A submission to Reinvention: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research Cover page Full name of author
Contemporary leadership: the Japan-China dichotomy in the present day
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Contemporary leadership: the Japan-China dichotomy in the present day Economic leadership: macroeconomic management and the landscape of the international political economy Japan currently experiences two ‘Lost Decades’, characterised by low growth and consumption, chronic deflation and ineffective remedial policies (Hwang, translated by Chung, 2013 : 14) (Inoguchi, 2014 : 102-103). ‘Abenomics’ – utilising fiscal stimulus, monetary easing and structural reforms – is the newest effort to address this (Sharma, 2014 : 103 and 104). However, this government action has been constrained by, amongst other things, vested corporate interests opposed to reform and servicing its massive sovereign debt (ibid. : 103 and 109-110). Consequently, Abenomics inevitably departs from the previous style of state-led developmental capitalism in which Japanese governments were willing and much more able to impose controversial supply-side policies, as well as demand-side ones. (Japan, here, no longer offers a meaningful alternative to the Consensus for centrally-planned economies.) Ultimately, Abenomics is not very or successfully ‘state-led’. It is not successful, either. This is, though, symptomatic of wider and problematic failings to (in the way that China has successfully) ‘safeguarded its own policy space as to when, where and how to adopt foreign ideas’ (Zhang, 2006). These are ideas that – for example – encouraged Japan to defer to International Monetary Fund (IMF) austerity recommendations that were retrospectively, in 2014, admitted as being ‘less than fully effective’ (International Monetary Fund, 2014). Such deference is indicative of the secondary position that Japan plays within global economic governance. The primary position may be de jure held by institutions such as the IMF, World Bank or the World Trade Organisation; however, institutions of the Washington Consensus only serve as receptacles of US economic leadership around the world as a whole. This continues the trend observed in the colonial era. In this case, deference to the IMF harmed recoveries and was also at the expense of formulating new paradigms of macroeconomic management that – in hindsight – could have been a new opportunity to formulate an alternative regional (and global) economic leadership for others to follow. This, alongside the rise of an alternative – the so-called ‘China Model’ – now ends the Japanese monopoly on regional economic leadership, as ‘Abenomics may take 10 years to work’ (BBC, 2013b). The Washington Consensus is also questioned. China’s ideational model – in stark contrast – is state-led authorised ‘selective cultural borrowing’ that encourages gradual economic reform, instead of neoliberal ‘shock therapy’ (Zhang, ibid.). Here lies a pragmatic, radical, fused cultural leadership (‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics’ and de facto capitalism) that has – as it did with Japan in the colonial era – manifested into economic leadership. This has produced 8% average growth over thirty years (Zhu, 2012 : 104) (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development : 2013), and elevated China to the world’s largest exporter (Bloomberg, 2013) and largest economy by 2014 purchasing power parity (International Monetary Fund, 2015). The learning curve to leadership has been steep: an event such as the Great Leap Forward (and the future rise of Deng Xiaoping) probably ingrained into the contemporary crop of party leaders a mind-set to attain domestic legitimacy through positive economic results, instead of socio-political results. Because it is domestically successful, it appeals for other governments abroad to copy – only if they wish to ‘selectively borrow’ from it. There are no strings attached, although – on top of the idea itself – China offers financially generous rewards. Indeed, China remains only too willing to materially and financially sponsor and champion others who choose China’s idea and choose to diverge from the Washington Consensus (Huang, 2010 : 31-32). Examples include large-scale infrastructure projects financed by Chinese state funds. For China, this in turn precipitates comparatively favourable connections to access markets, investment opportunities and energy security – at Japanese-US expense. If anything, these are the only political conditions of its chequebook diplomacy, which has reached African and Latin American shores (Grimm, 2014 : 995) (Kotschwar, 2014 : 212). Tellingly, these are where ‘the West’ would be rebuked as any type of leader; reflected in discourse more as a destabilising neo-colonial imposition. China is also setting up an institutional (or conceptual) base with which to back up its ideational and material split from Washington. The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (a direct rival to the Asian Development Bank historically under Japanese control) is China’s attempt to exert leadership within the global governance of development (and no doubt, emasculate Japan) (The Economist, 2015c). The One Belt One Road initiative, which this article would describe as a quasi-institution, represents an attempt to enjoin the Eurasian continent using trade supported Chinese infrastructure (Bloomberg, 2015b). These institutions hold implications for security leadership, too – when it is considered that deepwater ports based in the Indian Ocean (known as the ‘String of pearls’) relieves pressure on the Malacca Strait, which could be blockaded by US vessels and choke 80% of Chinese oil imports (US Energy Information Administration, 2015) (The Economist, 2013c). It offers security leadership in the sense that China alone is able to adjust the status quo of the security of seaborne trade – an issue of strategic importance – in its favour. This attempt to economic and security leadership has gained the recognition from a rival and is not being accepted by Japan ‘lying down’; Japan has responded and is jockeying with China to building a deepwater port in Bangladesh (Bloomberg, 2015a). In respect of all of the above, in three ways – ideationally, materially and institutionally – China successfully leads a divergent coalition defecting from Washington and Tokyo. China’s East Asian economic leadership massively differs from the Japanese option. China, however, faces obstacles. A growing middle class and ageing population (caused by the one-child policy and increased life expectancy) have restricted injections into low-wage, labour-intensive