How China and Japan Went to War

In the ultimate test against Japan in 1894-95, Chinese naval officer quality was thoroughly outclassed

By Lyle J. Goldstein


Even as Western strategists spill gobs of ink recalling the Great War that convulsed Europe a century ago , Chinese military thinkers are actually fixated on another anniversary. 120 years ago, Japan shocked the world with a lightning campaign that not only reduced the faltering Qing dynasty to its knees in a matter of months , but more to the point: put the pride of China’s then ascendant fleet on the bottom of the Yellow Sea.
The war was primarily fought over the Korean Peninsula and featured two sizable naval engagements: the first near the Yalu and the second near the tip of the Shandong Peninsula at Weihai, where an enormous Chinese museum has quite recently been completed to commemorate the war. The conflict ended with Japan’s conquest of the Liaodong Peninsula, but this was not permitted by the jealous European Powers, which intervened collectively in the so-called “Triple Intervention.” Tokyo had to be satisfied with China’s recognition of an independent Korea, the not insignificant prize of Taiwan, a huge indemnity paid in silver, the right to navigate the Yangtze, as well as the opening of more treaty ports to Japanese merchants. 

This edition of Dragon Eye will not dwell on recent China-Japan tensions, which are presently experiencing a thaw albeit a tepid one . 

Instead, this brief analysis endeavors to sample a few of the innumerable Chinese military writings on the subject of that pivotal conflict.
Reflections on the war during this anniversary year have appeared in just about every military and quasi-military publication in China, for example a piece by the popular and rather hawkish professor-general Luo Yuan that appeared in a special issue of 军事文摘 [Military Digest] devoted to the war. 

However, for the purposes of this discussion, I will concentrate exclusively on several articles that appeared in the more authoritative 中国军事科学 [China Military Science] in mid-2014. 

The lead article in this valuable clutch of writings is by General He Lei, director of the Chinese Academy of Military Sciences. 

General He’s piece does not particularly focus on Japan’s aggressive intent, though he does observe that the war was “not accidental.” 

Nor does he dwell on strictly political factors, but he also credits Marx with the idea that “war is the continuation of politics” and suggests that the war illustrated the corruption and decline of the Qing regime. 

With evident disgust, he critiques the traditional Chinese cultural and social paradigm prevailing in that period: “好铁不打钉， 好男不当兵” [Just as good iron is not used for nails, so good men should not be soldiers]. 

In a seeming dig at contemporary Chinese society and its rampant materialism, he implores his fellow officers: “不当和平兵” [not to become peace-time soldiers]. 

To further inspire his forces, he writes that China’s total military failure in the Sino-Japanese War resulted from half-hearted preparation before the conflict and also the paucity of a military doctrine that emphasized vigorous combat tactics and seizing the initiative. 

It is noteworthy that a major theme of General He’s essay concerns China’s historical mistake of “重陆轻海” [emphasizing land forces, while neglecting naval forces]. 

He cites the classic misuse of naval funds by the Empress Dowager Ci Xi, and derides the Manchu regime as completely lacking any leaders with naval experience. 

That point is especially interesting in light of the prevailing critique of China’s current military leadership as overly representative of ground forces personnel, particularly at the highest levels. General He, in addition, points out the total failure of harmonization between Chinese ground and sea forces, and how this failure caused defeats in many instances. 

As a result of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95, it is said that China lost Korea, Taiwan and a wide expanse of maritime territory, thus “vastly compressing China’s maritime strategic space, and also blocking modern China’s historical process of “走向海洋” [going out to the ocean]. 

Keeping that in mind, General He states that China cannot permit “海上霸权” [the maritime hegemonic power] – obviously referring to the United States – from interrupting the historical march of the Chinese nation to the “deep blue.” 

Again, the fact that a Chinese Army general is making such points about the contemporary imperative of developing seapower may demonstrate the broad military consensus behind China’s current naval buildup.
Two further essays in this edition of China Military Science are by senior naval officers. 

Vice Admiral Jiang Weilie, a vice commander of the critical Guangzhou Military Region, echoes many of the points made in the essay by General He, especially concerning China’s historic neglect of seapower. 

