Through China’s post-Tiananmen economic growth, the Belt and Road Initiative, the South China Sea, and Confucian concepts of rule, this essay argues that China is a state that does not accept the logic of the West, and highlights the grave consequences of Japan’s delayed understanding of China.
It strongly warns that Reiwa Japan must build both a stronger U.S.-Japan alliance and an independent national strategy for survival.

2019-06-06
If that is so, then we must once again consider how grave a problem is involved in the fact that the West, and especially the nations of Europe, have so readily jumped aboard the Belt and Road Initiative.

The following is a continuation of the previous chapter.
It is said that, by the fact of China’s great economic growth over the thirty years since the Tiananmen Incident, the effectiveness of the “China model” as a growth principle for the twenty-first century has ended up being “proven.”
The “Belt and Road” concept, which the Xi Jinping leadership began advocating in 2014, three years after the publication in Japanese translation of Mr. Halper’s work, is likewise nothing other than the practice of this very model.
If that is so, then we must once again consider how grave a problem is involved in the fact that the West, and especially the nations of Europe, have so readily jumped aboard the Belt and Road Initiative.
Japan, Having Lost a Precious “Thirty Years”
Finally, I would also like to think about the logic on the Chinese side that decided on the armed suppression of the students in the Tiananmen Incident.
There it is necessary to understand that China, as a country, has always tried to overcome in a “Chinese way” the historical shock it received from the “outside world” of the Western nations, namely the “Western Impact.”
The first “Western Impact” China received was the material threat of the Western world, that is, industrial technology and military power.
The means of domestic systemic transformation to counter this were the Xinhai Revolution (1912), the Communist Revolution (1949), and “Reform and Opening Up” (1978).
At the core of Xi Jinping’s call for the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” too, there is a powerful motive to “overcome the Western Impact.”
Therefore, China will probably take whatever means are necessary in order to realize that dream.
One may say that “Tiananmen” was a milestone on that path.
It showed the world its determination that it would never accept democratization imported directly from the West.
And perhaps the “second milestone” is the Belt and Road Initiative, or the militarization of bases in 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, 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” is the set of values revered by the Western nations, such as democracy and the importance of human rights, but because China needs a counter-ideology against them, it sets up Confucianism as a “universal value.”
For example, what is being promoted in the post-Marxist era in order to rationalize Xi Jinping’s dictatorship is the revival of the “Mandate of Heaven” doctrine that legitimizes the absolute and coercive rule of power.
Or rather, it is precisely because that doctrine had continued to remain rooted in Chinese society up to the present that China was able to cover over the Tiananmen Incident and support that system through economic growth alone.
This is negative in meaning, but it is still undoubtedly a “miracle of world history.”
Indeed, it may even be called the result of “the reactive power of Chinese civilization” striving at all costs to push back the “Western Impact.”
The third “Western Impact” is modern international law and the international order.
Against this, Chinese history shows that its civilizational tradition is a Chinese world order, a “Sinocentric international order,” that does not recognize the existence of any equal counterpart to itself.
Even in its setting of the nine-dash line that claims the whole South China Sea as its own sea, and in the construction of artificial islands and military bases, although it was clearly told “No” by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, China brushed aside the ruling as “waste paper” and steadily proceeded with turning the matter into an accomplished fact.
That may truly be called one expression of this tradition.
Thus, the Tiananmen Incident was precisely an event in which China clearly demonstrated, through its actions, as long as thirty years ago, that it would not accept the “logic of the outside” and that it would live as a state fundamentally different from the Western nations.
Japan ought to have drawn the lessons of the Tiananmen Incident much earlier.
Only after a delay of thirty years did various discussions finally begin, belatedly and merely in the form of following behind the shift in the Trump administration’s China strategy.
Personally, I cannot dispel the feeling that “it is already too late.”
In fact, I myself have consistently continued to advocate the necessity of this for more than twenty years.
We must now once again question, from the standpoint of “what caused Japan to become like this,” the price and the magnitude of the responsibility for Japan’s delayed recognition of China, a delay that made it lose this precious time of the “lost twenty years,” or rather the thirty years since the Tiananmen Incident, the thirty years of the Heisei era.
The struggle for hegemony between the United States and China may continue for twenty to thirty years from now, and possibly even longer.
At any rate, Japan’s immediate choice is clear.
It is to make deterrence against China effective through an even closer U.S.-Japan alliance, and to defend Japan’s sovereignty and independence.
Japan must now make that stance clear.
However, the problem lies in what comes after such a security policy of deterrence against China succeeds.
At that time, to a greater or lesser extent, 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 the role of world policeman and shifted to only a “half-engaged posture” in Asia as well.
If, at that time, China has not become a country that has fully overcome the Tiananmen Incident, then at precisely that moment Japan will face a power whose existence can no longer be described merely with 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 begin immediately, how to equip ourselves with the comprehensive national power of survival, including diplomacy, that would enable us to protect 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.