China's Territorial Disputes (14 page)

The intensity of the dispute seems to be closely related to the rise of nationalism in China, Taiwan, and Japan following the “end of ideology.” With the collapse of Communism in particular and ideology in general, nationalism seems to have returned with gusto, both in East Asia and throughout the world. To the Chinese, memories of the Pacific War figures prominently, and Diaoyudao/Tiaoyutai represents to them an attempt by Japan, led by its right-wing nationalists and militarists, to keep from the Chinese what it stole from them during half a century of invasion and occupation. They will not allow Japan to escape its unpleasant, embarrassing and shameful past. In this, they are aided by those Japanese who exhibit a form of national stubbornness and denial behavior by refusing to consider their past actions and by not considering the claims of those who suffered as a result of being invaded by Japan.

On the Chinese side of the dispute over sovereignty of the islands, it should be noted that there was a kind of competitive nationalism at work among non-governmental groups or public opinion in Hong Kong, Taiwan and overseas Chinese communities in North America, and to a lesser extent, because of political restrictions imposed on demonstrations, the Chinese of the PRC. This created a kind of competitive bidding or desire to manifest one’s patriotic credentials
vis-a-vis
Beijing and one’s Chinese compatriots elsewhere, which accounted for their spirited marches and feisty rallies.

The rise of nationalism or irredentism on the Chinese mainland to fill the ideological vacuum left by the irrelevance of Communism reflects to some extent China’s economic might, but it is to a large degree encouraged by the present collective Chinese leadership. Nationalism is a popular force to be reckoned with, one which the leadership may find much profitable to inculcate but difficult to control. Diaoyudao may be seen as an attempt to balance strong anti-Japanese rhetoric with decisive moves to head off its expression by organized civic groups. So saying, one has to agree with those who argue that, as a past victim of foreign imperialism and an insecure modernizing state, Chinese nationalism today is more reactive than assertive, and then only as a temporal response to setbacks in foreign relations and perceived slights to national dignity.
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These events include the fiftieth anniversary of the defeat of Japan in World War II, the loss of the year 2000 Olympic Games bid due to an unfavorable resolution passed by the United States Congress, the frustrating eighteen-year wait since 1984 to enter the World Trade Organization, and Western harping on China’s treatment of political dissidents, human rights and Tibet. Although China was admitted to the WTO in 2002 and awarded the Olympic Games for 2008, perceived slights to national dignity may again be felt by the Chinese, if for example the United States or Japan were to punish North Korea for developing nuclear weapons without first consulting the Chinese government, accuse China of engaging in the proliferation of missile technology, or blame China for flaunting WTO rules by not liberalizing foreign trade and investment quickly enough.

As such, there is always an irrational and unpredictable element present in nationalistic feelings anywhere, especially with regard to China’s attitude toward the Japanese. Indeed, when the fifteen Chinese and Hong Kong activists returned in June 2003 from the Diaoyu rocks in their fishing boats to a port in Zhejiang province, local officials were on hand to welcome them at the harbor, while the national anthem played in the background and journalists described them as “patriots”!
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The Chinese government may lose control of nationalist sentiments and feel that it has to respond to increasingly popular, frequent and strident anti-Japanese expressions and actions over the Diaoyu rocks. It may also wish to inculcate and galvanize nationalistic feelings or exploit xenophobic tensions as a diversion from wealth inequalities, economic dislocations, ethnic conflicts, or other problems. Under those circumstances, the Diaoyu situation could get explosive. The possibility should also be recognized that, as China’s ability to project air and sea power in the China Seas increases, it may be prepared to adopt a posture of assertive nationalism to meet perceived challenges to its interests and identity; worse, if a specific enemy should become identified as a threat to China’s vital interests, then nationalism might even turn aggressive and lead to war.
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On Taiwan, all major political parties compete with one another to voice support for actions to defend national sovereignty and the livelihood of the very vocal fishing lobby, which perceives itself to be threatened by any move by the Japanese to close off the Tiaoyutai waters to Taiwanese fishermen. However, most people there would appreciate that trade and investments with Japan are too important to be held hostage to the fortunes of tiny, uninhabited bits of rock. The Taiwanese also know that even if they were to fight the Japanese over the rocks, they would most likely be defeated, and the government would lose all credibility.

