Japan's response to China's rise: regional engagement, global containment, dangers of collision

Japan and China's ability to manage their bilateral relationship is crucial for the stability of the East Asian region. It also has a global impact on the security and economic development of other regions. For just as China's rise has inevitably involved an expansion of its global reach, so Japan's responses to the challenges posed by China have increasingly taken a global form, seeking to incorporate new partners and frameworks outside East Asia. Japan's preferred response to China's regional and global rise in the post‐Cold War period has remained one of default engagement. Japan is intent on promoting China's external engagement with the East Asia region and its internal domestic reform, through upgrading extant bilateral and Japan–China–US trilateral frameworks for dialogue and cooperation, and by emphasizing the importance of economic power to influence China. Japan is deliberately seeking to proliferate regional frameworks for cooperation in East Asia in order to dilute, constrain and ultimately engage China's rising power. However, Japan's engagement strategy also contains the potential to tilt towards default containment. Japan's domestic political basis for engagement is becoming increasingly precarious as China's rise stimulates Japanese revisionism and nationalism. Japan also appears increasingly to be looking to contain China on a global scale by forging new strategic links in Russia and Central Asia, with a ‘concert of democracies’ involving India, Australia and the US, by competing for resources with China in Africa and the Middle East, and by attempting to articulate a values‐based diplomacy to check the so‐called ‘Beijing consensus’. Nevertheless, Japan's perceived inability to channel China's rise either through regional engagement or through global containment carries a further risk of pushing Japan to resort to the strengthening of its military power in an attempt to guarantee its essential national interests. It is in this instance that Japan and China run the danger of a military collision.     

3. EVOCATION, ANALYSIS, AND THE "CRISIS OF LIBERALISM"

In The Years of Extermination , the second volume of Nazi Germany and the Jews , Saul Friedländer attempts to write an "integrated" history of the Holocaust that captures the "convergence" of German decisions and policies, the reaction of the surrounding world, and the perceptions and experiences of the Jews. Although several historiographical issues are studied in detail (the role of Hitler, the evolution of Nazi anti-Jewish policy, and the role of the Christian churches), the most innovative aspect of the book is its extensive use of excerpts from over forty diaries of Jewish victims, which are interspersed among the statements of Nazi leaders and officials, Wehrmacht soldiers, churchmen, and various collaborators and bystanders in order to juxtapose "entirely different levels of reality." What ultimately holds the book together, despite its intentionally disrupted narrative and Friedländer's disclaimer that the history of the Holocaust can be encompassed within any "single conceptual framework," is the overarching theme of the "crisis of liberalism."     

Nearest Neighbour Analysis and Wedge-Tailed Shearwater Burrow Patterns on Heron and Masthead Islands,Great Barrier Reef

Heron and Masthead Islands in the Capricorn Group of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park support major nesting colonies of the wedge-tailed shearwater. The distribution pattern of shearwater nesting burrows was established for particular habitats on both islands by means of a nearest neighbour analysis. Areas of Pisonia grandis forest had the highest burrow density and near-random distribution patterns for burrows while the island fringes had the lowest densities and higher degrees of aggregation. These results may reflect the importance of social communication within a wedge-tailed shearwater colony. Burrows are distributed in patches around the margins of the colony where clear and fringe habitats are represented, but randomly near the centre in Pisonia areas, where sheer numbers may negate the need for further aggregation.     

Urban brownfields redevelopment in Canada: the role of local government

As in many U.S. and European cities, the legacy of a negligent past has left scars on Canada's urban landscape in the form of numerous under-used industrial and commercial brownfield sites. While governments in the U.S. and Europe have implemented a variety of policies and programs to help developers overcome the costs and risks associated with redeveloping these sites, there continues to be apprehension among stakeholders in Canada that efforts implemented by the different levels of government here have been deficient, fragmented and piecemeal in comparison. This paper examines the nature of the brownfields problem in Canadian cities and investigates the role of local governments in managing these problems 'on the ground'. Survey data from 24 cities, coupled with information gathered from four site visitations, reveal that brownfields are indeed a problem for many cities. The data suggest that even though perceptions of what is needed to better manage the problem locally are relatively similar throughout the country, managerial efforts remain disparate and somewhat limited because of diverse provincial policies and variable property markets.