Manchurian Comrades

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un did not show up for the party.

Why did Kim stay put in Pyongyang? Was it for the same reason that, at the very last minute, he opted out of Moscow's Victory Day Parade in May? Maybe the political situation was still too unsettled at home to permit him to be away with confidence—after all, the most serious plot to overthrow his grandfather was mounted during the Great Leader's travels abroad in 1956. Maybe Kim, scion of a small, poor country that is at once dependent on and distrustful of its “great power” neighbor, feared any appearance of kowtowing to Xi. Or maybe the Young Marshal wants to wait until he can hold his first major summit in Pyongyang, where the choreography will be under his command.

Whatever Kim's motives, it probably came as a relief to Xi Jinping that he chose not to come. Media madness over the iconic Korean autocrat could have detracted from the grand display of Chinese wealth, power, and glory. Kim's attendance, as with so much about North Korea in the eyes of Beijing, could have easily turned into a mild nuisance, if not a serious headache. On the other hand, for China's only treaty ally to send a mere figurehead would be a slight, and to send no one at all would be unthinkable even in these frosty times. So it was also probably comforting that Kim dispatched his confidant Choe Ryong-hae, a senior member of the Korean Workers’ Party, to sit in for him. After all, Choe has traveled as Kim's emissary on high-profile trips to South Korea, Russia, and China—in fact, he met Xi two years ago on a fence-mending mission in the aftermath of North Korea's third nuclear test, conducted against Beijing's wishes.

But that turns out to be only the beginning of the story of Choe Ryong-hae's family ties to China, which, like Kim Jong Un's, penetrate deep into common bedrock out of which the North Korean and Chinese Communist states evolved. Choe's father, Choe Hyun, was born in China to a Korean émigré family. Arrested by the local warlord government for involvement in the anti-Japanese movement, Choe converted to communism during his seven years in prison. Released in 1932, he joined a guerrilla outfit of Koreans fighting under Chinese Communist command and got to know Kim Il Sung, who had spent his formative years in Manchuria attending Chinese schools. Fluent Mandarin speakers, Choe and Kim became commanders in the CCP's Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army, and scored the occasional modest victory, like the famous, albeit brief, takeover in June 1937 of the Korean town of Pochonbo. But mostly they struggled to survive Japanese forces’ relentless “bandit suppression” campaigns in Manchuria. Choe finally fled to the Soviet Far East in late 1940, and Kim followed suit the next spring.

Four and a half years later on August 15, 1945, when Emperor Hirohito abruptly announced Japan's surrender, Choe and Kim set out to cross the Chinese border into “liberated” Korea. They were unable to get across overland, so they doubled back to Vladivostok and found a Soviet ship to transport them to the east coast city of Wonsan, alighting on Korean soil on September 19. Thus, on that historic September day in Tokyo Bay when surrender became official, Choe Hyun and Kim Il Sung were most likely in China.

Seventy years later, Kim's grandson entrusted Choe's son with the delicate mission of returning to China as emissary from Pyongyang. Choe apparently did not confer with Xi during his brief visit, however, and during the main event itself, he was relegated to an end row seat, far from the Chinese leader. His presence on the Tiananmen rostrum was an embodiment of the deep yet strained bond between longtime communist allies.

Manchurian Enemies

The sense of alienation was enhanced by the striking presence of a different Korean leader at Xi Jinping's side on Victory Day—South Korean president Park Geun-hye.

Arriving a day early for summit talks with Xi, Park walked beside Xi on the big morning of the parade, smiling like Guanyin as they ascended the steps up the Gate of Heavenly Peace, where she sat just one leader away on Xi's right as the tanks and missile launchers rumbled down the Avenue of Eternal Peace. Beijing made the most of Madame Park as top VIP among the “true friends” of China, ranked second only to Vladimir Putin. It was a savvy and bold choice for Park to attend, but hardly a surprising one. From the day she set foot in the Blue House, she has been pursuing a close relationship with her counterpart in Zhongnanhai. She and Xi hit it off on her state visit to Beijing in June 2013, only her second international trip after the obligatory (and unremarkable) pilgrimage to Washington. Park lunched privately with Xi and the First Lady, and wowed students at Tsinghua University with her self-taught Mandarin and allusions to Chinese philosophy. A year later, Xi made a reciprocal visit to Seoul that sealed a personal bond that was buttressed by their shared annoyance with Kim Jong Un, who was busy testing missiles and nuclear weapons, and Abe Shinzo, who was unapologetically pushing a revisionist history agenda.

