A New Cold War in Japan-China Competition Toward ASEAN : Political Dimension of FTA

Abstract

This paper explores Japan-China power competition over ASEAN after China’s embarking on a revisionist aspiration in the mid-1990s. It called forth a new cold war in their relations. In a new age, the powers employ FTA as a way to add more power to their blocs with economic significance therein. ACFTA and AJCEP were initiated in this context. China’s and Japan’s behaviors in ASEAN marked in contrast. Japan departed from ASEAN owing to its deteriorating financial market after the collapse of bubble economy and the Asian financial crisis. Japan’s departure provided China an impulse to bolster an economic creep into ASEAN by undertaking a financier and market. The two wars also offered China an opportunity to attempt it without worrying about the U.S. pressure. China preempted to embrace ASEAN in a web of FTA sooner than Japan. The ACFTA would provide China a cornerstone for building EAFTA whose aim is to consolidate its regional dominance. The power has an incentive to transform the FTA into a political muscle in the wake of power competition. Relying on it, China attempts territorial creeps in East and South China Seas. Japan lags behind China in power competition. It traces to Japan’s politico-economic postures inappropriate to the reality as follows: the patchwork realism and naive liberalism, the absence of FTA policy-making organ, misperception over a deeper reality, and inflexible external behaviors as a result of heavier dependence on the U.S.