China/ Japan Conflict!

                              

The spat between China and Japan over disputed sovereignty on a group of small islands in the East China Sea, called the Senkakus by the Japanese and Diaoyus in China, is taking dangerous overtones. China is sending planes and surveillance vessels to test its claims, with Japan taking counter-measures. Taiwan too has entered the fray, as the alternative China, with Japanese firing water cannons at a Taiwanese boat carrying a group of activists wanting to land on the disputed islands.

                             

The trouble began on Aug. 15, when Japanese authorities arrested 14 Chinese citizens from a Hong Kong-based vessel after some of them staged a protest by landing on one of the islands. The landing of Japanese activists on one of the disputed islands further intensified tensions. In response, anti-Japanese protests, some violent, spread across China, apparently chaperoned and approved by the police.

Japan's defense minister, Itsunori Onodera

The governor of Tokyo, a well-known nationalist, further angered Chinese activists by announcing that he wanted to buy three of the disputed islands from their owner, a Japanese citizen. He said he believed that Japan’s central government was not doing enough to defend them.

The next week, the Japanese government announced that it had bought all of the islands from their private Japanese owners for nearly $30 million. It said it acted in the hope of forestalling further conflict, but China accused Tokyo of stealing the islands and dispatched two maritime enforcement ships in a show of force.

In late September, the Japanese Coast Guard used water cannons to disperse fishing boats from Taiwan near the islands, which are also claimed by Taipei.

In October, China announced that it would not send its finance minister or central bank chief to the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in Tokyo. The decision was a clear sign of China’s displeasure with Japan’s handling of the dispute over the islands.

The last-minute cancellation, confirmed by Japanese officials on Oct. 10, came as a Japanese news agency reported that Tokyo may try to defuse the standoff by officially acknowledging for the first time that China also claims the islands.

On Oct. 11, a senior Chinese diplomat made a secret visit to Tokyo to hold talks aimed at defusing tensions between the two countries, according to a Japanese government spokesman. The spokesman, Osamu Fujimura, said Luo Zhaohui, who leads the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s Asian Affairs Department, met with Shinsuke Sugiyama, the director general of the Asian and Oceanic Affairs Bureau at Japan’s Foreign Ministry.

According to a statement from the Japanese ministry, the diplomats “exchanged opinions” on the dispute and held preparatory talks for a higher-level meeting between the two nations to take place at an unspecified date.

In December, a Chinese military surveillance plane entered what Japan considers its airspace near the disputed islands, the Japanese Defense Ministry said. Japan scrambled fighter jets in response, but the Chinese plane left before they arrived, according to Japanese authorities.

The ministry said the plane’s incursion was the first known violation of Japanese airspace by a Chinese plane since they began keeping records some 50 years ago. China considers the airspace its own, because it is laying claim to the islands that Japan has controlled for decades.

Tokyo lodged a formal protest with Beijing, which swiftly retorted that it was the Japanese who had encroached.

Looking back at the historical experience of the two major powers of our times, Britain and the United States, the dominance over oceans and sea-lanes was a prerequisite for regional and global primacy. Indeed, this is how China was humbled during the opium wars of the 19th century and reduced to a semi-colonial status. Now China wants to establish its sway over the South China Sea and over the disputed (with Japan) islands in the East China Sea.

When the communists won the civil war and established the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the US was the dominant military power ruling the waves in much of the world in the midst of a Cold War, with China on the Soviet side. After intense internal ideological and power struggles, and a serious rift with the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s overlapping into the 1980s, China started to emerge slowly as a power in its own right under the stewardship of Deng Xiaoping. Deng was a practical leader with emphasis on learning from facts and not too infatuated with communist ideology, though he was a strong upholder of the Party’s monopoly on power. He wanted to modernise China and build it into a strong and powerful nation. But he also advised that China should bide its time while building its strength.

