Should the US Play Solomon and Split the Senkakus?

I have grown pretty tired of hearing about the Senkakus.  I have a feeling I’m not alone.

As far as I can see, Taiwan has the strongest claim to the Senkakus, by geography, geology,  history, and propinquity.  Japan grabbed the Senkakus in 1895, lost them in World War II, then got them back from the U.S. Occupation as a sloppily-executed, legally dubious afterthought.  But it’s got ‘em.  The PRC, by speaking for Taiwan under the one-China policy, is in OK shape as a matter of logic and equity, but hampered by the fact that nobody wants to see big, bad China get a win at Japan’s expense.

The Senkakus have turned into an American headache.

Japan makes an issue of the Senkakus to goad the PRC and use the ensuing uproar to justify Japan’s emergence as a full-fledged regional military power.

The PRC, IMHO, uses the issue to goad Japan and deepen the wedge between the United States and an increasingly independent Japan, thereby encouraging the United States to shift away from Japan and towards China in order to sustain U.S. clout.

So the United States is on a cleft stick as far as the Senkakus are concerned.

I don’t think the Obama administration, as suggested by Shisaku’s Michael Cucek, is interested in coming down on Japan’s side and confirming Japanese sovereignty over the Senkakus at China’s expense.  Beyond the unpleasant prospect of having the PRC really, really mad at us, the PRC will make the United States pay for its decision, probably by punishing Japan in ways that reveal the limits of American power to protect it—like the anti-Japanese economic warfare of 2012—and marginalizes the US in Asia.

My suggestion:  the United States, as the responsible hyperpower always sedulously concerned with regional peace and stability, should propose that the Senkakus be split between Japan and the PRC.

There are, to my understanding five uninhabited islands and three barren rocks.  Total eight things.  I suggest each side get four things on opposite sides of a line.  That gives the United States the ability to unambiguously support Japanese sovereignty over here, and Chinese sovereignty over there.  Here's one possibility.

Like that red line?  Took me less than two minutes.

Bear in mind that the Japanese government is contemplating a similar 50/50 split in an effort to resolve its endless dispute with Russia over the Northern Islands.

The Japanese would be angry with us, but so would the Chinese.  But it’s better to be hated as high-handed imperial lawgivers than resented as handwringing bystanders.  

As to the immense fishery and energy resources supposedly contained in the sea surrounding the islands, forget about efficient joint development.  What’s on this side of the line is yours, on that side mine.  Let each side plunder the resources until the fish are gone, the basins are exhausted, and there is no reason to pretend to be interested in these ridiculous rocks.

I think this initiative is not for the ostentatiously cerebral President Obama.  It’s a job for diplomatic blunderbuss Joe Biden or gaffe-guru John Kerry, maybe pontificating at some confab at the Center for a New American Security, standing in front of a big map of the Senkakus and making a sweeping gesture.

Little does he realize he is holding an uncapped marker in his hand, creating a bold and highly suggestive line splitting the eight islets and rocks.  The assembled politicians, pundits, and diplomats step back with an involuntary gasp of astonished awe…

War In the East China Sea: Not Quite Yet

[Correction: Mr. Hatoyama was the DPJ PM until 2010, well before the current Senkaku/Diaoyutai crisis.  Sorry 'bout that.--CH 1/18/13]

 The PRC regime has been preparing for escalating confrontation with Japan if Tokyo decided it really wanted to test the commitment of the United States to back it in the crisis over the Senkaku/Daioyutai Islands.

Showing Japan the undesirability of openly aligning with the United States as the U.S. pivots into Asia—instead of giving some lip service at least to PRC interests and priorities—is pretty close to an existential issue for the PRC.

And the PRC knows that the U.S. appetite for giving Japan military support over the Senkakus/Diaoyutai is extremely limited, despite the brave talk of the U.S. defense appropriations bill.  If an incident had occurred between the PRC and Japanese ships and planes jostling around the islands, the U.S. would have been faced with the very difficult choice between exacerbating a crisis in Asia and admitting the limitations of the “pivot”, not only to Japan but to Vietnam, the Philippines, and, for that matter, everybody else.

