How Long Can the U.S. Exploit the Senkakus Sovereignty Crisis It Created?

The United States does not acknowledge Japan's claim to sovereignty over the Senkakus.  If this fact is allowed to seep into the consciousness of journos, pundits, and newly minted Asia experts, perhaps a lot of stuff that has happened, is happening, and will happen in the East China Sea will appear somewhat more explicable.

But I'm not optimistic.  I was rather dismayed to learn that An Important Journalistic Figure subscribes to the myth that Japan's claims to Senkaku sovereignty are incontestable, and PRC shenanigans around the islands are simply another indication of unprovoked Chinese aggression and cupidity.  Regrettably, this misunderstanding shows signs of getting baked into PRC coverage, and will serve as the departure point for years of China-bashing by a legion of journalistic, analytic, and political hacks.

The truth is, as they say, out there, and as usual it's much more interesting than the myth.

Point of departure should be the magisterial essay at Asia-Pacific Journal, The Origins of the Senkaku/Daioyu Dispute between China,Taiwan, and Japan, by Yabuki Susume with an introduction by Mark Selden.

Long story short, the Nixon administration withheld an affirmation of Japan’s sovereignty over the Senkakus when the whole Ryukyu shebang was transferred from U.S. to Japanese administration with the reversion treaty of 1972.

Nixon and Kissinger were doing a favor to Taiwan, which had to cope with the political fallout from U.S. normalization of relations with the PRC and looked for help from the United States in avoiding another piece of humiliation by losing the islands to Japan.  

It should be noted that the islands are clearly in Taiwan’s bailiwick, as a cursory look at a map reveals.  Sorry Japan, the Senkakus are comfortably on the Asian continental shelf, a mere 170 kilometers from Taipei, and on the wrong side of the Ryukyu Trench from the Ryukyu Kingdom i.e. Okinawa and the other islands Japan seized, together with the Senkakus when it was the region’s preeminent imperial bully.  

 Japan’s legal claim to the Senkakus rests on the rather contestable assertion that the islands were “vacant territory” and Japan could just take ‘em.

Those who suspect or ignore academic journals with an allegedly lefty bent can turn to the Congressional Research Service's September 2012 Senkaku (Diaoyu/Dioayutai) Islands Dispute: U.S. Treaty Obligations, by Mark Manyin, for confirmation of the U.S. decision to withhold recognition of Japanese sovereignty over the Senkakus.

In the section U.S. Position on Competing Claims, Manyin  covers  Susume’s points on the return of the islands to Japanese administration but without confirmation of sovereignty, and quotes the relevant legal opinion:

 In his letter of October 20, 1971, Acting Assistant Legal Adviser Robert Starr stated: The Governments of the Republic of China and Japan are in disagreement as to sovereignty over the Senkaku Islands. You should know as well that the People’s Republic of China has also claimed sovereignty over the islands. The United States believes that a return of administrative rights over those islands to Japan, from which the rights were received, can in no way prejudice any underlying claims. The United States cannot add to the legal rights Japan possessed before it transferred administration of the islands to us, nor can the United States, by giving back what it received, diminish the rights of other claimants. The United States has made no claim to the Senkaku Islands and considers that any conflicting claims to the islands are a matter for resolution by the parties concerned.

Manyin adds:

Successive U.S. administrations have restated this position of neutrality regarding the claims, particularly during periods when tensions over the islands have flared, as in 1996, 2010, and 2012.

Japan has done its level best to ignore this state of affairs with, I might add, a certain amount of help from the journalistic community.

But understanding this background is important to an understanding of recent tensions in the US-Japan-China triangle.

On August 17, 2010, in a news item little noted, apparently, except by me, Japan Times reported:

The Obama administration has decided not to state explicitly that the Senkaku Islands, which are under Japan's control but claimed by China, are subject to the Japan-US security treaty, in a shift from the position of George W Bush, sources said Monday.

