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Japan, Australia, and the Rejigging of Asia-Pacific Alliances

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Abstract

Certain fundamentals of the geopolitical frame of inter-state relations in East Asia remain as set around 70-years ago in the wake of the cataclysmic Second World War and subsequent San Francisco Treaty (1951), when the US was undisputed master of the world, China divided and excluded, Korea divided and at war, and Japan occupied. The economic underpinnings of that system, however, are now rudely shaken. The United States, in 1950, with about half of global GDP, is now 16 per cent (in “purchasing power parity” or PPP terms) while China, already (2016) 18 per cent, has grown by an astounding fifteen times in the two decades from 1995. Chinese GDP, one-quarter that of Japan's in 1991, trebled (or even quadrupled) it in 2018. Late in 2020 the IMF declared that China had become the world's biggest economy, $24.2 trillion to the US's $20.8 trillion, with the gap widening. The alliance system as a design to preserve US hegemony looks increasingly incongruous in a period of mounting US-China conflict.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2020

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References

Notes

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9 (Konishi Makoto, “Nansei shifuto-ka no kyodai yosaito to shite arawashitsutsu Mageshima-Tanegashima,” 19 August 2020) The rate of China's spending increase has been dramatic and uninterrupted, as military affairs critic and former Japanese Self Defence officer, Konishi Makoto, makes clear. He calculates that China's military spending to 2020 had grown by 44 times over 30 years, 11 times over 20 years, and 2.4 times over the past decade.“

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11 In a significant but neglected interview with veteran journalist Tawara Soichiro, Abe acknowledged that revision of the wording of the constitution was no longer necessary because Washington was satisfied that the 2015 package had accomplished the necessary change. (Tawara Soichiro, “Waga sokatsu – taikenteki sengo media-shi,” Sekai, January 2020, 243-251, at p. 244.)

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27 Quoted in Nakano Koichi, “The leader who was Trump before Trump,” New York Times, 29 April 2019.

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34 On 19 September and 19 October. “Kyodo, ”Abe visits war-related Yasukuni Shrine for second straight month,“ Japan Times, 19 October 2020).

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37 Kimura Akira [Kagoshima University historian and political scientist], “Hatoyama seiken hokai to Higashi Ajia kyodotai koso – atarashii Ajia gaiko to ampo, kichi seisaku o chushin ni,” in Kimura Akira and Shindo Eiichi, Okinawa jiritsu to Higashi Ajia kyodotai, Kadensha, 2016, pp. 202-230, at p. 230.

38 Yamaguchi Izumi [author], “Matsurowanu kuni kara no tegami,” Ryukyu shimpo, 21 October 2016.

39 Yamaguchi Jiro [Hosei University political scientist], “Bunmei no owari?” Tokyo shimbun, 22 May 2016.

40 Shirai Satoshi [Kyoto Seika University historian/political scientist], Kokutairon – Kiku to Seijoki, Tokyo: Shueisha shinsho (2018).

41 Desmond Ball, “Whither the Japan-Australia security relationship?”, APSNet Policy Forum, September 21, 2006.