So, if the Japanese forces had decided to engage in some pushback on the provocative PRC actions around the Senkaku/Diaoyutai, the PRC would have made sure that things got pretty ugly pretty quick.

And if the PRC wanted to try to strangle the pivot in its cradle, they might have rolled the dice, provoked an incident, and let the crisis escalate.

However, it seems that the PRC is thankfully willing to let the crisis de-escalate for now.

Ex-Prime Minister Hatoyama—on whose watch the disastrous decision to nationalize some of the Senkaku/Daioyutai Islands occurred—is paying a visit to China.

His visit to the memorial to victims of the Nanjing Massacre was front page news in Chinese state media, especially since he marked his visit with the sort of respectful bow that is usually associated with the obeisance paid to Japanese war dead by Japanese prime ministers. For good measure, Xinhua also photographed Mr. Hatoyama observing a photograph of a Japanese soldier preparing to decapitate a Chinese prisoner.

 

The Xinhua headline read: Former Japan’s PM Apologizes for War Crimes in China.

Not by accident, this relatively abject episode (which, if carried out by a current or former United States leaderwould have been excoriated as a capitulationist apology tour) occurred while current Prime Minister Abe was preoccupying the Japanese media with his largely symbolic defiance tour of Southeast Asia, ostensibly including an unwelcome security component but more concretely advertising the benefit to all concerned of economic ties that are not dependent on the pleasure of the PRC.

But, to the PRC at least, the willingness of Japan to make some kind of concession to cool things down is noted and, thankfully, welcome.

Xinhua also ran a report on a meeting between Hatoyama and Jia Qinglin, at which nice and conciliatory words were spoken:

Top political advisor Jia Qinglin said Wednesday that China and Japan should resolve the Diaoyu Islands dispute through dialogue and consultation.

"The two sides should handle the Diaoyu Islands dispute properly in order to ensure that bilateral relations remain on a track of healthy and stable development," said Jia, chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), while meeting with former Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama.

Jia said cooperation between China and Japan will serve the fundamental interests of both sides, as well as the region and the international community.

China attaches importance to its ties with Japan and will continue to work to develop bilateral relations in accordance with previous agreements, Jia said.

In meetings with the U.S. team of superpundits and retired diplomats (i.e. the Nye/Steinberg/Armitage/Hadley mission to Japan and PRC in October 2011 that attempted to apply U.S. good offices to resolve the dispute—something that the PRC, whose entire purpose in milking the Senkaku/Diaoyutai crisis was to convince Japan of the conditional, equivocal, and partial character of US support embodied in the pivot, had no interest in encouraging), the PRC reportedly shifted the frame away from China’s eternal claim to the islands to the seemingly tangential question of Japan trying to shed the moral and diplomatic burden of World War II.

Peter Ennis interviewed Professor Nye and posted the transcript on his blog, Dispatch Japan.  In one exchange:

DISPATCH JAPAN: Is there a broader strategy underlying China’s approach to the Senkakus, or is a Japan-China dynamic primarily at work?

NYE: Chinese regard Japan as having changed the status quo by having the central government purchase the islands from the private owner. China has not accepted Prime Minister Noda’s public explanation that he took that step to prevent Governor Ishihara from having the Tokyo municipality purchase the islands, which could have caused mischief. 

The Chinese think there is a large plan by Japan to erode what they call “the outcome” of World War II. I don’t know how much of that is pure rhetoric, or represents the real thinking in China. But that is what senior Chinese say. 

DISPATCH JAPAN: What is your assessment? Is it rhetoric, or real thinking? 

NYE: I think a lot of Chinese really believe that Japan is trying to erode the status quo. I think others are using that line in an effort to create a wedge between the US and Japan. 

