As China ups the ante on its border dispute with India, now even bringing the territory of Sikkim back into the contentious category, it’s time to closely keep tabs on China’s broader strategic agenda and the changing balance of power in the region and beyond. Just this month, Chinese President Hu Jintao went to Tokyo on a five-day visit, trying to showcase a China that is at ease with its neighbours and confident of its ability to shape the strategic environment around its periphery. He couldn’t have chosen a better destination: if there is any nation in the Asia-Pacific that is really concerned about China’s growing economic and military heft, it is Japan.

For the first time since the 1870s, Japan has a serious Asian rival and despite significant economic and trade ties between China and Japan, political tensions have increased in recent years, especially over the differing interpretations of history by the two nations. There was a public outcry in China two years back when Japan’s education ministry approved history textbooks that were said to whitewash Japan’s militarism in Asia during the first half of the last century. It is argued that about 200,000 to 300,000 Chinese were killed during the Japanese occupation of Nanjing that began in 1937 and the new Japanese textbooks refer to this as the “Nanjing incident”. Unrest erupted in various Chinese cities with some subtle manipulation by the political establishment. When it is in the interest of the Chinese government to stir up nationalism, usually for domestic reasons, memories of Japanese atrocities are recalled and this invariably provokes nationalistic counterblasts from the Japanese.

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