Park's privileged spot on the podium was a clear marker of the remarkable friendship blooming between Beijing and Seoul. But given the year being commemorated, her attendance also papered over the awkward historical ironies behind this new alignment. After all, Park's family ties to China also date back seventy years. In fact, like Choe's father and Kim's grandfather, her father Park Chung-hee was on Chinese soil on Victory Day, 1945, albeit for reasons neither she nor Xi would much care to remember.

Born and raised in colonial Korea, Park Chung-hee crossed from the Korean peninsula to the Chinese mainland in the spring of 1941, although his destination, the city of Changchun, had been known for almost a decade as Shinkyō, “New Capital” of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo. He arrived in Shinkyō as one of a handful of Korean cadets accepted into the prestigious new Imperial Japanese Military Academy. After two years of study, Park qualified for two more at the mother academy in Zama, outside Tokyo. Upon graduation in the spring of 1944, Lieutenant Park was deployed to an isolated valley on the provincial border between Hebei and Inner Mongolia in a mixed company of Koreans, Japanese, and Chinese, fending off assaults by Chinese Communist forces right up until Hirohito's surrender. Chong-sik Lee describes how Park and his fellow Korean soldiers, left stranded by peace, drifted down toward Beijing, arriving in late September.Footnote ¹ Not until the following spring did Park find a passage to Pusan on a U.S. military ship leaving from the port at Tianjin.

In justifying Park Geun-hye's decision to attend the Victory Parade, her spokesman explained, “We also kept in mind the historical fact that Korea's independence fighters were active in China.”Footnote ² After leaving Beijing, Park flew to Shanghai to attend a reopening ceremony for the refurbished Korean Provisional Government building in the city's former French concession—underscoring Charles Armstrong's point, in his contribution to the previous issue of this journal, about how Korean nationalism houses two rival lineages of anti-Japanese patriotic resistance, both based in China: the communist partisans who fought in the wilds of Manchuria, and the conservative nationalists who founded a government-in-exile in Shanghai. But nowhere on Park's tour, nor in the media coverage, was there discussion about the uncomfortable existence of a third lineage of Koreans active in China up to 1945—loyal officers fighting for the Japanese empire, the lineage to which the president herself is a personal heir.

Ian Buruma writes in Year Zero: A History of 1945 how the “foundation myths of national revival in postwar Europe” had to be written around the heroics of resistance fighters who were actually marginal figures during the war years.Footnote ³ These myths also had to write out the depressing and divisive memories of widespread collaboration. The kind of misremembrance of 1945 that Buruma describes is hardly unique to Europe.

One Is Silver and the Other Gold

During the Cold War struggle that filled the void left by the end of World War II, Korean leaders’ family ties continued to reflect the 1945 configuration. Park Chung-hee took power through a military coup in 1961, determined to transform South Korea using Japan's economic development model, from the Meiji restoration to the Manchukuo miracle. For that, he needed an infusion of capital, and again he looked to Japan for the solution by normalizing relations in return for a windfall of aid and investment. Park's key counterpart on the Japanese side in driving through that controversial 1965 normalization deal was former prime minister Kishi Nobusuke, grandfather of current leader Abe Shinzo. Kishi sent Park a friendly letter soon after the coup, and in a handwritten reply (held in the National Diet Library), Park wrote, “Your special cooperation during the Korea-Japan normalization negotiation process, which we will try to do from now, will realize your noble idea that making our country and your country's bond strong is our two countries’ historical destiny.”Footnote ⁴

Park Chung-hee's Korea, reliant on U.S. troops for its security and Japanese trade and investment for its growth, was firmly rooted in the Western bloc. Kim Il Sung's Korea was just as ensconced in the Eastern bloc, alternating artfully between support from rival communist powers, China and the Soviet Union. But the Sino–North Korean relationship was never easy, and, heading into the final decade of the Cold War, relations became severely strained due to Deng Xiaoping's misgivings about Kim Il Sung's “feudalist” plan to pass power on to his son, Kim Jong Il. Kim lobbied Deng at meetings in Shenyang, Beijing, and Pyongyang to accept his succession plan. Deng finally signaled the softening of his resistance by sending a trusted cadre to North Korea in October 1982 to give a speech reaffirming the PRC-DPRK alliance and toasting “Dear Leader Comrade Kim Jong Il,” paving the way for Kim Jong Il's inaugural visit to China the following year. Deng's envoy was Xi Zhongxun, father of current CCP leader Xi Jinping. Xi Zhongxun and Kim Il Sung met a number of times in the 1980s. At what was probably their final meeting during Xi's visit to Chongjin in 1988, Kim told him, “We have faith that the friendship and unity between our two countries and peoples will continue to consolidate and develop.”Footnote ⁵

Kim Il Sung's faith in Sino–North Korea friendship, like Park Chung-hee's faith in the “historical destiny” of a strong bond between South Korea and Japan, seems not to have transferred to the next generation. The familial bonds are not holding up on either side of Northeast Asia's 1945 divide. Kim Jong Un has shown no interest in a summit meeting with Xi Jinping, and Park Geun-hye has refused to hold a summit with Abe Shinzo. Beijing's Victory Parade rostrum captured these new Sino-Korean dynamics in a seating plan.

