Activity: Talk or presentation › Oral presentation
Description
This paper hypothesizes that under the leadership of Prime Minister Shinzō Abe, Japan is pursuing a foreign policy with China which is a revised version of containment. Rather than 'contain' China, Japan is 'sieving' the elements of power coming out of China. ‘Sieve-ment’ seeks to promote bilateral economic relations with China to the point of dependency as a deterrent to outright war. Meanwhile, Tokyo is solidifying and expanding interpersonal, diplomatic, and security relations with states along China’s periphery in order to leverage regional hegemony from China and contain an expansion of its political power. The systemic methodology for geopolitical analysis is employed to measure distributions and trends in regional hegemonic power in peripheral states. Four peripheral states, the Philippines, Thailand, India, and Kazakhstan are analyzed as disciplined interpretative case studies, as these states represent sub-systemic linchpins with varying ethnicities, geographies, degrees of democracy, and diplomatic histories with China and Japan. Via synthesis, the resultant trend of power for Japan is revealed on a final systemic scale for each peripheral state, then the sum of all four. The empirical results indicate which regional power has stronger hegemony, trends in power, and fields where expansion of hegemony can be made.