‘Power’ and ‘stability’ in the China–Japan–South Korea regional security complex

Abstract

Despite continuing economic liberalization and social integration, relations between Northeast Asian governments are often tense and lead to enhanced military readiness. Alongside confrontation in all three dyads, however, trilateral cooperation between China, Japan and South Korea has been evolving. This study shows that history problems, territorial disputes and geopolitical concerns lock the Chinese, Japanese and South Korean governments into a constellation that creates political space for the emergence of cooperative frameworks. The very fixation on material power and bilateral relationships reveals that power is being exercised in non-material ways in effect foreclosing alternative futures and reproducing existing structures including the pertaining security dilemmas.

Keywords:

• Power
• Stability
• China
• Japan
• South Korea

Aknowledgements

I thank Andrew O'Neil and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Disclosure Statement

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and publication of this article.

Notes

1. For examples, see Snyder (2009, p. 165).

2. An example is Armitage and Nye's (2012) call on Japan to address the history problem instrumental to improve security cooperation with South Korea disregarding the fact that it is the very issues that haunt Japan's relations with China.

3. Revisionist history textbooks remain also contested within Japan. While suppressed in China, their use to bolster authoritarian state institutions makes them controversial within South Korea too. Chinese and Korean historiography paint Japan in an overly negative and the own regimes in overly positive lights.

4. Despite official denials earlier statements confirm the existence of a consensus (Ishida 2013).

5. Personal conversation, Tokyo, July 2012.