GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS AND CHINA-JAPAN ECONOMIC COOPERATION IN EAST ASIA

The article is devoted to the urgent problem of economic cooperation between China and Japan in the era of the "World Financial Crisis". The global economic crisis of 2008, which became a powerful blow for the capitalist world since the Great Depression and inflicted a heavy blow on the economies of the United States and Western Europe, did not have such a strong impact on East Asia, China and even Japan, despite their greater involvement in the world financial and economic system. It confirmed the fact that the center of the world economy, its core, the core of global growth and development has been gradually moving to East Asia whose largest economies are Chinese and Japanese ones. Political relations between the two countries have been extremely tense over the past more than a hundred years, constantly escalating into open clashes, but it did not prevent them from finding mutually beneficial economic cooperation and jointly resisting the challenges of the 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis. Over time, Japan became the second-third most important trading partner of China, China became Japan's first partner.Currently Japan-China economic cooperation is increasingly exposed to political factors. The geopolitical clash of the two countries threatens to violate close industrial cooperation and scale down the mutual trade. Trade wars between China and Japan affect all new spheres. The global financial crisis has become a catalyst for the divergence of foreign economic strategies between the two countries reinforcing the desire of the parties to form a single center for the region's economic development around themselves, institutionalizing and consolidating their economic power in various regional integration structures. China and Japan have been arguing for years around the format of the East Asian community and the conditions for the creation of a free trade zone in the region. The economic competition of the two countries, which started in the early 2000s, is gradually coming to an end with China's convincing victory, but in the authors' opinion, its moving from the economic plane to the political struggle can radically change this trend due to the US siding with Japan.