mass-production workforces – the domain of poorer and younger folk (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, ibid.) (Banister et al., 2010 : 8-9). This is in similar vein to Japan. (China, therefore, is rebalancing towards different sources of growth, diverging away from its previous course.) (Huang et al., 2015) (Hwang, op. cit. : 16-17) (British Embassy Beijing, 2015). The problems above resemble Japan’s; however, others – such as corruption (Pei, 2012 : 39), industrial accidents (The Economist, 2013b), environmental degradation (The Economist, 2013d) and ‘conspicuous inequality’ (Hwang, op. cit.: 16) – do not. Over-investment, persistent debt levels and the 2015 summer stock market crash also indicate an oncoming ‘hard landing’ (Hawksworth, 2015). These are all debilitating when attempting to sustain economic growth and to foster economic development – as domestic policy, a global model for governments afar and East Asian economic leadership. Political and security leadership: territorial and maritime disputes In the Senkaku/Diaoyu dispute, Japan counters Chinese surges of leadership with more success than in economics (Togo, 2014 : 243). So far, China has imposed its own Air Defence Identification Zone (BBC, 2013c) and threatened to fire radar-guided weapons (BBC, 2013a). This is in addition to a ‘cabbage strategy’ in which a contested area is surrounded by: ‘so many boats – fishermen, fishing administration ships, marine surveillance ships, navy warships – “that the island is thus wrapped layer by layer like a cabbage”’ (Himmelman, 2013). All of this is part of China’s compulsion to ‘push out’ the string of US military bases in the Asia Pacific and to secure island chains (of which there are three, but may be occupied, such as Taiwan) in order to avoid being surrounded. However, in response, Japan appears to have done away with Yoshida’s pacifism, preferring: naval manoeuvres (BBC, 2010), vows to shoot down ‘unauthorised’ aircraft (Baker et al., 2013), and a constitutional reinterpretation to authorise both projections of hard power beyond its territory (Akiyama, 2014) and weapons exports (BBC, 2014). However, Japan’s capability for the latter actions still remain pegged to the US, because of economic and financial reasons constraining defence expenditure increases. Abe still requires significant US military assistance and welcomes the US ‘Asia Pivot’ (Campbell et al., 2013 : 8-9). Alone, Japan cannot compete with Chinese hard power projection. Ideationally-founded discourse, therefore, is Japan’s means to indigenously-created security leadership. There is a de facto Japan-led coalition of ‘anti-Chinese’ countries – fearful of China’s projection of its interests in territorial and maritime disputes (Abe, 2014) (Richards, 2014) (Fackler, 2014). Indeed, the empowerment of smaller nations embroiled in other disputes with China in a ‘coalition of the fearful’ outnumbers and offers greater ‘collective security’ vis-à-vis China. (For instance, in the South China Sea, China unilaterally constructed island infrastructure (Hardy et al., 2015) and drilled into oil and gas reserves claimed by four other governments (The Economist, 2015a).) For the Japanese, US and other parties to other disputes, China’s conduct resembles the nationalistic rise of 1914 Germany (Nye, 2014). This legitimates Japan-US-led containment of the ‘Chinese threat’. However, both express the other’s leadership as neo-colonial and belligerent (Wang, 2014). For China, the disputes represent justified reclamation of territories illegitimately taken away from Asia’s then-sick man. This especially resonates in the Senkaku/Diaoyu dispute, evocative of Japanese wartime expansion (Chau, 2014). This also applies to four other island disputes across the South and East China Sea, other maritime claims, and further land disputes over Kashmir and Taiwan. In addition to risking a ‘miscarriage of justice’, conceding to the Japanese-led discourse and coalition would be domestically and regionally judged as weak. This would be inconsistent with Xi’s ‘Chinese Dream’ that ideologically guides national rejuvenation from being humiliated during the colonial era (Swaine, 2013 : 10), and China’s staunch position on the estranged territories of Xinjiang and Tibet already under control, but which desire independence. Here is a case in which constructivist analyses take primacy: China’s military leadership may win individual battles, but not the whole dispute. Compromise appears unlikely. This is because these disputes are as much an ideational battle as a material one. And, although Japan is exploiting the current insecurity of other governments to its leadership advantage, this is temporal and paradoxical. If it is to become a long-term security guarantor (counterbalancing China), it must still address the moral elements (of tolerance, restraint, responsibility and so on) lacking in its previous leadership. This moral appeal forms the basis of the pre-existing, China-led ‘anti-Japan’ coalition. The coalition is legitimised further by Japanese political elites still visiting Yasukuni Shrine, in which convicted Class-A Japanese war criminals are honoured (O’Dwyer, 2010 : 166-167) (Japan Today, 2015). Japanese efforts to revise its wartime history in national curricula also fuels frustration towards Japan’s perceived lack of contrition (Fifield, 2015). Scepticism should still surround Japan’s medium-to-long-term security leadership, because of these ideational and deeply-rooted perceptions-based obstacles. Conclusion Leadership has been complex and in flux: because of external variables (including the US), of leadership’s multi-faceted-ness and of futuristic, unanticipated leadership factors. Any forecast would likely echo similar sentiments. For Japan to remain a serious constituent of the subcontinent, it will continually rely on decisive US superpower support to frustrate the rising China. References Please note that some references pertaining to factual news pieces have unknown authors (for example, the BBC or Japan Today). However, even some open editorials (especially those from The Economist) are also anonymised (as per their convention to allow their writers to assume different voices: http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/09/economist-explains-itself-1). Some organisational pieces, such as those from the International Monetary Fund or the British Embassy in Beijing, do the same, too. In all and any such cases, the author has marked the author of these sources as the name of the overarching organisation (for example, ‘BBC’, ‘The Economist’ or ‘British Embassy Beijing’).
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