Sino-Japanese Relations in Africa
During late August, the Japanese Prime Minister stated at the Tokyo International Conference on African Development that Japan would begin investing more money($30 billion dollars) in African support. This appears to be an attempt to gain some political leverage in Africa. China has already had continuous support of several African nations, but Japan is trying to intervene and gain the support of some of them to further their goals of UN Security Council Reform.
As seen in examples from class, power is largely dependent on the number of connections to a node. The more connections a country(node) has, the more powerful they become. As Japan forms more of these connections in Africa, China’s power is reduced. However, China is still much more powerful, as it can offer more money to the countries than Japan can, and as a result offers better propositions to them. Japan is now branching out to these countries because they also need trade partners for natural gas and oil after their nuclear disaster five years ago. It will also help them gain more power in the global markets because they have breached new markets to which they can export their goods.
Despite the monetary advantage China holds, Japan still poses a large threat because of their superior products and image, showing that in the world of international politics there is more to power than simply the number of links to other nodes. Not only are both countries economically entangled, but they have military entanglements as well. That is yet another variable in the measurement of power on the global scale.