China's Territorial Disputes (12 page)

For Taiwan, whose foreign ministry issued a statement on 24 July reaffirming Taiwan’s sovereignty over the disputed islands, the primary concern seemed to be fishing rights. If Taiwan were to accept the 200-mile limit set by Japan, it would have to negotiate fishing allocations with Japan in the rich fishing grounds surrounding the Tiaoyutai Islands. The Taiwanese do not wish to recognize Japan’s claims over the islands, or be denied access to the vicinity, in which case, Taiwan fishermen claim, of the 2,000 boats now in operation, only 300 will survive.
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The estimated annual catch from the area in 1996 was 40,000 tons, worth NT$1.8 billion.
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Meanwhile the governor of Taiwan, Soong Chu-yu, appealed for calm and stated his country’s willingness to submit the issue for international arbitration or start joint development talks with the Japanese.
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To force the issue to a head, the Taiwanese Ilan and Suao Counties Fisheries Cooperative decided on 20 July to send a 200-boat flotilla to the islands between

28 July and 3 August,
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and could only be dissuaded from the adventure by President Lee Teng-hui himself. Councilmen from Taiwan’s Ilan county, the economy of which relies heavily on fish catches from the Tiaoyutai vicinity, then passed a resolution requesting military support for the fishermen. Sensing a political opportunity, legislators from all three major political parties represented in Taipei’s National Assembly, the ruling Kuomintang (KMT), the major opposition Democratic Progressive Party, and the New Party, followed with calls on the government to dispatch the coastguard and the navy to Tiaoyutai.
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To stave off Taiwan’s claim to the area, both the Yaeyama Fisheries Cooperative and the Ishigaki City Assembly of Okinawa reacted by petitioning Tokyo to acknowledge the lighthouse.
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After a Taiwanese fishing boat was putatively shot at by a Japanese warship off Tiaoyutai waters,
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a round of fish talks was held on 3 August between Taiwan and Japan, but although Japan agreed informally not to obstruct Taiwanese fishing vessels operating in the waters of the disputed islands, there was again no progress over the sovereignty issue.
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On 10 September, four fishermen’s associations and members of the legislature again called on the government to send warships to protect fishing rights near the disputed islands.
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Meanwhile, the Chinese Patriotic Alliance, founded in 1972 by Taiwanese students in the United States, called on both Taiwan and the mainland government to put aside their political differences and join hands in protecting Chinese territorial integrity.
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A United Daily News poll found 69 percent of those questioned supporting the use of force to resolve the issue, which so concerned President Lee, foreign minister John Chang, and then KMT secretary-general Ma Ying-jeou that all three publicly appealed for calm and peaceful cooperation to resolve the issue.
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However, there were expressed doubts as to whether the Taiwanese armed forces would be able to defeat Japan. What was left unsaid, of course, was that Taiwan might in future need to count on Japanese military assistance in the event of an attempted invasion by China. Furthermore, Japan was already Taiwan’s largest trading partner and source of overseas investment. Bilateral trade reached US$45 billion in 1996,
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and Japan invested US$394 million in Taiwan for the first nine months of 1996.
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Japan has in the past tacitly agreed to allow Taiwanese fishing boats unimpeded access to the Senkaku waters, and may continue to do so again, if Taiwan does not take too hard a sovereignty line and both countries can come up with some understanding to treat the dispute primarily as an economic issue. Taiwan’s negotiating position is relatively weak, for it is not recognized as a state by China or Japan, and not being a member of the United Nations, does not have a right to submit disputes to the International Court of Justice for resolution. As both Japan and the PRC have publicly stated since normalization of bilateral relations in 1972, the question of this sovereignty dispute will be settled directly between them and will not involve Taiwan.

