By Yoshinori Kaseda
Chinese President Xi Jinping (left), Japan Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (right). Photo courtesy Day Donaldson/Flickr/CC-By-2-0.
Tokyo’s relations with Beijing in recent years have been very tense. Mutual visits of the top leaders have been suspended since Prime Minister Noda’s visit to China in December 2011. As of October 2014, Prime Minister Abe Shinzō, in office since December 2012, has not met his Chinese counterpart.
Factors Behind the Tensions
The tensions can be ascribed to decline in Japan’s power vis-à-vis China, their territorial dispute, and their conflicting views on Japan’s wartime past.
In 2010 China replaced Japan as the world’s second biggest economy. Since then, its economy has grown to nearly twice the size of Japan’s. Its rapid growth has fueled China’s military beef-up and has raised the security concern of Japan that has a territorial dispute with China over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, which Japan had annexed in 1895 during the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95.
The territorial dispute was shelved when Japan and China normalized their relations in 1972 and was largely kept under control for decades. However, it became a diplomatic flashpoint in 2010, following Japan’s arrest of the crew of the fishing vessel that operated in “Japanese” territorial waters near the islands and corroded with two patrol ships of the Japan Coast Guard in September 2010. Instead of deporting them, Tokyo decided to put the captain on trial, which was the first of its kind. Infuriated, Beijing took retaliatory actions including a de facto embargo of its rare earth metals to Japan. The embargo paralyzed Japan’s hi-tech industry, leading to Tokyo’s disgraceful release of the captain.
The territorial tensions rose again in 2012 due to Tokyo’s nationalization of three of the five main islands of the Senkaku Islands in September 2012 by purchasing them from their private owner. That happened only two days after Prime Minister Noda met Chairman Hu Jintao who strongly opposed the nationalization. Beijing was enraged and let violent anti-Japan public demonstrations and attacks on Japanese stores and cars take place in many parts of the country. It also decided to send its government vessels and aircraft to “Japanese” territorial waters and airspace around and over the Senkaku Islands more frequently.
Abe, who replaced Noda in December 2012, denounced China’s provocative handling of its territorial disputes with Japan and other neighbors, and actively pursued the policy of strengthening Japan’s defense capability and its security ties with the United States and other countries that are also concerned about China. In July and December 2013 respectively, Abe made public his intention to provide the Philippines and Vietnam with patrol ships to help them strengthen their coast guards.
Meanwhile, Abe provoked Beijing also by questioning the appropriateness of considering Japan’s pre-1945 action toward Asian countries as invasions at a National Assembly (Diet) meeting in late April 2013.
In this context, in November 2013 Beijing, led by Chairman Xi Jinping since March 2013, established an Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) in East China Sea, which significantly overlapped Japan’s and met its strong criticism.
The bilateral relations deteriorated further over another issue of Japan’s wartime past. On December 26, 2013 Abe visited the Yasukuni Shrine that enshrines the Japanese war dead, who fought for the Emperors, including Class-A war criminals such as Tōjō Hideki, regardless of the strong opposition from Beijing as well as Seoul. It was the first premier visit since 2006. For Abe, December 26, 2013 was the one year anniversary of his premiership, but for Beijing it was the 120th anniversary of the birth of Chairman Mao Zedong who fought against the Imperial Japanese Army.
Apparently in response to Abe’s “unrepentant” stance on Japan’s wartime past, Beijing hardened its stance on the history issue. In mid-January 2014, it opened a museum to commemorate Ahn Jung-geun, Korean independence fighter, in Harbin in Northern China where in October 1909 he assassinated Itō Hirobumi, the Resident General of Korea that had became Japan’s protectorate in 1905. It was South Korean President Park Geun-hye who proposed to Xi Jinping erection of a stone monument to Ahn in June 2013. Instead, Xi decided to build a museum.
Furthermore, in late February 2014 Beijing allowed its court to accept a lawsuit by Chinese citizens who or whose family member were taken to Japan and forced to work for Japanese companies during WWII. Chinese courts had never accepted such lawsuits because Beijing relinquished its right to reparations at the time of its diplomatic normalization with Japan in 1972. This new development was prompted partly by the similar development in South Korea where in May 2012 its Supreme Court for the first time recognized the right of victims of the war-time forced labor to seek for compensations from Japanese companies although Tokyo and Seoul “completely” and “conclusively” settled the compensation issue at the time of their diplomatic normalization in 1965.
In addition, in June 2014 Beijing submitted documents of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre and “comfort women” sexually exploited by Imperial Japanese soldiers to UNESCO’s Memory of the World program.
Thawing Tensions and the Future
The tensions have been gradually thawing since mid-2014, due largely to Tokyo’s overtures. In early May, Kōmura Masahiko, the Vice-President of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) visited Beijing and met with Zhang Dejiang, Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, ranked No. 3 in the Communist Party. At a Diet meeting on July 14, Abe expressed his desire to meet Xi at the upcoming APEC meetings in November in Beijing. It was followed by an unofficial meeting between former Prime Minister Fukuda and Xi in Beijing and a foreign ministerial meeting in early August, the first of its kind since September 2012, alongside the ASEAN ARF meetings in Myanmar.
Behind the thawing relations lies the strong economic interdependence between the two countries and their recent economic downturn that has increased their desires to revitalize their economic exchanges. For Japan, China is the biggest trade partner and a growing market. For China, Japan is the second biggest trade partner (as a country) and is a leading investing country (the no. 1 in 2012 and the no. 2 in 2013). Abe must feel urged to stop economic slowdown in order to extend his power by winning the upcoming presidential elections of his party, LDP, in September 2015. Xi’s position seems more secure. Yet, he is also under strong pressure to revitalize the economy in order to contain public discontent with the Communist rule.
To conclude, Japan-China relations are likely to remain haunted by the territorial and historical disputes for years to come. Their economic interdependence would continue to limit escalation of hostilities. However, as China’s economic and military power keeps growing, the relative cost of confrontation would increase for Japan.
Yoshinori Kaseda is a professor of political science at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, Japan.
Courtesy of JTW
JTW – The Journal of Turkish Weekly – is a respected Turkish news source in English language on international politics. Established in 2004, JTW is published by Ankara-based Turkish think tank International Strategic Research Organization (USAK). For more information, please visit http://www.turkishweekly.net/
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