China's Relations with Japan in an Era of Economic Liberalisation

The main purpose of this book is to explore the influences of reform on changes in China's economic relations with Japan after the late 1970s. There are three reasons for investigating the links between Chinese reform and bilateral economic relations at this particular juncture in history. First, in the past two decades reform has meant that China has enjoyed faster economic growth then Japan. This has transformed the pattern of bilateral economic relations, hitherto characterised by an industrial Japanese economy and a resource-based Chinese economy, a result of Japan's successful industrialisation and China's failure to industrialise in the previous hundred years. Second, reform has brought about the deepening of the interdependence between the Chinese economy and the world economy. Through links with the world economy, the Chinese economy has not only come to rely on foreign countries for technology, capital, markets and management skills, but has itself become a growth pole, exerting a strong impact on world economic growth. In the reform era, economic relations between China and Japan have been woven into regional and global economic networks of trade an investment. Third, reform has transformed the management of China's domestic and external economic activities.