This new equilibrium is ironic given the genealogies of the current leaders. But in light of each leader's political needs and strategic approach, the reconfiguration makes a certain amount of sense. Kim Jong Un is seeking to establish his independence from Beijing, while shifting his country's economic and diplomatic relations onto a more balanced footing—just as his grandfather maintained autonomy by playing Beijing off Moscow. Thus he has kept Xi at a distance while making the occasional goodwill gesture, such as sending an old friend of China, the son of Choe Hyon, to Xi's parade. Park Geun-hye is zealously courting her country's economic future, China, without, she hopes, offending its traditional security guarantor, the United States. Thus she gambled that the credit won with Xi for proving her “true friendship” by attending his parade outweighs the costs to Seoul's reputation in Washington. This coincidence of Park's eagerness and Kim's aloofness gives Xi Jinping an opening to advance Beijing's overarching strategy toward the peninsula, pursued since the end of the Cold War: namely, to normalize relations with both Koreas by upgrading ties to the South and desacralizing ties to the North.

So the balance is tilting, but how far can it go and what form will the final equipoise take? After all, just a month after Beijing's extravaganza, Pyongyang held a military parade of its own to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of the founding of the Korean Worker's Party. Xi Jinping did not attend, but he did send the CCP's fifth-ranking member with a personal letter from Xi gushing with enthusiasm for the Kim regime and the bond between their two Communist Parties. Xi's envoy stood prominently at the side of an animated Kim Jong Un throughout the parade, symbolizing a possible reset or thaw in relations. So how will the Tiananmen rostrum look on the eightieth anniversary of Victory Day, for example? Beijing might hope that both Korean leaders will be standing shoulder to shoulder near center stage, and, as Yan Xuetong has argued, China could enjoy a kind of alliance with both North and South Korea.Footnote ⁶ But for now Pyongyang and Seoul seem doomed to see relations with one another, and by extension with China, in zero-sum terms. Thus an older and wiser Kim Jong Un might want by 2025 to steal Park's seat of honor from the South. Seoul's aspirations a decade hence are the hardest to anticipate—will South Korea's leader be willing to share center stage with Kim Jong Un? Or will Park's experiment with becoming China's friend be abandoned, with Seoul reverting to the traditional orientation around the United States? Alas, the one certain thing history teaches us is that the future is unpredictable. We will have to wait a decade and see for ourselves, tracing the strategic logic as well as historical ironies as we go.

Reticent Diplomacy and Nationalist Politics

The patterns of Sino-Japanese diplomacy have altered in this new century. Since normalization of relations in 1978, high-level visits by state leaders have paved the way for postwar reconciliation. Notable among these meetings was the initial visit of Deng Xiaoping to Japan to ratify the Treaty of Peace and Friendship, the occasion for Deng's oft-quoted statement that resolving the difficult territorial dispute should be left to future generations. Conservative and progressive Japanese political leaders repeatedly traveled to Beijing in the 1980s to solidify their country's ties with a changing China. Market reforms in China provided the opportunity for Japan's economic assistance to underpin these early reconciliation efforts. Economic development was a priority for both the CCP and Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party, a shared outlook that was highlighted in 1989 when the Western nations scorned Beijing for its repression and use of force against its own citizens in Tiananmen Square. Japan temporarily suspended economic assistance along with other G7 Western nations, but resumed its loans earlier than others. Nonetheless, Japanese officials worked hard to persuade their G7 counterparts that economic development would transform China. Reconciliation continued to motivate diplomacy, and, in 1992, Emperor Hirohito and Empress Nagako made their delicate visit to China to express remorse for the war.

This summitry began to take a different tack by the end of the 1990s, however. Jiang Zemin's 1998 state visit, ostensibly to return the courtesy of the emperor's visit, was a disaster. Jiang's decision to lecture the emperor on Japan's wartime behavior during the state dinner at the palace shocked his Japanese hosts and cooled popular receptivity to the CCP. The Koizumi years (2001–6) saw a further decline in Japan-China summitry when Prime Minister Koizumi's visits to Yasukuni Shrine drew strong Chinese ire and a “freeze” in bilateral diplomacy. Koizumi argued for moving beyond old wounds, visiting the Marco Polo Bridge war museum in China to express Japan's remorse for Chinese suffering but also continuing his own visits to Yasukuni. His successors, Abe Shinzo and Fukuda Takeo, restored Sino-Japanese diplomatic ties with their own bilateral summitry, but sought to identify a new framework for Japan and China. In 2008, President Hu Jintao returned to Tokyo, a decade after Jiang's breach of trust, and concluded significant agreements on joint energy development in the East China Sea and food safety. Japan and China dubbed this the beginnings of a new “mutually beneficial relationship based on common strategic interests.” The earlier ambition of promoting peace and friendship, embodied by the normalization treaty, seemed a much simpler task.

