ABSTRACT
The relationship between the People's Republic of China (PRC) and Japan is obviously a very important one for the East Asian region and globally, given the tremendous influence that each country has over its neighbors and the world. Yet this is a very troubled set of bilateral relationship, which can be characterized as one of contention amidst integration, with increasingly more rivalry and less interdependence as the years following the Cold War's end elapse. By 1997, Sino-Japanese interactions had begun to meet the definition of a rivalry, although contentious behavior was not yet openly displayed amidst the mutual search for forms of cooperation. Increasingly, this rivalry or competition is taking place, not only in terms of bilateral relations, but within the context of their presence in multilateral arrangements of regional states of Asia and the Pacific. The results of early post-Cold War Japanese ideas for regional economic and security cooperation were respectively the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation and ASEAN Regional Forum.