The administration of Barack Obama has already notified Japan of the change in policy, but Tokyo may have to take counter-measures in light of China's increasing activities in the East China Sea, according to the sources. 

Although the defense treaty apparently doesn’t require this kind of public affirmation (it covers areas under the administration of Japan, not just sovereign territory), apparently the Obama administration’s backpedaling was taken in Tokyo as a worrisome sign that it might be giving aid and comfort to the PRC.

As to the “counter measures”, I believe that they involved the deliberate provocation of detaining the hapless Captain Zhan and his fishing boat off the Senkakus a few weeks later, declaring the intention of trying him in Japanese courts, and achieving a crisis in Japan-China relations (rare earths!) in which Hillary Clinton, perhaps by pre-arrangement, plunked the U.S. firmly on Japan’s side—and issued  the explicit statement covering the Senkakus under the treaty.  But let’s set that aside for another discussion.

In 2012, the Japanese government, rather ignobly stampeded by Shintaro Ishihara’s threat that his Tokyo Governate would acquire some of the Senkakus from their private Japanese owner, nationalized three of the eight islands by purchase.

Now, looking at the background, was this act of outrance directed at the People’s Republic of China…or the United States, whose position is that the fate of the islands should be negotiated?

I suspect one big reason that the PRC insistently yanks Japan’s chain on the Senkaku matter is because it’s a point of friction in US-Japan relations, and serves to remind the United States of its “honest broker” responsibilities in East Asia.  And the United States, in order to show it's not entirely in the China-containment bag, makes conciliatory noises about the Senkakus to Beijing.

It appears that the United States is unwilling to let the Senkaku matter rest, and put pressure on Japan last week to acknowledge that issues existed in order to smooth the way for Japan-PRC rapprochement.  At a recent meeting in Beijing, the PRC and Japan grunted out this formulation:

The two sides have acknowledged that different positions exist between them regarding the tensions which have emerged in recent years over the Diaoyu Islands and some waters in the East China Sea, and agreed to prevent the situation from aggravating through dialogue and consultation and establish crisis management mechanisms to avoid contingencies.

Per the New York Times China Diplomatic Correspondent Jane Perlez, the United States promptly spun this as “agreeing to disagree” i.e. a welcome admission that differences existed.

Judging by an article in the National Review, Japan let it be known through its channels equally promptly that the “different positions” referred to “tensions” over the islands, not the sovereignty of the islands themselves.

So “agree to disagree” about nada.  Basically, a face-saving exercise enabling resumed diplomatic contacts between Japan and China.

And, of course, no mention of the U.S. non-position on Senkaku sovereignty.

One can assume the backstory is that the United States finds its geopolitical plate unpleasantly heaped with ordure in the Middle East and Ukraine, is unwilling to add to its problems by continuing to mix things up with China in the East and South China Seas for the time being and, furthermore, doesn’t want to see the PRC turn its back on the West in order to make sticky, slobbering authoritarian love with its fellow pariah, Russia, in Central Asia.

Time, therefore, for a charm offensive and a call for comity, perhaps seasoned with the quiet threat that, once again, the PRC’s banks might otherwise find themselves as risk of getting embroiled in the U.S. Treasury Department’s sanctions jihad against Russia (a ploy that has been trotted out over North Korea and Russia and is feared and resented by the PRC).

And that, I think, illustrates the reason why the U.S. allows this bizarre state of affairs over Senkaku sovereignty to persist.

It gives the United States leverage in East Asia against the PRC and, perhaps more importantly, against its rather headstrong ally in Japan.

In terms of underreported stories, the Abe administration’s arms-length relationship with the Obama administration is also a worthy contender.  Strategically and emotionally, Abe is more at home with the Dick Cheney/neo-con group in the United States.  Abe was an enthusiastic participant in Cheney’s envisioned China containment "Asia Security Democratic Diamond" (US, Australia, India, and Japan) during his first term and, when he and his representatives come to the United States, it’s  conservative outfits like the American Enterprise Institute and the Hudson Institute that do the hosting and arranging.