Admiral Jiang, moreover, bemoans the fact that contemporary Chinese society still obviously lacks in maritime consciousness. 

Using the case of the Sino-Japanese War as a clear illustration of disjointed command structures, Admiral Jiang makes the fascinating point that the recent unification of Chinese maritime law enforcement forces in March 2013 “未得到根本解决” [did not result in a fundamental resolution] with respect to unifying China’s maritime power. 

Above all, Admiral Jiang focuses, similarly to General He, on the regrettably “passive disposition” of Chinese forces during the Sino-Japanese War. 

In the essay’s conclusion, he calls for “积极长远的力量运用规划” [plans for the active wielding of long range power]. 

As for the many maritime disputes on China’s flanks, he calls for Beijing to “regularize the demonstration of military forces, developing military deterrence, and gradually consolidating [China’s] advantageous position in these maritime struggles.”
A somewhat more reflective essay is contributed by Senior Captain Yang Xiaodan, director of a PLA Navy maritime studies center. 

Unlike the other two essays that are quite dismissive of the late Qing’s efforts at military reform and naval modernization, Captain Yang offers a detailed look at the establishment and initial operations of China’s very first modern naval academy at Fuzhou in 1866. 

He notes that China’s nascent, modern navy had quite an extensive system of sending young officers abroad, as well as a relatively ambitious training program, focused on “远航训练” [long distance training] in particular. 

In a somewhat nuanced conclusion about China’s much-maligned naval reformer, Li Hongzhang, Captain Yang concludes that “Although Li Hongzhang put great emphasis on building up the Beiyang Fleet, there was not sufficient focus on combat operations…” 

In the ultimate test against Japan in 1894-95, Chinese naval officer quality was thoroughly outclassed and is described as: “又慢又旧又有限” [slow, archaic, and totally limiting]. 

For Captain Yang, the primary lessons of this conflict for China’s current naval modernization are to raise the combat realism of naval exercises, to rotate personnel frequently and, above all, to build a first-rate naval educational and training system.
These writings by senior Chinese military officers on the 120th anniversary are not surprising. 

 We may even be somewhat reassured, given the recent bitter recriminations flowing between Beijing and Tokyo, that these articles are not ultra-nationalist in tone and tinged with anti-Japanese xenophobic sentiments, but are generally professional and substantive. 

 It might be said that they even betray a continuing Chinese admiration for Japanese military prowess. However, this series of articles is, at the same time, revealing of a Chinese military that has a definite chip on its shoulder. 

 As any sports coach knows, a team that has been humiliated, relentlessly studies its former mistakes, enjoys new access to resources, is hungry for respect, has a laser-like focus, and is fired by no small amount of bitterness as well, is one that may be poised to “roll.” 

 One interpretation of these Chinese military articles is that the PLA is now in such a state of mind – and this should concern practitioners and students of international security on both sides of the Pacific.

The Reason China Has Built a Massive Military

By Harry J. Kazianis

Over several years in this publication, I have been exploring the dynamics of the budding U.S.-China security dilemma—a high-tech drama pitting anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) against what we used to refer to as Air-Sea Battle (ASB)—and have offered several different ways to lessen the possibility of such a dynamic from becoming cemented into the Asia-Pacific’s security architecture. 

However, China’s development and implementation of A2/AD clearly has various origins. 

One such origin that deserves to be explored is the China’s subjugation at the hands of various colonial powers.
In many respects, China is trying to solve a centuries-old problem that never went away: how to defeat in battle military forces that are at least in a symmetrical sense superior to its own and will be for some time to come. 

If we alter our perspective and take a much longer view of Beijing’s own military obsolescence, a strategy that emphasizes anti-access makes tremendous sense. 

According to Admiral Wu Shengli, former commander of the PLA Navy, “in China’s modern history, imperialist and colonists initiated more than 470 invasions of China, including 84 large ones, from the sea.” 

If China’s military were to deter or halt the deployment of superior military forces into areas of Chinese territory or areas Beijing perceives as a core interest, another period of what leaders in China might see as a new form of subjugation could theoretically be avoided. 

A2/AD allows Beijing to compete with the United States asymmetrically—an important point when one thinks through how many years away China is from competing with America ship for ship or plane for plane.
The following serves as an account of what many Chinese consider their own historical nightmare at the hands of foreign forces and why A2/AD would protect China from being subjugated yet again.

