Global economists are keeping their eyes glued to the Asia-Pacific region, where a bitter feud is brewing between two of the world’s most powerful nations over a small collectivity of islands in the East China Sea. The Chinese government argues that a treaty signed during the first Sino-Japanese War (1894-95) conferred ownership of the islands to China. Japan has long disputed these claims, and today argues that the islands are integral to its national identity.
The argument came to a head last September, when a boycott of Japanese products led Chinese demonstrators to target fellow citizens who owned Japanese cars. Three months later, the situation escalated when when Japanese jets confronted a Chinese plane flying over the islands; no shots were fired, but the act of antagonism has set a troubling precedent between the military forces of both nations.
The conflict between China and Japan has put the United States in a precarious position: if a full-scale war were to erupt, the U.S. would be forced to choose between a long-time ally (Japan) and its largest economic lender (China). Last year, China’s holdings in U.S. securities reached $1.73 trillion and goods exported from the U.S. to China exceeded $100 billion. The two countries also share strong economic ties due to the large number of American companies that outsource jobs to China. Read the rest of this entry »
Chinese straight talker on the forest for the trees : Tianjin-born, American-educated China realist Yan Xuetong 阎学通 in an interview with the 7.96m circulation Japanese national daily Asahi Shimbun.
Q: You published an article under the title, “It Is a Football Game Rather than a Boxing Match” to describe Sino-U.S relations.
A: Exactly. I think that the rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States was like a boxing match. They tried to knock each other down to the point of death. But China and the United States try to win a game by scoring more points. They try to win with smartness, strength and good strategy. There will be no major violence.
INTERVIEW/ Yan Xuetong: China, U.S. should seek cooperation without trust
By YOICHI KATO/ National Security Correspondent
Source – Asahi Shimbun, published December 24, 2012
BEIJING–Conflict between China and the United States is inevitable, says Yan Xuetong, dean of the Institute of Modern International Relations at Tsinghua University in China.
In an interview with The Asahi Shimbun, the foreign policy hard-liner said Beijing’s recently announced national goal of a “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” does not sit well with the unipolar leadership of the United States.
He criticized Washington’s new policy of a pivot or rebalancing toward Asia as exacerbating strategic rivalry. He argues that both countries should drop the illusion of nurturing mutual trust and instead pursue cooperative relations without trust.
Please click here to read the rest of the article at the source.
Professor Hugh White of the Australian National University on the prospect of the world’s three richest countries going to war. Of particular long-term concern to him is how the world intends to accommodate and hedge against China’s growing power.
So how do we all get out of this bind? Perhaps creative diplomacy can find a face-saving formula that defuses the situation by allowing each side to claim that it has given way less than the other. That would be wonderful. But it would still leave the deeper causes of the problem – China’s growing power and the need to find a peaceful way to accommodate it – unresolved. That remains the greatest challenge. Hugh White
THIS is how wars usually start: with a steadily escalating stand-off over something intrinsically worthless. So don’t be too surprised if the US and Japan go to war with China next year over the uninhabited rocks that Japan calls the Senkakus and China calls the Diaoyu islands. And don’t assume the war would be contained and short.
Of course we should all hope that common sense prevails.
It seems almost laughably unthinkable that the world’s three richest countries – two of them nuclear-armed – would go to war over something so trivial. But that is to confuse what starts a war with what causes it. The Greek historian Thucydides first explained the difference almost 2500 years ago. He wrote that the catastrophic Peloponnesian War started from a spat between Athens and one of Sparta’s allies over a relatively insignificant dispute. But what caused the war was something much graver: the growing wealth and power of Athens, and the fear this caused in Sparta.
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China’s foreign ministry augments its stance on the East China Sea flashpoint with Japan by taking the international stakeholder’s route, submitting its East China Sea claims for multilateral consideration with the UN.
BEIJING (AP) – China provided the United Nations with detailed claims to waters in the East China Sea on Friday, apparently padding out its legal argument in an ongoing territorial dispute with Japan.
The Foreign Ministry said it submitted documents claiming waters extending beyond its 200-nautical-mile (370-kilometer) exclusive economic zone. It said geological features dictated that China’s claim extended to the edge of the continental shelf off the Chinese coast, about 200 kilometers (124 miles) from Japan’s Okinawa island.
A statement posted to the Foreign Ministry’s website gave no specifics, but China had pledged to make such a submission shortly after its dispute with Japan over uninhabited islands in the East China Sea flared again in September. Japan angered China by buying the islands from their private Japanese owners to block a rival bid by Tokyo’s nationalist mayor, a move Japan had hoped would prevent a bigger crisis.
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Businessweek: Sino-Japanese socio-economic faceoff manifests in auto industry over the Diaoyu/Senkaku spark + How not all foreign carmakers are yet to leverage on this gap.
