The China-Japan Conflict over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands

Useful Rivalry

Anna Costa

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351389709
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines the foreign and security policies adopted by China and Japan since the 1970s in their competition over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea. It charts the development of a dispute that has become a potential flashpoint for conflict between the two countries. The book explains that while increasing nationalism in both China and Japan helps to fuel and sustain the dispute, a key factor is that the leaderships in both countries find competition over the islands to be a convenient vehicle supporting their wider approach to foreign and security policy, which is becoming increasingly assertive and potentially belligerent.

1 Contested territory

The dispute: what it is and why it matters

How did a few specks of land that were largely ignored for over half of the twentieth century turn into the ‘sacred’ territory they are depicted as today? What put the islands on Chinese and Japanese leaders’ radars, making them a major flashpoint for conflict? And what do changes in Chinese and Japanese, but also US, handling of the islands issue tell us about broader and deeper dynamics that are occurring between and within these countries? Useful Rivalry examines the impact of relative power on the foreign and security policies adopted by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Government of Japan (GOJ) since the 1970s in their competition over the Senkaku/Diaoyu (SD) Islands in the East China Sea. Tracking the evolution of the territorial sovereignty dispute from its inception to the present, it explains how and why the PRC has come to challenge Japan’s control over the territory, Japan’s response, as well as elements of continuity and change over time in their respective postures. This interaction is placed against the backdrop of shifts in the distribution of regional and global power, whose effects are filtered by factors operating at state level, including leaders’ perceptions of threats and opportunities, and identity politics. The existing literature interprets growing bilateral tensions around the islands as anomalous in the context of growing economic interdependence, as determined by the past and historical memory, and as the product of the current leaderships’ short-termism and a lack of wisdom compared to wiser earlier generations. I explore a different dimension of the dispute – the way in which it is ‘useful’ or instrumental, rather than detrimental, to sustaining the core security strategies pursued by leaders in Beijing and Tokyo.

Disagreements between the PRC, Japan and the Republic of China (ROC) in Taiwan regarding their competing claims to sovereignty over the group of islands in the East China Sea start from the territory’s very name. The Japanese name, Senkaku, is a direct translation of the British Navy’s mid-nineteenth-century label, Pinnacle Islands. The PRC calls them Diaoyu Dao and the ROC uses Diaoyutai. The archipelago consists of five uninhabited islands and three reefs located approximately 170 kilometres northeast of the coast of Taiwan, 410 km west of Japan’s Okinawa Island and 330 km east of the mainland Chinese coast. The territory is currently under the administrative control of Japan under the jurisdiction of Okinawa Prefecture. Both the PRC and ROC dispute Japan’s claim to sovereignty over the territory, while the latter refuses to acknowledge the very existence of a dispute on this point.

The principal island, called Uotsuri-shima (Diaoyu in Chinese), is 4.6 km long and 1.85 km wide.¹ Securing international recognition of sovereign rights over the islands can be used as a basis to claim a substantial portion of the economically and strategically valuable surrounding waters.² In spite of their relatively small size, the SD Islands are now a powder keg in contemporary East Asia, not altogether different from what disputed imperial possessions represented for European powers before the two great world wars of the twentieth century. With all the limitations of historical analogies, this comparison conveys the full disruptive potential of the issue for the region.

Competition over the islands is an excellent place to look at for understanding multiple dimensions of the rise of China in a regional security environment that is still volatile and open ended, and also for deepening our knowledge about the reaction of Japan and the United States to China’s rise. Conflict in the East China Sea would have dangerous implications not only for the security, stability and prosperity of China and Japan, but also serious global repercussions given their status as the second and third largest economies in the world, respectively. In the eventuality of conflict the United States also risks entanglement owing to its security commitment to Japan. Reaching an in-depth understanding of the genealogy and development of Sino–Japanese competition over the islands is valuable not only from the perspective of academic research, but also to the realm of policymaking. As lamented by a leading scholar in the field, at present government officials outside Japan and China appear to only have a cursory understanding of the issues at stake.³

An expression of competitive politics in East Asia

The relative paucity of English-language monographs on the SD Islands reflects the fact that the issue only became highly publicised and politicised since 2010. Conversely, a vast amount of literature exists in both the Chinese and Japanese languages. These latter materials focus predominantly on assessing the validity of the historical, legal and geographical evidence advanced by the respective claimants to the islands, with Japanese scholars mainly defending Japan’s title and Chinese ones challenging it. Unryu Suganuma’s Sovereign Rights and Territorial Space in Sino–Japanese Relations of 2000 was the first English-language academic book on the subject.⁴ Suganuma helpfully departs from what I term the ‘assessment tradition’ and instead uses the dispute as the empirical focus for a broader analysis of irredentism in East Asia. He concludes that the islands issue is deeply rooted in history, and that any possible resolution of the dispute ‘either according to international law or diplomatic negotiation between Japan and China, will depend on historical evidence’. Suganuma adds that the dispute ‘seems to be only [sic] a political dispute; however, it is rooted in the deep history of Sino–Japanese relations’.⁵ Similarly, in 2013 Daqing Yang contends that whereas the dispute is supposed to be about international law, ‘the legitimacy of territorial claims is inevitably bound with history, or rather, the interpretations of history.’⁶

