Sino-Japanese relationship too brittle for comfort
Lanxin Xiang says both Japan and China are to blame for allowing an argument over disputed islands to harden and jeopardise the region's most important bilateral relationship
Singapore's prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, made a speech to a Japanese audience earlier this year, in which he claimed that if the Chinese government should decide to use non-peaceful means to take the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands, it may lose the world. The statement apparently irked the Chinese a great deal, albeit belatedly. The nationalistic paper Global Times made a big fuss of it some two weeks ago. But Lee's argument is not entirely wrong.
The tensions between China and Japan over these islands are unnecessary, unwarranted and extremely harmful not only to the most important bilateral relationship in the region; they have also destroyed a reservoir of goodwill between the two peoples, painstakingly built by leaders on both sides for more than half a century.
Leaders like Zhou Enlai and Kakuei Tanaka would surely turn in their graves if they could see what is happening between the two nations, where polls show that a majority of the populations hate the other.
China should not dismiss the Japanese intention to hold a goodwill summit to resolve the problem
There is, however, little doubt that both sides are to blame. Tensions have built up because of clumsy diplomacy by both governments. The island dispute has been largely a non-issue for decades. But, since 2010, Japan has jumped on the US "pivot" to Asia all too enthusiastically, which has caused enormous suspicion in Beijing of a joint containment strategy against China.
The turning point undoubtedly came last autumn when the Japanese government announced a plan to "nationalise" these islands, which were under threat from the Tokyo governor, who was raising money to "buy" them.