China-Japan Relations
My longstanding interest in China-Japan relations has always been motivated by my search to understand the puzzle at the heart of the relationship: despite profound political and security tensions between China and Japan over the past century, the two countries’ economies have remained deeply interwoven.
My doctoral research and first book, China-Japan Relations after World War Two: Empire, Industry and War, 1949-1971 (Cambridge University Press, 2016), explored one dimension of this puzzle, examining how and why Japan became China’s most important economic partner in the aftermath of major war, and at a time when the two countries were still Cold War opponents.
Developing an innovative conceptual framework on the role of ideas in shaping foreign policy, and empirical research using hundreds of recently declassified Chinese archives, I demonstrated that China's leaders saw Japan as a symbol of a modern, industrialised nation, and Japanese technology and expertise as vital in developing China's economic and military power.
I suggest that, for China and Japan, the years between 1949 and 1971 were not simply a moment disrupted by the Cold War, but rather an important moment of non-Western modernisation stemming from the legacy of Japanese empire, industry and war in China.
The research on which my book was based involved, among other things, access to the Chinese Foreign Ministry Archive, which I visited during extensive fieldwork in China between 2008 and 2012. I have written about the value of this archive, which is now largely closed to researchers. I have also collaborated with the Cold War International History Research Project at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, and with scholars and research centres at other institutions, to make more widely available my holdings of rare Chinese archives.
Elsewhere, I have explored the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) magnanimous treatment of Japanese technicians, civilians and Prisoners of War left behind in China at the end of World War II, showing how this treatment stemmed from CCP ideas about technology, industrialized warfare, and its search for international legitimacy during the turbulent transition from World War II to Cold War.
Beyond my contributions to the study of China-Japan relations during the Cold War, I have also examined the contemporary legacy of memories of war and colonialism in Northeast Asia. My research and commentary has explored “re-remembering” and “memory contests” in China, Japan and Taiwan; conflicting Sino-Japanese ideas about Asia’s strategic order; where Japan fits in China’s idea of a “New Type of Great Power Relations”; and the implications of conflicting historical memories for maritime and territorial disputes in the East China Sea.
— FEATURED PROJECT
How China Shapes International Economic Order
Through an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellowship and a Westpac Research Fellowship, I lead a research team investigating China’s role in shaping the post-WWII international economic order, and the contemporary legacy of China’s historical economic ideas.
