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The Sino-Japanese relationship is among the central factors in East Asian international politics, but it remains a derivative rather than primary strategic pattern. Leaders in Beijing, long preoccupied by the Soviet-American military competition in East Asia and the more immediate Soviet challenge to China's security, have only begun to assess the potential effects of Japanese power on Chinese political and security interests. Japan's predominant concern has been the maintenance of its political and security alignment with the United States, reinforced by decades of Soviet rigidity toward Tokyo.
The relationship between China and Japan is a many-layered cake, impossible to eat all at once. This article will concentrate on the diplomatic layer of the relationship. Diplomatic history is essentially about the decisions of governments and the documents that are subsequently exchanged. Each of these aspects has its difficulties for the historian of East Asia. For substantial parts of the period under review “government” in a western sense hardly existed in China, while in Japan even the considered decisions of the government in Tokyo frequently failed to reflect the situation on the ground. In Japan's relations with China there was often a dual – if not a multiple – diplomacy at work where the army (among others) had an independent hand in fashioning “policy.”
This article is concerned with the evolving framework of Sino-Japanese economic interdependence as seen in the development of plant and technology contracts between the two countries. I believe that this is the most fruitful approach to adopt in order to provide an understanding of the nature of the relationship, and because I have been involved in these transactions for two decades, this article is both an analysis of the available materials and a reflection of my own experiences. In the conclusion, I suggest ways in which the Sino-Japanese relationship can be further improved.