Interaction Of China-Japan Relations In Disaster Crisis

In recent years, a sizable number of natural disasters have struck the world. As a type of non-traditional security issues, the danger of natural disasters has been more and more serious and has caused countless deaths, terrible damage and economic losses. The effects caused by disasters are not limited by country or regional boundaries. Mega natural disasters require not only crisis management made by the affected countries, and also the cooperation by the international society. Disaster crisis has gradually contacted with international relations. Giving timely affected countries, humane, free assistances to disaster-affected countries has become an international convention. As a result, interactive relations caused by disaster crisis has become a new topic in the field of international relations.China and Japan are the countries prone to natural disasters. The close geographical position objectively determines the sensitivity of the disaster crisis for the two countries. In recent years, China and Japan suffered great earthquakes, which provide detailed information and latest material for case studies. Based on the rescue activities and media reports, interactions in the Great Wenchuan Earthquake and the Great East Japan Earthquake as affected and rescue countries have affected the relations between China and Japan. The reasons of interactions can be summed up as: the needs of practical interests on the government level and emotional response based on common experience and mutual moral on the civil level. In the case of Great Wenchuan Earthquake, interaction mainly "promoted" the strategic mutual relations; in the Great East Japan Earthquake, the interactions "improved" the thawing of the relations between the two countries.However, the interactions between China and Japan in disaster crisis also have limitations. As the two cases showed that the impacts of the disaster crisis interaction had only short-term effects. The shortages of disaster crisis interaction and the lack of mutual identity led to the limitations above. As a result, disaster crisis interactions cannot become the stable basis of China-Japan relations. And also cannot make long-term and deep influence on the development of bilateral relations.From the view of crisis management, while there are four phases in the crisis management cycle, the interaction between China and Japan mainly happened in the response phase and lacked the interactions in other three phases. From the view of Constructivism, Alexander Wendt provides four master variables for analyze the identity among countries, which shows that the identity between China and Japan is weak. Reliable solutions have been proposed based on these analyses above, which help to maintain the interactions in all four phases of crisis management and improve the identity between China and Japan. On the one hand, the effects and effectiveness of crisis management can be preferred by close cooperation; on the other hand, it is an opportunity to ease the interest conflicts. The bilateral relations between China and Japan can be maintained and improved by mutual identity and common interests.In this study, the interactive relations between China and Japan in disaster crisis are the objects of study. The Great Wenchuan Earthquake and Great East Japan Earthquake are selected as critical cases for us to conduct analysis. This study aims to identify the reason, influence and limitations of interactions, and rhen propose reliable solutions to solve the problems.