Deng’s successors obviously believe that the time has come for China to assert and reclaim its power and national interests. And these interests include recovering what it perceives to have been historically its sovereign territories and waters in the South China Sea and other maritime territories, including the Senkaku/Diayou islands, controlled by Japan. In the regional political power play, China once had an advantage over Japan as its atrocious war record in China and other Asian countries created a kind of aggrieved brotherhood, revived now and then over specific issues like the ‘comfort women’, Asian prostitutes that Japanese soldiers used during wartime.

But with China’s rise and its determination to consolidate and expand its power, it is now simultaneously involved in sovereignty disputes over islands in the South China with a number of regional countries like Vietnam, the Philippines and others, and with Japan in the East China Sea. That is creating an aggrieved brotherhood of a different kind against China, with Japan increasingly regarded favourably. The most welcoming of Japan in this respect is the Philippines, with its own serious maritime dispute with China. Japan and the Philippines have become strategic partners agreeing to collaborate to resolve their territorial disputes with China. And they have expressed ‘mutual concern’ about China’s increasingly assertive claims.

Vietnam is another country with a serious maritime dispute with China in the South China Sea, and has lately drawn strategically close to the United States. Both Japan and the Philippines have their security pacts with the United States, as does Australia. But Japan is not without its own problems, arising from a serious maritime dispute with South Korea, which too is a US ally. The US has been urging both its allies to resolve their dispute but the signs so far are not propitious.

Even without the US security connection, Japan is not an inconsequential power, though constrained militarily because of the US-imposed post-WW11 pacifist constitution. There has been a slow erosion of that position, with US support, as Washington has been urging Japan for quite some years to play an important regional military role as its ally. With Shinzo Abe as Japan’s new prime minister, known for his ultra-nationalist views, Japan will raise its defence expenditure and take measures to get rid of the relevant constitutional provision constraining its military power.

China is already an ascendant military power with its defence budget reportedly doubling over the last six years. It seems determined to uphold its perceived national interests, which is its great strength with the Chinese people. While the government might not be playing the military band, the country’s senior military officers are not holding back their frank views. This was recently the case with Senior Colonel Liu Mingfu of China’s National Defence University in an interview with John Garnaut, China correspondent of The Sydney Morning Herald. He said colourfully, “America is the global tiger and Japan is Asia’s wolf and both are now madly biting China.” He hypothetically raised a scenario of nuclear retaliation by raising the WW11 analogy when Japan attacked Pearl Harbour and asked, “...how do you know it wouldn’t receive another nuclear bomb?” And said, “The world would hail if Japan receives such a [nuclear] blow.” He amplified, “I don’t want to mention China here [presumably, the country that might deliver the blow], as it is sensitive.” And he had a message for Australia not to follow the US or Japan into any military conflict, saying, “Australia should never “play the jackal for the tiger or dance with the wolf.” 

Though Colonel Liu said his views did not represent government policy, at the same time he emphasised that his views were consistent with what the political and military leaders thought, if not what they said. In addition to the interview, Liu also provided written comments accusing the US of creating “a mini-NATO” to contain China, with the US and Japan at its core and Australia within its orbit.

Having taken such a strong public stand on the sovereignty issue, the Chinese government would find it difficult to retreat from that position. Japan will equally be averse to making its sovereignty over the islands an open issue. If so, China and Japan are heading for a showdown of some sorts in the not-too-distant future. And that won’t be pretty regionally and globally.

In a region devoid of rules like those that existed between the United States and the Soviet Union when their ships and planes crossed paths, the possibility of a deadly accident is high. In addition to the radar scares, the two sides have exchanged threats, with Japan stating that its fighter jets would fire tracer bullets near Chinese aircraft if they strayed too near the rocks. A retired but influential Chinese army general responded that such an act would constitute a “first shot".

The new chief of China’s Communist Party, Xi Jinping, has even taken to urging the People’s Liberation Army to “prepare for war.”

Word for the Day: “ We boil at different degrees. ”— Ralph Waldo Emerson