Overview

A Financial Times ""Summer Books"" Selection ""Will become required reading."" -Times Literary Supplement ""Elegantly written with a confidence that comes from decades of deep research on the topic, illustrating how influence and power have waxed and waned between the two countries."" -Rana Mitter, Financial Times China and Japan have cultural and political connections that stretch back fifteen hundred years, but today their relationship is strained. China's military buildup deeply worries Japan, while Japan's brutal occupation of China in World War II remains an open wound. In recent years both countries have insisted that the other side must openly address the flashpoints of the past before relations can improve. Boldly tackling the most contentious chapters in this long and tangled relationship, Ezra Vogel uses the tools of a master historian to examine key turning points in Sino–Japanese history. Gracefully pivoting from past to present, he argues that for the sake of a stable world order, these two Asian giants must reset their relationship. ""A sweeping, often fascinating, account Impressively researched and smoothly written."" -Japan Times ""Vogel uses the powerful lens of the past to frame contemporary Chinese–Japanese relations [He] suggests that over the centuries-across both the imperial and the modern eras-friction has always dominated their relations."" -Sheila A. Smith, Foreign Affairs

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This elegantly written history of the relationship between East Asia's two major powers deploys a 1,500-year chronology with a confidence that comes from decades of deep research on the topic, illustrating how influence and power have waxed and waned between the two countries.--Rana Mitter Financial Times (06/07/2019) Vogel uses the powerful lens of the past to frame contemporary Chinese-Japanese relations...With scholarly care and an eye on contemporary policy, Vogel suggests that over the centuries--across both the imperial and the modern eras--friction has always dominated their relations.--Sheila A. Smith Foreign Affairs (03/01/2020) Will become required reading...Vogel delves broadly into Japanese and Chinese societies to urge less acrimony and better mutual understanding...Displays a lifetime of deep engagement with sources in English, Chinese and Japanese...He is one of the few thinkers alive with sufficient traction to speak equally with leaders in both countries as well as people on the street.--Alexis Dudden Times Literary Supplement (07/23/2019) For 1,500 years, China and Japan have taken turns as the major Asian power players, shaping each other's destinies even as they're often at odds. Vogel traces the nuances.-- (08/04/2019) The importance of this book--by one of the great Asian specialists from the U.S. of the modern era--is in alerting what will hopefully be a wide readership to how complex, and crucial, Sino-Japanese relations are, and how any complacency about the two being able to get on easily and unproblematically can be cured by attending to their long, complex and frequently acrimonious history.-- (08/01/2019) While it is not easy for outsiders to plumb the deep-seated emotions and complex psychology of the Sino-Japanese relationship, no one is better qualified to help us than Ezra Vogel. As the author of many important and influential books on both countries and possessing an extraordinary network of contacts among scholars and policy makers in China, Japan, and the United States, he is truly a unique scholar of Asia, and it is no surprise that his new volume is a work of exceptional learning.-- (09/01/2020) Ezra Vogel's China and Japan is more than just an important, new addition to scholarship. Based on more than half a century of Vogel's own work, along with that of many others, this masterful book traces the long relationship between China and Japan in a way that favors neither over the other and covers a wide range of social, political, economic, and cultural ties. General readers and scholars alike have much to gain from reading this marvelous and welcome history of the interactions between China and Japan.--Joshua A. Fogel, author of Articulating the Sinosphere A sweeping, often fascinating, account...Impressively researched and smoothly written, China and Japan is a timely reminder of how public perceptions are shaped by political expediency, how new leaders and propaganda can efface existing goodwill.--Nicolas Gattig Japan Times (07/27/2019)

Author Information

Ezra F. Vogel (1930-2020) is the author of Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Lionel Gelber Prize, and of the international bestseller Japan as Number One. He was Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences Emeritus at Harvard University.

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