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Japan and China have been rivals for more than a millennium. In more recent times, China was the more powerful until the late nineteenth century, while Japan took the upper hand in the twentieth. Now, China's resurgence has emboldened it even as Japan perceives itself falling behind, exacerbating long-standing historical frictions.June Teufel Dreyer's Middle Kingdom and Empire of the Rising Sun provides a highly accessible overview of one of the world's great civilizational rivalries. Dreyer, a senior scholar of East Asia, begins in the seventh century in order to provide a historical background for the main story: by the mid-nineteenth century, the shrinking distances afforded by advances in technology and the intrusion of Western powers brought the two into closer proximity in ways that alternately united and divided them.