This top-down management of the Japan-China relationship, however, was not up to the task of solving the growing number of practical problems that accompanied China's growing influence. As I argue in my recent book, Intimate Rivals, myriad domestic interests have shaped Japan's response to increasing Chinese influence over the past decade or more. Prime ministerial visits to Yasukuni Shrine and citizen clashes around the Senkakus riled the public, but new issues of maritime boundary claims and food security also revealed the few facets of the relationship that the two governments failed to manage well. Ratification of the UN Law of the Sea in the mid-1990s prompted a new sense of competition over where to delineate their respective Exclusive Economic Zones, and Japan's growing reliance on imports of food from China, sold by Japanese corporations but processed in China, increased Japanese consumers’ concerns about food safety. The former issues had long evoked strong popular sentiments, but the latter issues also revealed the limits of existing frameworks of understanding between Tokyo and Beijing and the failure to keep up with demands on government problem solving in new areas of interdependence.

The rapidity with which the island dispute escalated into a standoff of coast guards, and even potentially militaries, brought into immediate relief the political obstacles that had encroached on diplomacy. Beyond the island dispute, Japan's growing concern over the increase in Chinese military capability, and its activities in and around Japan, had had an impact on security planning. It was the popular nationalism over the island dispute that altered the equation, translating a policy concern into a political standoff. Activists from Japan, Taiwan, and most recently the PRC had demonstrated in the waters around the islands, and the Japanese and Chinese governments sought to manage these incidents in concert. Yet in 2012, Japan and China sent their national forces to demonstrate their control of waters around these distant, uninhabited islands, and both Abe and Xi seemed uninterested in compromise even as the conflict escalated to include possible involvement of their militaries. Instead of trying out their newly minted agreement on crisis communications, concluded in June of 2012 as a result of a prior round of island tensions in 2010, the Japanese and Chinese governments publicly argued their case both at home and in diplomatic meetings in the United Nations and with other Asian leaders, including the United States. Neither Abe nor Xi created the territorial dispute or the political tensions that resulted. But both were willing to send ships to sea and aircraft to the East China Sea airspace in defense of their claims to sovereignty. Both upgraded their military preparedness.

Two and a half years later, after some intervention by Washington and with a growing recognition of the downside of their diplomatic standoff, Abe and Xi agreed to meet. As the host of the APEC summit, President Xi could not avoid inviting Prime Minister Abe to China, and thus to a face-to-face meeting with the Japanese leader. In the weeks leading up to the summit, negotiations intensified on the understanding that would precede that meeting. A finalizing meeting in Beijing between Abe's national security advisor, Yachi Shotaro, and State Councilor Yang Jiechi produced a four-point statement. There was no direct reference to a territorial dispute or to the Yasukuni Shrine. But two of those four points addressed obliquely these complaints; one on the need to “overcome political difficulties” with “the spirit of squarely facing history and advancing toward the future,” and another to acknowledge a common interest in avoiding conflict across the East China Sea (Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, November 2014).Footnote ⁷ No direct reference was made to a territorial dispute or to Yasukuni Shrine visits.

Military Risk Reduction with China

At the core of this estrangement between Beijing and Tokyo was the growing danger of military conflict. The initial meeting of Abe and Xi at the APEC summit began to turn the wheels of government relations again. Long-stalled meetings between bureaucrats resumed on a host of issues, but the real test was whether the two countries could seriously address the new risk of inadvertent war. Instigated by the island tensions, China had declared a new Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ), initially claiming it would enforce compliance, if necessary, with military force for any and all aircraft that entered the extended airspace without prior notification. While ADIZs have long been maintained by both of China's Northeast Asian neighbors, Japan and South Korea, this was a first for Beijing. U.S. officials announced immediately that this would have no impact on U.S. military activities, and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel ordered two B-52 bombers on a training mission in Guam to fly (unarmed) into the area China claimed it would police.

But for Tokyo this raised new and more worrisome issues. First, Prime Minister Abe refused to recognize the ADIZ, as it covered the disputed islands and thus challenged Japanese sovereignty. This meant that Japan's civil airliners were potentially subjected to actions by the Chinese military if Beijing chose to follow through on its warnings. Second, the Japanese and Chinese militaries both conducted surveillance across the East China Sea, and the ADIZ suggested greater Chinese military attention to Japan's surveillance aircraft. Indeed in the spring of 2014, the Japanese Ministry of Defense reported two incidents within a month or so of Chinese jet fighters coming perilously close to unarmed Japanese surveillance aircraft. Thus Beijing's interest in risk reduction was welcomed in Tokyo, as well as by others in the region.

