Glorious mission update
As Chinese, we should unite together to defend the Diaoyu Islands and completely defend our homeland. Let us annihilate any attempt by the Japanese devils to come ashore our islands, throw them back to the Japanese isles, defend the Diaoyutai.
(Introduction to Defend the Diaoyu Islands, game on iPad)
At least, in a corner of the hyper-world of video gaming, the matter of the Diaoyu Islands – also known as Senkaku to the Japanese and as the Diaoyutai in Taiwan – has been resolved. A video game for China’s iPad users launched in 2012 featured much of the vitriol that has been flung back and forth between China and Japan over a series of small islands and rocks in the East China Sea during that same year. In this game, called Defend the Diaoyu Islands, players are challenged to attack and resolutely evict Japanese ‘invaders’ by force from a group of small islands that are considered to be an unalienable part of China, doing so with a variety of weapons and military material, including a deployment of the talismanic Liaoning, the first aircraft carrier commissioned for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
The game is an update of Glorious Mission Online, a gaming platform originally part-sponsored by the Chinese PLA as a virtual simulator to train soldiers, and fashioned after the popular Call of Duty game series developed in the United States. The game is hopping on the ‘kang ri’ or ‘anti-Japanese’ bandwagon: a term that refers to a recent raft of Chinese dramas, movies and games that invariably feature Japanese characters as the villains of the piece.
A video trailer for the new downloadable content was posted to YouTube (Blum, 2013a). An English caption reads, ‘Diayou Island is inherent territory of the Chinese nation’, while hawkish images of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe flash across the screen. A montage of fighter jets, parachuting soldiers, tanks and naval gunships with cannons firing quickly follows. A picture of the disputed island chain then appears. ‘Response to defend the Motherland’ is displayed on the next screen as the background music intensifies. Suddenly, various computer graphic angle shots of the Liaoning carrier appear. Toward the end of the trailer, machine gun-wielding PLA soldiers burst into a Japanese encampment, with bullets flying. A small rising sun banner pops up on-screen for each virtual Japanese soldier that is neutralised. In classic Call of Duty fashion, an approaching attack helicopter is blown away by a bazooka shot (Blum, 2013b). The stereotyped Japanese ‘enemies’ include moustachioed World War Two soldiers, samurai, clumsy sumo wrestlers and ninja warriors. There are altogether 71 levels in the game, each named after an island.
The game developers are Shenzhen Zhongqingbaowang Interaction Network Co Ltd, or ZQGame. This is a Chinese company that makes massively multiplayer online games as well as other browser and mobile games (ZQGame, 2016). Defend the Diaoyu Islands is not their first foray into plugging into the Chinese citizens’ apparent zeal for conflict with their neighbours. The company’s website includes several promotions for online chapters of the company’s banner game set in China during World War Two, including one called Nanjing Trial that puts gamers in the city of Nanjing during the infamous Nanjing Massacre to fight off the intruding Japanese. The game’s tagline spells out the content clearly: ‘Return to Nanjing, pay back blood with blood.’ In Resistance War Online, another game created by Shenzhen ZQGame in 2007, the advertising slogan reads: ‘Kill the devils if you are Chinese!’ The ‘devils’, of course, are Japanese: anti-Japanese war dramas make up a third of the series shown on Chinese TV. In present-day China, the quantity of anti-Japanese war movies and teleplays is abnormally high, and their values deeply enmeshed in a radical nationalism, resulting is a general trend towards a ‘carnival of vengeful images’ (Gai, 2015). One recent offering is Royalty in Blood, a grisly 36-part TV series about the Sino-Japanese conflict of 1937‒1945, now downloadable off the Internet (Love TV Show, 2015).
The emergence of patriotic digital games in China can been interpreted as both reactions to the perceived rising wave of government-led militarism in Japan, as well as attempts to profit from the nationalistic impulse of an increasingly gaming-savvy Chinese public. The Chinese government has cleverly integrated online game technology into an expanding and modernising propaganda tool, utilised it for disseminating official ideology, sustaining economic growth in the high value e-gaming sector, while also offering venues for the display of (electronic, and therefore rather politically safe) nationalism. Through policy regulations, financial support and partnership with private game companies, the Chinese Party-state has turned online gaming into a profitable industry, a vehicle for the projection of soft power and an instrument for patriotic education (Nie, 2013).
