Islands in dispute in the East China Sea

[Ray]

China must teach Japan a lesson, says Chinese daily

A strongly worded editorial - "Discard illusion of friendly ties with Japan" - in Global Times said that Sino-Japanese relations suffered a serious blow on Tuesday when the Japanese government signed a deal to purchase the Diaoyu Islands with the self-proclaimed "owner".

"The friendly ties between the two countries established in the 1970s collapsed completely," it said.

The daily added: "Chinese anger of over a century toward Japan was awakened Tuesday, and will in turn affect Japanese feelings toward China. It appears inevitable the two sides will be overwhelmed by hatred again now that more conflicts can be expected. China needs to be prepared for further deterioration of bilateral ties. For Beijing, the future priority isn't to maintain stable ties, but to protect its core interests as Sino-Japanese relations sour."

The editorial said that though China was committed to building friendly ties with neighbours, the Diaoyu issue has turned China and Japan into opponents.

"China isn't used to having an adversary close by.

"...Japan inflicted painful atrocities against China in the past. It is now more developed than China, but is in decline. The balance of national power is shifting between the two. With such a close opponent, China can be spurred to action," it said.

The daily noted that Japan depends on the Chinese market more than China does on the Japanese market......

"But its behaviour toward the US and Russia demonstrates its inferiority toward strong countries. China cannot repeat what the US and Russia did to Japan. But a lesson is necessary to dispel its contempt toward China..."....

"Keeping friendly neighbouring ties is a good policy. But it cannot be achieved through one-sided begging and compromising."

http://m.timesofindia.com/world/chin...w/16363360.cms

[Dayuhan]

China must teach Japan a lesson, says Chinese daily

There's a lot of verbal spear-shaking and saber-rattling going on, but the response on the water has been pretty restrained. The PLAN has kept well away. A couple of CMS ships have been sailing around, but the Japanese Coast Guard has ignored them.

"Teach Japan a lesson" is easy to say but doing it could be complicated. In a full scale war China might prevail due to attrition, but war is an unpredictable business and a full scale war could have all kinds of very negative ramifications for China. I doubt very much that the Chinese would want to try to initiate a naval skirmish or other limited conflict in order to "teach Japan a lesson". The Japanese may call their navy a Maritime Self Defense Force but it is in fact one of the most modern and capable navies on the planet within its range of influence, and the Chinese could easily come off second best, which would be politically excruciating. Japan is a poor candidate for bullying, and going out to teach a lesson and coming back with a black eye and a bloody nose is not the message anyone wants to send to the domestic audience.

I suspect that mostly China wants respect.

I don't know that it's possible to say what "China" as a unitary entity "wants". Certainly there's a widespread desire to be recognized as a big player, and on some levels a widespread desire to show some muscle and slap someone around. I don't think China's leaders care as much about "respect" from abroad as they do with maintaining just enough jingoist spirit to keep the public eye away from domestic sources of friction. Nationalism and pride are useful things for a government, especially when the populace has good reasons for discontent.

Of course the Chinese leadership has to walk a thin line. They want to keep that pride and that nationalist spirit going, but they also have to consider that actually getting involved in conflict would not necessarily be a good thing for them. There's certainly some in China who would like to have a "splendid little war" to confirm China's arrival in the global circle of great powers, but keeping wars splendid and little is not always assured. Taking a bite at Japan or Vietnam would be risky: either could bite back, and a fight with a less than victorious outcome would be a political disaster. The Philippines would be easy, but there remains the matter of that treaty with the US. I think the Chinese could probably contrive an incident, sink the Philippine Navy and get away with it without the US actually doing any shooting, but "probably" carries some risk as well.

We shall see. So far the preferred approach seems to be to talk aggressively but studiously avoid armed confrontation, doing the pushing and shoving with the unarmed CMS as the proxy for the PLAN. I don't think there's any plan to escalate beyond that, though of course what's planned and what happens ain't always the same...

[Dayuhan]

China and Japan sailing ships around the disputed islands and issuing protests. Meanwhile, 100 Taiwanese ships escorted by 10 Taiwanese Coast Guard vessels are moving in to assert Taiwan's claim:

http://ph.news.yahoo.com/japan-prote...090542527.html

Water cannon battle between Japanese and Taiwanese ships:

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ukp...1348572069352A

The party looks set to end fairly soon, though, as a Category 5 supertyphoon is headed straight for the area:

http://www.maybagyo.com/t2kgraphsat.gif