A Lost Opportunity
There are several events in Chinese history that mainland scholars, politicians and academics point to that weakened the collective power of the Chinese nation and diminished its global standing for generations. 

Indeed, Chinese strategic planners are keenly aware they have missed multiple “revolutions” in military affairs looking back several centuries—a driving factor in China’s subjugation by the West and other Asian powers. 

Critical transitions from cold-weapon warfare (knives or blunt striking instruments) to hot-weapon warfare (such as guns and firepower) and from hot-weapon warfare to mechanized warfare (tanks, armored naval vessels, airplanes and so on) were lost opportunities to transform the military establishment into a modern fighting force.
The consequences were shocking. 

When well-armed Western powers forced their way into China two centuries ago, the Chinese were defenseless, thanks to obsolete technology. 

When Western powers developed mechanized weapons during and after World War II, China was in the midst of internal turmoil and suffered from foreign invasion (i.e., the Chinese Civil War and Japanese invasion); it did not have the capacity to keep up with the devel­opments of new military technology.

“Century of Humiliation” Begins: The First Opium War
Numerous current Chinese scholars speak of China’s “century of humiliation” or subjugation by various powers that led, according to their line of argument, to the loss of China's great-power status, loss of territory, and in many respects, national sovereignty. 

Defeat on the battlefield marked the beginning of this century of loss and humiliation. 

The first major military loss at the hands of Western powers that had wide-ranging repercussions for China and large parts of the Asia-Pacific was its defeat at the hands of the British during the First Opium War (1839-1842). 

As scholar Richard Harris explained: “The Chinese have one very broad generalization about their own history: they think in terms of ‘up to the Opium war’ and ‘after the Opium war’; in other words, a century of humiliation and weakness to be expunged.”
The consequences of the conflict—China’s crushing defeat—were felt far and wide. 

Beijing’s geostrategic position in Asia was weakened dramatically. 

China’s military was crushed in a series of defeats by a vastly smaller, but technologically superior, British force. 

Chinese military technology, tactics and strategy were not on par with the West’s. 

This defeat sparked the first of what has been referred to as the “unequal treaties.” 

Five ports were opened to foreign traders, and the British colony at Hong Kong was founded (which would not be returned until 1997).

The Sino-Japanese War
A second military defeat, this time at the hands of Japan, during the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895, also had wide-reaching consequences for Beijing. 

For several decades, Japan and China had spared in various domains—largely political and diplomatic—over control and influence on the Korean Peninsula. 

For China, Korea had been a vassal state, having been heavily influenced by Chinese culture. 

Japan, having undertaken a massive effort to Westernize under the Meiji Restoration, was undertaking efforts to bring Korea under its sphere of influence. 

Both nations were actively pursuing efforts to modernize their armed forces.
While a larger study of the conflict has been done across many formats and is beyond the scope of this article, the war and its aftermath are of extreme importance. 

Japan would defeat China convincingly, most importantly at the Battle of the Yalu, an important naval victory. 

While China had by this time been clearly passed by Western powers and had lost considerable stature and territory, to now be defeated by a neighboring Asian nation-state was even more humiliating. 

Korea would be declared free of Chinese influence and placed effectively under Japanese control. China would be forced to pay large reparations to Japan. 

Tokyo would also receive the Liaodong Peninsula, which it was forced to give up, due to Western pressure.

A Chaotic 1930s, Civil War and World War II
A series of events from the early 1930s until the eventual victory of Mao’s communists in 1949, establishing the People’s Republic of China, would also have a lasting effect on today’s China. 

While each event is worthy of its own larger study, a narrow focus will be utilized for the purposes of this article.
In 1931, Japan occupied the Chinese territory of Manchuria, creating a puppet state named Manchukuo. 

In 1937, tensions flared once more when an incident at the Marco Polo Bridge would become the catalyst for full-scale war between China and Japan. 

Both nations waged a bloody conflict until the end of World War II in 1945. 

Large sections of Chinese territory were held by Japan, and vast areas of Chinese commerce, industry and farmland were destroyed. 

