Sino-Japanese Relations in a Changing East Asia

The expansion of economic relations under a banner of "friendship and cooperation" dominated Sino-Japanese affairs since 1972, when the two countries resumed formal diplomatic ties, until the Tiananmen incident of June 1989. Official "friendship and cooperation" notwithstanding, the two countries often have disagreed. China has objected to a bilateral trade gap widening in Japan's favor, to lagging technology transfers from Japan, to what Chinese see as a trend toward revived Japanese militarism, ¹ to the way Japanese government-approved history textbooks interpret Japan's invasion of China in the 1930s, to Japan's position toward Taiwan, and, finally, to Japan's territorial claims to the Diaoyutai (or, in Japanese, Senkaku) islands. ²