China not to pick that East China
Sea fight By Jens Kastner
TAIPEI - Reports run by mainland Chinese
media make it seem as if war between China and
Japan is imminent following the recent
high-profile landings by Chinese and Japanese
nationalists on the East China Sea's Senkaku
Islands - called Diaoyu in Chinese - which are
controlled by Japan and claimed by China and
Taiwan.
Anti-Japanese protests have been
taking place in cities across China, with
thousands calling on Beijing to take up the
hatchet against arch-rival Japan, yet in reality
the prospect of combat action in the East China
Sea is about as remote as ever.
Even so,
the otherwise relatively sober Hong Kong weekly
Yazhou Zhoukan dedicated half of its latest
edition to advising how China's People's
Liberation Army (PLA) should forcefully take the Diaoyu
Islands from the
Japanese. On the magazine's cover page, two heroic
warriors - one from China, one from Taiwan - are
seen clutching their assault rifles against the
backdrop of a rock in the ocean, and in more than
a dozen articles the PLA and the PLA Navy are told
that it should unleash its submarines, air power
and anti-ship ballistic missiles against the
US-Japan security alliance. The daily news
coverage by international wire services does its
share in sending chills down the spines: Japanese
restaurants and Japanese-made cars are being
smashed in China, and even the car of Japanese
Ambassador Uichiro Niwa in Beijing was assaulted.
On top of that, PLA brass have been arguing in
countless interviews that the time has come for
China to dare go on the attack.
If all
these impressions are taken together, it becomes
very clear that Japan can no longer ignore that
many in China want to hear the war drums being
beaten.
The question arises how high is
the likelihood that the Chinese government is
indeed considering paying heed to the increasingly
impatient calls for bloodshed. According to
experts interviewed by Asia Times Online, close to
zero.
"Such pressure from the general
public is not particularly significant when the
leadership is strong, confident and stable," said
Steve Tsang, director of the University of
Nottingham's China Policy Institute. "The CCP
[Chinese Communist Party] has no wish to get into
a military confrontation with Japan unless and
until it can be sure it will come out better,
about which it cannot be certain in the
foreseeable future."
While it might seem
as if PLA major generals and senior colonels who
promote a bloodthirsty stance on Chinese TV shows
and in newspaper interviews could exert
significant pressure on the Chinese civilian
leadership to forcefully take the Senkakus, their
media comments are deceptive, said Tsang.
"They are allowed to make hawkish noises
but they can be reined in by a strong leadership,"
he said.
Bonnie Glaser, a senior fellow
with the US-based Center for Strategic and
International Studies, agrees that Beijing is
nowhere near to seeking combat. According to her,
the Chinese are crystal clear that the Diaoyu
Islands are covered under the US-Japan Mutual
Cooperation and Security Treaty because the
islands are under Japan's administrative control.
"They understand that any use of force by
China against the islands would immediately
involve the United States," she said.
A
closer look at the bigger picture reveals what
Beijing wants to achieve, and that military
confrontation with the US, which could easily end
China's economic miracle, isn't part of the plan.
In editorials run by the state-run Global
Times that are often written by either the Foreign
Ministry or the CCP's Publicity Department and
that have been published both in Chinese and
English to make sure audiences at home and abroad
take note, the game plan is fairly clearly laid
out.
While respectfully applauding the
anti-Japan movement and ostensibly urging the
Chinese government to ready the PLA's arms for
combat, the overarching aims that are subtly
identified are distinctively dovish: Japan should
be discouraged from doing anything that
legitimizes its claims, so that the door stays
open for future negotiations.
Calls for
actual combat are not only conspicuous by their
absence but even explicitly dismissed: to
"retrieve" Diaoyu Islands by force now would be
"unwise" and China should instead "be restrained
and further increase its strength".
The
editorials furthermore suggest that if shots were
fired, Beijing would do what was necessary to
prevent the situation from escalating into a
full-out war. "The clashes will be kept within
certain parameters," the authors assuringly said.
Jean-Pierre Cabestan, head of Hong Kong
Baptist University's Department of Government and
International Relations, singled out what Beijing
is actually up to. "The Chinese government
strategy is to try to compel the Japanese
government to admit that there is a territorial
dispute around the Senkaku, which is not the case
now," he said.
In mid-August, South Korean
President Lee Myung-bak made a controversial visit
to Dokdo, a Korean-controlled island claimed by
the Japanese, who call it Takeshima. The Koreans
have long had an actual military position on
Dokdo, effectively making their case many times
stronger than Japan's. Seeing that there is little
concrete chance that Tokyo is ever going to gain
sovereignty over the island, the Japanese opted
for the last possible maneuver, which is trying to
bring the case to the International Court of
Justice (ICJ).
The Japanese government has
also been attempting do take similar action over
its other hopeless sovereignty issue, namely with
Russia over the Kuril Islands, known in Russia as
the Southern Kurils.
The Koreans and
Russians in their respective positions of strength
can simply refuse to admit that a sovereignty
dispute exists between them and Japan, and as
international arbitration demands the consent of
both sides, the Japanese can only resort to being
persistent.
In the case of the Senkakus,
it is exactly the other way around. Here, it is
Tokyo that has the say, and just as Moscow and
Seoul do in their spats with Tokyo, the Japanese
refuse to even talk to Beijing and Taipei over the
case. The powerful backing of the US-Japan defense
treaty makes Japanese concessions almost
completely unnecessary, and Beijing understands
that it must first isolate Tokyo from the US if it
wants to force the Japanese to the negotiation
table and make them a head shorter there.
In recent weeks, there have been clear
moves by the Chinese government to achieve
precisely this end. Aiming at sowing doubt in
Tokyo that the US will choose to be an active
combatant in case of a Sino-Japanese war, it was
leaked to Chinese media that the PLA has tested a
new intercontinental ballistic missile that can
reach targets all over the US.
To be seen
in the same context, a new submarine-launched
ballistic missile was test-launched shortly
afterwards; if equipped with nuclear warheads
these weapsons could wipe out US cities. On August
27, the PLA declared that its nuclear arsenal is
fully mobile so that it now can launch missiles
against US targets from anywhere in China even if
the US were to nuke China first.
When
dealing with China's neighbors, particularly on
highly contentious issues, it has been the
hallmark approach of most of the country's great
leaders, from the historic emperors to Deng
Xiaoping, to "put aside differences and look
forward" and to "seek common ground while
reserving differences".
The significant
downside to these ancient pieces of wisdom
arguably is that if controversies are shelved
again and again, they do not go away but add up.
By alternately fanning and cooling the anti-Japan
movement at home while working relentlessly to
isolate Japan, the contemporary Chinese leadership
at long last seeks to get rid of the time-tested
approach. It paves the way to sort out inherited
sovereignty quarrels once and for all. But that
historic change of attitude won't lead to war with
Japan any time soon.
"Over some rocks? I
don't see this happening," said Glaser. "All their
neighbors would respond by cementing closer ties
with the United States; China's neighborhood would
be very unfriendly for a long time. The Chinese
are much smarter than that."
Jens
Kastner is a Taipei-based journalist.
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