After these things I saw, and behold, a door opened in heaven, and the first voice that I heard, a voice as of a trumpet speaking with me, one saying, Come up hither, and I will show thee the things which must come to pass hereafter.
"What is he? And what was on that data crystal he gave you?"
"Reflection. Surprise. Terror. For the future."
See that red box on the map? That's our generation's "damned foolish thing in the Balkans." Only this time it is called the Senkaku Islands, and it is where the future is being revealed even as we speak. Come below the fold to peer into the crystal ball...
Taiwanese fishing boats near Gueishan Island just off Yilan, Taiwan
Our story of China's increasingly aggressive 2010 took a new turn on Sept 8, 2010 when a Chinese fishing boat captain was arrested in Japanese territorial waters for ramming Japanese coast guard vessels. Two weeks later, on Sept 24, the captain of the boat was released by local prosecutors in Okinawa (thus freeing the Japanese government of the onus for the decision) after two weeks of intense Chinese pressure. In between East Asia pretty much completed its re-assessment of the Peaceful Rise of China. And the evaluation was negative....
The incident began on Sept 7, 2010, when a Chinese fishing vessel collided with or rammed two Japanese patrol vessels in the Senkaku Islands. The Senkakus lie between Taiwan and Okinawa, in that red box in the map above. Known in Chinese as the Diaoyutai, the islands are "disputed". More on that in a moment.
The significant thing about this event was not the gamesmanship with fishing boats, which is common in China's littoral waters, but China's overwrought and belligerent response. As the Economist pointed out, this was a departure from the days of Deng, who counseled the setting aside of such disputes....
China’s response to Japan’s arrest on September 7th of a Chinese fishing crew near the disputed islands has exposed a dangerous source of instability in the relationship. Far from putting the dispute to one side, as Deng urged, China is escalating it into a full-blown diplomatic stand-off. It has suspended official exchanges with Japan at the level of government minister or above, including provincial leaders. The prime minister, Wen Jiabao, is unlikely even to meet his Japanese counterpart, Naoto Kan, in the sidelines of a United Nations gathering attended by both men in New York this week. A Chinese spokeswoman said the atmosphere was "not suitable".
...........
Japan’s alliance with America and its own considerable military muscle make it highly unlikely China would risk armed conflict over the islands. But China has allowed its wrath to go far beyond the diplomatic realm. It has suspended talks on the joint exploration of gasfields in the East China Sea as well as over increased flights between the two countries. It has cancelled a Chinese government-sponsored visit by 1,000 young Japanese people to the World Expo in Shanghai (again citing an inappropriate atmosphere).
Additionally, when the captain of the Chinese fishing vessel finally returned to China, Japanese reporters were blocked from attending the press conference.
China's belligerence was clearly aimed solely at Japan. It should be noted that back in February the Russians sank a Chinese fishing vessel but China's response was quite muted, and that at the same time Beijing was blustering at Tokyo and demanding apologies, it was holding Vietnamese fishing vessels and their captains and crews. Hypocrisy doesn't even begin to cover what Beijing was doing. So what was it doing?
Taiwan's Next Media animations, famous the world over, has a hilarious depiction of the Chinese fishing boat that apparently rammed the Japanese vessels in the Senkakus last week (still from the video).
If you read the media reports, you learn that the Senkakus are "disputed." A few reports have probed a bit deeper, but basically, what you don't learn is a very simple fact:
The current dispute dates from 1971.
Yes, that's right. In Jan of 1895 Japan grabbed the Senkakus, then unoccupied and unclaimed. For all of the 20th century down to 1969, both Communist China and Nationalist China (ROC) recognized the Senkakus as Japanese. It is easy to find examples of maps and articles showing this. For example, this 1953 Renminerbao article from the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party not only describes the Senkakus as Japanese but also uses the Japanese names to refer to them. Down to 1969 PRC maps were still showing the Senkakus as Japanese. Similarly, the Nationalist government, which fled to Taiwan in 1949, also treated the Senkakus as Japanese. For example, between 1959 and 1972, maps issued by one of the defense research institutes in Taiwan showed the Senkakus as Japanese, with no disclaimers. If you can read Chinese, the fabulous Taiwan map blog has a huge collection of maps and texts that show that throughout recorded history, the Chinese never thought of the Senkakus as Chinese.