China was also in the midst of a civil war from 1927 until 1937, which was halted to combat the Japanese invasion. 

The civil war resumed in 1946, when China once again suffered severe losses. 

The Kuomintang or KMT under Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan in 1949. 

The status of Taiwan to this day has yet to be resolved and is a major factor in Chinese strategic thinking on A2/AD.
China suffered dearly during this period of its history. 

Countless lives were lost during Japan's invasion and during the civil war. 

Even though almost seven decades have passed since the end of World War II, Chinese and Japanese emotions on the subject are considerably heated, serving as a source of tension, which drags on positive bilateral relations.
Such a tumultuous period of Chinese history would have far and wide repercussions on the Chinese people, its collective sense of history and its national psyche. 

Chinese scholars have debated for several decades the role of such a period when thinking about its place in today’s international order. 

During this century, China would have to redefine itself, its place in the global order, its place in Asia and its own sense of history. 

As one scholar notes: "China had to redraw its world map: where it had for millennia sat comfortably at the center of a ring of tributary relationships with neighboring countries, it now found itself a weak competitor in a world of dozens or even hundreds of nation-states. Where Chinese rulers and intellectuals had before had little concept of an international arena, they now had to grapple with the notion that there existed a global system of power relationships whose dynamics – though almost entirely out of China’s control – would determine her fate".

Chinese History: Chinese A2/AD?
As noted by many analysts (including myself), Chinese A2/AD strategy seeks to target selected perceived weaknesses in U.S. military technology, force structure and strategic doctrine—all while not having to match U.S. forces in all combat domains. 

At present, even though China possesses the second-largest economy in the world, it still does not have the economic or technological base to challenge America in a symmetrical military matchup. What China can do is devise an asymmetric strategy that is designed to inflict maximum damage on American forces if they were to intervene militarily close to China’s perceived interests along its coasts and out towards the first island chain.
History clearly shows us China has suffered from technological obsolescence on the battlefield for some time—allowing various nations to take advantage. 

A century of humiliation has taught Chinese planners that to allow military forces to be able to approach the coast and be able to build up forces for a possible attack invites strategic weakness and possible subjugation by foreign powers. 

Beijing does not feel it has the luxury of time to wait for the development of a first-class military if it were challenged by Washington or another great power. 

A2/AD solves an age-old problem for China and might just be able to at least deter America and others from possible infringement on China's core interests. 

And if history is any guide, it seems clear that is exactly the outcome Beijing wants.

Sina Delenda Est

Trump’s blundering cold lead to war between China and Japan
By Richard McGregor

For news out of east Asia, it is difficult to compete with North Korea’s youthful, jocular despot, Kim Jong-un, and his near-daily threats to fire a nuclear-tipped missile at US territory. 

On Monday, Kim was pictured surrounded by his top generals mulling over maps with targets closer to home, in South Korea and Japan, while warning again that he was ready to “wring the windpipes of the Yankees”. 

The young Kim, and his father and grandfather before him, have long tossed violent epithets at their enemies, but Pyongyang’s new capabilities – to potentially deliver a nuclear warhead across the Pacific – have injected fresh danger into the crisis on the Korean peninsula.
The North Korean crisis is one of the few creations of the cold war to have outlived the Berlin Wall, despite persistent predictions that the communist dynasty would collapse. 

There are many factors driving the confrontation, chief among them paranoia in Pyongyang, where the Kim dynasty is focused above all on preventing regime change. 

In neighbouring China, Beijing is paralysed: it is caught between anger at Kim for destabilising the region, and fear that if it pushes Pyongyang too hard, the regime will collapse, and fall into the hands of South Korea, an ally of the US. 

The US itself also seems impotent, knowing that starting any war could lead to devastating attacks on its allies in Seoul and Tokyo.
Lost among the headlines is the fact that the crisis is just a symptom of a bigger drama unfolding in east Asia, where an entire postwar order, built and maintained by the US since 1945, is slowly coming apart.
While the US military bases still dotted across the region have a whiff of latter-day imperialism, for the past seven decades Pax Americana has underwritten an explosion in wealth not matched in the world since the industrial revolution. 