Such ‘projections’ sometimes go too far: China has had to rein in excessive anti-Japanese sentiment on various occasions. In August 2004, riots broke out after a Japanese victory over China in the Asian Cup Soccer Final in Beijing. Vandalism started outside the stadium after the game; and security forces were at hand to contain the damage (CNN, 2004). When Tokyo pursued membership of the UN Security Council early in 2005, an online anti-Japan petition against the proposal was signed by millions of Chinese; streets protests called for a boycott of Japanese products, and vandalism broke out in various Chinese cities, including Shanghai (Marquand, 2005). The Diaoyu/Senkaku affair would catalyse even larger protests in 2012 (about which read more in Chapter 4).
Anti-Japanese protests are nothing new in China. Such and similar episodes of (often grassroots) anti-foreign mobilisation in China have been tolerated or repressed by the PRC to signal either resolve or reassurance (Chen Weiss, 2014). In fact, Defend the Diaoyu Islands was taken down from the China Apple store without warning (Waugh, 2012). One explanation for the sudden removal is that the game violated Apple’s terms of service: its rules specify that ‘enemies’ within the context of a game cannot target a specific and actual race, culture, government or corporation, or any other real entity (Martin, 2012).
In any case, the game was good while it lasted: in the first week after its launching, Defend the Diaoyu Islands stormed to the top ten free iPad games available off the China iTunes app store. Most game downloaders come from China, the United States and, perhaps surprisingly, Japan. Or, perhaps not: a game is a game after all.
Passion clouding pragmatism beyond the fantasy world of video games
The same burning questions can be raised, beyond the fantasy world of video games: to what extent have the statements and manoeuvres indulged in by China (and Taiwan) and Japan around a group of small, uninhabited (and probably uninhabitable) islands to be taken seriously? To what extent should one believe the official rhetoric that these barren rocks are inviolate sovereign territory, as claimed by each of these two neighbouring sovereign states? And to what extreme lengths would each of the two countries be prepared to go to defend such a claim? Moreover, which of the two countries has the strongest claim to the islands?
Much has been written in response to the escalation witnessed in the East China Sea in recent years involving the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands. For a few weeks in September 2012, the world held its breath: few could believe that China and Japan, both among the world’s three largest economies and with a total bilateral trade of almost US$334 billion in 2012, could actually go to war ‒ and over a heap of small rocks. To get a sense of how small, check out the complete list of islets and rocks that make up the archipelago known as Diaoyu or Senkaku, with their respective land area (see Table 1.1).
Table 1.1 The eight main members of the Diaoyu/Senkaku island chain, with land area
| Japanese name | Chinese name | Land area (km2) |
| Uotsuri-shima (魚釣島) | Diaoyu Dao (釣魚島) | 4.32 |
| Kita-kojima (北小島) | Bei Xiaodao (北小島) | 0.3267 |
| Minami-kojima (南小島) | Nan Xiaodao （南小島） | 0.4592 |
| Taishō-tō (大正島) | Chiwei Yu (赤尾嶼) | 0.0609 |
| Kuba-shima (久場島) | Huangwei Yu (黃尾嶼) | 1.08 |
| Oki-no-Kita-iwa (沖ノ北岩) | Da Bei Xiaodao (大北小島/北岩) | 0.0183 |
| Oki-no-Minami-iwa (沖ノ南岩) | Da Nan Xiaodao (大南小島/南岩) | 0.0048 |
| Tobise (飛瀬) | Fei Jiao Yan (飛礁岩/飛岩) | 0.0008 |
Source: Kakazu (2016, pp. 2.3)
For Japan, struggling to emerge from two decades of economic malaise, exports to burgeoning China are a key source of growth. Companies from Sony to Toyota desperately need Chinese consumers to buy their television sets and automobiles – which, by the way, may be both assembled by Chinese workers in China – to offset a sluggish home market. Meanwhile, China imports more from Japan than from any other country, and many of those ‘made-in-Japan’ goods – such as high-tech components and capital equipment – are critical to China’s economic advance. And yet, passions over the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands have been clouding pragmatism. In China, sales of Japanese-branded cars plummeted amid large anti-Japan protests in 2012. Japanese direct investment into China plunged by nearly 37 per cent in the first nine months of 2013 (Schuman, 2013). By 2014, the value of bilateral trade had still not returned to pre-2012 levels. ‘The fledgling trade recovery between Asia’s two economic giants could be derailed by another political dispute’ (Obe, 2014). In its cover for the 22‒28 September 2012 edition, the seriously popular The Economist magazine – which claims to reach 5.3 million readers a week in print and online – offered readers a view of the disputed islands, suitably scaled down to highlight their small size, with the question printed in bold type: ‘Could China and Japan really go to war over these?’ A green turtle, swimming in the bottom right corner of the cover, ventures to answer, ‘Sadly, yes’.
