by Admin | Apr 22, 2014 | News
(Photo Credit: www.japan-guide.com)
(BGF) – Yesterday, April 21st, 2014, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe sent a ritual offering to the Yasukuni Shrine. This article, written by Elaine Lies and featured on the Reuters website, discusses the reaction to Prime Minister Abe’s offering, as well as a recent court order from a Beijing court impounding a Japanese ship, the Baosteel Emotion. The Yasukuni Shrine is viewed by many as a “symbol of Japan’s past militarism” and honors Japan’s dead, including 14 individuals who were declared war criminals for their actions during World War II. In reaction, China and South Korea condemned the offering and expressed anger over Prime Minister Abe’s action. However, the Japanese Government contends that this offering was sent by the Prime Minister as a private individual, and thus the Government could not comment on the offering. Regardless, the offering has strained the already tense relations in the region. Click here to read the full article or visit the Reuters website.
Japan PM makes offering to Yasukuni Shrine, angers China, South Korea
By Elaine Lies
(Reuters) – Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has sent a ritual offering to the Yasukuni Shrine, seen by critics as a symbol of Japan’s past militarism, angering both South Korea and China on Monday and putting regional ties under further strain.
Adding to unease in the region, a Chinese maritime court in Shanghai seized a ship on Saturday owned by Japanese shipping firm Mitsui O.S.K. Lines, a move that Japan warned could have an adverse impact on its businesses in China.
The court said the company had failed to pay compensation stemming from a wartime contractual obligation. China’s Foreign Ministry said the disagreement was a normal commercial dispute.
Japan said the ship seizure, apparently the first time the assets of a Japanese company have been seized in a lawsuit concerning compensation for World War Two, was “extremely regrettable”.
“It is inevitable that this will have an adverse impact on Japanese companies in China,” said Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga. “We strongly urge the Chinese government to make the proper response.”
The spat over the ship was a “regular business contract dispute”, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said, adding that the government would safeguard the rights of foreign investors.
“This case has nothing to do with compensation from the Chinese-Japanese war (World War Two),” Qin told a regular news briefing.
“Nothing has changed in the Chinese government’s position on adhering to, and defending every principle in, the Sino-Japanese Joint Statement,” he added, referring to an announcement in 1972 that the two countries were establishing official ties.
At the time, Japan also recognized the government in Beijing as the sole government of China and China gave up claims to Japanese war reparations.
“China will continue to protect the interests and rights of foreign investors in China according to law,” Qin said.
“MISTAKEN ATTITUDE”
The offering by Abe, who visited the shrine in December but did not go in person this time, was sent just before U.S. President Barack Obama begins a three-day visit to Japan on Wednesday.
The United States has said it was “disappointed” with Abe’s shrine visit last year, which infuriated Beijing and Seoul.
China protested on April 12 after internal affairs minister Yoshitaka Shindo visited the shrine, where 14 Japanese leaders convicted as war criminals by an Allied tribunal after World War Two are honored, along with Japan’s war dead.
Abe made his latest offering to the shrine as a private individual so it was not the government’s place to comment, Suga, the chief government spokesman, told a news conference.
“It will not have an impact on the U.S.-Japan leaders meeting,” he said.
Qin, China’s foreign ministry spokesman, said Beijing had already lodged a protest with Tokyo, adding that Abe’s move reflected Japan’s “mistaken attitude towards history”.
“SLAP IN THE FACE”
China’s official Xinhua news agency condemned Abe’s offering as a provocative move that threatened regional stability and was a “slap in the face of the leader of Japan’s closest ally”.
South Korea’s Foreign Ministry also responded angrily.
“We deplore the fact that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has romanticized Japanese colonialism and its war of aggression by paying tribute to the Yasukuni Shrine,” it said in a statement, noting it had happened despite expressions of concern from the international community.
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by Admin | Apr 21, 2014 | News
(BGF) – This article, featured on Bloomberg‘s website discusses a recent Chinese court order to impound a Japanese ship, the Baosteel Emotion, as compensation for two Chinese ships leased by Japan in 1937 that were ultimately lost at sea. As the article discusses, this Chinese court order reflects the recent increase in tensions between Japan and China over the Senkaku/Diaoyo Islands and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s visit to the Yasukuni Shrine. Consequently, this court order could have negative impacts on Chinese-Japanese economic ties by discouraging business between the two countries. Click here to read the full article or visit Bloomberg‘s website.