Since the 1950s, Japan, and then South Korea, Taiwan and China, have been able to put bitter political and historical enmities aside to pursue economic growth.
At the same time, the US presence in east Asia has papered over serial diplomatic failures. 

All of the frozen-in-the-1950s conflicts buried during the decades of high-speed economic growth are starting to resurface. 

China and Taiwan have drifted further apart than ever politically. 

The Korean peninsula remains divided and bristling with conventional and nuclear armoury. 

The Sino-Japanese rivalry overflows with bitterness, despite a bilateral business relationship that is one of the most valuable in the world.
The Chinese often quote an ancient idiom when speaking about Japan: two tigers cannot live on one mountain. 

China is in growing competition with Japan to be the dominant indigenous power in Asia, and many view this as a zero-sum game. 

Any clash between them would not be a simple spat between neighbours. 

A single shot fired in anger could trigger a global economic tsunami, engulfing political capitals, trade routes, manufacturing centres and retail outlets on every continent.
Whether these tensions play out peacefully depends not just on the two superpowers, the US and China. Japan – which has at different times threatened to eclipse them both – is also pivotal to regional stability. 

Prior to Donald Trump’s emergence, it was assumed that just about any scenario for the US in east Asia would involve broad continuity for the core elements of past policy, including trade liberalisation and a commitment to alliances, such as that with Japan. 

But Trump is also a living embodiment of the larger trend that the days of US dominance of the region are numbered.

Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe with Donald Trump at the White House in February. 

Today the relationship between the three powers resembles a geopolitical version of the scene in the movie Reservoir Dogs in which a trio of antagonists simultaneously point guns at each other, creating a circle of cascading threats. 

In the east Asian version of this scenario, the US has its arsenal trained on China; China, in turn, menaces Japan and the US; in ways that are rarely noticed, Japan completes the triangle, with its hold over the US. 

If Tokyo were to lose faith in Washington and downgrade its alliance or trigger a conflict with Beijing, the effect would be the same: to overturn the postwar system. 

In this trilateral game of chicken, only one of the parties needs to fire its weapons for all three to be thrown into war. 

Put another way: if China is the key to Asia, then Japan is the key to China, and the US the key to Japan.
In recent months, it has become fashionable among American journalists and foreign policy analysts to warn of the so-called Thucydides trap – the idea that a rising power (China, in this case) is destined to go to war with an established power (the US). 

But there is another geo-strategic dilemma identified by the same ancient Greek historian, which is more pertinent. 

It is dangerous to build an empire, Thucydides warned; it is even more dangerous to give it away.
This “other Thucydides trap” encapsulates the real dilemma faced by the US in east Asia.

After more than seven decades as the region’s hegemon, the US now has a choice to make. 

It could stand and fight to maintain the status quo, at potentially massive cost. 

Or it could retreat from east Asia, potentially leaving a trail of chaos in its wake.
During the presidential campaign, Trump suggested that Japan and South Korea had become over-reliant on US security, and that it was time for the US to pack and up and go home. 

But Asia’s economic rise has only magnified the dangers of an American drawdown. 

“It is not only true that China changed the status quo by getting strong,” said Yan Xuetong, one of China’s most prominent hawks, “but also that America and Japan changed the status quo by getting weak.”

George Kennan, the renowned strategist, called Japan’s partnership with the US “an unnatural intimacy”, born of conflict between two very different countries, which, over time, developed into a close relationship of its own. 

This intimacy – if that is what it is – has been hard won. 

In his authorised biography, Brent Scowcroft, a hard-nosed veteran of America’s national security establishment, called Japan “probably the most difficult country” the US had to deal with: “I don’t think we understood the Japanese and I don’t think the Japanese understood us.”

Japan to develop missile as tensions with China mount.

It is not only the Americans who feel uneasy about the relationship. 

Washington originally saw the alliance as a way to ensure that Japan was on its side in the cold war and, later, that it stayed in sync with the US’s broader global strategy. 

By contrast, for Tokyo, according to the Japan scholar Kenneth Pyle, the security pact was an “unpleasant reality” imposed on the nation after the war, but one it cleverly and cynically made the best of. 

