Very informative

If you want to understand the current relationship between China anf Japan, this book is ideal. There are a few things that are missing and at times bias towards the the USA. However, the reader was not so great. Why have someone who can't pronounce Chinese, Japanese and Korean names?

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Excellent book

I always wanted to learn about the history of China and Japan and this book did that very well with good balance of detail and overall history.

Highly recommend :)

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Interesting, if not very surprising

This a primarily a decent narrative history of international relations between China and Japan, but it's not quite what I was expecting.

- It's focused mostly on Japan
- It's mostly post-Meiji era (late 19th century on)
- It's pretty detailed, for the most part, but skips over the Mao era almost completely

The relative lack of emphasis on more ancient history and deeper cultural connections was, for me, disappointing, but this was still interesting for the depth it gave to a key relationship that I've not seen discussed that much in other books of Japanese history I've read.

The general thrust of the argument seems to be the fair one that, by the mid-late 19th century, both China and Japan were being impacted by similar external forces in the shape of imperialist pressure (primarily from Britain, the US and Russia). This forced Japan into the Meiji modernisation, and China into an identity crisis that took it a long time to shake off. China's weakness was then both an opportunity and a threat for Japan - if it didn't colonise China (and Taiwan, and Korea, etc etc), someone else would, and in the late 19th/early 20th century, imperialism seemed to be the way forward. If China had got it's act together first, it probably would have been China making the move. And if not, Russia or Britain or even the US or someone else would have taken them all over.

Quite how that led to some of the more extreme violence Japanese troops carried out in China /Manchuria (and elsewhere), I'm still not entirely sure - but it's certainly possible that this too was inspired by European imperialism. After all, European empires were up to some pretty disgusting stuff around the same period, particularly in Africa, so...

Either way, almost a century on, China isn't yet ready to fully get over Japan's aggression or accept that the country's fairly fundamentally changed since WWII.

For a country with such a long history, that's understandable. But what this book does a good job of making clear is that China and Japan have more in common than they sometimes like to admit, and a lot more shared interests.

None of this is especially surprising, of course. But it's still interesting.

The audiobook is spoiled rather by the narrator's consistent inability to pronounce Japanese names properly. I can't speak to his Chinese pronunciation.

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