The political relationship between China and Japan is often narrated as though the present were simply the afterlife of the twentieth century: invasion, occupation, empire, wartime atrocity and competing national memories endlessly resurfacing inside disputes over territory and regional power.

Buzan and Goh do not deny the force of that history. They argue instead that the familiar account is too narrow—historically compressed, nationally selective and unable to explain the much longer structures within which China and Japan have encountered one another. 

The book places Northeast Asian relations since the nineteenth century within the larger transformation of global order. Its sharper claim is that historical memory is not just inherited; it is politically arranged. Each state uses the past to stabilise its own identity while demanding a more forgiving historical consciousness from the other.

The second half turns from diagnosis toward the possibility of a new regional settlement. Buzan and Goh examine earlier moments of strategic accommodation and ask what kind of “great-power bargain” might prevent memory, nationalism and security competition from hardening into permanent hostility. This is serious international-relations scholarship, but its deeper subject is familiar far beyond East Asia: how nations convert history into moral property, and whether a shared past can be built without pretending that everyone experienced it equally.

Oxford University Press first edition, first impression, 2020. Paperback with light cover rubbing and handling marks; internally clean.