All the while, Tokyo has harboured the fear that the US and China are "natural" partners – big, boisterous continental economies and military superpowers that wouldn’t hesitate to bypass Tokyo in a flash, if only they could find a way to do so.
Into this volatile landscape strode Donald Trump, Republican candidate and now president, a man who cut his teeth politically in the 1980s with attacks on Japanese trade practices. 

On the campaign trail, Trump criticised Japan and South Korea for free-riding on US military power, and said both countries should acquire nuclear weapons if they wished to reduce their reliance on Washington. 

On trade, he singled out China and Japan for cheating Americans, in league with the domestic Visigoths of globalisation, Wall Street and big business.
In the White House, Trump has slightly altered his rhetoric, paying lip service to the conventions of the postwar order. 

When Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister, visited soon after the election, Trump repeated a commitment made by his predecessors, saying that the two countries’ bilateral defence treaty covered the Japan’s Senkaku Islands.

Diplomats in Washington told me after the meeting that Trump had only done this after being talked into it by his daughter, Ivanka.

Japan's Senkaku Islands, coveted by China

Even if Trump accepts that the US, for the moment, has to abide by its treaty obligations to Japan, and other regional allies, he has never made the argument, during the campaign or in office, as to why it should. 

On the question of the other “Thucydides trap” – the principle that it is dangerous to build an empire but more dangerous to let it go – Trump had seemed quite unconcerned; that was something for other countries to worry about. 

Far from fretting about Japan’s ability to defend itself against China, Trump seemed to believe it would do fine.
In an interview with the Economist in September 2015, Trump was asked what would happen if China started bullying its neighbours without the US being there to protect them. 

He cast his mind back to more than a century earlier, when Japan and China began to fall into conflict. 

“If we step back, they will protect themselves very well,” Trump said. 

“Remember when Japan used to beat China routinely in wars? You know that, right? Japan used to beat China, they routinely beat China. Why are we defending them at all?”
Trump, in his clumsy way, had hit on an existential point, one that he exploited brilliantly in his campaign. 

Why do Asian countries need the US in the region anyway? Why can’t they get on with each other independent of the US? 

To fully grasp this dilemma, it is essential to understand the poisonous relationship between China and Japan.
Most accounts of Sino-Japanese relations paint the two countries’ differences as the inevitable result of Japan’s invasion and occupation of China in the 1930s, and throughout the second world war, until Tokyo’s surrender in August 1945, followed by an extended squabble over responsibility for the conflict. 

Alternatively, their clash is depicted as a traditional great-power contest, with an ascending superpower, China, running up against a now-weaker rival. 

A third template takes a longer view: one of a China bent on rebuilding the influence it enjoyed in Asia in imperial times.

Japan accuses China of threatening Pacific peace.

None of these templates alone, however, captures the tangled emotions and complex psychology of the Sino-Japanese relationship. 

For centuries, China had been an empire that established a template of cultural structures that permeated the region. 

Japan’s scripts, its merit-based bureaucracy, hierarchical social relations and exam-intense education system originated in China.

The histories of modern Japan and China have much in common as well. 

Both were forcibly opened in the 19th century at the point of a gun wielded by an imperialist west. 

In the century that followed, they both battled to win the respect of the intruders who considered themselves racially superior to Asians. 

And yet, far from displaying solidarity with each other, the two nations went in different directions: Japan modernised rapidly, while China disintegrated. 

Ever since, they have struggled to find an equilibrium of their own. If one country was ascendant, the other was subordinate.
Despite their shared roots, Japan and China have remained as psychically remote as they are geographically close. 

In Europe, an acknowledgment of the second world war’s calamities helped bring the continent’s nations together in the aftermath of the conflict. 

In east Asia, by contrast, the war and its history have never been settled, politically, diplomatically or emotionally. 

There has been little of the introspection and statesmanship that helped Europe to heal its wounds.
A corrosive mutual antipathy has gradually become embedded within large sections of the public. 

In turn, seemingly unavoidable political divisions have eroded trust and strengthened hyper-nationalists in both countries.

China’s economic rise and Japan’s relative decline have only reinforced this trend. 

In both capitals, the domestic tail now wags the diplomatic dog as often as the other way around. What once seemed impossible and then merely unlikely is no longer unimaginable: that China and Japan could, within the coming decades, go to war.
The enduring strains of the cold war and China’s expansionism all help to explain the region’s diplomatic tensions. 

