Historical past and territorial disputes keep on haunting bilateral relations between China and Japan, exemplified by commemorations of the Nanking massacre, tributes to war criminals at the Yasukuni Shrine and the conflict over the ownership of the Senkaku islands. Van Evera (1994) argues that distorted understandings of shared history, self-glorifying myths, compromises to the defensibility and legitimacy of borders can embolden hawkish government policies, producing virulent nationalism and in turn lead to conflict. Yet the East Asian order hitherto is surprisingly in balance, in absence of direct confrontation: does Van Evera's theory, himself a neorealist according to Stephen Walt, need refinement? The paper introduces norms, perception and identity into the theory in order to improve its explanatory power.
