Through China’s growth after Tiananmen, the Belt and Road Initiative, the South China Sea, Confucian concepts of rule, and Japan’s delayed understanding of China, this essay questions the essence of the China strategy confronting Reiwa Japan.
It urges readers to face the cost of the lost thirty years and to consider how Japan should strengthen both the U.S.-Japan alliance and its own independent national capacity for survival.

2019-06-06
We must bear firmly in mind that, at the opening of the new Reiwa era, we are standing on precisely such a razor’s edge.

The following is a continuation of the previous chapter.
It is said that the fact of China’s enormous economic growth over the thirty years since the Tiananmen Incident has ended up “proving” the effectiveness of the “China model” as a philosophy of growth in the twenty-first century.
The “Belt and Road” initiative, which the Xi Jinping leadership began advocating in 2014, three years after the Japanese translation of Mr. Halper’s work was published, is nothing less than the practice of this very model.
If that is so, then it is necessary to think once again about how grave a problem it is that the West, and especially the nations of Europe, have so readily jumped aboard the Belt and Road.
Japan, Having Lost a Precious “Thirty Years.”
Finally, I would also like to think about the logic on the Chinese side that decided upon the armed suppression of the students in the Tiananmen Incident.
There, it is necessary to understand that China, as a country, has always sought to overcome in a “Chinese way” the historical shocks it has received from the “outside world” of the Western nations, that is, the “Western Impact.”
The first “Western Impact” received by China was the material threat of the Western world, industrial technology and military power.
The means of transforming the domestic system in response to this were the Xinhai Revolution of 1912, the Communist Revolution of 1949, and “Reform and Opening Up” in 1978.
At the core of Xi Jinping’s call for the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” too, there is at work the powerful motive of “overcoming the Western Impact.”
Therefore, China will probably take whatever means are necessary in order to realize that dream.
One may say that “Tiananmen” was one milestone on that road.
It showed the world its determination never to accept democratization imported directly from the West.
And perhaps the second milestone is the Belt and Road, or the militarization of the South China Sea.
There, in economic friction and struggles over technological hegemony with the United States, it is inconceivable that China would, like Japan, so readily acknowledge American leadership and “fall flat in submission.”
In other words, it means that China is determined never to follow “the path of Japan, which yielded to American hegemony and became a loser in world history.”
The second “Western Impact” was the values revered by the Western nations, such as the importance of democracy and human rights, and because it needs a countervailing set of ideas against them, China sets up Confucianism as a “universal value.”
For example, what is being advanced in order to rationalize Xi Jinping’s dictatorship in the post-Marxist age is the revival of the “Mandate of Heaven” doctrine, which legitimizes the absolute and coercive rule of power.
Or rather, it is precisely because that had already continued to take root in Chinese society that China was able to cover over the Tiananmen Incident and sustain that system by economic growth alone.
This is negative in meaning, but it is undoubtedly still a “miracle of world history.”
Indeed, one might call it the result of “the reactive force of Chinese civilization” striving at all costs to push back the “Western Impact.”
The third “Western Impact” was modern international law and the international order.
In contrast to this, Chinese history shows that its civilizational tradition is a Chinese world order, a “Sinocentric international order,” that recognizes no existence of equals to itself.
Even in the setting of the nine-dash line claiming the whole South China Sea as its own sea, and in the construction of artificial islands and military strongholds, although the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague clearly told China “No,” China brushed the ruling aside as “waste paper” and steadily pushed ahead with turning it into an established fact.
This may truly be called one manifestation of that tradition.
Thus, the Tiananmen Incident was, in exactly this sense, an event by which China clearly demonstrated, through action, as long as thirty years ago, that it would not accept the “logic of the outside,” and that it would live as a state different in kind from the Western nations.
Japan ought to have drawn the lessons of the Tiananmen Incident much earlier.
Only after a delay of thirty years, and at last in response to the shift in the Trump administration’s China strategy, did various debates begin belatedly, in a form that merely followed behind it.
Personally, I cannot dispel the feeling that “it is already far too late.”
In fact, I myself have consistently continued to argue for the necessity of this for more than twenty years.
The price and the magnitude of the responsibility for Japan’s delayed recognition of China, which caused Japan to lose this “lost twenty years,” or rather the thirty years since the Tiananmen Incident, and this precious span of thirty years of the Heisei era, must now be questioned anew from the standpoint of “what caused Japan to become like this.”
The struggle for hegemony between the United States and China may continue from twenty to thirty years from now, and perhaps even longer.
At any rate, Japan’s immediate choice is clear.
It is to make deterrence against China effective through a still closer U.S.-Japan alliance, and to protect Japan’s sovereignty and independence.
Japan must now make that stance clear.
However, the issue is what comes after such a security policy of deterrence against China succeeds.
At that time, whether to a greater or lesser degree, an even more powerful China will still continue to exist next to Japan.
And it is also possible that the United States will have completely retired from being the world’s policeman and shifted to only a “half-bodied posture” even in Asia.
If, at that time, China has not become a country that has fully overcome the Tiananmen Incident, then Japan will face a power whose existence can no longer be expressed merely by the words “a security threat.”
Our “immediate security policy” must also be one that takes this situation into account.
While maintaining the U.S.-Japan alliance for as long as possible, we must at the same time seriously debate, and immediately begin working on, how to equip ourselves with the comprehensive national capacity for survival, including diplomacy, that would enable us to defend this country by our own strength and skill.
Unless Japan becomes such a country, it will not be able to prevent the rise of the “profound bond” between the United States and China mentioned earlier.
We must bear firmly in mind that, at the opening of the new Reiwa era, we are standing on precisely such a razor’s edge.