Japan in the politics of Chinese leadership legitimacy: recent developments in historical perspective

This article explores Sino-Japanese relations by looking at how negative sentiments towards Japan among the Chinese population are deployed as a form of political capital in struggles among the Chinese Communist Party elite. It gains insights into this process by looking at how such sentiments have been deployed to challenge the legitimacy of three CCP leaders since the establishment of the People's Republic of China, resulting in the downfall of two. The conclusions from these case studies are then used to understand how the current Chinese leadership has engineered the ‘new starting point’ in the relationship with Japan in the context of the movement from a ‘winner takes all’ type of factional politics into one characterized by ‘power balancing’ among the elite.