Found in the comments section…
The onus is on Japan. Ishihara and Noda arbitrarily and insanely created this crisis by spitting on the 40 year old tacit agreement between china and japan that the island issue should be shelved so that other ties could develop. Japan is not only in the wrong here, but is the weaker party as it certainly needs China more than the reverse. Sure both countries will suffer, but Japan is certainly more vulnerable.
What we are seeing is genuine anger by chinese at all levels against a Japan that has never fully come to terms with their war crimes. Their leaders issue token verbal apologies one day and visit war shrines to convicted war criminals next. The CCP could not have foresaw or planned for the provocative action by Ishihara and Noda. Besides, they have enough problems to deal with at home than to have this issue as another headache. Japan needs to step up if it really wants better ties with China and a more peaceful and prosperous Asia in general. Online comment by Charles Custer
Related – China’s central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan (profile on Forbes here, with an interesting writeup by the Plaid Avengerhere) was due to deliver a closing keynote lecture but has now withdrawn, escalating tensions. See – Chinese bank governor withdraws from IMF summit in Japan amid islands row (Guardian, October 10, 2012)
Anti-Japan demonstrators overturn a Japanese-made car in Suzhou in Jiangsu Province, China. Sales of Toyota and Honda vehicles nosedived in China during September as anti-Japanese sentiment flared over a territorial dispute. Photo – Businessweek, 2012
Toyota’s China sales plunged 49 percent last month, compared to September 2011. Honda was off 41 percent and Nissan was down 35 percent.
If the territorial dispute doesn’t subside soon, anti-Japanese sentiment in the world’s biggest auto market threatens to mar prospects for companies such as Nissan that have major hopes for the Chinese market. In May, Nissan’s chief executive officer, Carlos Ghosn, was in Hong Kong to open the global headquarters for the company’s luxury brand, Infiniti. The idea was to base the brand in Hong Kong, rather than back in Japan, in order to be closer to the vital Chinese market.
Automakers aren’t the only ones suffering from the impact of the islands dispute. Japanese airlines are hurting as fewer Chinese tourists travel to Japan, and China’s central bank governor, Zhou Xiaochuan, is staying away from IMF and World Bank meetings in Tokyo, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Tuesday. Read the rest of this entry »
Perspective of Sino-Japanese tension from China’s northern neighbours with a view from Japan-based James Corbett, editor of the Corbett Report website as US missile defence deal is signed – in name to watch over North Korea…
Latest update
China’s ‘unleashing’ of its fishing boats toward the area by lifting a moratorium. Diaoyu Islands fish are Chinese (Global Times, September 27, 2012)
Anti-Japanese protests have swept China, as the volatile dispute over who owns a series of islands escalates. The fallout over the archipelago dispute has been widening between Tokyo and Beijing since Japan decided to bypass China and buy the territories from private investors. This comes as Washington and Tokyo agreed to put a second anti-missile defence radar in Japan, claiming it’ll be focused on deterring North Korean aggression. But James Corbett, editor of the Corbett Report website who lives in Japan thinks the system will be deployed for all the wrong reasons.
With her sister ship now a floating integrated resort, the Varyag is reborn as Liaoning, almost eight years after she arrived in Chinese docks and 16 years after being bought for USD$20m.
September 25, 2012 marks her re-emergence as the symbolic flagship of Chinese maritime power at a time when China needs to assert its legitimacy to defend what it sees as national sovereignty.
Though in no position to match American naval projection due to its limited range and lack of combat readiness, it nevertheless marks a giant leap forward. Not quite a flexing of abrasive hard power yet, but certainly a symbolic referent for those on the Chinese side in Sino-Japanese tension, or potential focal point for Chinese nationalism.
Incidentally, the Chinese news reports are describing their carrier as 航母 (hang mu), a shortened version of 航空母舰 – literally translated – mother of the fleet.
Here is a CCTV report that paid particular attention on the mother ship’s combat readiness. It was most interesting hearing about the intense selection process for the crew. Unfortunately the 30min video is in Mandarin with no subtitles.
China’s Ministry of Defense said the newly named Liaoning aircraft carrier would “raise the overall operational strength of the Chinese navy” and help Beijing to “effectively protect national sovereignty, security and development interests”. In fact, the aircraft carrier, refitted from a ship bought from Ukraine, will have a limited role, mostly for training and testing ahead of the possible launch of China’s first domestically built carriers after 2015, analysts say. ANALYSIS | China aircraft carrier a show of force vs Japan (Interacksyon, September 26, 2012)
Just as Liaoning the province was created when existing northeastern provinces and municipalities were merged and integrated into a more powerful whole in 1954-55, so too “Liaoning” the carrier integrates a mix of building blocks into a warship that has the potential to bolster China’s regional influence—and also to force China’s leaders to confront perhaps the most complicated naval diplomacy questions in the PRC’s history.Introducing the ‘Liaoning’: China’s New Aircraft Carrier and What it Means (China Real-time Report by the Wall Street Journal, September 25, 2012)
– – –
An Aircraft Carrier of One’s Own
After much struggle, China finally has the massive naval vessel it always wanted.