Japan's ally, the United States, had a head start on a military-to-military conversation with the PRC. A series of incidents involving U.S. military, including the EP-3 incident in 2001 and more recent interactions between Chinese ships and U.S. naval vessels (the Impeccable in 2009 and the Cowpens in 2013) operating in the South China Sea, prompted Washington and Beijing to consider agreements to reduce the risk of incidents between their militaries. At their November 2014 meeting in Beijing, President Obama and President Xi announced some progress on maritime risk reduction. These two agreements—one on notification of military exercises and one on rules of behavior for encounters at sea and in the air—set a precedent for Tokyo's conversation with Beijing.

As China's military continues to grow and its maritime reach continues to expand, interactions with U.S., Japanese, and other Asian militaries will increase, and confidence-building mechanisms between the militaries of the Asia Pacific will be all the more necessary. New to this round of diplomatic estrangement between Beijing and Tokyo is the danger of military conflict. Japan and China have yet to resume their military exchanges and have curtailed their port visits. China hosted the 2014 Western Pacific Naval Symposium, but unfortunately excluded the participation of Japan's Maritime Self Defense Force ship because of the island dispute. Nonetheless, Japan did send officers to the discussion on the Code for Unplanned Encounters at Sea that emerged from the conference. Abe and Xi's resumption of talks, however, led to the initiation of a serious conversation between Beijing and Tokyo on how to reduce military risk. Modeled in part on the PRC-U.S. discussion, the Japan-China agreement, if successful, could be the foundation of a larger regional maritime regime, based on new norms and practices to ensure peaceful maritime behavior and cooperative management of incidents at sea.

Ending Apology, Demonstrating Might

The seventieth anniversary commemorations were anticipated as potential flare-ups of nationalism in both countries. Revisionism was the order of the day in the speeches of both Prime Minister Abe and President Xi. There was much to contend with in their historiography and their reframing of narratives to support their respective political ambitions.

Equally striking was how Abe and Xi used this year's war commemorations to recast their relationship. Neither criticized the other by name, but the shadow of the other was evident. Abe's statement on August 14, 2015, that Japan's mistake in the 1930s was to become “a challenger to the new international order,” suggested a warning to a contemporary rising China.Footnote ⁸ Xi's repetition of the title of the commemoration itself, “The Commemoration of the Seventieth Anniversary of the Victory of the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War,” made it hard to ignore that Japan was perceived as the root cause of Chinese suffering. All told, President Xi used the term “Japanese aggression” nine times and referenced Japanese militarists twice.Footnote ⁹

Both leaders spoke of how this legacy of war informed their contemporary identities, suggesting that their citizens—most of whom had no direct experience of World War II—were ready to turn the page. But whereas Prime Minister Abe suggested that it was time to look ahead rather than backwards, President Xi urged Chinese to look back so as to understand their present and future. Specifically, Abe argued that the time had come for Japanese to end their postwar apology, noting that postwar generations of Japanese now comprised 80 percent of the population. For these Japanese, Abe had this advice:

Xi's admonition to his people had a decidedly different tone. In between his articulation of China's global aspirations, his speech was peppered with calls for generations of postwar Chinese to remember their country's past war with Japan:

Xi reminded the Chinese people that their task of rebuilding China remains incomplete:

Coupled with a demonstration of China's own military prowess, Xi's call for justice and peace seemed somewhat contradictory. But in tone, Abe and Xi's reflections on the past revealed an even more important shift in their relationship. Moving on for Abe meant ending Japanese apology, whereas for Xi, China's future would depend on its own military strength.

Postwar reconciliation, therefore, no longer seems to be a diplomatic priority for Japan and China. In both policy emphasis and political ambition, Asia's two largest powers look beyond each other to claim their identities. In an era of geostrategic change, Japan and China are no longer defining their relationship together. The backdrop for the Japan-China relationship today is the regional and global stage. China has arrived as the newest and still rising power. Japan points to its established presence in regional and global affairs. At home, this jousting for primacy in Asia feeds deeply held beliefs about which country is most advanced, most modern; abroad these two visions of how to move beyond the postwar effort at reconciliation signal a far more complex and unpredictable phase in the Japan-China relationship, one that suggests less of a shared sense of destiny and more of a zero-sum competition.

