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But Japanese activists have never needed encouragement from China on this front. They lead homegrown movements with specific political targets in Japan itself, notably attacking the conservative establishment and defending the country’s “peace constitution.” These well-established groups, the origins of which lie in the Cold War splits of 1950s Japanese politics, have long been attacked from the right in Japan for being unpatriotic. But none has been linked credibly to Beijing’s United Front Work Department. Nor is there evidence that they have been manipulated and managed by CCP-aligned or directed interests.
The Japanese Communist Party, which still retains a substantial electoral base, is little help to Beijing on the ground in Japan. The JCP was pro-Soviet through the Cold War and has no special affinity with Beijing.
Japan’s cultural and institutional familiarity with China makes it, in different ways, less amenable to Chinese influence than it would appear to be at first blush. After all, Japan has absorbed much from China over many centuries, taking in what it wanted and adapting it to its own ends, and keeping out much else. On top of that, any notions of Asian solidarity have been subverted since the early twentieth century by war and politics and by the failure of the two countries to reach an equilibrium in the aftermath of Japan’s defeat in 1945 and the victory of the Chinese communists in 1949.
Productive Back Channels
The opaque political cultures of both countries have shaped the way that bilateral relations are conducted. Aside from conventional diplomacy, leaders of the dominant political parties in China and Japan have extensively used back channels to establish understandings on sensitive issues, including the overt use of CCP organs, outside of normal state-to-state relations.
The Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, headed by Li Xiaolin, the daughter of former Chinese president Li Xiannian, has long been
a forum through which the two sides have conducted dialogues. The Friendship Association is effectively the public face of the CCP’s UFWD., It is not covert and,
for all the connotations conjured up in its name, it remains avowedly an arm of the party-state. In that respect, the Friendship Association remains a reliable conduit for passing messages between the two countries, especially at a time, as in recent years, when senior-level political exchanges have been fraught. When bilateral relations froze in 2012 after the clash over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, it was a measure of how dangerous things became that the back channels, or the “pipes,” as the Japanese describe them, froze, making diplomatic signaling difficult across the East China Sea.
Appendix 2
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