Asia’s Reckoning: The Struggle for Global Dominance, by Richard McGregor

Like the War of the Roses, the contest for Asian supremacy in the modern era has ground on for decade.

Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping in Beijing in November. Picture: AFP

Like the War of the Roses, the contest for Asian supremacy in the modern era has ground on for decade after decade, with first one then another contender gaining the upper ground. It even features, in the families of ­Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Japan’s Shinzo Abe, dynastic rivalries as in that ancient English feud.

Australian journalist Richard McGregor, who worked for this newspaper in Japan and China, then for the Financial Times in the US, has followed up his masterful 2010 book on The Party — no need to explain which one — by focusing on the collisions and the less frequent collusions between the three Pacific powers: China, Japan and the US.

The Pacific War and its history have never been settled, he writes in Asia’s Reckoning, “politically, diplomatically or emotionally”. The relationship is

like a geopolitical version of a scene in Reservoir Dogs in which a trio of antagonists all simultaneously point guns at one another … a trilateral game of chicken.

The spectre of a renewed China-centred order in Asia now appears to be up-ending the regional status quo for good. Most regional strategic writing is focused on one of the three countries, but McGregor has done immense research in each of them.

It’s hard to disagree, as he helps the reader thread through a complex series of interwoven narratives, with his measured judgments. For proper reasons — because it was never a contender for dominance — he had to leave mostly to one side the fourth phantom player in the east Asian game: the Korean peninsula, now back topping the concerns of the other three.

The second part of the book’s title might seem slightly misleading, but that would mean missing the point that Japan’s post-war economic rise was for a couple of decades far more pervasive globally than its militarily constrained, and doomed, East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

It’s a pity McGregor hasn’t the space to delve more deeply into the cultural clashes, mismatches and misunderstandings between the three, including the contrast between Japan’s collectivist ethos and Chinese individualism. It is no coincidence that the phrase “soft power”, which has played an intriguing role in “the struggle for global dominance”, was devised by a prominent American expert on Japan and East Asia, Joseph Nye.

But McGregor’s stories of geopolitical power plays more than make up for any such lack. China was slow to follow Japan into modernisation, and then substantially ­because it was prompted by the treaty ports it conceded.

Both countries naturally insisted from the turn of the 20th century that the West treat them as equals, but they have rarely managed to do so with each other, he says.

Maybe the closest they have come was in 1961 when Mao Zedong “thanked the Japanese for invading”, as McGregor writes, “because it had enabled the Chinese Communist Party to retreat from the superior Nationalist forces and regroup”.

Neither Japan nor China appear keen to reopen their 20th century histories. And Don­ald Trump seems not to know much history at all, saying Xi gave him a history lesson on Korea and China. “After listening for 10 minutes, I realised it’s not so easy,” he conceded.

There is a Chinese saying — when isn’t there a Chinese saying? — that two tigers can’t live on one mountain. Let alone three. Nevertheless, since the Pacific War the defensive shield of Pax Americana provided the strategic stability within which East Asia could transform itself through its economic miracle, which continues.

What are the alternatives?

China was never enthusiastic about building Asian institutions when Japan was strong, McGregor writes. “Now, it’s the reverse.”

In Japan there has long been a constituency for a pan-Asian union. China, McGregor argues, doesn’t know how to court Japan even if it decides it might want to: “The party is not a good vehicle for diplomacy, an art that demands grace, flexibility, an appreciation of your counterpart’s position, and the ability to make concessions.” Beijing, he says, wants to reinstate the old tributary system rather than build a new Asian narrative.

Henry Kissinger was entranced with China from the start, believing “economic leaders are usually political idiots” and naturally gravitating to political winners such as Mao and Zhou Enlai. Japan’s power is diffuse, which ­frustrated Kissinger who, like his boss Richard Nixon, loved to ingratiate himself with strongmen. The US thus did not tell Tokyo about its move to recognise the People’s Republic, and Japan “felt betrayed”.

The first decade after Tokyo followed Washington in recognising the PRC, relations remained quite smooth, but fell apart when Jiang Zemin succeeded Deng Xiaoping as leader, and restructured history, McGregor says, to focus on China as wartime victim, a trope that now seems unending.

Then, during the global financial crisis, Xi’s political ally Wang Qishan told US Treasury secretary Hank Paulson, “We aren’t sure we should be learning from you any more.”

The power struggle moved on from China v Japan to China v the US. Barack Obama announced in Australia the US pivot back to Asia, but by now it seems too little, too late. And so the triangle keeps turning.

McGregor is especially good at tracking the intersections of the people who make policy, noting for instance how Xi and Abe came to office at about the same time, were products of their ruling elites, and their “families and their political patrimony were tied indelibly to their countries’ past conflicts with each other”, with Xi’s father and Abe’s grandfather launching their careers in the Sino-Japanese war on opposite sides.

Thus the pair are “more than just resolute guardians of the national interest”; they are defending their families’ honour as well.

McGregor has set up the ongoing story beautifully. Watch this space.

Rowan Callick is The Australian’s China correspondent.

Asia’s Reckoning: The Struggle for Global Dominance

By Richard McGregor Allen Lane, 396pp, $49.99 (HB)