Shifting the focus to the big question of World War II is a better way of improving relations than arguing over the Senkaku/Diaoyutai Islands.  The island dispute is zero sum: either they are China’s or Japan’s.

On the other hand, fortunately, a significant portion of Japan elite opinion can still agree with the PRC that World War II was a bad thing.  A climbdown for Japan is easier and allows the PRC to claim a moral victory.

Mr. Hatoyama’s participation in the Nanjing shaming ceremony will hopefully be enough to smooth things over for now:

Hatoyama nodded as Zhu Chengshan, the memorial's president, told him that it is an undeniable fact, as stated in the verdicts of the Tokyo and Nanjing martial courts, that Japanese invaders killed more than 300,000 people in Nanjing.

"The Japanese government had made it clear when signing the Treaty of San Francisco 1951 that it accepted the verdicts of the Far Eastern International Military Court of Justice and others verdicts regarding its war crimes," Zhu said.

It will be interesting to see how the Japanese media covers Hatoyama’s visit.

Whether or not the de-escalation of the crisis in Japan-China relations through Mr. Hatoyama’s visit represents Japan’s abandonment of its ideas of shedding the incubus of World War II and entering the brave new world of the 21^st century, where Japan jettisons its peacetime constitution, rebrands its “self defence forces” as a conventional military and, maybe assembles a few atomic bombs from its large stash of plutonium and mounts them on its space rockets is an open question.

Actually, it’s really not an open question.

Japan will probably draw the conclusion that China that Chinese desire to confront and humiliate Japan will remain, and will muscle up in response.

Ironically, this may be the endgame that the PRC was looking for.  

If Japan continues with its accelerated military investment and practices an even more independent security policy, the credibility of the United States--safe to say, the only military power the PRC really cares about—as the guarantor of security in East Asia, specifically as the force restraining Japanese rearmament, is eroded.

The key takeaway from the Senkaku/Daioyutai crisis is that the Japanese government, in large response to domestic imperatives, undertook a regional security adventure without the enthusiastic support of the United States.  China escalated the crisis, rejected US mediation, and forced Japan to address the situation bilaterally, at first through the deployment of its military forces and now diplomatically.

The crisis revealed a small but significant chink of daylight between Japan and the United States.

That makes it likely that the PRC will be happy to return to the fraught issue of the islands again, whenever it wants to reveal and encourage the centripetal forces implicit in the US pivot to Asia.

China checks the US picket line

[The Asia Times Online yearender, which appeared on Dec. 22, 2012.  It can be reposted if ATOl is credited and a link provided.]

The passing year was the People's Republic of China's (PRC) first opportunity to get up close and personal with the United States' pivot back to Asia, the strategic rebalancing that looks a lot like containment.

The PRC spent a lot of 2012 wrestling with contentious neighbors emboldened by the US policy, like Vietnam and the Philippines; combating American efforts to nibble away at the corners of China's spheres of influence on the Korean peninsula and Southeast Asia; and engaging in a test of strength and will with the primary US proxy in the region, Japan.

This state affairs was misleadingly if predictably spun in the Western press as "assertive China exacerbates regional tensions", while a more accurate reading was probably "China's rivals exacerbate regional tensions in order to stoke fears of assertive China."

Whatever the framing, this was the year that the world - and in particular Japan - discovered that the PRC can and could kick back against the pivot.

The fat years for "rising China" were the presidencies of George W Bush. Preoccupied with cascading disasters in the Middle East, a burgeoning fiscal deficit that demanded a foreign partner with an insatiable appetite for US debt, and, later on, a meltdown in the US and world economies, Bush had no stomach for mixing it up with China.

The PRC took the ball and ran with it, emerging as an overpowering presence in East Asia, plowing into Africa, establishing itself as a crucial paymaster for the European Union, and hammering away at the final bastions of Western leadership of the post-World War II planet: the major multinational policy and financial institutions.

Rollback was inevitable, and it was pursued, purposefully, carefully, and incrementally under Barack Obama.