As far as Japan is concerned, even if the broad populace do not agree with their right-wing fringe that Japan should be entitled to keep the territories it was able to capture in past wars, they still on the whole believe the Senkakus to have been discovered and first occupied by Japanese, islands which were then seized by the Americans and should later be rightfully returned to them.
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Japan already controls the sea around these islands, and it knows that because of its economic links with mainland China and Taiwan - Japan has been either their first or the second biggest trading partner or source of private and government investment since 1970, and Japan’s trade with China and Taiwan reached US$90 billion and US$ 35 billion respectively in 2 0 0 2
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- these countries are not likely to mount an all-out invasion of these islands. Japan’s security arrangement with the US both protects and constrains its strategic posture. However, this does not mean that Japan is sanguine about the rise of Chinese nationalism and the prospect of China as a formidable military power in the region. Japan’s multi-billion dollar investment interests in China, not least the long-term project to connect the rich oil-and-gas fields of Central Asia to Japanese end-users through China,
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means that China is not without leverage on Japanese foreign policy, at least with respect to bilateral relations. At any rate, seventy-two LDP and Shinseito politicians and leaders were concerned enough to pen a policy statement in January 1995 urging their government to “admonish China for its chauvinism” in the Senkaku and Spratly islands and advocating the use of ODA and other policy tools to influence errant Chinese behavior.
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The positions on sovereignty adopted by all the people and state governments involved can only be described as “uniformly” uncompromising. As such, even if they were indeed common grounds or win-sets on areas of joint development, it would be exceedingly difficult for negotiators engaged in preliminary and exploratory talks to bring the subject into the open, let alone implement any such projects, given that the sovereignty issue is still unsettled. These “uniform” sovereignty positions and weak “synergistic” links between the countries make it impossible for negotiators on one side to appeal to any possible breach in public opinion on the other side(s). Such a breach, no matter how small, is often necessary to achieve some openings for meaningful bargaining to take place.

“De-linking” the economic issues from the sovereignty issue, a suggestion first made by Deng Xiaoping in 1978, would also be difficult in the absence of clear boundary demarcations. Petroleum companies are generally reticent to start drilling only to discover later that they have sited their oil-rigs on the wrong side of the maritime border. It is not without significance that the only “semi-official” talks that have taken place with regard to cooperation over the East China Sea were fishery talks. These talks principally involve matters like the engine size of trawlers, the tonnage of catch, and the number of fishing vessels permitted within one another’s territorial waters or EEZ. They probably succeeded to the moderate extent that they did because there was a history of prior agreements between Japan with China and Taiwan dating back to the 1950s,
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reciprocal advantages to the fishermen of all three countries were realized, and a real possibility has existed of retaliation against any of the three countries trying to stop foreign fishing by the other two. Retaliation would entail losses to the fishing industry of all sides, yet with very little possibility of going to war. Unfortunately, with the present territorial dispute, there has been no history of agreement, reciprocal benefits cannot be derived because sovereignty is indivisible, and the option of limited retaliation against an adversary may not be available once hostilities begin. With historical grievances and indivisible sovereignty, it seems that the limits of diplomacy have truly been reached, at least with this dispute.

I did not find evidence that the nationalist groups in each country had actually contemplated targeting or provoking their counterparts in the other countries in order to produce “negative reverberations” which would force their own governments to adopt a more confrontational stand. Perhaps the nationalist groups from the three countries concerned here were more than content to provoke some symbolic action on the part of their own governments in making a stand on sovereignty. However, there is some evidence to suggest that the Japanese right-wing groups did work in tandem with their own government over this particular sovereignty issue - their private forays onto the islands offered the government the chance to follow up on their claims of sovereignty, but if such attempts were to be vehemently or successfully opposed by other governments or their nationalist civic organizations, then there is always the opportunity for the Japanese government to deny foreknowledge and involvement with its right-wing fringe. Right-wing groups from Japan whose activities on the islands were clearly protected by patrol crafts from the MSA were later depicted by their own government as individuals visiting privately owned land whose owners could not be traced but were assumed to have given their permission. Proof of state-society coordination is less clear with the Taiwanese, although there was some indication that the 1990 touch relay by Taiwanese athletes was encouraged by Kaohsiung mayor Wu Dun-yi; and such proof is altogether absent in the case of the Chinese. My research did yield indisputable evidence that all three governments were engaging in tacit communication and behavioral convergence with one another, to signal the fact that they were trying their utmost to play down, if not suppress, the entire controversy by doing nothing to encourage and everything to restrain their domestic nationalist forces; and that they expected this goodwill to be reciprocated by the opposing governments.

