America’s Dwindling List of Good Friends in Asia : Foreign Relations: For the first time, the U.S. seems headed into an era in which neither Japanese nor Chinese will be the Asians of our dreams.

Japan and China have had shifting and contradictory fortunes in this country. Whenever Americans have tended to romanticize one of the two Asian countries as a close and loyal disciple, they have tended to cast the other as a fiendish enemy.

From the 1920s through the early ‘40s, for example, America’s favorite Asian country was the Nationalist China of Sun Yat-sen and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. Later, after the Chinese Communist Party gained control and Gen. Douglas MacArthur led the postwar occupation of Japan, U.S. policy-makers and public opinion switched with remarkable speed: Japanese were viewed positively, Chinese much more negatively. Scholars who have studied this historical pattern even think up names for it. Anthropologist Sheila K. Johnson calls it the “migrating Asian stereotype.”

“The favorable Asian stereotype includes such attributes as patience, cleanliness, courtesy and a capacity for hard work; the unfavorable one emphasizes clannishness, silent contempt, sneakiness and cruelty,” writes anthropologist Johnson. “There is a good deal of evidence that these two stereotypes alternate between the Japanese and the Chinese . . . “

Now, for the first time, Americans seem heading into an uncharted era in Asia, in which we have no warm friendships with either of these two countries--an era in which neither Japanese nor Chinese will be the loyal Asians of our dreams. Consider recent events.

In his visit to Tokyo, President George Bush found his hosts remarkably unreceptive to American pleas for changes that would lower the $41-billion-a-year U.S. trade deficit with Japan. His trip set off a new wave of anger in this country about Japanese economic practices. A caller to one TV-talk show branded Japan “an ant society.” In New Hampshire, Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.), a presidential candidate who had run his campaign mainly on his biography, suddenly produced television ads portraying himself as a hockey goalie who would defend the American net against Japanese attackers.

Last Thursday, the Bush Administration came remarkably close to an all-out trade war with China. American negotiators took eight months of extremely contentious talks with Beijing over piracy of U.S. copyrights and patents right up to the deadline before reaching a settlement hours before hefty new duties would have been imposed on Chinese imports. If the United States had imposed trade sanctions, the Chinese regime had threatened to retaliate against sales of American airplanes, cotton, corn, steel and chemicals in China. No one believes this settlement will much affect continuing congressional and Democratic criticisms of the Administration’s policy of seeking dialogue with the Chinese leadership.

Outpourings of annoyance are not confined to this side of the Pacific. The Bush visit to Tokyo seems to have helped fuel popular Japanese feelings of kenbei, or dislike of Americans. Even Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa hinted at a bit of it when he offered some unsolicited compassion for U.S. social problems like AIDS and homelessness. Many Chinese leaders these days take an even dimmer view of Americans, accusing the United States of being a global bully.

Why the estrangement?

One factor is certainly the breakup of the Soviet Union. The fear of Soviet military power in Asia helped to bond Japan and China, in different ways, to the United States. Similarly, U.S. eagerness for partners in combatting Soviet power in Asia caused Washington to suppress its usual standards and judgments when there were trade frictions with Tokyo or Beijing.

There is also this country’s current economic insecurity. Americans are more acutely aware than ever of how Japanese companies, with help from their government, have beat out their U.S. rivals. China represents competition, too, at least for low-wage, low-tech manufacturing. More important, China stands as an annoying reminder of the supposedly huge but ever-elusive market that Americans have long hoped would be their economic salvation. That was true a century ago, when the panic of 1893 caused U.S. manufacturers to look to “the awakening of China” as an outlet for their goods. And it remains true today, at a time when China’s population has surpassed 1.1 billion. The dispute over Chinese intellectual piracy demonstrated the extraordinary frustration of U.S. pharmaceutical and drug companies and the U.S. computer-software industry at having had their best products copied and resold without permission by Chinese producers.

The tensions do not mean that Japan and China have become outright enemies of the United States. Washington’s ties with Beijing have become increasingly frosty, but they are, after all, not nearly so bad as during the 1950s, when Americans and Chinese were fighting opposite one another in Korea. And for all the economic frictions, Japan remains in some ways an extremely close American ally.

Still, a mood of mistrust often limits the extent to which countries can cooperate, because legislatures reflect public attitudes. The United States would like Japan to take part in international peacekeeping operations in places like Cambodia, but the Japanese Diet won’t approve legislation to allow this. Japan wants to head off new trade legislation sponsored by Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), but if American public opinion about Japan remains aroused, some form of this legislation might pass.

What are the consequences of Americans being sour toward Japan and China?

In one respect, the results may be good. Each time Americans have developed overly romanticized images of either Asian power, they have found later that they were distorting reality. The American love affair with Nationalist China led to disillusionment with Chiang’s corrupt government and, later, a domestically poisonous witch hunt to find out “Who lost China?” Similarly, our post-World War II romanticism about a Japan it wrongly thought was trying to become like the United States led to disillusionment when Americans discovered Japan’s changes fell short of expectations.

Yet there are downsides. U.S. public animosity toward Asia’s two powers means that Japan and China have some leverage to work with each other and against the United States. That may seem improbable or even absurd, given the legacy of China’s anti-Japanese war and the Chinese people’s intense nationalistic resentment of the Japanese.

Already, Japan has led the way in helping China’s Communist leadership to regain respect and financial help from the international community following the 1989 political upheavals in Beijing. And both Japan and China are sounding the theme that Asians have a different approach to human rights than the West.

The souring U.S. attitude toward Japan and China also means that the United States will have to operate much more on its own in Asia. “We are a Pacific power, and we are going to remain a Pacific power,” Bush said during his trip to Asia earlier this month. That is undoubtedly true--but if its concurrent feuds with both Japan and China continue, the United States will find itself a pretty lonely power.