Also back is ineffable American self-regard. With the election and re-election of a black president from a modest background, the United States reclaimed as its assumed birthright the moral high ground, something that one might think the US had forfeited for a decade or two thanks to the Iraq War, American mismanagement of the global financial system, and the failure to face the existential issue of climate change.

It would have been amusing, in a grim sort of way, to see if the election of Mitt Romney as president would have elicited the same ecstatic neo-liberal squealing about the glories of American democracy that we saw with President Obama's re-election. In any case, the comically inept Romney was no match for the popularity, intelligence, and relentless organizational focus of Obama and American self-righteousness - or, as Evan Olnos of the New Yorker would approvingly characterize it, America's "moral charisma" - is back.

With the United States firmly back in the leadership saddle, at least as far as the foreign affairs commentariat is concerned, China has nothing to show the world except the flaws of an authoritarian political and economic system, nothing to teach except as an object lesson in how to avoid them, and no right to participate in any world leadership councils except by Western sufferance.

This attitude dovetails almost perfectly with Obama's apparent disdain for the PRC as an opaque, unfriendly, and unsavory regime that responds to engagement with overreach, one that must be stressed, pressured, and coerced in order to drive it toward humanity's preferred goals. Under the leadership of the Obama administration, the West has made the significant decision to restrain China instead of accommodate it.

China will be a welcome partner in the world order, at least defined by the West, only if it democratizes, dismantles its state-controlled economy, and adheres to the standards of liberal multinational institutions in seeking its place in the world order. These outcomes are so far off the radar as far as the current PRC leadership is concerned, the only near-term endgame on these terms is regime collapse.

That's a risky bet. If the regime doesn't collapse, a simmering, constitutional hostility between the PRC and its many antagonists is on the books for the foreseeable future.

China's response has been to avoid confronting the United States head-on, instead probing for weaknesses in the US chain of proxies and allies, while trying to shore up weaknesses in its own proxies and allies.

The only unalloyed win for the PRC in East Asia in 2012 was the re-election of the Kuomintang's Ma Ying-jeou as president of Taiwan. President Ma has a steady-as-she-goes policy of minimal friction with the PRC, in contrast to the fractious pro-independence and pro-Japanese Democratic Progressive Party. In 2012 he went a step further. In a move that was largely ignored in the Western press because it complicated the narrative of unilateral PRC thuggery, Ma dispatched a flotilla of official and unofficial vessels to give grief to the Japanese coastguard presence around the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands.

Other than Taiwan, one of the brighter spots in the authoritarian firmament has been the gradual pro-China/pro-reform tilt of North Korea under Kim Jong-eun. The PRC is still making the Obama administration pay for its disastrous miscalculation in 2009, when the US thought that the PRC's overwhelming trade ties with South Korea would cause Beijing to abandon North Korea in the aftermath of the Cheonan outrage (the sinking of a South Korean frigate by forces unknown, but widely assumed to be North Korea) and join the United States in a multi-lateral diplomatic and sanctions-fueled beatdown of the Pyongyang regime.

Instead, the late Kim Jung-il realized that his long-standing opera-bouffe efforts at engagement with the United States were futile and got on his armored train to journey into China and fall into the welcoming arms of Hu Jintao.

On the other side of the ledger, Myanmar threatened to slide out of the PRC camp with the decision of the government to rebalance its foreign policy away from China toward the United States and reach an accommodation with domestic pro-democracy forces. The necessary demonstrations of pro-democracy and pro-Western enthusiasm by the Thein Sein government were 1) the release of Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest and her return to public life and 2) postponement of the Myitsone hydroelectric project.

The Myitsone project was unpopular domestically because it was PRC-funded and had been adopted as a symbol of the casual sell-out of Myanmar interests to China by corrupt generals. Postponing Myitsone was popular with the West because it raised the possibility it would block development of Myanmar's sizable hydroelectric potential by China and, instead, allow Western interests, shut out of the Myanmar economy for years because of sanctions, to reorient hydropower exports away from China and towards Thailand.