Beyond Japan, the import of the parade of military personnel and equipment that accompanied President Xi's day of “Commemoration of the Seventieth Anniversary of the Victory of the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War” was difficult to miss for many in Asia. Even in Washington, the display of missiles designed to sink U.S. ships—and the simultaneous deployment of Chinese ships in U.S. waters off Alaska, where President Obama was visiting—carried an eerie message. BBC World carried interviews of young Chinese in Beijing who were proud of their government and its military might. Repeatedly the interviewees seemed to see this military might as a reassuring sign, a sign that China could no longer be invaded. But there were other popular expressions of celebration. One that caught the eye of many outside China was the new computer-generated video, Battle to Capture an Island: A Full View of Chinese Military Strength, released by the Chinese media conglomerate Tencent. This five-minute video was widely distributed around the globe on September 3 via social media, and showed a mock Chinese attack and invasion of a tropical island.Footnote ¹³

For Japan-China relations, the seventieth anniversary was an opportunity missed. There was some hope that Prime Minister Abe might travel to Beijing. Indeed, in his appearance on NHK just after his August Abe Statement, the prime minister noted that he was still thinking of visiting after the parade to meet with Xi Jinping. For whatever reason, the two governments could not realize another summit meeting. President Xi's visit to Washington, D.C., in September highlighted the growing dissonance in the U.S.-China relationship. From concern over Chinese land reclamation on disputed islands in the South China Sea, to the fallout from a suspected Chinese cyberattack on the U.S. government, to Chinese government efforts to detain and coerce Chinese nationals in the United States, U.S. and Chinese officials were also hard pressed to find common ground.

Geostrategic Change and Japan-China Relations

For decades, Beijing and Tokyo sought to define their postwar relationship, but today, after fits and starts at defining something different, the two largest nations in Asia seem to have moved into an era better described as post-reconciliation, an era with no shared understanding of how to frame and define their cooperation. No one doubts that the Asia-Pacific region is in the midst of a profound geostrategic shift, and yet it remains unclear what will emerge to define regional international relations. Much ink has been spilt on the rise of China, and yet this shorthand seems insufficient to describe the complex currents of change that this new concentration of economic and military power in Asia means for the diplomacy as well as the domestic politics of those around China.

Japan-China relations today are far more tentative and far more precarious than ever before. Economic interdependence continues to deepen, with a bilateral trade balance of roughly $345 billion in 2013 and large flows of foreign direct investment by Japan in the Chinese economy. Yet Beijing has more suitors today, and China continues to be seen as a prominent destination for Asian and global capital flows. Recent volatility in the Chinese stock market also demonstrated the interdependence of the global market with China's domestic economy. Looked at bilaterally, the economic dependency of China on Japan has decreased, and Japan's reliance on the success of the Chinese economy has increased. Investment flows from China to Japan are far smaller in scale, but growing.

What is more remarkable, however, is that this economic interdependence no longer curtails political friction. Indeed, there is far more opportunity for contest, and there are far more issues to disagree on, than ever before in Sino-Japanese relations. What remains to be seen, in this post-reconciliation phase of their relationship, is whether Beijing and Tokyo can develop sufficient tolerance and resilience in their relationship to allow them to agree to disagree.

The Global Spectacle of Strategic Ties

Both ceremonies projected a solidifying strategic partnership between China and Russia, oriented toward balancing out hegemonic rule of the West, especially that of the United States. Most world leaders bypassed commemoration ceremonies, but Xi and Putin stood proudly together, implicitly communicating to the world that they do not mind being ignored because they have each other. Russia's NTV journalist reporting on Putin's visit to Beijing noted that “Putin is the main guest of the celebration—number one amongst twenty other official guests of the parade.”Footnote ¹⁴ Chinese media coverage of Xi's attendance of Moscow parades similarly emphasized that President Xi was seated in the first row next to Putin at the Red Square parade, and that he was “the most honorable guest of honor.”.Footnote ¹⁵ Some Chinese reports further emphasized the importance of Xi's visit to Russia by citing and translating a popular quote from a Russian news agency: “The attendance of Xi Jinping is much more important than the absence of Obama and European leaders”.Footnote ¹⁶

Both leaders emphasized the importance of safeguarding the postwar world order, but also of fostering multipolarity in international politics. Indeed, in the past decade, the two sides have jointly vetoed six UN Security Council resolutions and have partaken in regional institutions, including the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the newly founded Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, aimed in part to stave off U.S. influence in the region.

Strategic collaboration ensuing from the commemoration ceremonies is further evident in economic terms. As part of Xi's visit to Moscow in May, thirty-five new economic agreements between the two nations were signed. Last week in Beijing, Putin and Xi signed another thirty. These agreements follow last year's historic $400 billion gas deal and growing trade between the two nations. According to some estimates, bilateral trade is to reach $100 billion by the end of 2015.