China Court Impounds Japanese Ship in Unprecedented Seizure
By Bloomberg News
A Shanghai court ordered the seizure of a Japanese ship owned by Mitsui OSK Lines Ltd. (9104) as compensation for the loss of two ships leased from a Chinese company before the two countries went to war in 1937.
The 226,434-ton Baosteel Emotion was impounded on April 19 at Majishan port in Zhejiang province as part of a legal dispute that began in 1964, the Shanghai Maritime Court and Mitsui OSK said in notices on their websites.
The holding of the ship reflects strained ties between China and Japan amid a territorial dispute over an island chain and visits by Japanese politicians to a Tokyo shrine honoring that country’s war dead. The move is the first time a Chinese court has ordered the seizure of Japanese assets connected to World War II, and could cast a pall over the countries’ trade, according to Shogo Suzuki, a senior lecturer at the University of Manchester in the U.K. who studies China-Japan relations.
“Many of the major Japanese companies like Mitsubishi or Mitsui have existed through back to the pre-war era and could all be implicated in one way or another,” Suzuki said. “Japanese companies can’t extract themselves easily at this stage so I think they’ll be quite worried.”
Disputes have increasingly shifted to the courts, with a Chinese judge accepting a lawsuit last month against two Japanese companies, including Mitsubishi Materials Corp. accused of using forced labor during the war.
Discourage Business
Speaking at a briefing today, Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said the seizure could discourage Japanese companies doing business in China. Mitsui OSK spokesman Atsushi Seki said the company is studying details of the case and trying to come up with a solution.
The dispute had its genesis in 1936, when Mitsui OSK predecessor Daido Kaiun chartered two vessels from Chung Wei Steamship Co., only to have them appropriated by the Japanese government, Mitsui OSK said in a statement today. Both ships were later lost at sea.
The heir of Chung Wei Steamship’s president sued unsuccessfully in Japan in 1964 and 1970, and then took the case to China in the late 1980s. After the maritime court ruled in the plantiff’s favor, Mitsui was seeking an out-of-court settlement when the vessel was “suddenly impounded,” Mitsui OSK said.
Japan argues that China gave up its right to reparations as part of a 1972 joint communique signed when the two countries established diplomatic relations. The communique says China “declares that in the interest of the friendship between the Chinese and the Japanese peoples, it renounces its demand for war reparation from Japan.”
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by Admin | Apr 19, 2014 | News
(Photo Credit: Google Maps)
(BGF) – Reporting for The Diplomat, Shannon Tiezzi discusses the implications of Japan’s recent decision to station troops on the Yonaguni Islands. The Yonaguuni Islands are Japan’s western-most islands and are only “150 kilometers south of the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands”. The base on the island will be 25 hectares and will house 100 troops as well as a radar outpost, which will expand Japan’s surveillance capabilities in the area of the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands and China’s mainland. As Tiezzi discusses, this has the potential to strain Japan’s already tense relationship with Japan. Click here to read the full article or visit The Diplomat‘s website.
Japan to Station Troops on Yonaguni, Near Disputed Islands
By Shannon Tiezzi
In a move that threatens to reverse the recent signs of a burgeoning thaw in China-Japan relations, Japan will break ground Saturday on a new military lookout station on Yonaguni, Japan’s westernmost inhabited island. Yonaguni, which has a population of around 1,500, is located 108 kilometers east of Taiwan and 150 kilometers south of the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands. According to Reuters, with the new outpost,Yonaguni’s military presence will expand from two police officers to 100 soldiers and a radar outpost.
A report in the Ryukyu Shimpo said that the base will be built on 25 hectares of land leased from Yonaguni to the Ministry of Defense. In return, the local government will receive around 15 million yen ($150,000) in rent each year. Construction will begin with the groundbreaking ceremony on Saturday, and is expected to be completed by the end of fiscal year 2015.
Japanese Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera said in a press conference Tuesday that Japan “decided to deploy a GSDF (Ground Self-Defense Force) unit on Yonaguni Island as a part of our effort to strengthen the surveillance over the southwestern region.” The new outpost will house radar equipment. As a result, it is expected to increase Japan’s surveillance capabilities both over the disputed islands and the areas close to the Chinese mainland.
