East Asia’s New Frictions

Peter Lee

The ascent of Sanae Takaichi to Japan’s premiership has added a sharp new edge to East Asia’s already jagged geopolitics. Her uncompromising position on Taiwan has triggered a storm of diplomatic sparring with Beijing, drawing in a region that had hoped—perhaps naively—for a period of relative calm. Yet the spat says less about Japan than it does about the now-familiar source of regional turbulence: the souring of Sino-American relations.

For years, China’s public sphere indulged in triumphalist slogans—about the renminbi challenging the dollar, the “rise of the East,” and China’s supposed strategic lead. In retrospect, such proclamations were not only premature but strategically costly. They hastened America’s deployment of tariffs, technology embargoes and supply-chain fortifications that now girdle China’s economy. The latest Sino-Japanese quarrel looks like another side effect of Washington’s long preparatory work. During last week’s APEC summit, Xi Jinping felt compelled to clarify to Donald Trump that China’s development is “not aimed at replacing any country”—a line that betrayed Beijing’s own anxiety over Japan’s shifting intentions.

Japan, for its part, has not drifted into this moment by accident. Eight decades of post-war discipline have produced a formidable economy, a world-class technological base and a lingering hunger to be treated as a “normal” power. Washington has quietly supplied the missing ingredient: diplomatic opportunity. When the script is ready and the stage built, a protagonist inevitably appears. Ms Takaichi, stepping into the spotlight at precisely this juncture, has amplified East Asian tensions with theatrical efficiency. Many in the region now wonder whether the contest between China and Japan may prove even sharper than the one between China and America: it is, after all, a struggle for primacy within Asia itself.

A wider view reveals a familiar pattern. Whenever relations between Beijing and Washington deteriorate, China’s links with its neighbours fray in parallel.

● Pakistan has struck new energy and mineral agreements with America—an unmistakable sign of strategic drift.

● India, locked in long-standing border quarrels with China, has moved steadily closer to Washington.

● Southeast Asian governments coordinated an unusually forceful crackdown on telecom-fraud centres, reflecting their attentiveness to shifting regional winds.

● The leaders of Central Asia’s five republics made a collective pilgrimage to the White House.

● Mongolia is strengthening strategic ties with the United States.

Together these moves suggest that Sino-American tension is not a bilateral dispute but a structural shock radiating through the region’s security architecture.

The same currents swirl through the Middle East. Several regimes or organisations once seen as aligned, tacitly or otherwise, with Beijing—Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran and Venezuela—find themselves weakened or in retreat. Their decline stems not from foreign pressure alone, but from a fatal misreading of public aspirations. Ideological struggle and coercive governance proved poor substitutes for prosperity and stability. Discontent grew; legitimacy withered. Their experiences reaffirm a broad historical truth: economic openness and political liberalisation tend to prevail over isolation and autocracy, however loudly the latter proclaim their resilience.

China’s partnership with Russia adds another layer of ambiguity. The two powers share a history of mistrust; their wartime “no limits” partnership owes more to expedience than affinity. Russia, isolated from Western markets, leans heavily on Chinese trade. America and Europe continue to test the relationship for cracks. Should China fail to meet Russian expectations, or should the war in Ukraine take an unexpected turn—or should Washington offer Moscow a tempting bargain—the partnership could shift with surprising speed. The possibility, however remote, of a Russian-American rapprochement at China’s expense cannot be ruled out.

Ms Takaichi’s emergence thus reflects deeper forces: Japan’s accumulated ambition, America’s strategic calculus and China’s increasingly constrained diplomatic environment. Her rise—and the broader regional drift—share a common origin in the structural tension between the world’s two largest powers.

For East Asia, the central question remains unresolved: not what Japan intends, nor how neighbouring states behave, but where Sino-American relations are heading. The answer will shape China’s external environment—and the geopolitical architecture of the Indo-Pacific—for years to come.