Page 1 of
2 China pushes back against
Japan By Peter Lee
China's strategy on
the Diaoyu Islands, or Senkakus as Japan calls
them, appears to reflect careful calculation of
risk and reward by the Beijing leadership, rather
than the spasm of counterproductive nationalism
sometimes described in the Western press. As a
matter of equity, China has a pretty strong claim
on the Senkakus. As a matter of geopolitics, the
People's Republic of China (PRC) is not holding as
weak a hand as one might think.
This is
something that the administration of US President
Barack Obama, to its chagrin, knows well.
Careful readers of The Japan Times
(presumably including
strategists in Beijing)
may remember this passage from August 17, 2010:
The Obama administration has decided
not to state explicitly that the Senkaku
Islands, which are under Japan's control but
claimed by China, are subject to the Japan-US
security treaty, in a shift from the position of
George W Bush, sources said Monday. The
administration of Barack Obama has already
notified Japan of the change in policy, but
Tokyo may have to take countermeasures in light
of China's increasing activities in the East
China Sea, according to the sources.
[1]
The Japanese "countermeasure"
occurred less than three weeks later, on September
8, 2010, when Japan's ambitious minister of the
interior, Seiji Maehara, instructed the coast
guard to turn over the captain of a Chinese
fishing boat to prosecutors for trial under
Japanese law for ramming a pair of coast-guard
vessels while trying to evade them near the
Senkakus.
The rest is "contain China"
history, as the spat escalated to a crisis in
Sino-Japanese relations and lip service in favor
of Japan's rights to the Senkakus became an
important element of US East Asian policy and
justification for the Obama administration's pivot
into Asia.
Discreet silence also played a
role, when the United States declined to
contradict Maehara (by this time foreign minister)
when he claimed, perhaps untruthfully, that he had
obtained assurances that the Senkakus were covered
by the US-Japan Security Treaty. [2] [3]
However, US enthusiasm for using the
Senkaku dispute as a useful diplomatic lever
appears to be reaching its limit.
Two
major US dailies, The New York Times and the Los
Angeles Times, recently weighed in with reviews of
the history of the islands that may cause the
Japanese government some heartburn. Nicholas
Kristof turned his NYT column over to a Taiwanese
scholar, Han Yishaw, to lay out China's historical
claims to the islands. [4]
The LA Times'
Barbara Demick also looked skeptically at the
Japanese provenance of the Senkakus with a piece
describing the research of scholar Unryu Suganuma,
who found several references in Japanese
government documents describing the Chinese
character of the islands. [5]
A glance at
a map confirms the impression that the
Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands are in Taiwan's backyard,
and Japanese efforts to claim them are almost as
risible as China's infamous South China
Sea-swallowing nine-dash line.
Japan's
claim to incontestable sovereignty over the
islands goes back no further than its seizure,
together with Taiwan and the Ryukyu Islands, from
the Qing empire in the 1895 Sino-Japanese War, and
not being forced to give them back in the
post-World War II muddle.
The "spoils of
war" argument, aka we got 'em and by golly we're
gonna keep 'em approach, is an awkward one for
Japan. It would dearly like to get back four
islands on the southern end of an archipelago
stretching between the Kamchatka Peninsula and
Hokkaido, which are now occupied by Russia as heir
to the Soviet Union's spoils of war.
The
short form of this imbroglio is the "Kurile
Islands dispute", but the two southernmost islands
are more Hokkaido-esque, and Russia has signaled a
willingness to give them up. The two more
northerly islands are bona fide members of the
Kurile chain. Russia wants to keep them. Japan
wants them. Awkwardly for Japan, in 1956 it
promised to surrender its claims to these two
islands if a formal peace treaty were concluded.
Given this unfavorable position, Japan
must contest the "spoils of war" argument and rely
on emotive, historical claims to the islands - the
exact opposite of its position on the
Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands.
The "exercised
sovereignty" argument also provides no comfort to
Japan in its dispute with South Korea over the
Dokdo Islands (Takeshima to the Japanese). After
the conclusion of World War II, the United States
supported the historical Japanese claims to the
islands but declined to put their defense within
the scope of the US-Japan Joint Security Treaty.
Since 1991, the main island has been home
to a family of South Korean octopus fishermen and
about three dozen Republic of Korea Coast Guard,
fishery, and lighthouse personnel. President Lee
Myung-bak has visited, as well as thousands of
South Korean tourists who take a US$250 ferry trip
to the island.
In July 2008, the
administration of then-US president George W Bush
acknowledged South Korean control over the islands
by designating them as ROK territory.
