The Dispute Over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands

How Media Narratives Shape Public Opinion and Challenge the Global Order

T. Hollihan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137443359
• eBook ISBN: 9781137443366
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

The small unpopulated islands in the East China Sea that the Chinese call the Diaoyu and the Japanese call the Senkaku, have long been a source of contention. This volume will undertake an examination of the controversy as it plays out in legacy and new social media in China, Japan, and the West.

C H A P T E R 1

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Introduction

Thomas A. Hollihan

A chain of eight small unpopulated islands in the East China Sea that the Chinese call the Diaoyu and the Japanese call the Senkaku has long been a source of contention among China, Taiwan, and Japan. Although all three governments claim the islands, Japan has controlled them since the 1890s, with the exception of a few years following World War II when the United States controlled them. The islands are located approximately 120 nautical miles northeast of Taiwan, about 200 nautical miles east of mainland China, and about 200 miles southwest of the Japanese islands of Okinawa.¹ They are situated at the edge of China’s continental shelf, just before the sea floor plummets into one of the deepest parts of the Pacific Ocean, the Okinawa Trough, which is approximately 7,500 feet at its deepest point. The geography itself is cited by the governments of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Taiwan, the Republic of China (ROC) as a natural boundary between China and Japan and as evidence that the islands are part of China. Japan, on the other hand, sees the trough as only an “incidental depression” and claims that the islands are part of the Okinawa archipelago.²

The disputed sovereignty claims captured media and public attention most recently in April 2012, when Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara launched an online appeal for funds to buy the islands from the Kurihara family, which had gradually acquired ownership of four of the islands from the Koga family that once operated a fish processing plant in the archipelago.³ Hiroyuki Kurihara, who has acted as spokesperson for the family, is a Japanese political activist and nationalist. In media interviews Kurihara celebrated the importance of the islands:

You can clearly see that Japan lies like a bulwark off the continent . . . It’s mainly thanks to its chain of islands, which extends almost to Taiwan . . . Japan is the greatest obstacle to Pacific expansion—and that must annoy the Chinese immensely. We Japanese lack an awareness that we need to protect our own territory.⁴

Donations from the public poured in after Ishihara’s appeal for funds was circulated on nationalist websites. The Chinese government issued a formal protest to the government of Japan, and media outlets in China discussed the story in some detail. This media coverage in turn sparked increasingly nationalistic sentiments in China. Since then there have been a number of increasingly provocative symbolic actions as nationalist protestors in both China and Japan pressed their claims to sovereignty. For example, in August 2012 Japan deported 14 Chinese protestors after 5 swam ashore to the islands waving Chinese and Taiwanese flags. Soon after, a group of Japanese protestors traveled to the islands to raise the Japanese flag. Claiming that their intention was to halt the escalating series of provocative acts, the Japanese national government decided to purchase the islands. “On September 11th, Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Osamu Fujimura confirmed that the government had approved the islands’ purchase from private owners for 2.05 billion yen (U.S. $26.2 million).”⁵ If the national government leaders genuinely believed that this action would prevent the escalation of the crisis they were badly mistaken. Instead, the decision to transfer ownership of the islands from a private family to the government further escalated the tensions. On September 14, 2012, six unarmed Chinese patrol boats sailed around the islands and into waters that the Japanese administer. A few days later thousands of people took to the streets to protest in cities across China, including Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Shenyang, Hangzhou, Harbin, and Qingdao. Bottle-throwing protestors in several cities targeted Japanese manufacturing plants, department stores, and sushi restaurants. A Toyota dealership and a Panasonic plant in Qingdao, a city that was occupied by Japan in the war years, sustained extensive fire damage. A Chinese citizen was pulled out of his Toyota and beaten in Xi’an. The protests came to a head on September 18 when many Japanese businesses closed for the day and Japanese nationals in China were urged to protect themselves from possible attacks by staying home. Dozens of protestors in Beijing threw plastic bottles at the Japanese embassy as local police looked on.⁶

The next day the protests ended, and the police stepped in to restore order. The potential for long-term economic damage resulting from the protests, however, remains high. China and Japan represent the world’s second and third largest economies, respectively. Furthermore, because the United States has pledged to defend Japan from military attack, there is a risk that the United States too could be pulled into the conflict. While it was possible to end the street protests, easing the lingering resentments and tensions between China and Japan will be much more difficult.

