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published_or_final_version / Politics and Public Administration / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

This thesis is a study of the People’s Republic of China’s foreign economic policy towards Japan between 1949 and 1965. In particular, the thesis explores Chinese policy-makers’ ideas about Japan in the wake of the War of Resistance against Japan (1937-1945), and considers how those ideas shaped China’s foreign economic policy towards Japan between 1949 and 1965. To do so, the thesis employs a four-part ideas framework that examines Chinese policy-makers’ background, foreground, cognitive and normative ideas about Japan, and shows how the interaction between these four different idea types shaped China’s Japan policy between 1949 and 1965. Furthermore, the thesis draws on over 200 recently declassified Chinese-language archival records from the Chinese Foreign Ministry, as well as additional Chinese, Japanese, US and British archival sources. It argues that China’s experience of Japanese imperialism, industrialisation and war during the first half of the twentieth century deeply shaped Chinese ideas about Japan after 1949, though in ways that at first seem counterintuitive. Although Japan had waged a brutal war against China, Chinese policy-makers viewed Japan as an important source of industrial goods, technology and expertise, and a symbol of a modern, industrialised nation-state. However, China’s experience of Japanese imperialism and militaristic aggression often made it difficult to justify the policy of ‘trading with the enemy’. Ultimately, the thesis argues that China sought to expand economic ties with Japan after 1949 because Chinese policy-makers believed that doing so would assist China in becoming a modern and industrialised state, one that was strong enough to withstand foreign imperialism and restore its central position in the international system. Chinese conceptions of Japan thus help to explain how Japan became China’s largest trade partner by 1965, despite the bitter legacy of the War of Resistance and the Cold War divide between the two countries after 1949.

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences. / Department of History

This study explores some of the urban visions inherent in Japanese colonial modernity in Manchuria and how they represented important aspects of the self-consciously modernizing Japanese state. Perceiving the northeastern Chinese city of Changchun as a tabula rasa upon which to erect new and sweeping conceptions of the built environment, Japanese used the city as a practical laboratory to create two distinct and idealized urban milieus, each appropriate to a particular era. From 1905 to 1932 Changchun served as a key railway town through which the Japanese orchestrated informal empire; between 1932 and 1945 the city became home to a grandiose, new Asian capital. Yet while the facades the town and later the capital—as well as the attitudes of the state they upheld—contrasted markedly, the shifting styles of planning and architecture consistently attempted to represent Japanese rule as progressive, beneficent, and modern. More than an attempt to legitimize empire through paternalistic care, however, Japanese perceptions of these built environments demonstrate deeper significance. Although Japanese intended Changchun's two built environments to appeal to subject populations, more fundamentally they were designed to appeal to Japanese sensibilities in order to effect change in Japan itself. Imperialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries involved policies of dominance and exploitation that included a range of endeavors central to the creation of contemporary societies. It is in part because Japanese believed they were acting progressively in places like Changchun that many Japanese in the postwar era have had difficulty acknowledging the entirety of Japanese activities on the mainland in the first half of the twentieth century.

This thesis examines the deep bilateral tensions surrounding the East China Sea (ECS) disagreements between Japan and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the period from August 19th 2003 to June 18th 2008 from an actor-centred constructivist liberal viewpoint. The East China Sea disputes could be described as a conflicting difference of opinion over a) the demarcation of maritime territory and Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) in which potentially significant energy deposits exist and b) the ownership of the strategically important and historically sensitive Pinnacle (Senkaku/Diaoyu) Islands. This research addresses the question of why, given the fact that China and Japan have a strong interest in co-operation and stable relations with each other, small incidents in the ECS blow up into larger problems, cause approaches to the East China Sea to wax and wane, and move the relationship in a direction that goes against preferred national objectives? In attempting to unravel this puzzle, this work argues that domestic politics and popular negative sentiment have been the major issues that have greatly amplified and politicised the ECS problems and have significantly affected positive progress in negotiations aimed at managing and stabilising these disputes. By examining these, the thesis addresses the question of why China and Japan have been so constrained in their attempts to find a workable bilateral agreement over disputed energy resources and demarcation in the East China Sea. It also indirectly deals with the question of why the conflicting legal complexities surrounding these disagreements contributed to both states so fervently maintaining and defending their claims.