A top Chinese general yesterday sought to distance the country from claims by some of its academics that the Ryukyu Islands, which include Okinawa, do not belong to Japan.
Lieutenant General Qi Jianguo (戚建國), deputy chief of the General Staff of the People’s Liberation Army, told a security conference in Singapore that the academics’ views did not represent China’s official position.
The People’s Daily, China’s most circulated newspaper, had published an article last month written by two academics from a top state-run think tank that argued Beijing may have rights to the Ryukyus.
Photo: AFP
The lengthy article argued that the island chain was a “vassal state” of China before Japan annexed it in the late 1800s.
“This is only an article of particular academics and their views on these issues... It does not represent the views of the Chinese government,” Qi said at the annual forum known as the Shangri-La Dialogue.
However, he repeated Chinese arguments for China’s historical claims over a set of tiny uninhabited islets in the East China Sea known as the Diaoyu Archipelago (釣魚群島) in China, the Diaoyutai Islands (釣魚台) in Taiwan — which also claims them — and the Senkaku Islands in Japan.
“I have to say Diaoyu Islands and Ryukyu Islands and Okinawa Islands... the first, and the second and the third, are not the same nature. The Chinese government on this is very clear,” he said.
Beijing and Tokyo have been locked in a long-running dispute over the island cluster in the East China Sea, which Tokyo administers, but is claimed by Beijing and Taipei.
The two nations have stepped up a war of words in recent months, with Chinese vessels regularly entering waters around the islands, stoking fears of armed conflict.
Some Chinese see historical ties as a basis of sovereignty and dismiss Japan’s possession of the islands as a legacy of its aggressive expansionism that ended in defeat at the end of World War II.
Before being annexed into Japan in the late 19th century, the independent Ryukyu Kingdom, centered on Okinawa, paid tribute to China for centuries — as did numerous other traditional Asian states — often receiving favorable trading rights in return.
Okinawa hosts major US Air Force and US Marine bases and is home to 1.3 million people.
The US military occupied Okinawa and some other islands in the Ryukyu chain for 27 years after the end of World War II, returning them to Japan on May 15, 1972.
Far from the violence ravaging Haiti, a market on the border with the Dominican Republic has maintained a welcome degree of normal everyday life. At the Dajabon border gate, a wave of Haitians press forward, eager to shop at the twice-weekly market about 200km from Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. They are drawn by the market’s offerings — food, clothing, toys and even used appliances — items not always readily available in Haiti. However, with gang violence bad and growing ever worse in Haiti, the Dominican government has reinforced the usual military presence at the border and placed soldiers on alert. While the market continues to
An image of a dancer balancing on the words “China Before Communism” looms over Parisian commuters catching the morning metro, signaling the annual return of Shen Yun, a controversial spectacle of traditional Chinese dance mixed with vehement criticism of Beijing and conservative rhetoric. The Shen Yun Performing Arts company has slipped the beliefs of a spiritual movement called Falun Gong in between its technicolored visuals and leaping dancers since 2006, with advertising for the show so ubiquitous that it has become an Internet meme. Founded in 1992, Falun Gong claims nearly 100 million followers and has been subject to “persistent persecution” in
ONLINE VITRIOL: While Mo Yan faces a lawsuit, bottled water company Nongfu Spring and Tsinghua University are being attacked amid a rise in nationalist fervor At first glance, a Nobel prize winning author, a bottle of green tea and Beijing’s Tsinghua University have little in common, but in recent weeks they have been dubbed by China’s nationalist netizens as the “three new evils” in the fight to defend the country’s valor in cyberspace. Last month, a patriotic blogger called Wu Wanzheng filed a lawsuit against China’s only Nobel prize-winning author, Mo Yan (莫言), accusing him of discrediting the Communist army and glorifying Japanese soldiers in his fictional works set during the Japanese invasion of China. Wu, who posts online under the pseudonym “Truth-Telling Mao Xinghuo,” is seeking
‘SURPRISES’: The militants claim to have successfully tested a missile capable of reaching Mach 8 and vowed to strike ships heading toward the Cape of Good Hope Yemen’s Houthi rebels claim to have a new, hypersonic missile in their arsenal, Russia’s state media reported on Thursday, potentially raising the stakes in their attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and surrounding waterways against the backdrop of Israel’s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The report by the state-run RIA Novosti news agency cited an unidentified official, but provided no evidence for the claim. It comes as Moscow maintains an aggressively counter-Western foreign policy amid its grinding war on Ukraine. However, the Houthis have for weeks hinted about “surprises” they plan for the battles at sea to counter the