What changed?
In 1968 Japanese scientists announced the possibility of huge reserves of oil beneath the Senkakus. Suddenly both Beijing and Taipei began working on claims that the Senkakus belonged to China. Since at that time the US was still administering Okinawa and the Senkakus, in 1971, a week before Okinawa was returned, the ROC government on Taiwan declared the Senkakus to be part of the Republic of China. Six months later, the People's Republic of China followed suit (both governments strive hard to outdo each other in their public support of Chinese nationalism). After that both governments began back-reading their current claim into history, pretending that references in records of voyages hundreds of years ago gave them a claim to the islands. Another common but completely false Chinese claim is that they were handed over to Japan with Taiwan in the Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895, but Japan seized the Senkakus in Jan while the Treaty was signed in April. The two have nothing to with each other.
In other words, what we're watching in the Senkakus is not a dispute in which each side is making plausible claims about sovereignty. Rather, what's happening is that China is engaged in a pure land grabbing, and Japan is resisting. That is why Japan continually insists in its public communications that "there is no dispute", because Tokyo knows perfectly well that China is not settling its borders but expanding them.
The reason the Senkakus are so telling is twofold. First, as I discussed above, China's belligerent approach, in which each aggressive demand was followed by further bullying and ramping up of tension, set the final nail in the coffin of its claim to be undergoing a Peaceful Rise. Arthur Waldron, the longtime East Asian observer, wrote in the conservative Jamestown Brief this month with respect to Taiwan's position:
The new cold breeze blowing from China, however, looks to have had some effect on Taiwan, and is likely to continue to do so. A foreigner who had recently met with a number of regional governments told me that in his opinion not one expected anything other than trouble from China in the years ahead. As already mentioned, Taiwan's government would seem to have slowed down the rate at which it has been embracing cooperation with China. As a coalition of other Asian states takes shape to counter-balance China, I argued in my presentation at the conference, it was unlikely that democratic Taiwan would take the side of a dictatorship against other democracies (among other things the military would never stand for this—I was told), and even more unlikely that the United States would seek to force a democratic country like Taiwan to make terms with a would-be regional hegemon.
Jon Adams reported from Taipei that while Chinese commentators attacked the US, in the west China was viewed as the problem....
Jeff Kingston, director of Asian studies at Temple University's Japan campus, told USA Today that China had "overplayed its hand."
"It's a revealing moment, and the rest of Asia is looking on and saying 'uh-oh,'" Kingston told the newspaper. "[Beijing's] 'soft-power diplomacy' -- that a rising China is not a threatening China -- has all gone up in smoke."
The Economist made a similar point, saying, "the ferocity of the Chinese response has harmed China ultimately, by undermining confidence in China as a responsible stakeholder in the region."
The result is that in the East and SE Asian region the process of states around China's frontier coalescing into some kind of alliance backed by the US has begun. It was a region that was China's for the winning with leadership, gentle words, and a show of evenhandedness and generosity. But instead Beijing has treated all its agreements and interactions as zero-sum games. This is an important indicator for how China will behave in the future, and everyone around China is reading it the same way: gird thy loins.
A stele in Manchu language, issued in the 18th century in Taiwan, then a Qing holding
The second reason the Senkakus are so telling has to do with the way people in China and the West think about the history of China. In the 17th century the foreign Manchus conquered China and established the Qing dynasty, which finally fell in 1911. The Qing saw themselves, and were seen by the Chinese, as a foreign dynasty. They established a very large empire that included areas now considered part of other nations, and many kingdoms around the border sent tribute, among them the Ryukyu Kindom in Okinawa.