This volume will undertake an examination of the controversy as it has played out in mediated discussions in China, Japan, and the United States. In each nation political leaders, diplomats, military leaders, academicians, and political activists contributed their opinions and arguments to ongoing public conversations about which nation owned the islands. These competing arguments were discussed both in the legacy press and in the social media resulting in a cacophony of differing voices and perspectives. These perspectives reflected and indeed constitute competing narratives of the historical relations between these nations, different understandings of the present moment, and finally alternative ways to imagine or predict the future. The controversy over these small and unpopulated islands has as a result expanded from a regional territorial dispute to a much more complex and potentially dangerous contest over patriotic values, national identity, and the need to reconcile with the past.

The book will examine the controversy from the perspective of media diplomacy in order to better understand how the governments in these countries used the media to communicate simultaneously with their domestic and overseas audiences.⁷ Chapters in the book will also consider how the controversy is further complicated by anxieties about the rise of China and the shifting power relationships in the Asian Pacific. The issue of China’s rise has impacted the role that the United States plays as a global hegemon. It has also led to a perception among Japanese citizens that their nation, which has struggled for more than two decades to recover from a lingering economic recession, is now in decline and risks being eventually swallowed up by an increasingly powerful neighbor if it does not defend itself from Chinese aggression. Finally, the book argues that controversies such as this one can be deeply disruptive to the interconnected global order and economy.

COMPETING CLAIMS OF OWNERSHIP

In order to better contextualize the current crisis, this section will explore the historical origins of the controversy and summarize the arguments offered to justify the competing claims to sovereignty by China, Taiwan, and Japan.

A historical narrative of Japan’s claim to ownership of the islands begins with the citation of a series of surveys of the archipelago and the region undertaken in 1885 by the government of the Okinawa Prefecture. The government of Japan asserts that the survey indicated that the islands were uninhabited and that they showed no evidence that they had ever been under the control of another nation. In essence, this claim is based upon the notion of “discovery occupation”—the acquiring of territory through occupation of said territory after it was indeed recognized as “terra nullius.”⁸ On January 14, 1895, the Japanese government made a Cabinet decision to formally claim the Senkaku islands and to place a marker on them, thereby incorporating them into the territory of Japan.⁹

China and Taiwan contest the claim that the islands were unclaimed territories. Both the PRC and ROC base their claims on the fact that the islands that they know as the Diaoyu “were first discovered, named, and used by the Chinese as early as the fourteenth century” and therefore could not be considered “terra nullius.”¹⁰ The Chinese argue that the islands were part of the Ryukyu Kingdom, a tributary state of the Ming Dynasty of China, and that this claim is supported by the existence of documents and maps from the time. They also argue that the imperial courts of the Ming and Qing Dynasties sent imperial title-conferring envoys to the Ryukyu Kingdom on 24 separate occasions. The maps and records of these journeys, dating all the way back to 1534, are said to have “depicted the topography and geography of the Diaoyu islands in detail and recorded the demarcation line between China and Ryukyu east of Chiwei Islet.”¹¹ The Chinese also assert that the islands were incorporated into the coastal defense system of what is now Taiwan as early as 1562.¹²

The Japanese have asserted that just because the islands are mentioned in Chinese documents or on Chinese maps, this does not prove that they are indeed claimed. The Japanese position on ownership of the islands was explained in a series of statements issued by the Okinawa Civil Government in the early 1970s and reaffirmed in a statement issued on March 8, 1972, entitled “The Basic View of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the Senkaku Islands.”¹³ This claim also asserts that Japan surveyed the islands from 1901 to 1902 and that China at the time conceded that the islands were Japanese territory.¹⁴

The claims by China and Taiwan hold, however, that since the islands were not “terra nullius” when they came under Japan’s control they were taken as a product of Japanese imperial conquest and that their transfer to Japan was based on the illegitimate Treaty of Shimonoseki that the conquering power forced upon a weak China. At this point, however, the claims for control of the islands offered by the PRC and the ROC diverge. In asserting its claim, the government of Taiwan cites the 1943 Cairo Declaration: “Japan shall be stripped of . . . all territories Japan has stolen from the Chinese, such as Manchuria, Formosa, and the Pescadores, shall be restored to the ROC. Japan will also be expelled from all...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Configuring a Threatening Other: Historical Narratives in Chinese School Textbooks
• 3 Historical Narratives in Japanese School Textbooks
• 4 Fanning the Flames of Public Rage: Coverage of Diaoyu Islands Dispute in Chinese Legacy Media
• 5 Public Opinion on Weibo: The Case of the Diaoyu Islands Dispute
• 6 How the Japanese Legacy Media Covered the Senkaku Controversy
• 7 How the Japanese Social Media Users Discussed the Senkaku Controversy
• 8 US Media Coverage of the Diaoyu/Senkaku Dispute
• 9 Media Diplomacy: Public Diplomacy in a New Global Media Environment
• 10 Conclusions
• Bibliography
• About the Authors
• Index