Abe wants to ally with the US government, and he determinedly cultivates the United States.  At the same time, he wants to exploit the support of the U.S. government to increase Japan’s diplomatic and economic clout in East Asia, in part by encouraging polarization between the PRC and its smaller democratic neighbors.  The United States has gone along, because it sees itself and the pivot profiting from a dynamic that focuses on U.S. military power more than Chinese economic muscle.

But in an era of heightened confrontation with China and shoulder-to-shoulder rhetoric, the U.S. does not have a huge number of tools with which it can pressure Japan.  Any doubters might look at the rather fraught progress of the TPP trade pact negotiations between Tokyo and Washington.

But America does have the Senkakus.  In particular, I believe it can deploy the threat that it will openly repudiate Japan’s claim to sovereignty over the islands, and call for negotiations between the PRC and Japan.  And disputing sovereignty over the worthless rocks would also involve some slicing and dicing of the Exclusive Economic Zone and the reputedly worthwhile energy resources beneath the disputed waters.

I believe the U.S. would be rather loath to surrender that leverage.  So it’s not particularly interested in seeing the Senkaku issue go away.

My personal opinion is that the Senkakus are, for the United States, a wasting asset.  If the anti-mainland DPP, which continually plays footsie with Japanese ultranationalists thanks to the colonial heritage (little known fact: ex-president and independence stalwart Lee Tenghui’s brother is enshrined at Yasukuni), wins the presidency in the upcoming elections on Taiwan, one rumored piece of policy involves ceding Taiwan’s claims to the Senkakus to Japan.  

If that happens, much of the U.S. moral and diplomatic standing on negotiation of the Senkaku sovereignty issue would be swept away.

So, I think, for the Senkakus, the message to the U.S. is “make hay while the sun shines”.  This productive and useful conflict might not be around forever.

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…

Who’s the Biggest Asshole in Asia?

You are!  No, you are!

Now that Shinzo Abe’s LDP has rolled to triumph in Japan’s upper house elections, we can return to the pressing matter of Chinese and Japanese fingerpointing over the Senkakus and which nation is the real source of instability in the region—while both sides nervously look over their shoulders to see which story the U.S. is inclined to believe.

Today, Japan declared that a Chinese military aircraft intruded into Japanese airspace:

Japan's Defence Ministry said a Chinese military aircraft flew through airspace between Okinawa prefecture's main island and the smaller Miyako island in southern Japan out over the Pacific at around noon and later took the same route back over the East China Sea.

 "I believe this indicates China's move toward further maritime expansion," Japanese Defence Minister Itsunori Onodera told reporters, in comments carried on public broadcaster NHK.

According to the Japanese government the aircraft in question was supposedly a Chinese Y-8 airborne warning plane (a four engine turboprop).  However, the idiots at the Irish Times headlined the story as “Japanese warplanes scrambled after Chinese fighter jets enter airspace”.

Guys, the Reuters article you cut and pasted didn’t say that; so where’d that come from?

The Miyako Islands are about 300 km from Okinawa.  That’s a lot of empty ocean, so it’s not like the PRC airforce was accused of buzzing Tokyo.  However, thanks to its island possessions, Japan has been able to cobble together a pretty much unbroken stretch of 12-mile territorial waters (the basis for determining national airspace) almost down to the Senkakus.  And foreign military aircraft—unlike foreign military vessels—have no rights of innocent passage through national airspace.

Sun Bin had a very interesting post on Japan’s impressive territorial water/exclusive economic zone assets (and also points out that Japan forgoes the 12 mile limit in the Tsugaru Strait between Honshu and Hokkaido in order to permit US nuclear subs to transit without “entering” Japan).

On the matter of China, I believe that the Japanese government is willing to lie about the details of its confrontation with China, especially in order to serve the paramount good of managing the all-important U.S. government relationship.  I am not making any moral judgments here.  I am simply stating my opinion based on what I perceive as truth-stretching by Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara during the first Senkaku crisis in 2010.