So, too, does geopolitics, which is the furnace for Sino-Japanese rivalry. 

But at the core of their rivalry are the two countries’ wildly varying and persistently manipulated memories of the Sino-Japanese wars in Asia.
Even the most basic of disagreements over history still percolate through day-to-day media coverage in Asia, in baffling and insidious ways. 

Open a Japanese newspaper in 2017 and you might read of a heated debate about whether Japan invaded China – something that is only an issue because conservative Japanese still insist that their country was fighting a war of self-defence in the 1930s and 1940s. 

Read the state-controlled press in China, and you will see the Communist party drawing legitimacy from its heroic defeat of Japan; in truth, Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists carried the burden of fighting the invaders, while the Communists mostly preserved their strength in hinterland hideouts. Scant recognition is given to the US, which fought the Japanese for years before ending the conflict with two atomic bombs.
The history of Sino-Japanese relations since the late 19th century, when the two countries first fought a war, has long had a dominant storyline. 

Japan encroached on Chinese territory, demanding and then taking bits of land here and there, before eventually launching a full-scale invasion and occupation in the 1930s. 

After its defeat and surrender in 1945, so the narrative goes, Tokyo prevaricated endlessly about apologising to China and making good for the damage wrought by its armies.
The first part of the storyline is true. 

From the late 19th century onward, Japan did set out to dismember China. 

The history of the history wars, however, is more complex, with many twists and turns that are lost in today’s shrill headlines. 

When there was much soul-searching in Japan about the war during the 1950s and 1960s, for example, Beijing had no interest in seeking an apology and reparations. 

Instead, Mao Zedong and his premier, Zhou Enlai, cultivated relations with Japan in an effort to break the US embargo on their country.
In 1961, in a meeting with a Japanese Socialist Party leader, Mao perversely thanked Japan for invading China, because the turmoil created by the Imperial Army had enabled the CCP to come to power. 

“We would still be in the mountains and not be able to watch Peking Opera in Beijing,” he said. 

“The Japanese monopolistic capitalists and warlords did a ‘good thing’ to us. If a ‘thank you’ is needed, I would actually like to thank the Japanese warlords.”

Trump with Xi Jinping in Florida in April.

Mao often adopted a freewheeling, sardonic style in conversation, which seemed deliberately aimed at putting his interlocutors either at ease or off balance. 

But his statements brushing off an apology and expressing gratitude to the Japanese for their invasion are embarrassingly discordant in today’s China, and so jarring that they are invariably airbrushed by the CCP these days. 

The official explanation contends that Mao used sarcasm to underline how Japan’s invasion had “awakened” the Chinese people. 

Chinese scholars of Japan who have tried to tread a more independent path say the truth is simpler: Mao had no interest in an apology because he genuinely believed that the CCP owed its victory in the civil war to Japan.
Official policy was tailored in conformity with Mao’s views for much of the next three or four decades, even as it grated with many Chinese.

As one scholar at a government thinktank in Beijing told me last year: “This came from Mao’s mouth. There was no need for any discussion, or for him to consider outside elements such as public opinion or conflicts between past and present policies. His power was absolute.”

By the mid-1980s, when Beijing decided that Japanese "remorse" should become a permanent fixture of bilateral relations, Tokyo had come to view such demands as little more than self-serving politics. Some Japanese leaders were willing to apologise, just to deprive China of a ready-made issue to beat them over the head with. 

“We can apologise as much as China wants. It’s free, and very soon China will become tired of asking for apologies,” the former prime minister Noboru Takeshita confided to foreign ministry officials in the early 1990s.

As it turned out, the Chinese never did tire of receiving "apologies". 

They thought they were the country’s due. 

But Japan did tire of giving them. 

In the process, history disputes have become a huge obstacle to a genuine postwar settlement.
The rage expressed in China toward Japan these days over "history" is the tip of a much larger iceberg. 

Beijing’s core problem is not with the details of the war itself, but with the diplomatic deals that were agreed to settle it. 

In Washington’s and Tokyo’s eyes, the San Francisco Treaty of 1951 forms the foundation of the east Asian postwar order. 