Following Seinensha’s 9 September landing, MOFA announced in a press briefing the next day that the government of Japan was not involved in, and did not support, Seinensha’s activities, which was significant, since this was the first time the authorities had come out saying so since the affair started in mid-July MOFA also disclosed that on 28 and 29 August, the governments of China and Japan had reached an accord on extending the fishing agreement between the two countries first negotiated officially after normalization, now that both countries had ratified UNCLOS III. However, they were said to have discussed the Senkaku issue but could arrive at no conclusion. As to the position of the Japanese government on the lighthouse, MOFA’s stance was that “the islands are privately owned, the Japanese government cannot be directly involved ... and we consider this building as just a physical building and not a lighthouse according to Japanese law.” In other words, the Japanese government could do nothing about private property, and anyhow, there was really no lighthouse to object to. MOFAs press secretary reiterated that silence on the part of the island’s unnamed and unreachable owners indicated consent for Seinensha’s lighthouse venture, but when asked why MSA vessels could go to the islands while foreign fishing boats and reporters accredited to Japan were turned back, the press secretary said that checking on such domestic activities was really quite beyond his ministry’s competence.
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The only conclusion that could be drawn was that, irrespective of the legality of the Seinensha action, the MSA was there to make sure that they were not harassed in their endeavor to proclaim Japan’s territorial rights. However, the press secretary did seem to express his government’s concern over the international repercussions of the Seinensha action when, during the same press conference, he thrice called on all parties concerned to remain calm so as not to jeopardize existing relations.

The government of China was quite content to let the overseas Chinese of North America, Taiwan and Hong Kong take the lead in expressing the Chinese people’s outrage, until the scale of these activities, together with Nihon Seinensha’s 9 September attempt to repair the lighthouse it had first erected in July, forced Beijing to break its diplomatic silence. The Chinese foreign ministry lodged its first formal protest in Tokyo on 10 September by upbraiding the Japanese government for failing to control the activities of its citizens on the disputed islands.
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For weeks before, and even after the 18 September anniversary of Japan’s invasion of China, the Chinese government allowed Party and army newspapers to adopt a shrill, nationalist and anti-Japanese tone to counter criticisms by local and overseas Chinese of its alleged “softness” toward the Diaoyudao sovereignty issue because of its valuable trading ties with Japan.
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In a commentary, the official
People’s Daily
accused the Japanese government of “leading Sino-Japanese relations astray” by “conniving” with the right-wingers, and wondered whether their activities “have the government’s tacit support and whether there are ulterior motives for stirring up these incidents.”
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The
Liberation Army Daily
bellowed that “it would rather sustain a heavy economic cost than lose an inch of soil.”
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Still, the Chinese government attempted to downplay the controversy by instructing Foreign Minister Qian Qichen to raise the issue with his Japanese counterpart Yukihiko Ikeda at their scheduled meeting at the United Nations on 19 September.
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Ikeda reportedly agreed with Qian’s request to handle the lighthouse application “cautiously.”
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Insisting that Japan’s government did not support the activities of Seinensha, Ikeda said he would like to keep such a situation from adversely affecting the “very, very” important relations between China and Japan.
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However, no concrete steps were agreed to in order to resolve the crisis.