The widespread perception of the very real dangers of a confrontation that could even usher in a World War Three has catalysed a very large corpus of literature on the topic. Chinese, Japanese and third-party experts, researchers and scholars have published many titles on the case, and continue to do so. These provide details of the historical antecedents to the affair; and propose arguments and counter-arguments as to who of the two countries might have the stronger claim at international law. Above all, most seek to locate the whole matter within a strategic and complex macro-political analysis: the change of leadership in the Chinese Communist Party and the consolidation of the position of the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, the President of the People’s Republic of China and the Chairman of China’s Central Military Commission, Xi Jinping; Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s legacy and Japan’s growing militarisation; what is perceived as the shifting power balance in East Asia, given the rising and more assertive China; the recalibration of US power in the region as part of its ‘pivot’ to Asia; and a lingering, heavy, historical memory that ensures that there is no love lost between the two countries (Christensen, 2011).
This book
This text takes a different tack. It acknowledges that the matter at hand is essentially a disagreement over and about islands, and there is therefore scope and promise in reminding ourselves that, as such, the Diaoyu/Senkaku affair shares a pedigree with other island rows that have flared up in the course of history. These have typically involved two, often neighbouring powers, keen to secure territorial and/or marine rights (such as to fishing and/or seabed or underwater mineral resources), to project national power by the extension of exclusive economic zones (EEZs), and to stoke local national sentiment and fervour at home. Quite typically, the confrontation did not deal with the disputed islands per se. More, much more, was at stake. So far, the comparisons with the Diaoyu/Senkaku stack up nicely.
But, we can go further: history affords us the advantage of hindsight. From the comfortable perch of the twenty-first century, we can look back – at least 400 years – and coolly assess how, and why, some (though not all) of these squabbles over islands have been ‘solved’, in some way or other. A raft of solutions has been found to assuage the parties involved in these island clashes, enough to establish a modus vivendi that does not risk escalating into all-out violence and warfare. For those concerned with the Diaoyu/Senkaku affair, it would be opportune, wise and timely to note these many cases of resolution, since any, or a combination, or a hybrid amalgam of their details, could well provide a viable roadmap for what could unfold in the East China Sea, and indeed even for other, presumably more intractable, situations involving islands elsewhere – such as the South China Sea (Cronin et al., 2012).
A regime for island disputes: UNCLOS
This text is also original in another sense. After all, many interpreters of the Diaoyu/Senkaku quarrel do invoke other islands in order to shed light on the case; but they do so in the context of the track record of the outcome of international arbitration. In other words, these commentators source legal decisions that have outcomes which have (largely) determined who has title over what. (We will consider some of the most interesting exceptions in the chapters that follow.) The implicit understanding of such island‒island comparisons is that such episodes provide glimpses into zero-sum game scenarios – who might be right and who might be wrong in claiming title to the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands – and not in how such title may and can be creatively shared.
The principal mechanism for the adjudication of island disputes similar to the Diaoyu/Senkaku affair would now be the International Court of Justice (ICJ). And, apart from the ICJ’s own case law, the legal coda on which such adjudications would be based derive from the United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), a treaty that both China and Japan signed in 1996 (UNCLOS, 1982). It was the ambassador of a small island state to the UN that kick-started the processes that eventually led to UNCLOS. In a speech to the UN General Assembly in 1967, Malta’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Arvid Pardo, asked for ‘an effective international regime over the seabed and the ocean floor beyond a clearly defined national jurisdiction’ (UNCLOS, 1998, n.p.). What started as an exercise to regulate the seabed turned into a global diplomatic effort to regulate and write rules for all ocean areas, all uses of the seas and all of its resources, both in the sea and below the seabed. These fact...