The treaty ended the US occupation, reestablished Japan as a sovereign nation, fixed it as a security partner for the US, and gave the country space to rebuild itself into a modern, prosperous nation. 

The treaty also laid the basis for Japan’s gradual rapprochement with other former wartime foes in south-east Asia and Australia.
Chinese "scholars", in lock-step with the country’s political leaders, use a different template for the region, something that is largely overlooked in Washington. 

Their reference points are the conferences in Cairo in 1943 and in Potsdam in July 1945, at which the so-called Three Great Allies – the US, the UK and the Republic of China – set the terms for Japan’s unconditional surrender. 

In the process, as Chinese politicians, historians and activists have begun to argue more forcibly in recent years, Japan was consigned to a permanently subordinate role in the region.
Beijing favours Potsdam, because it disarmed Japan, restored the territories Tokyo had seized in the previous century, and confirmed China’s great-power status. 

It doesn’t recognise San Francisco, because it enshrines the US-Japan security alliance and the American military presence in east Asia. 

China was represented at Cairo in the form of the then-Nationalist government, but not at San Francisco in any form.
The notion that Japan should sit inert in east Asia, enduring a kind of life sentence as a result of having lost the war, absurd as it is, is given much credence by China's top leaders.

As Xi Jinping told the visiting Pentagon chief Leon Panetta in late 2012, “The international community must not allow Japan to attempt to negate the results of the World Anti-Fascist War, or challenge the postwar international order.” 

In another sign of this mindset, a nationalist book that became a bestseller in the mid-90s, The China That Can Say No, had a chapter titled In Some Respects, To Do Nothing Is Japan’s Contribution To The World!
Sheltering under America’s nuclear umbrella in the postwar period, Japan has in fact been a constrained power since its defeat in 1945. 

The Americans, after all, wrote a new “pacifist” constitution for Japan, which said it should only maintain military forces for its own self-defence. 

At times, Japan, at least in security terms, has seemed to be “inert” and willing to free-ride on the Americans.
But thanks to China and North Korea, those days are over. 

Shinzo Abe has fashioned a strong national security policy and strengthened the country’s military. 

While attention was focused on Pyongyang’s nuclear antics in early August, Japan quietly announced that it was studying equipping its military with offensive weapons, such as cruise missiles, to allow it to strike overseas enemies for the first time since the war.

An infantry unit in Japan’s self-defence force at a ceremony at Camp Asaka in 2016.

Japan presents a particular challenge to China. 

Militarily, it is not a pushover like other south-east Asian nations Beijing has clashed with recently, such as the Philippines. 

In 2012, the central government in Tokyo nationalised the Senkaku Islands in order to prevent a far right-wing nationalist politician, Shintaro Ishihara, from buying the islands from their private owners. 

At that point, Beijing considered trying to take the islands by force. 

A retired regional leader told me that Beijing had studied its options carefully: “They did a number of basic tabletop exercises to work out, if there was a conflict over the islands, whether China could prevail; I had many conversations with Chinese military planners at the time.” 

In the end, he said, Beijing concluded that the “co-relation of forces was not with them”. 

Unlike Japan, which has fought naval wars, China has fought only one, in 1894-5, which it lost. 

The Chinese had made huge strides as a military power, but not so far that they were confident about taking on their old foe.
Perhaps the most salient factor in China’s calculations over the Senkaku Islands was what might happen if it should lose to Japan. 

In Tokyo, a military loss would be disastrous, of course, and the government would certainly fall. 

But that would be nothing compared with the hammer blow to China’s national psyche should Japan prevail. 

“That would be terminal for the CCP,” the former regional leader observed. 

“Regime change.”
Over time, though, China’s capabilities, and its confidence, are likely to outpace those of its neighbour. 

Japan knows that China is not going away, whereas one day, the US might. 

China is keen to emphasise to every nation in Asia a single truth: China’s presence is a geopolitical reality in Asia. 

The US presence, by contrast, is a geopolitical choice, one that China intends to make more and more costly.
If Tokyo continues to feel threatened, and loses faith in the US, the next step is going nuclear. 

That will be the definitive sign that Pax Americana in Asia is over, and it could come sooner than anyone thinks.