Three days later, a group of Hong Kong protestors and journalists set sail for the Diaoyutai Islands in a worn-out vessel. Upon being blocked by the Japanese MSA from reaching the islands, four activists jumped into the water in an attempt to swim to shore, and one of them, reporter David Chan, suffered symptoms of drowning and died after he was pulled out of the water and efforts to resuscitate him failed. Chinese Deputy Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan promptly summoned the Japanese ambassador to his office to issue a protest blaming Japan for Chan’s death. At a press conference immediately following this, MOFA was forced on behalf of the Japanese government to deny again that it was in any way involved in the activities of Seinensha, and at four separate times called on all sides to approach this matter calmly. However, MOFA also insisted that the government could do nothing to stop the actions of Seinensha because the island’s owner “did not express his objections to the group landing on his island.”
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Strangely, this Japanese owner of the island was never identified. On the same day that Chan’s funeral procession took place, Hashimoto announced that the LDP would support the government’s claims to the Senkakus. This was too much for Beijing. In his National Day Address, Premier Li Peng condemned Japan by name for violating China’s territorial sovereignty, and warned the Japanese government that failure to restrain the activities of rightists could damage bilateral relations.
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However, despite its anger, Beijing was determined to prevent ordinary Chinese from making similar protests or organizing anti-Japanese demonstrations on their own initiative. A group of 257 civilians from Beijing and Tianjin had sent a letter to Jiang Zemin and the two vice-chairmen of the Central Military Commission, Liu Huaqing and Zhang Zhen, urging them to dispatch troops to the disputed islands to assert Chinese sovereignty and remove the offending lighthouse.
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Not only did they receive no reply, but Tong Zeng, the activist who had organized the petition, was quietly flown to the city of Lanzhou, 750 miles west of Beijing, together with five of his fellow activists.
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Tong had originally planned a rally outside the Japanese embassy, but dropped the idea in favor of sending a letter of protest against the Japanese “occupation” of Diaoyudao after what he described as pressure from the Chinese authorities. Before his banishment, Tong said that the government had accused him of “interfering in foreign affairs and affecting anti-Japanese relations,”
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which in fact he was. Security was visibly tightened around the Japanese embassy, and students from Beijing University and other major academic centers around the country were placed under tight surveillance after posters calling for demonstrations were discovered on university campuses by security agents.
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In one publicized case, the government moved to censor computer communications after one message on an internet bulletin board called for protest at the Japanese embassy in Beijing.
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Although nationalism was an important component of Jiang Zemin’s philosophy of a “spiritual civilization” for China, his intention was to fill the gap in the national psyche that had previously been occupied by socialism, not to encourage provocative gestures or public demonstrations which might scare away China’s biggest creditor nation. Apparently, the absence this time of any armed fishing boats from China meant that, compared to eighteen years previously, capital, technology transfer, trade and investment had a demonstrably higher priority for the Chinese government than any unrestrained contest over the sovereignty of a cluster of barren and uninhabited rocks. It could also have meant that, lacking a strong individual leader like Deng, the collective leadership of China might not want to be responsible for any consequences arising from provoking the Japanese. Jiang was also understandably nervous about promoting any cause which might have brought students and workers onto the streets, because once public protest began, they might not have stopped at the issue of the Diaoyudao or of Japanese war crimes reparations. Small-scale protests might in all likelihood have turned into widespread social discontent with the Communist leadership itself, as a target for the disaffection of millions of Chinese chafing against job losses in bankrupt state industries, corruption by Party cadres, and the wealth and ostentatious consumption habits of the small but visible nascent affluent class. So long as any anti-Japanese diatribe was restricted to a war of words in the Party newspapers, it could in no way weaken the nationalist credentials of any or all of the Chinese leaders hoping and waiting to inherit the mantle of the late Deng Xiaoping. However, the Diaoyudao issue would become extremely troublesome were it to mushroom into an autonomous anti-establishment movement. To that end, even the National People’s Congress was prevented by the Chinese Communist Party from issuing a letter of protest regarding the problem, for fear of provoking the nationalistic sentiments of the public at large.
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Publicly, Beijing has been blaming policy-makers in Tokyo of falling under the sway of the right-wing militaristic minority, but there is reason to believe that China suspected the US and Japan of being involved in this islands fracas in a move calculated to contest, if not constrain, any attempt by China to expand its power and influence seaward. The release of Japan’s 1996 National Defence Agency “white paper” in the midst of the July crisis, which argued that China should be “watched with caution, in view of its promotion of nuclear weapons, naval and air force modernization, and its 10 percent annual increase in military spending for the past eight years,” could not have endeared the Japanese government to its Chinese counterpart.
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China has officially denounced the move by both Tokyo and Washington to reaffirm the US-Japan Security Alliance in April 1996, taking it to be an act to contain China. An editorial in the English-language
China Daily
held Washington “directly responsible” for the resurgence of Japanese militarism, “by choosing to overlook the omens of extreme nationalism in Japan while sowing suspicions on and pestering China about rising Chinese nationalism.”
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It was at this time that the Chinese authorities surprised everyone by permitting the publication and circulation in China of a controversial anti-Western and anti-Japanese popular book,
China Can Say
No.
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China could not have been blind to Japanese newspaper reports that, since late September 1996, the Japanese Air Self Defense Force had dispatched E2C early warning aircraft to patrol the Senkaku airspace.
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Unfortunately, the live-firing exercises in the Taiwan Straits conducted by China to coincide with the presidential elections on Taiwan in March 1996 could only have diminished future negotiating win-sets over Tiaoyutai, as the Japanese leadership and public became more “uniformly negative” in their suspicion of China’s intents and their apprehension of its military capabilities.