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10. In the immediate future China's first and most obvious aim is to stop Japanese rearmament, partly by direct political pressure and manipulation of war-guilt (surely a declining asset?), partly by more indirect use of the "US card". Easing of the Soviet threat to Japan would help by removing an excuse; hence Chinese support for Japanese claims on the Northern territories. But with an eye to longer-term regional competition, China is bound to be unsettled by what it sees as Japanese attempts to buy influence with aid in ex-crisis regions such as the Gulf, Afghanistan and soon Cambodia. What China can do about this in the face of Japanese economic power, on which it relies here and now for a good deal of investment and technology, is not at all clear. In the long term, matching Japan is perhaps one of the most powerful, if unspoken motives for the Chinese drive for economic reconstruction. In the short term, Japan. is a powerful extra reason for China's hanging on to and modernising its nuclear weapons. In the medium term, the technical possibility of a Sino-Soviet political alignment against Japan, opened up by the fact of normalisation with Moscow, might come to seem not quite so unthinkable. The risk of this and of its creating a straight East- West divide in Asia (though on a Realpolitik and economic, no longer ideological or military, basis) is reason enough for the US and West generally to make sure their links with China do not lag too far behind those with Japan. Whether the US and West generally can devise any model of future Japanese-Chinese relations which avoids this kind of crunch - and would be acceptable to the parties is another question again.
11. The other important area of manoeuvre for Chinese diplomacy at the moment - India being more or less safely on the shelf is the future of Vietnam. The reason China is trying to drive such a hard bargain over Cambodia is that it has a clear vision of what Vietnam's future should be stripped of all foreign military embroilments and ambitions for political control of its neighbours, focussing on reform and on earning international aid just as China itself has done. under Deng - and would no doubt argue that this is the only good option for Vietnam itself as well as for China and Asia generally. have already noted China's attempts to harness Soviet influence to this aim. China's use of the Khmer Rouge as a frightener, as the only pressure which might persuade Hun Sen to make enough concessions on the internal political regime to exclude Vietnam permanently, serves exactly the same purpose.
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But success in China's aim would bring a new set of problems. A peaceful, reform-minded Vietnam would expect to keep economic links, if no others, with Cambodia; to repair its relations with all other S.E. Asian countries; and perhaps before too long to join ASEAN. That would risk creating a countervailing block of influence to China, which has only the accident of the Cambodian crisis to thank for its abnormally good relations with ASEAN over the last decade or so. ASEAN to become an alliance of the middle-sized opposed to both Chinese and Japanese domination, but with no equally strong historical reason to shun the Russians, would be a more natural development (not least on economic grounds) and one most worrying for China. One need look no further for the deeper motives of China's recent reconciliation
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