While eyes are fixed on the Sino-US competition in East Asia, there is also a competition for influence between China and Japan. In the decade of the 2000s, this centered mostly on Northeast Asia (over the terminus of an oil pipeline across Russia, South Korea’s role in the +3 meetings of ASEAN+3, etc.), and this area continues to be the object of their maneuvering despite China’s increasing edge. In the 2010s, however, China and Japan are more vigorously jostling for advantage in Southeast Asia and even India, as seen in the back-to-back summits this month of Prime Minister Abe Shinzo and President Xi Jinping with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Covering both Southeast and Northeast Asia with an emphasis on perceptions in both China and Japan and adding analyses focused on US thinking about how this competition is playing out in Vietnam, this Special Forum concentrates on multilateral implications of the deepening rift between Japan and China.

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