China, Japan and the European Community 9781472553324

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Preface Great power status used very often to derive from territorial conquest but now military strength, however crucial, is only one component of national power. In the 1980s the two superpowers have been shown as economically vulnerable: in the Soviet Union relative technological backwardness and inefficiency have prompt ed 'glasnost': United States pre-eminence has been eroded by massive trade deficits. In the race to acquire the innovative skills needed to compete in the twenty-first century the Japanese are well advanced, and if the promise of a unified market, scheduled for 1992, is fulfilled, the EC will become an even greater economic force. China, still technologically backward, has enlisted EC countries, among others, to aid her ambitious modernisation programme; an increasingly educated Chinese population and as yet virtually untapped abundant natural resources make her an emerging superpower. China remains a Communist country but at the present time her leaders appear to be placing a greater premium on economic growth at home than world revolution abroad. As China, Japan and the EC define their new roles in international affairs, this book contrasts China-EC relations and JapanEC relations. Ever since European colonial powers opened China to trade in the mid-nineteenth century, Western merchants and industrialists have seen that land as a vast market eldorado of untold wealth waiting to be exploited. But, in the 1980s, as before, the reality is different; while vast natural resources mean great potential for China and her trading partners, progress is inhibited by a poor infrastructure, a paucity of energy supplies and industrial management practices unsuited to the rigours of international competition. It is, though, in helping to remedy such deficiencies that future EC-China economic co-operation undoubtedly lies. In contrast, Japan, with fewer natural resources than China, successfully competed with Western powers on their own terms from the outset, and in spite of devastating defeat in the Pacific War has, in the short space of a hundred and fifty years, become the world's greatest creditor nation.

Acknowledgements This book has been written over a period of several years, during which time I have benefited from being able to discuss the major issues involved with fellow scholars as well as those concerned with the more practical aspects of East-West relations in EC countries. I am especially indebted to Dr Werner Draguhn of the Institut fuer Asienkunde, Hamburg and Professor Joachim Glaubitz of the Institut fuer Wissenschaft und Politik, Munich, who put the excellent source materials and facilities available at their respective institutions at my disposal. In addition, I would like to acknowledge a debt to the traders, industrialists and bankers who willingly gave me the benefit of their experience, particularly as it related to trade with China and Japan. The views expressed and the conclusions drawn in the text are, however, mine. I am grateful for the provision of a grant from the German Academic Exchange Service which greatly facilitated my research in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1982. Finally, I wish to thank Marjorie Gould, Beryl Stout and Janet Marks for typing various sections of the manuscript.