Beginning in 1911 Chinese made the very conscious decision to inflate China out to the Qing borders and treat everything that had been Qing, to the extent possible, as "Chinese." This is still an evolving policy. To put it in western terms, it is as if Kemal Attaturk and his followers had made the decision to inflate Turkey out to the old Ottoman boundaries. Everyone would laugh today if Ankara insisted that Egypt and Jordan belonged to Turkey and all their inhabitants Turks because the Ottoman empire had owned them, but when Beijing does this with Qing holdings, we accept it as normal.
The issue here is not really whether Beijing's claims are valid, but rather, what this habit portends for the future.
Nothing good.
A couple of interesting things happened this week in China and Taiwan. The President of the Republic of China on Taiwan, Ma Ying-jeou, an ardent Chinese nationalist, gave an interview to AP in which he said:
Well, on the East China Sea, for instance, the Diaoyutai or Senkaku [Islands], they were actually discovered and named by the Chinese more than 600 years ago, and during the process, they were used as navigation aids and that included the sea defense of Ming and Ching dynasties, ironically, against the Japanese. There are many historical records, particularly when the kings of the Ryukyus [acceded to the throne], they actually paid tribute to mainland China, to the Ming and Ching dynasties, for almost 500 years. So during the process, there were dozens of special envoys sent by the Ming and Ching courts to officiate their inauguration, so there were [many] historical records on using those islands.
Note how, in the President Ma's mind, the Senkakus and Okinawa are connected -- the fact of tribute from Okinawa to the Ming and Qing means that China owns the Senkaku Islands.
Now do the math: if tribute from Okinawa means that China owns the Senkakus, what does it mean about Okinawa?
Yes, that's right: many Chinese believe that China also owns Okinawa.
As if on cue, also recently over in China not only did a few anti-Japan protesters call attention to that, but academics as well. The belief that China owns Okinawa is widespread among Chinese and as a pro-independence foreigner living in Taiwan, I've been lectured on that topic many a time by right-wingers here.
What this means is that this isn't going to stop, because after the Senkakus there is still the issue of Okinawa. To Taiwan, conventionally seen as a flashpoint for a US-China conflict, the US commitment is ambiguous. But for Japan, the US formally committed to defending both the Senkakus and Okinawa under its security treaty with Japan -- a few years ago US and Japanese vessels conducted exercises in the Senkakus and this year they plan exercises on retaking islands occupied by an invader, a clear reference to the Senkakus.
What will happen in coming years if/when China begins hinting and then saying and then insisting that Okinawa is Chinese?
That red square above encompasses a few uninhabited rocks in the ocean that are a major flashpoint for a hegemonic war that will almost certainly involve the US, currently the regional hegemon and the ultimate target of Chinese expansion. One aspect of China's strategy is to blame the US in order to create a rift between Tokyo and Washington -- an echo of China's 1979 invasion of Vietnam, which was in part a brutal of way of showing Hanoi that its security treaty with the USSR was empty -- and whose pretext was the alleged maltreatment of ethnic Chinese in Vietnam (a variation of the principle that Chinese everywhere are Beijing's responsibility).
Readers are invited to hit Google image search and start finding maps of Qing dynasty holdings, and then imagine what else China might decide belongs to it. As if to answer that question, just this week China's Map World, its answer to Google Earth, showed that the entire Indian State of Arunachal Pradesh belongs to China, since many of its inhabitants are ethnic Tibetans, making them part of Tibet, which makes them Chinese. The Chinese are ramping up military preparations on their side of the Sino-Indian border at a furious rate.
Such nonsense illuminates: it shows that for Beijing, one claim piles onto another and another besides, and that Beijing won't stop until it is made to stop.
It's hard to see how this can end in any way other than war.
REFS: Chinese surface fleet from the Jamestown Brief, a piece on Fisheries and the Chinese fishing fleet and Goldstein's awesome piece on China's fishing boats, Ampotan's great background post on the Senkakus dispute.