Despite these apparent signs of cooperation, the spectacle falls short of reality. Much uncertainty pervades the relationship if we delve beneath the symbolism of geopolitical pronouncements and signed economic agreements that accompany the attendance of parades commemorating World War II. The relationship remains volatile and unequal in favor of China. This inequality is perceptible even at the level of image-making if one closely observes the two leaders walking side by side in Beijing. Whereas Xi's movements carry a gracious ease of confidence, Putin's movements appear as more rigid and forced. More substantially though, if we think about strategic geopolitical partnership, Russia is more reliant on China than vice versa—a reversal of the situation in the 1950s. In September 2015, Xi made a state visit to the United States. China's relationship with the United States, while strained, still remains the dominant one, far outweighing that with Russia. For Russia, China presents the key partner. Its relations with the West are badly strained over Ukraine—an issue on which China has remained diplomatically neutral. Moreover, the two face competition in Central Asia, where the plans of Russia's Eurasian Union and China's Silk Road Economic Belt are likely to eventually collide. With China's economic and cultural influence expanding, Russia will have difficulty competing by drawing primarily on the limited cultural and political reserves from the Soviet era.

The economic ties are equally fragile. High expectations about the gas deal are starting to wear off, as the two sides have yet to agree on a gas price acceptable to both. The deal, already perceived as unfair by many in Russia, is now facing more pressures as the drop in global gas prices is forcing China to make further recalculations. Trade is thus far falling behind the anticipated $100 billion target. The combination of the ruble's devaluation and China's own economic crisis makes Chinese investors more cautious about investing in Russia's volatile economy.

Further economic cooperation also continues to be inhibited by Russia's fears of its stronger partner, especially in the Far East and Siberia—a region bordering China. This is most notable in the sphere of labor migration. Russia needs labor to develop the Far East. China can supply it, but Russia is wary of letting in more labor migrants out of concern for them permanently settling in the region.Footnote ¹⁷ Labor issues link directly to the implementation of the gas deal, as China wants to bring its own workers to develop the infrastructure needed for gas exports, something Russia is likely to treat with caution. On the whole, the bilateral economic relations are far from where they could be, considering that the two countries share a 4,000-kilometer border and have highly complementary economies.

Domestic Volatility and Nationalistic Awakening

While it is still challenging to distinguish the substantive elements of China-Russia relations from the symbolic appearances, what is evident from the commemoration parades held in Moscow and Beijing is the apparent similarity in their modes of authoritarian governance. The parades, turned into national celebrations of pride through the powerful role of a media spectacle, point to both leaders’ attempts at using nationalism and history as a means of bolstering public support.

In both countries, this year's commemoration events were somewhat exceptional. In Russia, while the parade takes place every year, the May events have outpaced all others in terms of grandeur and military prowess. In China, the parade marked the first national celebration of the World War II victory since the end of the war. In both cases, the parades coincided with national holidays, making the events ever more conducive to public celebration.

Rana Mitter's notion, in his contribution to the previous issue, that intensifying commemoration of World War II in Asia symbolizes a “reversal of time” in contrast to Europe, where commemoration has been slowly waning the further we get away from the anniversary, is true for both China and Russia. In China, vocal anti-Japan public opinion largely invokes raw images of the war and Japan's aggression. Unlike many young people uninterested in the war in Europe, Chinese youth are generally aware of China's victimization in the war and proud of how far their nation has come in reinventing its identity. The wide resonance of World War II with the Chinese public is partially shaped by the media, with nationalistic outlets like Global Times often utilizing the theme of humiliation to invoke an emotional sentiment and implicit support for a strong Chinese state.

Russia is similarly experiencing a spark in World War II victory nostalgia. As part of the commemoration celebration, over 500,000 citizens participated in a state-sanctioned remembrance march in Moscow, carrying photographs of relatives who died fighting in the war. Similar marches called the “immortal regiment” took place throughout Russia, from the far east all the way to the capital. The whole spectacle was riddled with emotion as participants cried while recollecting memories of their distant loved ones on live television, and was also a real show of patriotism, with the nation united in honoring its glorious victory over Germany and celebrating being part of the same nation, united under shared sacrifice. Vladimir Putin led the “immortal regiment” march in Moscow with a photograph of his father, a soldier in World War II. “I am really glad that I and my father, whose portrait I'm carrying, along with hundreds of thousands of common people, simple soldiers … can now be present at the Red Square, even if only through photographs; they have deserved it,” was Putin's widely televised remark at the parade.Footnote ¹⁸

Of course, the victory celebrations carry a double meaning in Russia's context in the aftermath of Russia's takeover of Crimea, with parades, some argue, being as much a commemoration of World War II as a celebration of Russia's resistance to Western pressures on Ukraine. The tension between the two victories was especially notable in the commemoration ribbons that had the same color scheme (orange and black) as the ones worn by pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine. Not only were these ribbons worn by all news presenters and citizens interviewed, but they were larger in size than the typical ribbons used in previous years.