The PRC has responded cautiously to the Myanmar shift, apparently taking consolation in its dominant role in Myanmar's economy, foreign trade, and security policy thanks to the long and porous border the two countries share.

Myanmar's political elites, including Aung San Suu Kyi, apparently have decided that an anti-China economic jihad would be counter-productive and the PRC has good reason to hope that by upping its public relations game, spreading money around to deserving citizens both inside and outside politics (and perhaps discretely renegotiating some terms of some excessively favorable sweetheart deals with the Myanmar junta), it can successfully navigate the now dangerous shoals of Myanmar multi-party politics (in which a traditional strain of anti-Chinese populism has become an inevitable tool of political and popular mobilization).

In a sign that the United States also hoped to put Laos and Cambodia into play, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton paid a rare visit to the Laotian capital of Vientiane before putting in an appearance at Phnom Penh for a get-together of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Results were mixed, as Cambodia loyally defended the PRC from an attempt to place an ASEAN united front versus China concerning a South China Sea mediation initiative on the agenda.

Cambodian and Laotian desires to distance themselves from the big bully of Asia, the PRC, are perhaps counterbalanced by their desire to keep the big bully of Southeast Asia, Vietnam, at bay. As for Vietnam, it has learned that, as far as the United States is concerned, China is not Iran and Vietnam is not Israel - at least for now, and quite possibly for always.

Even as the United States has vocally supported freedom of navigation in the South China Sea and a multilateral united front in dealing with the PRC, it has avoided "taking sides in territorial disputes" - the only kind of dispute that the nations surrounding the South China Sea care about, since "the PRC threat to freedom of navigation" in the area is little more than a nonsensical canard.

With the US Seventh Fleet unlikely to slide into the South China Sea and blast away at Chinese vessels as an adjunct to the Vietnamese navy, Vietnam appears to have drawn the lesson from the PRC's ferocious mugging of Japan that the disadvantages of auditioning for the role of frontline state in the anti-China alliance may outweigh the benefits.

The big story in East Asian security affairs this year was the PRC's decision to bully Japan, ostensibly over the idiotic fetish of the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, but actually because of Tokyo's decision to give moral and material support to the US pivot by once again making an issue of the wretched (Taiwanese) islands.

In 2010, China made the diplomatically disastrous decision to retaliate officially against a Japanese provocation - Seiji Maehara's insistence on trying a Chinese fishing trawler captain in Japanese courts for a maritime infraction near the Senkakus. A relatively limited and measured effort to send a message to Japan by a go-slow enforcement effort in the murky demimonde of rare earth exports became a China bashing cause celebre, an opportunity for Japan to raise the US profile in East Asian maritime security matters, and an invitation to China's other neighbors to fiddle with offshore islands and attempt to elicit a counterproductive overreaction from Beijing.

In 2012, the PRC was ready, probably even spoiling for a fight, seizing the opportunity even when the Yoshihiko Noda government clumsily tried to defuse/exploit the Senkaku issue by cutting in line in front of Tokyo governor and ultranationalist snake-oil peddler Shintaro Ishihara to purchase three of the islands.

This time, Chinese retaliation was clothed in the diplomatically and legally impervious cloak of populist attacks on Japanese economic interests inside China. The 2012 campaign did far more damage to Japan than the 2010 campaign, which was conceived as a symbolic shot across the bow of Japan Inc. The Japanese economy was not doing particularly well even before the 2012 Senkaku protests devastated Japanese auto sales and overall Japanese investment in China, raising the possibility that China might deliver a mortal blow, and not just a pointed message, to Japan.

The major US effort to refocus the economic priorities of Asia and offer material benefits to countries like Japan which line up against the PRC - the China-excluding Trans Pacific Partnership - is facing difficulties in its advance as economies hedge against the distinct possibility that China and not the United States (which is looking more like an exporting competitor than demand engine for Asian tigers) will be the 21st century driver of Asian growth.

