Riot!

Well, the Chinese and the Japanese are at it again. A dispute over totally insignificant, uninhabited, worthless islands in the middle of nowhere getting totally out of control. The whole dispute was sparked off by actions of some Japanese nationalists, notably the governor of Tokyo, Ishihara, who announced that he would like to buy the islands from their private owners who are Japanese; and then the Japanese government, ostensibly in order to avoid diplomatic row with China, decided to buy these islands instead. Alas, this didn't stop the Chinese from taking to streets at all. Mostly young (so far as I cd see from Western and Japanese media) Chinese were soon on the rampage, smashing Japanese cars, Japanese run restaurants, shops, factories and convenience marts. They threw PET bottles filled with dyes and paints at the Japanese Embassy. Then, all of a sudden, these disturbances stopped as the Chinese government appealed to the public to protest more rationally.

The question of the Senkaku, as the Japanese called these islands, had been practically forgotten until Ishihara made it a frontline news. To most Japanese, who had absolutely nothing to do with these islands, it is difficult to understand why the Chinese were so hot-tempered over the issue. So the news media tends to emphasise that the area around the islands is resource rich. It is suspected that the sea bed in the area is full of oil and other useful minerals, including precious metals. The sea is a rich fishing ground (hence the name - Senkaku means thousands of catches; the Chinese name for the islands also means roughly the same thing) too, attracting many Japanese and Okinawan fishermen.

So it might look as if this was a crisis caused by cynical, territorial greed on the part of the Chinese who are now behaving like a 19th century colonial power. China is in similar disputes in the (also oil-rich) South China Sea with other Asian nations, including the Philippines, a US ally, and Vietnam. In the 90s, the expansion of Chinese naval power was a main concern for us security analysts, until the Al Qaeda question overshadowed everything in Asia-Pacific. But this does not mean security questions in Asia went away.

So, is this Sino-Japanese row just anther round of territorial disputes in Asia-Pacific? But between China and Japan, problems are a little more complicated, not least because of the question of the war time past. WW2 cost the Chinese at least ten million lives (estimates vary but now somewhere around sixteen million seems to be the most accepted figure nowadays), mostly inflicted on them by the Japanese army. The younger generations of the Japanese are utterly oblivious of this fact. If anything, they think they are the victims, as they were bombed by the US Air Force and two atom bombs were dropped on two of their cities. So whenever there is a dispute between China and Japan, the Chinese tend to get rather shrill - they are like, 'it's them again!' and go totally berserk.

And of course, developments in the post-WW2 years did not help. We in the west tend to think that  some sort of healing process has been progressing since 1945, but, China first had to go through their own civil war, killing millions more. The Communists won, which made China one of the major enemies of the US. Then they had to go through the so-called Cultural Revolution at a cost of another millions. In the meantime, Japan and America decided that the Senkaku islands should belong to Japan, without letting the Chinese have their say on the territorial issues whatsoever. I think this is another important factor to understand the Chinese reaction to the Japanese government buying up the islands. China is a country with more than 120 million people and it is now the world's No.2 economy and yet Japan and America dare ignore it!

The stand-off is still ongoing; Japanese and Chinese coast guard ships are staring at each other just off the Senkaku islands. The Chinese are threatening to overwhelm the Japanese by sending 1,000 fishing vessels to the area simultaneously. Possibly the Chinese government is calculating that they could teach Japan (and the US) not to ignore it  - on the surface, the Senkaku question looks like a minor issue, but, no matter how insignificant it might look, Japan and her allies ignore China's wishes at their peril: acting without having diplomatic consultations first cannot be tolerated. They are trying to send such message by turning this into a major crisis out of all proportions (smashing off Japanese properties in China is costing millions of dollars already - plus long-term damages to tourists industries, exports, fisheries, etc. could amount to more millions of dollars).

[A Chinese frigate, which looks like a copy of the French La Fayette class stealth frigate, off the Senkaku islands.]

Is it wise? For us level headed ordinary citizens of a free country, this is most worrying. The Japanese now fear that, if they visit China, they might be physically attacked even if they are not hostile to China at all or are even opposed to Ishihara's brand of Japanese nationalism and the government's policy regarding the Senkaku islands. Already Japanese businessmen are having second thoughts about staying on in China. By making this dispute such a divisive issue between China and Japan, they are merely helping extremists in both countries. History also teaches us that this sort of brinkmanship can easily lead to some miscalculation that causes unnecessary war. WW1 is a good example, as systems of alliances among European powers designed to deter war among them actually led to a major war. If China is testing America's resolve, there is a danger of sparking off a war with the US no one wants. Or, if this is China's ploy to undermine the alliance between Japan and the US, that would only help Japanese extremists who are willing to bring Japan back to militarism, which, in turn, could lead to another futile Sino-Japanese war.

Elsewhere, the Muslims are also at it, incensed by anti-Islamic Youtube film made in the US. I was sharing a flat with several Muslim students when the Salmon Rushdie affair brew up years ago. One thing I learnt is that they did not believe that western governments were not behind Salmon Rushdie - to me, they sounded like paranoid conspiracy theorists, but this time round, the Muslims all over Islamic countries seem to be reacting in the same way again. They cannot believe that some private citizens who happened to live in the US would just make an anti-Islamic movie to express their personal, not official, views. The Muslim violence appears to be more spontaneous than the Chinese one, but they are overreacting just the same. However, for us non-Muslims, these riots should help us understand their fragile psychological state, which is caused by poverty, injustice and insecurity in their respective countries. The same thing can be said about China. The irony is that their grievances partially come from lack of democratic rights, whilst they seem to miss the point that in a free, democratic society, people do say things you might not like. Even more ironical is that more people are now watching the film in question! (I haven't yet, by the way.)

Or simply they are rioting because their lives are hard and the issues in question are just excuses? At least in London last year, the rioters were more honest about why they were doing what they were doing ....