Of course, judging by the “China claims Okinawa” media frenzy of this year and the botch of the airspace intrusion story (thank you, Irish Times), it doesn’t look like the Japanese government needs a lot of help.

The PRC is unpopular, unlikable, and has been certified as being aggressive and unpleasant in its maritime claims.  Its state media is unapologetically all about serving the party and state interest, not the cause of objective journalism.  Japan gets a pass because it is perceived as the nice democracy, the hapless victim of Chinese skullduggery.

Things have changed a bit with the ascendancy of Mr. Abe.

For the first time in a long time, the United States is concerned about Japanese nationalism championed by Mr. Abe, particularly because it calls for an independent Japanese security policy and a repudiation of the U.S. victor’s justice constitution that has constrained Japan’s regional military activities.

Mr. Abe’s foreign policy stance is all about maximizing Japanese freedom of movement—while forestalling an open divergence of aims with the United States.

Therefore, it is important for Japan to appear the injured party in any confrontation with China…and, I wouldn’t put it past Japan to orchestrate its own mini Tonkin incident to make sure that the PRC gets caught out in the most conspicuous and well-documented way possible.

As the Chinese air intrusion incident grabbed the headlines, the Abe government also started its post-election nibbling at the pacifist constitution.  Per Reuters, reporting on a story in Yomiuru Shimbun:

Japan is likely to start considering acquiring the ability to launch pre-emptive military strikes in a planned update of its basic defense policies, the latest step away from the constraints of its pacifist constitution.

Apparently the first bite of the apple is the ability to launch an independent strike against North Korean missile installations, a capability that the US government, with 28,000 troops in South Korea within range of North Korean retaliation, probably finds less than enchanting.  The South Korean government, already at loggerheads with the Abe administration, will probably be equally displeased.

Maybe the media minders in the Japanese cabinet decided that it was a good idea to give the world a two-fer, balancing a piece of unsettling Japanese neo-nationalism with a story about that nasty Chinese boogeyman.

At the same time, China wants to tattle on Abe to the U.S. as the real source of instability in the western Pacific—a story that the U.S. may not be disinclined to hear, given the concern that Abe is pursuing a strategy of polarization with China that may be good for Japan, but not great for the United States.

I’m not saying the PRC won’t act like jerks and step over the line in the matter of the Senkakus.  And maybe they did send a turboprop rumbling over a meaningless stretch of Japanese ocean in order to yank Tokyo’s chain and try to get Japan to over-react.  I’m just saying I’ll give as much credence to a Chinese denial as a Japanese accusation if and when an incident occurs.

Perhaps I am unwilling to cut Mr. Abe slack because of his affinity for Dick Cheney, whom I regard as a ruthless, no-holds-barred "virtuous conspirator" who regarded the media as a tool of propaganda and misinformation that was ripe for manipulation.

For the entertainment of readers, I provide a partial history of neocon hijinks relating to China during the George W. Bush administrations—with a final twist of Abe.

George W. Bush, like his father, George H.W. Bush, had no particular axe to grind vis a vis the PRC.  However, the Bush administration’s eminence gris (or noir, if you prefer) for foreign policy, Vice President Richard Cheney, was perhaps the most committed and determined high-ranking advocate of existential confrontation with the People’s Republic of China since Douglas MacArthur.

In 2006, in the American Prospect, Robert Dreyfuss described the Cheney outlook on the People’s Republic of China, based on the account of Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff, Lawrence Wilkerson.  Dreyfuss wrote:

Two of the people most often encountered by Wilkerson were Cheney's Asia hands, Stephen Yates and Samantha Ravich. Through them, the fulcrum of Cheney's foreign policy--which linked energy, China, Iraq, Israel, and oil in the Middle East--can be traced. The nexus of those interrelated issues drives the OVP's broad outlook.

