• Looks at the history of the present-day enmity between China and Japan, the world's second and third largest economic powers
• Argues that the contemporary rivalries between the two states are symptoms of hostilities stretching back to the beginning of relations between the two states
• Examines current issues such as war guilt, visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, and territorial disputes
• Cautions that unless China and Japan can learn to co-exist, the stability of the regional and global systems will be jeopardized

New to this Edition:

• New epilogue focusing on the issues that dominate China and Japan's fraught current relationship including economic competition, resurgent nationalism, military tensions, and globalization

   
Japan and China have been rivals for more than a millennium. In more recent times, China was the more powerful until the late nineteenth century, while Japan took the upper hand in the twentieth. Now, China's resurgence has emboldened it even as Japan perceives itself falling behind, exacerbating long-standing historical frictions. June Teufel Dreyer's Middle Kingdom and Empire of the Rising Sun provides a highly accessible overview of one of the world's great civilizational rivalries that ranges from the seventh century to the present. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, the shrinking distances afforded by advances in technology and the intrusion of Western powers brought the two into closer proximity in ways that alternately united and divided them. In the aftermath of multiple wars between them, including a long and brutal conflict in World War II, Japan developed into an economic power but rejected militarism. China's journey toward modernization was hindered by ideological and leadership struggles that lasted until the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. The final part focuses on the issues that dominate China and Japan's current relationship: economic rivalry, memories of World War II, resurgent nationalism, military tensions, Taiwan, the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands, and globalization. Dreyer argues that recent disputes should be seen as manifestations of embedded rivalries rather than as issues whose resolution would provide a lasting solution to deep-standing disputes. For the paperback edition, she has added a new afterword that takes readers up to the present day.