Bargaining theory’s standard prediction is that a more democratic form of government would make it more difficult for negotiators to get their negotiated agreements ratified by organized political forces, the absence of which is exactly why it would be easier for a non-democratic government to do so. I can find no evidence of this in my research, probably because the “uniformity” of opinion on this dispute already precluded the sovereignty issue from being settled at the negotiating table. However, it stands to reason that, at least with respect to Level

I negotiations, the preferences of the chief negotiators are more likely to persist in a political system where power is more concentrated and the pressure of minority views poses less threat than in more “competitive” electoral systems, where chief negotiators must be more attentive to the development of popular opinion. It can be argued that, because it is much easier for politicized interest groups to organize and propagate their agenda in a representative democracy, where freedom of opinion is protected, it would be much easier for nationalists in these countries to act as a political pressure group, both within and outside the government and the ruling party, to create and galvanize public opinion conducive to realizing their territorial ambitions. For a situation like the Diaoyu/Tiaoyutai/Senkaku dispute, that certainly seems to be the case with the right-wingers in Japan and the student organizations, fishermen’s lobby and the major political forces in Taiwan after the political liberalization of the late 1980s and early 1990s. This is obvious when contrasted with the scant activities and small-scale demonstrations permitted by the Taiwanese authorities in the early 1970s, the extent of which is not even allowed in China today.

Aside from the argument as to whether it is harder to resolve an all-or-nothing territorial sovereignty dispute with a democratic country than with a non-democratic country, perhaps it is more pertinent to find out if democratic governments may actually make it much easier than do non-democratic governments for latent boundary, territorial, or other disagreements between states to surface into very real conflicts, because political forces have to respond effectively to public opinion, which has the potential to be created, manipulated and galvanized by well organized and well funded groups with their own agenda. It is not hard to contrast the ease with which the Chinese government bundled Tong Zhen and his comrades out of Beijing, with the troubles that both Taiwanese and Japanese authorities had to take to restrain the actions of their own protesters, to assess the relative ease or difficulty with which authoritarian and democratic polities keep their nationalistic elements under control.

There is no question that domestic nationalist forces attach greater priority and preference to resolving the sovereignty aspects of the dispute and the attendant fishing rights than to the security concerns of the state or inter-state talks on joint development of sea-bed resources. However, can they be so ignorant or careless about the risks involved in pushing their own governments to confront the other claimant states? Analyzing the evidence presented, I arrived at the paradoxical conclusion that social forces within these countries were able to press their governments for confrontation, exactly because they knew that, while their governments could not concede sovereignty over these islands, their heads of state had to adopt more realistic and conciliatory positions. They could not risk breaking valuable economic ties or jeopardizing regional security over what were essentially small matters of more emotional than material value. As such, the high cost of confrontation means that the threat of deploying armed force by any state would sound incredibly hollow. However, these pressure groups, by whatever names they go under, also strongly believed they were doing their countrymen and governments a favor by asserting national sovereignty, by sailing into this stretch of sea and landing boats, planting flags, erecting lighthouses and lighting beacons on these disputed rocks, no matter how symbolic and ultimately futile their actions were to be. Even if they did want to goad their governments into risking all by taking a confrontational stand against the other claimants, but failed to do so, they would have already managed to highlight the higher priority they gave to asserting national dignity and state sovereignty over considerations of economic ties or regional security. At a minimum, their calculated but quixotic actions would have succeeded in keeping alive the issue by periodically forcing it back into the public view, which was what they were primarily concerned about and had set out to achieve. If and when an issue concerning the exercise of sovereignty next appears - be it over offshore petroleum development, fishing rights, overseas peace-keeping or the EEZ, we can expect these groups to return to their charts. As such, we have not quite yet seen the end of the Diaoyu/Tiaoyutai/Senkaku controversy.