On August 21-23, 2002, the Pacific Forum jointly sponsored a conference in Washington, D.C. entitled “U.S., Japan, and China: Developing Stable Trilateral Relations” with the Research Institute for Peace and Security (RIPS) in Tokyo and the China Institute for Contemporary International Relations (CICIR) in Beijing. This was the third and final year of a very productive collaboration among the Pacific Forum, RIPS, and CICIR, which began with a meeting in Tokyo in 2000, continued with a meeting in Beijing in 2001, and concluded with this meeting. A majority of the participants in Washington had attended the two previous meetings, so there was a strong rapport and collective memory from discussions in previous years on which to build the dialogue. (See Appendix A for the agenda and participants list).