Many Cheney staffers were obsessed with what they saw as a looming, long-term threat from China.

...

For the Cheneyites, Middle East policy is tied to China, and in their view China's appetite for oil makes it a strategic competitor in the Persian Gulf region. Thus, they regard the control of the Gulf as a zero-sum game. They believe that the invasion of Afghanistan, the U.S. military buildup in Central Asia, the invasion of Iraq, and the expansion of the U.S. military presence in the Gulf states have combined to check China's role in the region. …

One may speculate that Mr. Cheney’s determination to keep a threatening thumb over China’s Middle East oil artery lives on in the Obama administration’s continuing involvement in the bottomless pit of money, munitions, and misery that is US Middle East policy, despite the President’s avowed interest in pivoting away from the Middle East to the peaceful and profitable precincts of Asia.

In another interview with Jeff Stein of Congressional Quarterly, Wilkerson recounted the enthusiasm of the Bush administration neoconservatives for pouring gasoline on the smoldering embers of US-China confrontation by encouraging Taiwan’s President Chen Shui-bian—whose Democratic People’s Party reflected the priorities of Taiwan’s independence-inclined indigenes, rather than the Kuomintang carpetbaggers who followed Chiang Kai-shek and took over the island in 1949—to announce Taiwanese independence.

From CQ:

“The Defense Department, with Feith, Cambone, Wolfowitz [and] Rumsfeld, was dispatching a person to Taiwan every week...essentially to tell Chen Shui-bian...that independence was a good thing.”

Wilkerson said Powell would then dispatch his own envoy “right behind that guy, every time they sent somebody, to disabuse the entire Taiwanese national security apparatus of what they’d been told by the Defense Department.”

“This went on,” he said of the pro-independence efforts, “until George Bush weighed in and told Rumsfeld to cease and desist [and] told him multiple times to re-establish military-to-military relations with China.”
 

Wilkerson’s account was supported by Douglas Paal, former head of the American Institute in Taiwan, the de facto US embassy in Taipei.

“In the early years of the Bush administration,” Paal said by e-mail last week, “there was a problem with mixed signals to Taiwan from Washington. This was most notably captured in the statements and actions of Ms. Therese Shaheen, the former AIT chair, which ultimately led to her departure.”

Therese Sheehan was the previous head of AIT—and was married to Larry DeRita, Rumsfeld’s chief press flack at the Pentagon. She used her bully pulpit to push for Taiwan independence and support the credibility of the DoD approach until Colin Powell demanded her resignation and she was removed in 2004

In 2007, James Fallows recounted another anecdote concerning the Cheney China mindset conveyed to him by ex-US Senator Gary Hart:

[Senator Hart served] as co-chair of the "U.S. Commission on National Security in the 21st Century," aka the Hart-Rudman Commission.

Early in 2001, the commission presented a report to the incoming G.W. Bush administration warning that terrorism would be the nation's greatest national security problem, and saying that unless the United States took proper protective measures a terrorist attack was likely within its borders. …

At the first meeting, one Republican woman on the commission said that the overwhelming threat was from China. Sooner or later the U.S. would end up in a military showdown with the Chinese Communists. There was no avoiding it, and we would only make ourselves weaker by waiting. No one else spoke up in support.

The same thing happened at the second meeting -- discussion from other commissioners about terrorism, nuclear proliferation, anarchy of failed states, etc, and then this one woman warning about the looming Chinese menace. And the third meeting too. Perhaps more.

Finally, in frustration, this woman left the commission.

"Her name was Lynne Cheney," Hart said. "I am convinced that if it had not been for 9/11, we would be in a military showdown with China today." Not because of what China was doing, threatening, or intending, he made clear, but because of the assumptions the Administration brought with it when taking office.

