Who wants to be a part of China?
Illustration: John Shakespeare
Until now, China's territorial claims on Japan have been limited to small uninhabited rocks. And that was enough to create tension between the world's second-biggest economy and the third-biggest.But a new chorus of influential Chinese is raising the stakes. They argue that Japan is not entitled to one of its biggest islands, Okinawa, home to 1.4 million people and host to some of the biggest US military bases in the world.
Okinawa was an independent kingdom for centuries. Japan took it over in 1872, though its rule was interrupted when the US took it in World War II before returning it to Japan in 1972. China did not contest Japan's sovereignty over the island until 1970, and the issue has largely laid dormant since.But suddenly it's a burning issue. While Beijing is not officially staking a claim, the new Chinese argument is being advanced or tolerated by official and quasi-official parts of the Chinese system.
An outspoken two-star general in the People's Liberation Army said last week that the island
could not belong to Japan because its ancient rulers had paid tribute to China 500 years before it had been taken over by the Japanese.
Obviously, this has alarming implications. The list of countries that paid tribute to China in ancient times is a long one. It includes
Burma and Cambodia, Korea and Malaysia, even Italy and England.
''If this can of worms is opened, it could open a fractious time for the whole world,'' says the director of the Australian centre on China and the world at the ANU, Geremie Barme.
''Other countries can say, 'Well if that's open for renegotiation, then so are all these other territorial matters. Where does it stop? It doesn't.''
Major-General Luo Yuan told the China News Service the Ryukyu island chain, of which Okinawa is the biggest part, started paying tribute to China in 1372 during the Ming Dynasty. He said the islands' natives had closer ethnic and cultural ties to China than to Japan, as their rulers were vassals of the Chinese court. He said: ''Let's for now not discuss whether [the islands] belong to China, they were certainly China's tributary state. I am not saying all former tributary states belong to China, but we can say with certainty that the Ryukyus do not belong to Japan.''
But Luo is well known for his provocative hypernationalism, so does this really mean anything? The general's remarks were not in isolation. They followed a lengthy piece by two Chinese academics published a week earlier.
''It may be time to revisit the unresolved historical issue of the Ryukyu Islands,'' wrote Zhang Haipeng and Li Guoqiang.
The piece carried weight because the authors are from China's top state-run think tank, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. And it was published by the official mouthpiece of the Communist Party, the Peoples Daily. Further, when reporters raised it with the spokesman for China's foreign ministry, Hua Chunying, she answered the history of Okinawa and the Ryukyu chain had ''long called for attention in academia''.
Japan protested in strong terms at the publication. At one point, the home islands of Japan, too, paid tribute to the emperor of China. ''By General Luo's 'logic','' writes Chris Nelson, editor of the Washington-based Nelson Report, a daily newsletter on Asian policy affairs,
''his next essay will claim the Japanese home islands for China.
''Presumably even the … humorists at the PLA staff college might find that a bit of an overreach. But just in case, we'd note that Chinese ship anchors, an estimated 1000 to 1500 years old, have been recovered off Mexico's Pacific coast, so why stop at Japan?''
Australia in the centuries before European discovery did not pay tribute to Imperial China, but when China's then president, Hu Jintao, addressed the Australian Parliament in 2003, he pointed out:
''Back in the 1420s, the expeditionary fleets of China's Ming Dynasty reached Australian shores. For centuries, the Chinese sailed across vast seas and settled down in what they called Southern Land, or today's Australia.'' They brought Chinese culture to this land and lived harmoniously with the local people, contributing their proud share to Australia's economy, society and its thriving pluralistic culture.
''This is not fiction. It's supported by archaeological evidence of visits by Chinese sailors half a millennium before Captain Cook.
If Chinese nationalists can invent arguments about territorial sovereignty on the grounds of cultural and official contacts half a millennium ago, before most of today's nation states existed, then, as Barme says, where does it stop? China's senior leadership has not publicly endorsed this cheeky argument. But neither has it disowned it. The question is, why is it being advanced and tolerated by the leadership, perhaps even tacitly endorsed, and why now?
''From the Chinese viewpoint the Okinawan islands resemble nothing so much as a giant maritime Great Wall,'' writes ANU's expert on the island, Gavan McCormack, ''potentially blocking naval access to the Pacific Ocean.'' So it's important strategically in its own right. But an expert on Chinese elite politics, Willy Lam, of Hong Kong's Chinese University, says it's
''psychological warfare'' to pressure Japan into concessions on China's lesser territorial claims over the uninhabited Senkaku, as the Japanese call them, or Diaoyus in Chinese.
And why now? China's rising power has coupled with a stirring assertiveness to enliven its claims in several long-dormant disputes.Says Barme: ''The new president, Xi Jinping, has very firm views and they are not what we in the West want them to be. ''He and his cohort think that China has been coasting and has not put itself forward strongly enough.
In Chinese terms it's not outrageous and Xi believes China is a major world power and must exert itself as a major power should. I think everyone is in for a bit of a tough time.''
Article by
Peter Hartcher, Sydney Morning Herald's International Editor
Who wants to be a part of China?
