better than at any time in the last century. Sino-Japanese political ties are, of course, anchored by the establishment of diplomatic relations in 1972. It is hard to avoid the point that economic ties are really the ones that bind Sino-Japanese relations.
