Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016. xv, 261 pp. (Tables, figures.) US$114.95, cloth. ISBN 978-1-107-13164-4.
Amy King has written a brilliant book that illuminates a hitherto obscure but important phase in Sino-Japanese relations between 1949 and 1971. She examines the following puzzles: Why did Japan become China’s most important economic partner even before those two countries had established official diplomatic relations in 1972? Why was their bilateral trade marked by profound continuity after 1949 despite imperial Japan’s brutal invasion of China, a Maoist revolutionary and anti-imperialist mindset, and postwar Japan’s tight alliance with the US superpower in a bipolar Cold War international system?
Disavowing a simplistic and bifurcated approach to analyzing Chinese foreign policy towards Japan as either a case of short-term “pragmatism” or a principled “ideological” approach, King looks at the crucial role of ideas: the belief of top Chinese revolutionary leaders that industry and technology from Japan were necessary for Maoist China’s economic survival and progress amidst threatening imperialists, and their perception that the Japanese masses were also the victims of imperialism. Such an interpretation by these leaders permitted China to cooperate and trade with various leftist groups in Japan (notwithstanding the lack of official diplomatic ties) while criticizing and confronting any “imperialistic” tendencies by the Japanese ruling class. King skilfully highlights the paradox and irony of Maoist China “trading with the enemy” (Japan) allied with the US “imperialists,” friendly to renegade Taiwan, and capable of “re-militarism” and war.
There are at least three things I like about this outstanding book. First, King’s primary source-based research is impressive indeed. She thoroughly combed through the Foreign Ministry Archives in Beijing before their access became restricted again. However, given the fact that other archival records from the Ministry of Trade and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are closed, she declines to speculate whether factionalism among top CCP was an important factor that influenced Sino-Japanese relations. Nevertheless, she does identify many important Chinese personalities, including Premier Zhou Enlai, who highly desired trade with Japan to strengthen China, and addresses the tension between Mao’s ideas of embracing rapid economic development and confronting imperialism.
Second is her novel argument that the model state of Manchukuo (Northeast China) was a legacy of the Japanese Empire for Maoist China’s state-led, planned industrialization and rapid economic development. King notes that many CCP leaders were cognizant and impressed not only by this Manchurian model (which complemented the Stalinist model of central planning and breakneck industrialization) but also with postwar Japan’s economic miracle. She states that “[f]rom Mao Zedong’s recognition of Manchuria’s industrial potential in 1949, to Zhou Enlai and Takasaki Tatsunosuke’s comparisons of the Chinese and Japanese economies in the early 1960s, the CCP had continuously conceived of Japan as a modern, industrialized country, and as the only Asian nation to have achieved the industrial development the Communist Party so desired” (212). Not surprisingly, Japan continued to be an important source of trade, technology, and investments even for post-Mao China and the era of paramount leader Deng Xiaoping’s reforms and “opening up” from 1978 onwards.
Third is the sound logical structure of her book. In the introduction and chapter 2, she lays out the central argument very clearly and then explains the intersection of empire, industry, and war in the Sino-Japanese relationship. King notes the irony of the economic interdependence between the two foes: “Thus, even at the height of China’s bitter eight-year War of Resistance against Japan, large quantities of Japanese machinery and industrial goods were being exchanged for Chinese materials and foodstuffs” (23). Also interesting is her analysis that “in Manchuria, Japan left behind a legacy of development ideas, industrial goods and thousands of experts who would go on to shape the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s economic thinking and the China-Japan economic relationship after 1949” (24).
The next five chapters follow a chronological order: “Trading with the enemy, 1949–1952”; “Revolution through industrialisation, 1953–1957”; “When ideas collide, 1958–July 1960”; “Comparing ourselves with Japan, August 1960–1965”; and “Conclusion: on the eve of diplomatic normalization, 1966–1971.” Space does not permit me to summarize each chapter, but I will mention one interesting nugget of information in her book.
In her third chapter, “Trading with the enemy,” King writes that the Committee for the Management of Japanese “began to put Japanese in charge of leading industrial sites in the Northeast. For example, at the Hegang Mine in Heilongjiang Province, the Committee was so impressed with the skills of the Japanese engineers, that in late 1950 it put Japanese technicians in charge of four of the six operation sites at the mine” (74). Anecdotes like this certainly add flavour to King’s book and argument about the indispensability of the Japanese link for Chinese reconstruction in the postwar era.
The fifth chapter, “When ideas collide,” highlights the 1958 Nagasaki flag incident when two Japanese youths tore down the PRC’s flag at a trade exhibition in that city. That incident enraged China and led to the suspension of all trade with Japan. The radicalized mood of the Great Leap Forward in China and the Kishi government’s decision to revise the US-Japan Security Treaty led to Beijing’s hostility to Tokyo. “Ultimately, one particularly catastrophic event—the Great Leap Forward—provided the political and economic conditions that first allowed normative ideas to have considerable leverage in China’s foreign economic policy towards Japan, and later encouraged the CCP to restart economic ties with Japan” (164). In the following chapter, she notes: “By 1960, however, China could no longer rely on the Soviet Union for economic support. Chinese officials therefore redoubled economic ties with Japan” (195). In the concluding chapter, King writes that throughout the Cultural Revolution, Japan remained China’s number one trade partner and its major source of industrial goods and technology (209).
Though King does not explicitly make any predictions about the future of Sino-Japanese diplomatic relations in the twenty-first century, her wonderful historical account provides a useful analogy that their economics will continue to be “hot” even though politics may sometimes be “cold.”
Lam Peng Er
National University of Singapore, Singapore