The addition of 100 Japanese troops to an island so close to the disputed islands obviously has the potential to exacerbate the already substantial tensions between China and Japan. When asked about Yonaguni Island during a regular press conference, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said, “Due to historical reasons, any of Japan’s military moves will raise concern among Asian countries.” She added, “Japan should give a serious explanation for its real intention of building military muscle in [the] relevant region.” For China, the stationing of troops onYonaguni is one more piece of evidence of Japan’s rising militarism. It could also provide China with ammunition to fire back at recent accusations from Shinzo Abe that China seeks tounilaterally change the status quo in the region.
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by Admin | Apr 17, 2014 | News
(Photo Credit: Ed-meister / flickr)
(BGF) – In the March/April 2012 edition of Foreign Affairs Henry Kissinger discussed the future of the U.S.-Chinese relationship. Throughout the article, Kissinger emphasizes that conflict is a choice, rather than an inevitability. Thus, the goal of cooperation between these two great powers is realizable. As Kissinger notes, both the U.S. and China must be careful to recognize the other’s fears and the ways in which rhetoric, as well as policies, can feed into those fears. For example, some in the U.S. perceive China’s actions as a way to push the U.S. out of East Asia and to cement China’s power and influence in the region. This, however, is a possibility that the U.S. fears and would take great strides to prevent. As for China, many fear that the U.S. is a “wounded” superpower that will due anything in its power to curtail China’s rise internationally. Each country must take these concerns into account in their relations with one another. Moreover, the U.S.-China relationship must not be viewed as a zero-sum game. While there are no historical precedents to guide these two powerful, yet very different, countries through their complex, and at times, tense relationship an appropriate understanding of each country’s circumstances can breed cooperation rather than conflict. Click here to read the full article or visit Foreign Affair‘s website.
The Future of U.S.-Chinese Relations
By Henry A. Kissinger
On January 19, 2011, U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao issued a joint statement at the end of Hu’s visit to Washington. It proclaimed their shared commitment to a “positive, cooperative, and comprehensive U.S.-China relationship.” Each party reassured the other regarding his principal concern, announcing, “The United States reiterated that it welcomes a strong, prosperous, and successful China that plays a greater role in world affairs. China welcomes the United States as an Asia-Pacific nation that contributes to peace, stability and prosperity in the region.”
Since then, the two governments have set about implementing the stated objectives. Top American and Chinese officials have exchanged visits and institutionalized their exchanges on major strategic and economic issues. Military-to-military contacts have been restarted, opening an important channel of communication. And at the unofficial level, so-called track-two groups have explored possible evolutions of the U.S.-Chinese relationship.
Yet as cooperation has increased, so has controversy. Significant groups in both countries claim that a contest for supremacy between China and the United States is inevitable and perhaps already under way. In this perspective, appeals for U.S.-Chinese cooperation appear outmoded and even naive.
The mutual recriminations emerge from distinct yet parallel analyses in each country. Some American strategic thinkers argue that Chinese policy pursues two long-term objectives: displacing the United States as the preeminent power in the western Pacific and consolidating Asia into an exclusionary bloc deferring to Chinese economic and foreign policy interests. In this conception, even though China’s absolute military capacities are not formally equal to those of the United States, Beijing possesses the ability to pose unacceptable risks in a conflict with Washington and is developing increasingly sophisticated means to negate traditional U.S. advantages. Its invulnerable second-strike nuclear capability will eventually be paired with an expanding range of antiship ballistic missiles and asymmetric capabilities in new domains such as cyberspace and space. China could secure a dominant naval position through a series of island chains on its periphery, some fear, and once such a screen exists, China’s neighbors, dependent as they are on Chinese trade and uncertain of the United States’ ability to react, might adjust their policies according to Chinese preferences. Eventually, this could lead to the creation of a Sinocentric Asian bloc dominating the western Pacific. The most recent U.S. defense strategy report reflects, at least implicitly, some of these apprehensions.
No Chinese government officials have proclaimed such a strategy as China’s actual policy. Indeed, they stress the opposite. However, enough material exists in China’s quasi-official press and research institutes to lend some support to the theory that relations are heading for confrontation rather than cooperation.