Therefore, Japan's attempts to hold on to
the Senkakus on the principle that their effective
de facto control, by itself, constitutes de jure
sovereignty undermines its arguments on Dokdo and
the Kuriles. This inconsistency, one might assume,
does not make an ironclad case to the United
States to encourage a regional confrontation over
Japanese dismay over Chinese pretensions to the
rocks.
This year, the Japanese government
is also facing a cannier and better-prepared PRC
government than the flustered and panicky regime
it confronted in 2010.
At that time,
Beijing overreacted verbally and administratively
and made the mistake of intervening as a
government to disrupt trade with Japan to
retaliate for the threat to put the skipper of the
offending Chinese fishing vessel, Captain Zhan
Qixiong, on trial in a Japanese court.
It
tried to package its moves to pressure Japan as
enforcement of trade regulations, particularly in
the wild and wooly rare-earths business, but this
was seen as a distinction without a difference,
and the PRC was widely condemned by foreign
governments and media. As a public relations
bonus, China also stood accused of threatening the
free world's full enjoyment of iPads and green
energy and, indeed, attempting to bring America's
high-tech defense industries to heel by exploiting
its dominance over precious rare-earth oxides.
The ruckus over export and import
restrictions - and the possibility of retaliation
- also threatened China's access to the global
free-trade regime, a critical matter given the its
reliance on exports for growth and social
stability. Beyond the threat of bilateral
retaliation, there was the possibility that the
issue would internationalize, with some sort of
coordinated sanction against China.
This
year, things are different.
When the
Japanese right wing (which feels it got
shortchanged by government appeasers who released
Captain Zhan in 2010) served up its latest
provocation - the campaign by Tokyo Governor
Shintaro Ishihara to purchase the Senkakus - the
central government tried to defuse the situation
by purchasing the islands itself.
Nevertheless, the Chinese government
decided to make an issue of it, apparently to
demonstrate to Japan's elite the high cost of
pursuing an agenda of confrontation with the PRC
over the pretext of the Senkakus.
As
usual, Beijing is staying away from anything that
might be construed as a direct military threat to
the Japanese forces arrayed near the Senkakus.
Indeed, its first aircraft carrier, the
Liaoning (originally Ukraine's
Varyag, then repurposed as a floating
casino and now destined to become an instantaneous
and expensive artificial reef if it ever attempts
naval operations against the United States or
Japan), entered service on September 25. However,
it is not going anywhere near the Senkakus and
will need years and billions of yuan before it is
a viable military air-operations platform.
Out of consideration for its key North
Asia ally, the United States has declined to
follow through on its previous intention to treat
the Senkakus as it did the Dokdo and place them
outside the scope of Article 5 of the US-Japan
Security Treaty. Recently, Defense Secretary Leon
Panetta affirmed that an attack on the Senkakus
would evoke a US military response on behalf of
Japan.
However, the fact that Beijing
apparently has no intention of attacking the
Senkakus has understandably given more weight to
Panetta's statement that the United States has no
position on the conflicting sovereignty claims and
hopes that the Chinese and Japanese governments
will work out the issue peaceably.
This
time around, the Chinese government is not only
avoiding inflammatory moves that would
internationalize the dispute; in important ways,
it is even de-bilateralizing it. In contrast to
2010, China is not directly interfering in foreign
trade with Japan. Instead, Japanese interests
inside China have been threatened directly by
Chinese citizens, albeit egged on by their
government.
This is a distinction that has
been carefully drawn in Sino-Japanese
confrontations over the past century and is
probably well understood by current strategists.
Before World War II, "boycott" was an
all-purpose descriptor for two different
activities: what we would now call a popular
boycott of people declining to buy certain goods,
and also what is now called official government
economic harassment instituted by fiat.
It
was a matter of some anxiety for the Chinese
government to draw a line between the two,
particularly during the "Great Boycott" in 1931
protesting the Japanese incursion into Manchuria
(whose anniversary by coincidence occurred on
September 19, at the height of this year's
anti-Japanese rumpus), since the Japanese
government at the time was inclined to engage in
real warfare to retaliate for what it deemed
economic warfare by China.
Today, with the
anti-Japanese measures framed as a popular
boycott, as long as the Chinese demonstrations
stay away from red lines as defined in the Vienna
Convention on Diplomatic Relations - which
obligates the PRC to uphold the inviolability of
the premises, personnel and property, both
official and personal, of the Japanese diplomatic
mission - then offenses against Japanese persons
and property fall into the black hole of Chinese
domestic civil and criminal law.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