Fortunately for the PRC, as Senator Hart declared, the calamity of 9/11 intervened to shift the focus of the Bush administration and Mr. Cheney to the Middle East and China was credentialed as a U.S. partner in the War on Terror.  Nevertheless, Mr. Cheney’s right-hand man, John Bolton, was able to persuade the European Union not to revoke its post Tian An Men arms embargo against the PRC, a ban which still exists and, as a memory and warning of the PRC’s near approach to permanent pariah status, rankles Beijing to this day.

PRC President Hu Jintao had the misfortune of visiting Washington in 2006, when Vice President Cheney and his militant faction were riding high.  China's role as an impediment to Bush administration policies on Iran as well as North Korea did not make for a particularly hospitable environment for Hu's visit.

As Dana Milbank reported at the time:

   

 The protocol-obsessed Chinese leader suffered a day full of indignities - some intentional, others just careless. The visit began with a slight when the official announcer said the band would play the "national anthem of the Republic of China" - the official name of Taiwan. It continued when Vice President Cheney donned sunglasses for the ceremony, and again when Hu, attempting to leave the stage via the wrong staircase, was yanked back by his jacket. Hu looked down at his sleeve to see the president of the United States tugging at it as if redirecting an errant child.

    Then there were the intentional slights. China wanted a formal state visit such as Jiang [Zemin] got, but the administration refused, calling it instead an "official" visit. Bush acquiesced to the 21-gun salute but insisted on a luncheon instead of a formal dinner, in the East Room instead of the State Dining Room. Even the visiting country's flags were missing from the lampposts near the White House.

In addition to his sunglass-donning transgression, Cheney also had to deny he had marked Hu's Oval Office briefing by taking a nap in his chair (thereby, perhaps inadvertently, leaving the impression that he had actually chosen to feign sleep in order to show his contempt for the Chinese leader).

The capper to the disastrous visit was the outburst during Hu’s speech on the White House lawn by Dr Wang Wenyi of the Falun Gong spiritual practice movement, who gained access to the speech as a credentialed correspondence.

US news reports first concentrated on Dr. Wang’s dire—and legally more problematic statements—along the lines of “President Hu, your days are numbered!”

Subsequent reports concentrated on the more civil disobedience-styled Let My People Goisms such as “President Bush, stop him from persecuting Falun Gong!”. More recent reports merely described Dr. Wang as “pleading with Bush to stop the Chinese president from persecuting the Falun Gong”.

Ming Pao reported more categorically that Dr. Wang declaimed in a piercing voice, shouting exhortations such as “Heaven will destroy the Chinese Communists”, “Leave the Party”, “10 million heroes have left the party, when will you leave?”, “Judge Jiang Zemin, Luo Gan, Zhou Yongkang” and “Falun Practice is Great”.

The Secret Service did not cover itself in glory, as Milbank described:

 90 seconds into Hu's speech on the South Lawn, the woman started shrieking, "President Hu, your days are numbered!" and "President Bush, stop him from killing!"

 Bush and Hu looked up, stunned. It took so long to silence her - a full three minutes - that Bush aides began to wonder if the Secret Service's strategy was to let her scream herself hoarse. The rattled Chinese president haltingly attempted to continue his speech and television coverage went to split screen.

The revelation that the White House had granted Dr. Wang a temporary press pass in the name of the Epoch Times probably did not elicit a forgiving shrug from the Chinese government.

The Epoch Times, extensively distributed in the United States as a free newspaper, was widely known as the organ of the Falun Gong, which had been at loggerheads with the Chinese Communist Party ever since the Chinese government suppressed its practice as subversive in 1999.

Dr. Wang was not a journalist by profession. She was a pathologist, and the lead researcher on Falun Gong's hot-button issue--the alleged vivisection of Falun Gong practitioners by the Chinese government at a facility in Shenyang, and the sale of their organs for transplant purposes.

And, beyond Falun Gong’s well-known hostility to the Chinese Communist Party and Dr. Wang’s central role in Falung Gong’s most impassioned crusade against the Chinese regime, her prior personal history of confronting Hu Jintao was a matter of public record.

