Recently China and South Korea have been leading the drive to prevent Japan from gaining a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.
South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun has publicly criticized Japan for trying to secure a UN Security Council seat while the Chinese have staged a series of anti-Japanese demonstrations in several major cities in China. These actions are likely to have considerable political ramifications for the East Asian region.
The anti-Japanese sentiment among the Chinese and Korean public has been smoldering for decades. The flames of this resentment have been fuelled as a result of Japan's approval of a new history textbook, its constant territorial disputes with neighboring countries, its bid for a permanent UN Security Council seat and annual visits by senior political figures to a Tokyo shrine honoring Japan's war dead. There are indeed several very intricately intertwined reasons behind the recent wave of anti-Japanese sentiment. But the politicization in China and South Korea of their grievances has left its mark on Tokyo-Beijing and Tokyo-Seoul relations.
Roh is anti-Japanese mainly because of South Korea's territorial dispute with Japan over the Tokdo Islands in the Sea of Japan. Faced with growing domestic economic problems and a vigorous opposition, Roh, with his minority party in parliament, could only adopt an anti-Japanese stance.
However, the economic and trade cooperation between Japan and Korea have greatly improved in recent years. Since former president Kim Dae-jung made his first visit to Japan in 2000, both sides have managed to co-exist without engendering any new conflict. Moreover, over the past two years, Korean artist Bae Yong-jun and the pop culture he represents have surprisingly taken Japan by storm. Obviously, the root of the problem of the Tokyo-Seoul relations is simpler than that of the Tokyo-Beijing relationship.
In February, just when the Chinese were celebrating the Lunar New Year holidays, the Japanese government suddenly dispatched troops to take over the lighthouse on the disputed Diaoyutai (Senkaku) Islands. However, Beijing manipulated its media not to respond, so that the public did not react fiercely. Why did Beijing seem to be avoiding confrontation with Tokyo over the lighthouse issue? Firstly, Beijing hoped that Tokyo would be supportive of its anti-secession legislation, which was already in the pipeline. Secondly, Beijing was concerned over whether Tokyo was planning to stop large parts of its development aid to China. Now these two issues have been settled and the anti-Japanese protests have taken center stage. In China, people are not generally allowed to take their opinions to the streets. Without the government's go-head, it is impossible for people to stage large-scale demonstrations, particularly in four major cities in China. Therefore, it is possible that the recent rallies have been orchestrated by the government.
Nowadays, Chinese foreign-affairs personnel differ widely over Japan policy. Even though the conventional approach of treating Japanese relations from a historical perspective is still dominant, there are some officials who believe a new approach should be adopted in bilateral relations.
Both China and Japan are now, for the first time, considered two of the world's great powers. We do not know yet what impact the new situation will have on the East Asian region. Whether China will rise peacefully or whether its actions will unnerve its neighbors depend on Beijing's Taiwan policy and the development of Sino-Japanese relations.
Antonio Chiang is the former deputy secretary general to the National Security Council.
Translated by Daniel Cheng
Taiwan stands at the epicenter of a seismic shift that will determine the Indo-Pacific’s future security architecture. Whether deterrence prevails or collapses will reverberate far beyond the Taiwan Strait, fundamentally reshaping global power dynamics. The stakes could not be higher. Today, Taipei confronts an unprecedented convergence of threats from an increasingly muscular China that has intensified its multidimensional pressure campaign. Beijing’s strategy is comprehensive: military intimidation, diplomatic isolation, economic coercion, and sophisticated influence operations designed to fracture Taiwan’s democratic society from within. This challenge is magnified by Taiwan’s internal political divisions, which extend to fundamental questions about the island’s identity and future
The narrative surrounding Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attendance at last week’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit — where he held hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin and chatted amiably with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) — was widely framed as a signal of Modi distancing himself from the US and edging closer to regional autocrats. It was depicted as Modi reacting to the levying of high US tariffs, burying the hatchet over border disputes with China, and heralding less engagement with the Quadrilateral Security dialogue (Quad) composed of the US, India, Japan and Australia. With Modi in China for the
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) has postponed its chairperson candidate registration for two weeks, and so far, nine people have announced their intention to run for chairperson, the most on record, with more expected to announce their campaign in the final days. On the evening of Aug. 23, shortly after seven KMT lawmakers survived recall votes, KMT Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) announced he would step down and urged Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) to step in and lead the party back to power. Lu immediately ruled herself out the following day, leaving the subject in question. In the days that followed, several
The Jamestown Foundation last week published an article exposing Beijing’s oil rigs and other potential dual-use platforms in waters near Pratas Island (Dongsha Island, 東沙島). China’s activities there resembled what they did in the East China Sea, inside the exclusive economic zones of Japan and South Korea, as well as with other South China Sea claimants. However, the most surprising element of the report was that the authors’ government contacts and Jamestown’s own evinced little awareness of China’s activities. That Beijing’s testing of Taiwanese (and its allies) situational awareness seemingly went unnoticed strongly suggests the need for more intelligence. Taiwan’s naval
RSS