Via ASPI comes Amy King is a senior lecturer at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University:
For more than a century, close economic ties between China and Japan have developed in the absence of cooperative political and security relations, suggesting that the first is not a necessary precondition for the second. But the relationship also demonstrates the limits of the thesis that close economic ties can mitigate key sources of bilateral insecurity or political tension.
Following Japan’s victory in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–95), Japan received a series of valuable but highly unequal economic rights in China: most-favoured-nation status, preferential treatment for Japanese goods, and foreign investment rights for Japanese manufacturers. These economic rights created the foundation for a highly complementary economic relationship that has endured despite colonialism, war, a Cold War divide, historical grievances, territorial disputes and contestation over the future of the US-led order in Asia.