More Milbank:

But as protocol breaches go, it's hard to top the heckling of a foreign leader at the White House. Explaining the incident -- the first disruption at the executive mansion in recent memory -- White House and Secret Service officials said she was "a legitimate journalist" and that there was nothing suspicious in her background. In other words: Who knew?

Hu did. The Chinese had warned the White House to be careful about who was admitted to the ceremony. To no avail: They granted a one-day pass to Wang Wenyi of the Falun Gong publication Epoch Times. A quick Nexis search shows that in 2001, she slipped through a security cordon in Malta protecting Jiang (she had been denied media credentials) and got into an argument with him. [emphasis added]

It is difficult to avoid the suspicion that somebody in the White House press office thought it might be a fun prank to throw Hu together with a Falun Gong activist.

A quote from the AP report summed up the debacle:

"It's hugely embarrassing," said Derek Mitchell, a former Asia adviser at the Pentagon and now an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

China "must know that this Bush administration is good at controlling crowds for themselves, and the fact that they couldn't control this is going to play to their worst fears and suspicions about the United States, into mistrust about American intentions toward China."

Mr. Cheney further earned PRC mistrust by pursuing a North Korea regime change policy whose scope threatened, either by intention or design, to undermine the PRC’s access to the global financial system.   In a lengthy process that began in 2005, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned and sent into receivership a small Macau bank, Banco Delta Asia—whose owner, Stanley Au, was a well-connected figure in Beijing--on rather dubious evidentiary grounds that it had acted as a conduit for North Korean money laundering.  In testimony before Congress, an administration figure responsible for the strategy asserted that the BDA sanction was a threat directed at the People’s Bank of China—“killing the chicken to scare the monkey”--to cease its relations with North Korea or else suffer the same fate.

In another lucky break for the PRC if not the rest of the world (there is no evidence of coordination between Beijing and Pyongyang), North Korea detonated a nuclear weapon in October 2006 to demonstrate its extreme umbrage at the United States; the shock brought the Cheney program to a screeching halt.

Vice President Cheney suffered the indignity of having his foreign policy team sidelined in favor of moderates favored by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.  Nevertheless, in 2007 Mr. Cheney journeyed to Asia and personally attempted to will an anti-China alliance of the United States, India, Japan, and Australia into existence--in defiance of Bush administration policy, as Australia’s News Corp reported:

Australia has been approached to dramatically upgrade its three-way security arrangements with Japan and the US to include India in a four-way security agreement that would encircle China.

The Japanese Government and US Vice-President Dick Cheney are keen to include the growing economic and military power of India in the already enhanced "trilateral" security arrangements, locking together the three most powerful democracies of the Asia-Pacific region.

Mr Cheney gave the Japanese proposal new life on his recent visit to Japan and Australia after sections of the Bush administration rebuffed the plan.

…

Mr Cheney's backing for the plan, which is understood to be strongly supported by the new Japanese Prime Minister, came only two weeks before Tuesday's signing of a historic security declaration between Japan and Australia.

That declaration put security, intelligence and military relations on the highest level they have been since World War II.

The disclosure of Mr Cheney's support for a plan that would close the back door on China is likely to cause deeper concern in Beijing, which is already accusing the US of attempting to contain its growth and influence.

Readers tempted to dismiss Mr. Cheney’s Asian odyssey as the quixotic gesture of a disgraced has-been will be interested to learn that the Japanese prime minister in 2007 who so strongly supported the China containment initiative was none other than Shinzo Abe, during his first, brief, and disastrous administration.   

During his 2012 political campaign, Mr. Abe affirmed his vision of a U.S.-Japan-India-Australia "diamond" containing China.  His most striking and successful foreign policy initiative since taking office (other than deepening Japan-China enmity) has been obtaining the enthusiastic endorsement of a Japanese-Indian security partnership by Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh.

Maybe "rising Japan" really is a source of instability in East Asia.

Map of Japan's territorial waters and Exclusive Economic Zone from Sun Bin's blog; see link above.