U.S. strategic concerns are magnified by ideological predispositions to battle with the entire nondemocratic world. Authoritarian regimes, some argue, are inherently brittle, impelled to rally domestic support by nationalist and expansionist rhetoric and practice. In these theories — versions of which are embraced in segments of both the American left and the American right — tension and conflict with China grow out of China’s domestic structure. Universal peace will come, it is asserted, from the global triumph of democracy rather than from appeals for cooperation. The political scientist Aaron Friedberg writes, for example, that “a liberal democratic China will have little cause to fear its democratic counterparts, still less to use force against them.” Therefore, “stripped of diplomatic niceties, the ultimate aim of the American strategy [should be] to hasten a revolution, albeit a peaceful one, that will sweep away China’s one-party authoritarian state and leave a liberal democracy in its place.”
On the Chinese side, the confrontational interpretations follow an inverse logic. They see the United States as a wounded superpower determined to thwart the rise of any challenger, of which China is the most credible. No matter how intensely China pursues cooperation, some Chinese argue, Washington’s fixed objective will be to hem in a growing China by military deployment and treaty commitments, thus preventing it from playing its historic role as the Middle Kingdom. In this perspective, any sustained cooperation with the United States is self-defeating, since it will only serve the overriding U.S. objective of neutralizing China. Systematic hostility is occasionally considered to inhere even in American cultural and technological influences, which are sometimes cast as a form of deliberate pressuredesigned to corrode China’s domestic consensus and traditional values. The most assertive voices argue that China has been unduly passive in the face of hostile trends and that (for example, in the case of territorial issues in the South China Sea) China should confront those of its neighbors with which it has disputed claims and then, in the words of the strategic analyst Long Tao, “reason, think ahead and strike first before things gradually run out of hand . . . launch[ing] some tiny-scale battles that could deter provocateurs from going further.”
THE PAST NEED NOT BE PROLOGUE
Is there, then, a point in the quest for a cooperative U.S.-Chinese relationship and in policies designed to achieve it? To be sure, the rise of powers has historically often led to conflict with established countries. But conditions have changed. It is doubtful that the leaders who went so blithely into a world war in 1914 would have done so had they known what the world would be like at its end. Contemporary leaders can have no such illusions. A major war between developed nuclear countries must bring casualties and upheavals impossible to relate to calculable objectives. Preemption is all but excluded, especially for a pluralistic democracy such as the United States.
If challenged, the United States will do what it must to preserve its security. But it should not adopt confrontation as a strategy of choice. In China, the United States would encounter an adversary skilled over the centuries in using prolonged conflict as a strategy and whose doctrine emphasizes the psychological exhaustion of the opponent. In an actual conflict, both sides possess the capabilities and the ingenuity to inflict catastrophic damage on each other. By the time any such hypothetical conflagration drew to a close, all participants would be left exhausted and debilitated. They would then be obliged to face anew the very task that confronts them today: the construction of an international order in which both countries are significant components.
The blueprints for containment drawn from Cold War strategies used by both sides against an expansionist Soviet Union do not apply to current conditions. The economy of the Soviet Union was weak (except for military production) and did not affect the global economy. Once China broke off ties and ejected Soviet advisers, few countries except those forcibly absorbed into the Soviet orbit had a major stake in their economic relationship with Moscow. Contemporary China, by contrast, is a dynamic factor in the world economy. It is a principal trading partner of all its neighbors and most of the Western industrial powers, including the United States. A prolonged confrontation between China and the United States would alter the world economy with unsettling consequences for all.
Nor would China find that the strategy it pursued in its own conflict with the Soviet Union fits a confrontation with the United States. Only a few countries — and no Asian ones — would treat an American presence in Asia as “fingers” to be “chopped off” (in Deng Xiaoping’s graphic phrase about Soviet forward positions). Even those Asian states that are not members of alliances with the United States seek the reassurance of an American political presence in the region and of American forces in nearby seas as the guarantor of the world to which they have become accustomed.Their approach was expressed by a senior Indonesian official to an American counterpart: “Don’t leave us, but don’t make us choose.”
China’s recent military buildup is not in itself an exceptional phenomenon: the more unusual outcome would be if the world’s second-largest economy and largest importer of natural resources did not translate its economic power into some increased military capacity. The issue is whether that buildup is open ended and to what purposes it is put. If the United States treats every advance in Chinese military capabilities as a hostile act, it will quickly find itself enmeshed in an endless series of disputes on behalf of esoteric aims. But China must be aware, from its own history, of the tenuous dividing line between defensive and offensive capabilities and of the consequences of an unrestrained arms race.