While much scholarship, media commentary and official discourse focuses on the distant past to understand the nature of the dispute, it is in fact mainly the expression of contemporary competitive politics in the Asia Pacific region. The dispute, both in terms of its nature and possible future resolution, is primarily political. The reduction of Sino–Japanese competition over territory and resources in the East China Sea to its allegedly deep historical roots is not only inaccurate, but also analytically unhelpful. I trace the actions, reactions and motives characterising the Chinese and Japanese handling of the dispute over the four decades since its inception. Challenging what appears to be a misplaced ‘historical focus’ requires me to be exact about the timing and circumstances that led to the inception of the dispute. Pan argues that the dispute dates back to 1895, even though it only came into the open after the 1968 UN discovery of potential natural resources and the US reversion of the islands to Japan in 1971.⁷ In fact, although the islands were annexed by Japan in the late nineteenth century, the inception of the dispute over sovereignty and administrative rights is recent, and dates back to the UN discovery. This is not to claim that the SD Islands issue occurred in a vacuum, and for that reason it is necessary to dedicate some space to the history between China and Japan that predates its emergence.

The complicated and painful past that China and Japan share is a fundamental factor for understanding mutual suspicions underpinning bilateral interactions at both official and popular levels. However, historical events predating the inception of the dispute do not fully explain its evolution. That very same past existed when the islands were off the Chinese radar in the pre-1970 phase, when they were sidelined in bilateral negotiations to avoid jeopardising higher-order diplomatic objectives throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, and also when the crisis flared up dramatically in the 2000s.

Some of the existing literature on the islands dispute avoids the ‘deep roots in history’ bias. Albeit relatively sparse, some English-language scholarship focuses on the dispute’s geopolitical dimension. This literature consists mainly of short analyses in the form of journal articles and reports, rather than comprehensive book-length explorations. Strecker Downs and Saunders wrote an important article exploring the two cycles of the islands dispute that occurred in the 1990s. They found that PRC leaders sought to maintain good relations with Japan because the pursuit of economic growth for domestic legitimacy trumped living up to nationalist credentials.⁸ Shen pointed to the sobering influence exercised on both governments by deepening bilateral economic integration, with business communities on both sides said to be exerting successful pressure on their respective governments to ‘be more rational’.⁹ Deans explored the manipulation of nationalism by elites and domestic actors in relation to the islands in the 1990s in China, Japan and Taiwan to advance their political and diplomatic goals.¹⁰ In 2010, Fravel asked why neither side had used force until that point in time, preferring instead to employ delaying strategies to avoid escalation.¹¹ Fravel concluded that, despite inherent volatility, stability had prevailed and the potential for armed conflict going forward remained low.

Koo adopted a liberal peace perspective to explain the mechanisms through which Japan and China successfully managed to contain their respective territorial claims, arguing that ‘economic interdependence has repeatedly fostered the de-escalation of Sino–Japanese conflict over territorial and maritime rights.’¹² Koo’s explanation might fit the Chinese and Japanese handling of the crisis until the 1990s, and accords with interpretations such as the following: that in the minds of Chinese leaders, economic imperatives trumped the need to live up to nationalist credentials;¹³ that deepening socio-economic interdependence mitigates oppositional nationalism, with both Beijing and Tokyo primarily concerned with promoting domestic economic development by safeguarding regional stability;¹⁴ that in the ‘hot economics, cold politics’ equation, the heat of the economics offsets the coldness of the politics;¹⁵ that domestic economic reforms are each country’s priority, mitigating the risk of a Sino–Japanese ‘Cold War’.¹⁶

However, these interpretations fail to account for the turn of events observed since 2004–2005, and even more clearly since the 2010 and 2012 cycles of the crisis. First, the economic part of the bilateral relationship is increasingly less able to offset political and strategic tensions. Economic ties acted as a moderating element until the end of the 1990s, because China was economically dependent on Japan and was reluctant to let the islands disrupt the bilateral relationship. However, the progressive shift in the balance of economic power towards Beijing is contributing to the escalation of tensions.¹⁷ This has happened in parallel to a rise in economic interdependence. Second, certain domestic reforms, particularly in the realm of maritime security, far from mitigating the development of a ‘Cold War’ in Asia, are fostering and benefiting from it. I develop these lines of argument in chapters two a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Author biography
• 1 Contested territory
• 2 Neoclassical realism and managed strategic confrontation
• 3 The islands’ economic and strategic value
• 4 The Cold War phase of the dispute
• 5 The post-Cold War phase of the dispute
• 6 Symbolic value of the islands
• 7 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index