Uneasy Partnerships
PoliticsUneasy Partnerships presents the analysis and insights of practitioners and scholars who have shaped and examined China's interactions with key Northeast Asian partners. Using the same empirical approach employed in the companion volume, The New Great Game (Stanford, 2016), this new text analyzes the perceptions, priorities, and policies of China and its partners to explain why dyadic relationships evolved as they have during China's "rise."
Synthesizing insights from an array of research, Uneasy Partnerships traces how the relationships that formed between China and its partner states—Japan, the Koreas, and Russia—resulted from the interplay of competing and compatible objectives, as well as from the influence of third-country ties. These findings are used to identify patterns and trends and to develop a framework that can be used to illuminate and explain Beijing's engagement with the rest of the world.
"Despite the focus on the South China Sea in recent years, this excellent volume makes clear that China's most important economic relations and most difficult security challenges lie in Northeast Asia. Rejecting the common approaches of applying grand theories to Asia or focusing solely on how Asia is responding to the rise of China, the nuanced analysis and empirical rigor in these chapters reveals the complex and multi-faceted nature of China's interactions with Japan, Russia, and the two Koreas. With insights from Western and Asian experts, this is one of the best volumes on China and Northeast Asia that has been published in recent years."—Michael A. Glosny, Naval Postgraduate School, Department of National Security Affairs
"China's rising power in international affairs has wrought uncertain consequences in every region of the world, but none so much as northeast Asia, the arena of great power competition and conflict among Japan, Russia, the United States, and China for more than a century. This timely volume offers keen insights by a multi-national roster of contributors not simply into China's rise and the responses of the region's players to it, but also into their active pursuit of their own interests and goals by using China's rise to their own advantage in the region. Highly recommended."—Alice Miller, Stanford University
"Uneasy Partnerships well captures the reality of China's relations with its northeast Asian neighbours and presents diverse views from the field. It offers abundant cool-headed analyses that could easily form actionable policy advice for the United States and others."—Fei-Ling Wang, Pacific Affairs