It looks likely the US pivot into Asia will be a costly, grinding war of attrition fought on multiple fronts - with Japan suffering a majority of the damage - instead of a quick triumph for either side.

This year, let's call it a draw.

Call it a draw in most of the rest of the world as well.

The Indian government apparently feels that the Himalayas provide an adequate no-man's-land between the PRC and India and warily navigated a path between China and the United States.

With the re-election to president of Vladimir Putin and a return to a more in-your-face assertion of Russian prerogatives vis-a-vis the United States, Russia is less likely to curry favor with the US at Chinese expense than it was under Dmitry Medvedev.

On the other hand, the European Union, winner of the Nobel Prize for Pathetic Lurching Dysfunction, excuse me, the Nobel Peace Price, is desperately cleaving to the United States in most geopolitical matters, including a stated aversion to Chinese trade policies, security posture, and human rights abuses. It remains to be seen whether this resolve is rewarded by a recovery in the Western economies, or falls victim to Europe's need for a Chinese bailout.                                                                                                                                                                                                            The most interesting and revealing arena for US-China competition and cooperation is one of the most unlikely: the Middle East. The PRC has apparently been attempting a pivot of its own, attempting to leverage its dominant position as purchaser of Middle Eastern energy from both Saudi Arabia and Iran into a leadership role.

With the United States approaching national, or at least continental self-sufficiency through domestic fracking and consumption of Canadian tar sands - and ostentatiously pivoting into Asia - it might seem prudent and accommodating to welcome Chinese pretensions to leadership in the Middle East.

The PRC has a not-unreasonable portfolio of Middle East positions: lip service at least to Palestinian aspirations, acceptance of Israel's right to exist and thrive, a regional security regime based on economic development instead of total war between Sunni and Shi'ite blocs, grudging accommodation of Arab Spring regimes (as long as they want to do business), an emir-friendly preference for stability over democracy, and an end to the Iran nuclear idiocy.

As to the issue of the Syrian bloodletting, the PRC has consistently promoted a political solution involving a degree of power-sharing between Assad and his opponents. The United States, perhaps nostalgic for the 30 years of murder it has abetted in the Middle East and perversely unwilling to let go of the bloody mess, has refused to cast China for any role other than impotent bystander.

Syria, in particular, symbolizes America's middle-finger approach to Middle East security. Washington is perfectly happy to see the country torn to pieces, as long as it denies Iran, Russia, and China an ally in the region.

The message to China seems to be: the United States can "pivot" into Asia and threaten a security regime that has delivered unprecedented peace and prosperity, but the PRC has no role in the Middle East even though - make that because - that region is crucial to China's energy and economic security.

This is a dynamic that invites China to muscle up militarily, project power, and strengthen its ability to control its security destiny throughout the hemisphere.

The likely response is not going to be for threatened regional actors to lean on Uncle Sam, which has more of a sporting than existential interest in keeping a lid on things in Asia. Even today, the Obama administration has yet to come up with an effective riposte to China's playing cat and mouse with Japan - and chicken with the global economy. Sailing the Seventh Fleet around the western Pacific in search of tsunami and typhoon victims and dastardly pirates is not going to help Japan very much.

If Japan decides to seize control of its security destiny by turning its back on its pacifist constitution, staking out a position as an independent military power, and turning its full spectrum nuclear weapons capability into a declared nuclear arsenal - and South Korea nukes up in response - the famous pivot could turn into a death spiral for US credibility and influence in the region.

If this happens, 2012 will be remembered as the year it all began to unravel.

Is China trying to implode Japan's economy?

[This article originally appeared at Asia Times Online on December 1, 2012.  It can be reposted if ATOl is credited and a link provided.]
 
Is the People's Republic of China (PRC) trying to implode the Japanese economy? It is starting to look that way. The PRC has counterprogramed the US pivot to Asia - and US advantages in military and softpower - by leveraging its economic strengths.