China’s leaders will have their own powerful reasons for rejecting domestic appeals for an adversarial approach — as indeed they have publicly proclaimed. China’s imperial expansion has historically been achieved by osmosis rather than conquest, or by the conversion to Chinese culture of conquerors who then added their own territories to the Chinese domain. Dominating Asia militarily would be a formidableundertaking. The Soviet Union, during the Cold War, bordered on a string of weak countries drained by war and occupation and dependent on American troop commitments for their defense. China today faces Russia in the north; Japan and South Korea, with American military alliances, to the east; Vietnam and India to thesouth; and Indonesia and Malaysia not far away. This is not a constellationconducive to conquest. It is more likely to raise fears of encirclement. Each of these countries has a long military tradition and would pose a formidable obstacle if its territory or its ability to conduct an independent policy were threatened. A militant Chinese foreign policy would enhance cooperation among all or at least some of these nations, evoking China’s historic nightmare, as happened in the period 2009–10.
DEALING WITH THE NEW CHINA
Another reason for Chinese restraint in at least the medium term is the domestic adaptation the country faces. The gap in Chinese society between the largely developed coastal regions and the undeveloped western regions has made Hu’s objective of a “harmonious society” both compelling and elusive. Cultural changes compound the challenge. The next decades will witness, for the first time, the full impact of one-child families on adult Chinese society. This is bound to modify cultural patterns in a society in which large families have traditionally taken care of the aged and the handicapped. When four grandparents compete for the attention of one child and invest him with the aspirations heretofore spread across many offspring, a new pattern of insistent achievement and vast, perhaps unfulfillable, expectations may arise.
All these developments will further complicate the challenges of China’sgovernmental transition starting in 2012, in which the presidency; the vice-presidency; the considerable majority of the positions in China’s Politburo, State Council, and Central Military Commission; and thousands of other key national and provincial posts will be staffed with new appointees. The new leadership group will consist, for the most part, of members of the first Chinese generation in a century and a half to have lived all their lives in a country at peace. Its primary challenge will be finding a way to deal with a society revolutionized by changing economic conditions, unprecedented and rapidly expanding technologies of communication, a tenuous global economy, and the migration of hundreds of millions of people from China’s countryside to its cities. The model of government that emerges will likely be a synthesis of modern ideas and traditional Chinese political and cultural concepts, and the quest for that synthesis will provide the ongoing drama of China’s evolution.
These social and political transformations are bound to be followed with interest and hope in the United States. Direct American intervention would be neither wise nor productive. The United States will, as it should, continue to make its views known on human rights issues and individual cases. And its day-to-day conduct will expressits national preference for democratic principles. But a systematic project to transform China’s institutions by diplomatic pressure and economic sanctions is likely to backfire and isolate the very liberals it is intended to assist. In China, it would be interpreted by a considerable majority through the lens of nationalism, recalling earlier eras of foreign intervention.
What this situation calls for is not an abandonment of American values but a distinction between the realizable and the absolute. The U.S.-Chinese relationship should not be considered as a zero-sum game, nor can the emergence of a prosperous and powerful China be assumed in itself to be an American strategic defeat.
A cooperative approach challenges preconceptions on both sides. The United States has few precedents in its national experience of relating to a country of comparable size, self-confidence, economic achievement, and international scope and yet with such a different culture and political system. Nor does history supply China withprecedents for how to relate to a fellow great power with a permanent presence in Asia, a vision of universal ideals not geared toward Chinese conceptions, and alliances with several of China’s neighbors. Prior to the United States, all countries establishing such a position did so as a prelude to an attempt to dominate China.
The simplest approach to strategy is to insist on overwhelming potential adversaries with superior resources and materiel. But in the contemporary world, this is only rarely feasible. China and the United States will inevitably continue as enduring realities for each other. Neither can entrust its security to the other — no great power does, for long — and each will continue to pursue its own interests, sometimes at the relative expense of the other. But both have the responsibility to take into account the other’s nightmares, and both would do well to recognize that their rhetoric, as much as their actual policies, can feed into the other’s suspicions.
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