Source – Li Tang, Xinhua, in Foreign Policy Magazine, 2012
China finally has its very own — ostensibly functional– aircraft carrier, named Liaoning. As Andrew Erickson and Gabriel Collins explain in a recent article for FP, the Chinese had to overcome multiple obstacles, and “All [those watching the Liaoning] must have felt the weight of history on their shoulders as they witnessed the unfulfilled ambitions of their civilian and military predecessors. This milestone was a long time coming.” The Liaoning was originally the Varyag, a Soviet vessel that was purchased by China from Ukraine. After years of retrofitting, as of Sept. 25 the Liaoning is finally entering service in the People’s Liberation Army Navy, but its capabilities are largely unproven and sea tests of the ship have stayed close to its home port in Dalian. Above, the Liaoning appears at the Dalian shipyard before being commissioned. (Foreign Policy, September 26, 2012)
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From the Taiwan’s leading English-language paper (with 400,000 readers) China Post: toward a middle path and how this generation’s leaders still lack a common language on the Diaoyu dispute.
Japan should acknowledge that there is a dispute over the ownership of the islands. This does not mean giving up its own claim, or indeed the control that it has over them. But the first step to the resolution of a problem is the recognition of its existence.
Japan and China should then hold talks about their dispute. China’s claim is rooted in history, and it is by no means trivial. But, as they say, possession is nine-tenths of the law, and Japan has actually possessed these islands for most of the last century, so an international court may well rule in Tokyo’s favor.
“Our generation is not wise enough to find a common language on this question,” Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping said in 1978 about his country’s territorial dispute with Japan. “Our next generation will certainly be wiser. They will certainly find a solution acceptable to all.”
In the meantime, Deng proposed, the two sides should jointly develop the area’s rich economic resources.
Thirty-four years later, there is still no common language on the disputed Diaoyu — or Senkaku — islands. In fact, the situation has reached critical proportions, with protests breaking out in dozens of cities across China over the Japanese government’s decision to nationalize the islands. Read the rest of this entry »
From the New York Times: putting the knee jerk to rest?
The right to know is the bedrock of every democracy. The Japanese public deserves to know the other side of the story. It is the politicians who flame public sentiments under the name of national interests who pose the greatest risk, not the islands themselves. Han-yi Shaw
Source – Han-yi Shaw 2012 Diaoyu Island is recorded under Kavalan, Taiwan in Revised Gazetteer of Fujian Province (1871).
I’ve had a longstanding interest in the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands, the subject of a dangerous territorial dispute between Japan and China. The United States claims to be neutral but in effect is siding with Japan, and we could be drawn in if a war ever arose. Let me clear that I deplore the violence in the recent anti-Japan protests in China: the violence is reprehensible and makes China look like an irrational bully. China’s government should reign in this volatile nationalism rather than feed it. This is a dispute that both sides should refer to the International Court of Justice, rather than allow to boil over in the streets. That said, when I look at the underlying question of who has the best claim, I’m sympathetic to China’s position. I don’t think it is 100 percent clear, partly because China seemed to acquiesce to Japanese sovereignty between 1945 and 1970, but on balance I find the evidence for Chinese sovereignty quite compelling. The most interesting evidence is emerging from old Japanese government documents and suggests that Japan in effect stole the islands from China in 1895 as booty of war. This article by Han-Yi Shaw, a scholar from Taiwan, explores those documents. I invite any Japanese scholars to make the contrary legal case. Nicholas KristofRead the rest of this entry »
Reuters: Not-yet combat ready aircraft carrier stirs reality check for Chinese military power projection in the East China Sea? Outspoken retired Major General Luo Yuan reconfigures hardline tact by suggesting the naming of China’s new aircraft carrier Diaoyu to demonstrate symbolic sovereignty after the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands in the East China Sea.
(Reuters) – When Japanese activists scrambled ashore on a disputed island chain in the East China Sea this month, one of China’s most hawkish military commentators proposed an uncharacteristically mild response.
Retired Major General Luo Yuan suggested naming China’s new aircraft carrier Diaoyu, after the Diaoyu islands in the East China Sea. It would demonstrate China’s sovereignty over the islands known as the Senkakus in Japanese, he said.
For a notable hardliner, it was one of the least bellicose reactions he has advocated throughout a series of territorial rows that have soured China’s ties with its neighbors in recent months. Read the rest of this entry »
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