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.
Although the Japanese government was motivated by good intentions - it was trying to pre-empt a scheme by the extreme right to derail Sino-Japanese relations - the unfortunate use of the term "nationalisation" not only provoked a strong reaction from China, it also deepened suspicions.
The term "nationalisation" reflects a total lack of historical sensitivity on the part of Tokyo. First of all, the Japanese do not have undisputable sovereign rights over the islands and one cannot "nationalise" something one does not own. Second, the main Japanese claim of sovereign rights through a reference to the Treaty of Shimonoseki of 1895 pours oil on fire, as this is one of the most humiliating "unequal treaties" in modern Chinese history.
Like Margaret Thatcher's historic mistake of demanding a "renewal" of the 99-year lease of 1898 over Hong Kong's New Territories, building a historical legality by reference to an "unequal treaty" would surely push any Chinese leadership into a political corner where there is little room for them to manoeuvre.