Are China, Japan and South Korea fanning the flames of war?

Are China, Japan and South Korea fanning the flames of war?

There is no political framework to settle the rancorous confrontation in the South China Sea over the sovereignty of disputed islands between Japan, China and South Korea

By John Everard in the Telegraph newspaper

East Asia is a global economic powerhouse, but its economic progress has not been mirrored by progress in relationships between the countries in the region. These are mired in ancient and modern rivalries that are sometimes made toxic by strident nationalisms.

The parallels with Europe a hundred years ago are uncomfortable. Worse, unlike most parts of the world, there is no adequate regional machinery in East Asia to promote the peaceful resolution of increasingly rancorous disputes between neighbours.

Two recent articles in The Daily Telegraph – one by the Chinese ambassador to the UK, and one by his Japanese colleague – set out opposing views of one of these disputes. Tensions between China and Japan go back a very long time. Present Chinese antipathy to Japan has its roots in the brutal Japanese occupation of much of China in the Second World War – a period that has left deep scars on the Chinese psyche.

At the end of that war a group of islands, called Senkaku in Japanese and Diaoyu in Chinese, controlled by Japan since 1895, was placed under US administration. In 1972 that arrangement ended and administration passed to Japan. China claimed the islands, but lived with the status quo (with some grumbling) until September 2012, when they were sold by their private owner and bought by the Japanese government – effectively, they were nationalised.

It seems that the Japanese government took this step to prevent their sale to others in Japan who might have used them as props in support of Right-wing and nationalist political positions – their purchase was probably an attempt to calm matters.

But it backfired badly. China was furious, seeing the islands’ acquisition by the government as a provocation. On November 23 2013 China set up an Air Defence Identification Zone (ADIZ) that included the islands, which required all aircraft entering the zone to enter a flight plan and to submit radio information – a clear assertion of sovereignty over the islands.

To make matters worse, the ADIZ also included a rock claimed by South Korea. Japan and its US ally were deeply concerned, and reacted strongly. The US flew unarmed B52 aircraft through the ADIZ without complying with Chinese requirements, and Chuck Hagel, the US defence secretary, said that the US would stand by its treaty obligations to defend Japan if it was attacked. The American ambassador to Japan said that the ADIZ “only serves to increase tensions in the region”.

It is not clear whether China anticipated, let alone intended, such a reaction, and unlikely that it welcomed the closer US-Japan links that its action provoked. But it would be very hard now for China to back down and rescind the ADIZ. To do so would represent a severe loss of face – painful in any case, but almost unbearably so when Japan is involved.

A climbdown would also be difficult for the Chinese government to explain to its own people. Antipathy to Japan is widespread in China, and to show weakness on such an issue would invite a very hostile public reaction. Already, China’s lack of response to the B52 flights has been criticised as spineless by Chinese bloggers – the Chinese military will have been embarrassed by the incident. Moreover, the Chinese government has recently launched an ambitious reform agenda threatening vested interests that would probably not hesitate to take revenge by attacking the government on its Japan policy given the chance. So China is stuck.

Equally, Japan cannot back down. Sovereignty over the islands is for Japan, too, a matter of national pride, and nationalist Japanese – who carry considerable weight in politics – would ensure the death of any government that gave in to Chinese pressure.

And then, in the midst of all this tension, on Boxing Day Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister, visited the Yasukuni shrine, where (among many others) 14 class A war criminals are enshrined. It is true that, earlier in 2013, Abe refrained from attending the shrine in person, sending only a representative, and that neither China nor Korea gave him any credit for this gesture. Abe issued a “Pledge for Everlasting Peace” on his visit, and has now offered to meet Chinese and Korean leaders to explain his move. But nothing has assuaged the anger of either Chinese or Koreans, to whom Abe seems to condone the brutality of his country’s occupation of theirs.

It is not only with China that Japan has a dispute over islands. A small group called Dokdo in Korean and Takeshima in Japanese are controlled by Korea but claimed by Japan. This issue, too, is emotive – Korean schoolchildren pose for photographs in front of a large picture of the islands in Seoul’s military museum.

Meanwhile, Korean courts have started to question the 1965 settlement between Japan and South Korea of claims for compensation for Koreans either forced into slave labour during the Japanese occupation or to provide sex for Japanese soldiers. (Only part of the compensation paid by Japan reached the victims – much of it was siphoned off by the military government of the day to fund infrastructure projects.)

To the exasperation of the US, relations between South Korea and Japan – its two major allies in the region – have become increasingly acrimonious over these issues, to the extent that there is hardly any relationship between President Park of South Korea and Prime Minister Abe.

China also has disputes with the Philippines, Vietnam, and Indonesia over islands in the South China Sea, an area of complex overlapping claims. It has become increasingly aggressive in promoting its claims, building permanent structures on some islands. In December, it withdrew from a UN arbitration process dealing with its territorial dispute with the Philippines – the first time any state, let alone a permanent member of the Security Council, has taken such a step – and sent its first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, to the zone.

China has insisted that its rise is peaceful, but it is easy to understand the nervousness of its neighbours when faced with an ever increasing array of military hardware. It is easy, too, to understand the many calls in the region for increased military cooperation, and increased military budgets, to respond to the perceived Chinese threat.

The rise in China’s military power has also alarmed the US, which has defence treaties with several countries in the region. An armed spat between China and one of them would risk drawing the US and China into direct military conflict. On December 5 there was a near-collision between the USS Cowpens, shadowing the Liaoning, and one of the aircraft carrier’s escorting vessels – a reminder of how a miscalculation or accident too could cause a US-China confrontation.

If these tensions occurred in Europe there would be several regional institutions through which the parties would be urged to negotiate a solution (notably the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe). Even in Africa, a continent not always noted for peaceful development, the African Union is developing an effective track record in mediating disputes. But nothing like this exists in East Asia. Countries are left to solve their disputes bilaterally, without the support of an institutional framework. This allows stronger countries to pick off weaker ones individually.

The situation in East Asia in 2014 is uncomfortably similar to that of Europe in 1914. A rising power, then Germany, now China, resentful of past humiliations and looking for a place in the sun, seeks to change the status quo by asserting itself. Established powers (France, Japan) seek to maintain their position and fear what a world dominated by the rising power might do to them, while the superpower (UK, US) hopes that matters can be resolved without its direct intervention.

The chances of any given dispute in East Asia turning into a military confrontation are probably not large – but neither are the chances that any of them will be resolved peacefully in the near future. So for peace to continue in the region each dispute has to be contained, and all accidents leading to conflict avoided, all the time. The cumulative risk of armed conflict is not negligible.

John Everard was British Ambassador to North Korea, 2006-2008 and is the author of 'Only Beautiful, Please: A British Diplomat in North Korea’