Wed, Apr 27, 2005 page8

• Anti-Japan riots mask deep anxiety

  • By Tsai Zheng-jia 蔡增家
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  Recently, anti-Japanese demonstrations in China have brought Sino-Japanese relations to their lowest point in decades. China believes that the Japanese government's whitewash of its wartime atrocities in China in its high school textbooks and Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's visits to the Yasukuni Shrine indicate that Japan is eager to return to nationalistic militarism.

  China also regards disputes over the sovereignty of the Tiaoyu islands and the US-Japan security alliance's move to publicly identify Taiwan as a joint security concern as attempts to encircle China. As for Japan, it believes that its revised history textbooks and Koizumi's shrine visits are purely domestic affairs, and also a first step toward making Japan a normal nation. The Tiaoyu islands dispute and the US-Japan Joint Declaration on Security identifying security in the Taiwan Strait as a "common strategic objective," in Japan's view, represent a shift from a passive to an active posture in national defense policy.

  We cannot help but ask: Why do China and Japan have such different interpretations of these issues?

  These four issues -- history textbooks, Yasukuni Shrine visits, sovereignty disputes over the Tiaoyutais and the Taiwan issue -- are old bones of contention. So why have these old issues re-emerged as such violent causes of conflict? Moreover, China usually takes a low-key, restrained approach to domestic anti-Japanese sentiment to avoid disrupting Sino-Japanese relations. So why, on this occasion, has China let the demonstrations get so far out of hand?

  First, I think these questions can be explained by two phenomenons that have appeared recently in Northeast Asia: Japan's hope to become a normal country and China's growing economic strength.

  In the history of international relations, it is normal that any country would seek normalization and economic growth. But divergent interpretations of Japan's normalization and China's economic growth have given the two countries substantially different perspectives on these phenomenons.

  What is the difference in perception? For Japan, the reason it feels the need to rearm, and in this respect become a normal country, is the threat posed by North Korea. It believes that normalization at this stage is totally in line with the current international situation.

  China, by contrast, sees Japan's moves to amend its Constitution to give its self-defense force a stronger role as a way to clamp down on China's rise as an economic power and a reversion to nationalistic militarism. Therefore, from China's viewpoint, Japan's intention to become a normal country is a means of changing the current international situation.

  Taking China's economic rise as another example, Beijing believes that its economic development helps stabilize the East Asian region and its peaceful rise is a policy that is in accordance with the current international situation. Japan, on the other hand, thinks that China's economic development is tied to growing military power, and China's rise is therefore equivalent to a growth in the military threat it presents -- thereby changing the international situation.

  In ordinary times, China's and Japan's divergent perceptions would be regarded as typical in international relations, and a peaceful resolution might be expected. But on this occasion, perceptions have coincided with actual events. Japan's defense guidelines from last year describe China as a major threat to its security, a fact that has strengthened China's belief that Japan intends to revive its militarism. The discovery of a Chinese submarine in Japanese territorial waters suggests to Japan that China intends to break through the Pacific island chain to become a maritime power, reinforcing Japan's belief in the China threat.

  With countries that behave reasonably, when differences in perception occur, they can still restrain their responses in order to preserve bilateral relations. The worst-case scenario is that both countries light a fuse that results in a shattering of the balance of power. Unfortunately, such a fuse exists in the form of Japan's bid for a permanent seat in the UN Security Council and disputes over oil exploration and development in the East China Sea.

  Let's return the focus to the riots in China. We can see that the demonstrations are a way for Chinese people to express their discontent over Japan's gradual change in its national defense policy, in which it seeks to protect itself from China. Also, China is using Japan's growing nationalistic militarism as an excuse to support its prejudices about Japan. China's protests against Japan are just a way of disguising its anxiety over the possibility that Japan could challenge its ambition of achieving hegemony over East Asia.

  Tsai Zheng-jia is an assistant research fellow in the Institute of International Relations at National Chengchi University.

  TRANSLATED BY LIN YA-TI
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