What is the most worrying relationship in Asia today? Where is there the greatest potential for the most destructive conflict? Would it be from North Korea, with its burgeoning and almost incessant nuclearization program, perhaps, or the ongoing tensions between Pakistan and India? Is a more urgent issue China's ongoing clashes with the other competing parties in the South China Sea and the potential that this might lead to direct conflict with the United States? Or the real possibility of instability and fragmentation in, for instance, a young democracy like Indonesia, with its internal complexity and lack of institutional strength?
All of these are worrying problems. But if we look at history, the longest standing tensions — the area most strewn with competing, and frankly incompatible, visions for the region — is found in the relationship between China and Japan. It is this relationship that poses the most worrying problems for the future.
Though it is obviously a very complex issue, we can boil the Sino-Japanese conundrum the world and the Asian region have to sort out down to one simple question: In view of their inability to harmoniously exist side by side for the last millennium or so, can we really see ways in which a strong China and a strong Japan manage to exist alongside each other without conflict in the 21st century? If they do achieve this, they will be going against the pattern of their whole history with each other.