CHINA AND JAPAN: Facing History.

• Author: Pearson, Mark

CHINA AND JAPAN: Facing History Author: Ezra J. Vogel Published by: Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, 2019, 536pp, US$24.95.

China and Japan: Facing History is the last book by the renowned US scholar of East Asia Ezra Vogel, who died in 2020 aged 90. In a career spanning six decades, Vogel wrote extensively on Japan, China and Korea. His signature work Japan as Number One (1978) explained Japan's phenomenal post-war economic success to a Western audience, and became a bestseller in Japan too. His biography of Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, the architect of China's economic rise, has also been widely acclaimed, including in China.

China and Japan: Facing History is a survey of the two countries' relationship from its origins 1500 years ago to the present day, covering the gamut of political, economic and cultural links. Vogel begins by describing the cultural heritage Japan absorbed from China in the first millennium AD, such as the use of the Chinese writing system and Buddhism, which created a foundation for their future interaction. He adeptly captures the counterpoints in the relationship across the centuries--from Japan's adoption of the Chinese model of government in the 7th century, through to the China's efforts to learn from Japan's rapid modernisation in the 20th century. Along the way he provides fascinating vignettes of the role played by monks, scholars and traders in keeping contacts alive during long periods when political engagement was sporadic.

Vogel's analysis of the modern relationship, which started when Japan emerged from seclusion in the mid-19th century, describes how it joined European nations in predating on China, first occupying Taiwan (1895) and then expanding its influence into Korea and Manchuria, before embarking on a fateful invasion of central China in 1937. He explores resonances between the collapse of government authority in China following the 1912 revolution against imperial rule, and the breakdown of political order in Japan in the 1920s and 1930s, which saw Japan's armies in China embark on their own local wars in defiance of the government in Tokyo. Vogel's descriptions of Japan's colonial impact on Taiwan and Manchuria, and the lasting effects in terms of their economic development, is particularly well drawn.

Vogel also explores episodes which hint at other, unrealised possibilities. These include discussions between Japanese and Chinese thinkers in the 19th century...