“Is Japan really part of Asia?” This question has agitated Japanese intellectuals, pundits and politicians since the country embarked on the road to modernity in the Meiji era. By the turn of the twentieth century the widening cultural and economic gap between the Japanese and their neighbors on the Asian mainland suggested that Japan’s geography no longer matched its position the world order.  It raised the question of just where Japan belonged: with the countries immediately across the sea or with more distant “civilized” societies it sought as models and mentors? In a sense this issue still confronts the Japanese today as they face escalating friction with China and Korea in a much more complicated world.

Peter Duus has written extensively on the history of Japanese imperialism and colonialism before World War II and together with Mark Peattie and Ramon Myers co-edited a trilogy of conference volumes on the subject.  His most recent book (edited with Kenji Hasegawa) is Rediscovering America: Japanese Perspectives on the American Century (2011).

At the November 2013 Third Plenum, China’s leaders committed to an ambitious program of economic reform.  Now their challenge is to convert those commitments into a realistic and sustained program of change.  Barry Naughton, just back from fall term at Tsinghua University in Beijing, examines the achievements and obstacles, and discusses how these fit in with the other initiatives of Xi Jinping’s complex emerging agenda.

Barry Naughton is a professor at the University of California, San Diego.  He is one of the world’s top experts on the Chinese economy, and a long-term analyst of Chinese economic policy. Naughton received his Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University in 1986.  Naughton was named the So Kuanlok Professor at the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies (IR/PS) of the University of California at San Diego in 1998.  He has consulted extensively for the World Bank, as well as for corporate clients.  Naughton is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and is a non-resident fellow of the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.  

This event is co-sponsored with CEAS and is part of the China under Xi Jinping series.

China and Japan have entered a dangerous standoff in the East China Sea. As China launched a series of unprecedented maritime patrols, anti-Japan protests erupted in more than 200 Chinese cities to condemn Japan's nationalization of the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands. What missed signals and domestic political pressures led to this crisis? Why did Chinese authorities tolerate widespread anti-Japanese protests in 2012 after restraining protests in earlier crises, including the 2010 dispute over a Chinese fishing captain's arrest? Drawing on material from her forthcoming book, Powerful Patriots: Nationalist Protest in China's Foreign Relations (Oxford University Press, Summer 2014), Professor Jessica Chen Weiss will trace China's management of anti-Japan protest from 1985 to 2012, discussing the role of nationalism and public opinion in Chinese foreign policy.

Jessica Chen Weiss is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University and Research Fellow at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. Her research interests include Chinese politics and international relations, nationalism, and social protest. Her book, Powerful Patriots: Nationalist Protest in China's Foreign Relations, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press (Summer 2014). The dissertation on which it is based won the 2009 American Political Science Association Helen Dwight Reid Award for best dissertation in
international relations, law and politics. Her research has appeared in International Organization and has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Princeton-Harvard China  & The World Program, Bradley Foundation, Fulbright-Hays program, and the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. Before joining the Yale faculty, she founded FACES, the Forum for American/Chinese Exchange at Stanford, while an undergraduate at Stanford (B.A., 2003). She teaches courses on Chinese foreign relations, state-society relations in post-Mao China, and anti-Americanism in world politics.