When Japan kicked off this year's edition of the Senkaku (Diaoyu) Follies with the national purchase of the uninhabited rocks, the PRC leadership responded by giving free rein to nationalist Nipponphobic demonstrations, boycotts, and occasional anti-Japanese thuggery - and then refused to allow relations to renormalize.

The PRC frequently reiterates a hardline position during the press conferences of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. For instance, on November 19:

Q: Is there arrangement of meeting between the Chinese and Japanese leaders during the East Asian Leaders' meetings? What is your comment on the prospect of Sino-Japanese relations?

A: As far as I know, there is no arrangement of Sino-Japanese bilateral meeting during the East Asian Leaders' meetings.

On your second question, as is known to all, Japan's illegal "purchase" of the Diaoyu Islands has led Sino-Japanese relations to the current difficult situation. Japan should bear full responsibility. China hopes the Japanese side will seriously reflect on and correct its mistakes, show sincerity and make concrete efforts to properly settle the current problems and push bilateral relations back to the normal track of development.

By this framing, "pushing bilateral relations back to the normal track of development" would involve the Japanese government publicly repudiating the island purchase.

That simply isn't going to happen.

Japanese public opinion is rock-solid behind Japan's claims to the Senkakus, a situation that has more to do with fear and mistrust of Rising China in the Land of the Rising Sun than it has to do with the validity and value of Japan's claims to a cluster of uninhabited Taiwanese islands.

As the Japanese parliamentary elections - announced for December 16 - approach, the PRC is doing nothing to reduce the political profile of the issue, or its unpopularity in Japan. Chinese coast guard vessels have continually patrolled the waters near the Senkakus, allowing the Japanese media to report this affront in a style reminiscent of America's humiliation during the Iran hostage crisis:

Chinese vessels sail near Senkakus for 20th day [1]
Chinese vessels near Senkakus 30 days in a row [2]

And so on.

The widely accepted explanation for the PRC willfully pitching Sino-Japanese relations into the deep freeze is knee-jerk Chinese nationalism, with the emphasis on "jerk". A variation on this explanation is "weak and divided Chinese government is trying to look strong for internal political reasons", an explanation that has been trotted out for decades by every government that found its tit caught in a Chinese wringer, here floated by the current Noda government to explain the current crisis and obligingly circulated by the Asahi Shimbun:

In September, the Noda administration officially decided to put three of the Senkaku Islands under state ownership, before China's Communist Party Congress was held.

"If we purchased [the Senkaku Islands] immediately after the new leadership was established, it would bring shame to China," a source close to Noda said. "We will be able to improve our relationship with the new leadership if we finish putting [the Senkakus] under state ownership during Hu Jintao's era."

However, the friction between Japan and China has only worsened. The Noda administration has further strengthened the belief that the new leadership in Beijing is unstable, and Xi has no choice but to take a hard-line stance against Japan, according to an official at the prime minister's office. [3]

Unfortunately for Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, a nice Reuters backgrounder on the Senkaku purchase reveals that the central government could have delayed the sale of the islands to the city of Tokyo for an indeterminate period of time, thereby sparing the tender feelings of the new Chinese leadership, by insisting on parliamentary review, surveys and other bureaucratic hoo-hah; indeed, a key reason why the right-wing owner abandoned his ideological soul mate, Shintaro Ishihara, to sell to the central government was because he needed to see the money pronto in order to pay down a mountain of debts.

If Noda wants to see what hardline posturing driven by leadership instability looks like, he can take a peek in the mirror. [4]

The PRC's high-profile, unyielding position on the Senkakus seems to reflect something other than reflexive nationalism, political weakness, or the blunderings of a disoriented and incapable elite. It appears that the Beijing leadership may have decided to edge beyond using the Senkaku dispute as a mere demonstration of its economic countermeasures to the US pivot into Asia, to thinking seriously about actually trying to kick a key prop out from under the US initiative - a vital, but weakened and vulnerable ally: Japan.