The Sino-Japanese Relations and the Identity of Japan from the Perspective of PRC

When making and altering foreign policies towards Japan, China not only pursues certain material interests that are based on rational considerations, it also hopes to promote the constructed immaterial interests, which to be specific, is utilizing the policies to modify Japan’s identity and making the result fulfil China’s expectations. This paper carries out a research on Chinese foreign policies towards Japan during 1949 and 2010 from the perspective of Constitutionalism. According to the specific conditions between China and Japan at different times, the Sino-Japanese Relations can actually be divided into three distinctive periods. And with history analysis and discourse analysis as research methodology, this paper demonstrates that China does possess certain constructed immaterial interests in different periods. In the period from 1949 to 1978, China hopes to reclaim its traditional superiority in East Asia through leading the Japanese people to carry out the Anti-Imperialism and Anti- Hegemonism Movement with itself identified as “the elder brother”. In the period from 1979 to 1993, China hopes to achieve modernization on one hand, but to guarantee its traditional superiority in East Asia not be damaged by clarifying the dialectical relations between its Economy Construction and Anti-Hegemonism Movement on the other hand. And in the period from 1994 to 2010, China hopes to maintain the Sino-Japanese relations under the East Asian hierarchical structure through leading the Japanese people to carry out the Anti-Militarism Movement.