The symbolism of the commemoration events in the Russian context, therefore, was perhaps even more directly woven into the discourse on national pride than were the World War II parades in China. Nonetheless, with both nations heavily spending on and widely popularizing these events, it is obvious that they are directly interested in provoking exactly this sort of nationalistic sentiment, which is conducive to public unity and reverence for higher authority or benevolent leadership over the nation. While economic decline is much starker in the case of Russia, both regimes are facing significant economic challenges to their rule, in addition to growing public discontent, as well as pressures from social media and global information flows. Both regimes also struggle in building a unified national identity in the wake of dying ideology. Nationalistic legitimation presents a critical tool for overcoming these challenges, especially if combined with state-controlled media and intensive propaganda. “In order to seize these opportunities and overcome these challenges, we must cohere the positive energy of our people—and a military parade is an important way to stimulate national self-confidence and pride,” commented Gong Fangbin of China's National Defense University in an official interview published in People's Daily.Footnote ¹⁹

The events in both countries were widely televised, reported on, and commented on by leading official figures and journalists on social media. As with large sports events like the Olympics, the parades are typical examples of media spectacles designed to magnetize the public, interrupt daily routines, and invite them to partake in a mass public celebration. Citizens were told to pause to celebrate national glory. Rejuvenation of World War II memory, therefore, is not only a political tool for showcasing power internationally, but also a potent mechanism aimed at domestic audiences. This tool is also deployed by democratic regimes in the region, such as South Korea and Japan. In an authoritarian context, however, state-sanctioned nationalism is ever more significant considering the lack of institutional legitimation mechanisms like fair elections or free media.

Building national unity on war victories, however, has its drawbacks for regime resilience. First, once set free, nationalistic public opinion is difficult to contain, forcing authorities to take up a more aggressive militaristic stance in international politics. We see this in China's relations with Japan, but also in Russia's strategy vis-à-vis the West and Ukraine. In both cases, it can be difficult to discern the regime's policy from the rising bottom-up pressures of nationalistic public opinion. Once nationalism is in full swing, reverting back to moderate diplomacy can be challenging if not impossible.

Moreover, creating such media spectacles based on tragic events can also open up unexpected spaces for societal critique of the regime. Although satire was limited in parade discussions, as the topic is both sacred and highly censored, we still saw some snippets of critique of the costliness of the parades and militarization more generally. In China, for instance, while most posts carried patriotic sentiments, some critiqued the high spending on the parade, as well as the influence of nepotism in China's political appointments, such as that of Mao's grandson, Mao Xinyu, nicknamed the “Little General” for being the nation's youngest major. On Twitter, some more outspoken human rights activists compared the parade rehearsal to the 1989 crackdown. “An image of the parade rehearsal that I risked my life to take,” read the description of a photograph of a 1989 scene tweeted by Wen Yunchao on the day of the parade.Footnote ²⁰ Other netizens created a playful, fictional chat group called “friends of China” that depicted world leaders debating whether or not to attend the Beijing celebrations, which appears to have been taken down.Footnote ²¹

In Russia, some citizens have publicly or privately refused to wear commemoration ribbons as a show of resistance to Russia's conflict with Ukraine and the state's manipulation of commemoration symbols in justifying new forms of aggression. The few remaining liberal news outlets have also published analytical and critical accounts of the regime's use of victory celebrations as legitimation mechanisms. “Like thousands of my fellow citizens I remember those who died in the war, and there is no need to keep hitting us on the head with a dusty bag of official propaganda,” wrote a commentator for the magazine The New Times.Footnote ²² The official sensitivity to citizen satire on the topic of World War II commemoration, evident in the government's preemptive and reactive efforts to censor anything potentially negative on the topic, further highlights the contentious nature of these celebrations. While censorship is more institutionalized in China, in both countries media were instructed to promote strictly positive images of the parade and national unity.

To conclude, the Putin-Xi nexus in the war commemoration game is symbolic of their projections of growing bilateral ties that should not be ignored. At the same time, it is important to distinguish projections of a strong Sino-Russian partnership from the reality on the ground. The ties between the countries are unequal and are compromised by competition and mistrust. The Russian side, while boasting confidence, is well aware of its weaker positioning vis-à-vis China in strategic and economic terms. What the parades demonstrate more than anything, however, is that the two regimes are increasingly reliant on nationalistic sentiment to remain in power. This can be a risky game for both, but is likely to persist in the years to come, and should be watched closely.