Senkaku Irritation Level Rises

Good lord. I leave for a few days and all hell breaks loose in the Senkaku Islands.

The story of this mess is quickly told. A group of right-wing Chinese actually managed to land on the Senkakus despite Japanese obstruction and plant PRC and ROC flags there. Officials of the administration of President Ma Ying-jeou -- you remember him, the pragmatic one (O what romantic tales were told in the golden naivete of our youth) -- spoke approvingly of the appearance of the ROC flag on the Senkakus. Japanese rightists, not to be outdone, immediately riposted with their own flag....

About a dozen members of the right-wing group Gambare Nippon (“Hang In There, Japan”) swam ashore, an Agence France-Presse (AFP) journalist witnessed, from a 20-boat flotilla carrying activists and lawmakers.

The landing comes just days after Tokyo deported pro-Beijing protesters who had landed on the island, part of a chain administered by Japan, but claimed by China, which had warned against acts “harming” its territorial sovereignty.

Next -- I'm not making this up -- the Taiwan government summoned the Japan ambassador to protest this incident of Japanese landing on a Japanese island. The ROC claims it owns the Senkakus, a manufactured claim coined in the early 1970s, like the PRCs, after Japanese scientists announced the potential for oil in the seabed below. Prior to that time, as anyone can find out for themselves, neither Chinese government had considered the Senkakus to be Chinese. Since 1895, when Japan first grabbed them.

Aside: hopefully this Senkakus-are-ours nonsense behavior will forever put a stake in the zombie idea that the KMT and Ma Ying-jeou are "pragmatic." I've got a great idea! Let's call in the Japanese ambassador and upbraid him! Because that's just so fewking pragmatic! But you and I both know that reporters and commentators nattering about KMT pragmatism will continue to write as if the Senkakus were an island group located on one of Jupiter's moons that demonstrated nothing about KMT behavior.

Back to the story. Anti-Japanese protests broke out in China (WSJ's excellent piece). The Ministry of Foreign Affairs recycled bogus arguments to claim Japan "stole" the Senkakus and said Japan was "furtively occupying" them.

Furtively occupying! Laugh if you may, but this represents a rise in the level of rhetoric....

I know by now your head is spinning and you are groping for whatever painkillers and alcohol are near at hand. So let's point out a few things....

The Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs spoke approvingly of Chinese right-wingers putting the ROC flag on the Senkakus. TT reports:

“We thought that the appearance of the ROC national flag on the islands was in accordance with our sovereignty claims over the Diaoyutai Islands,” Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Tung Kuo-yu (董國猷) said.

As the Taipei Times pointed out, this skirts close to cooperation with China on the Senkaku claim, something the ROC government has said it would not do. This kind of behavior, especially coupled with the government's upgrading of its defenses on the islands it occupies in the South China Sea (a move one expert argues means that it will no longer put up with being ignored by the other claimants) also gives lie to Ma's 2008 promise -- O what romantic tales were told in the golden naivete of our youth -- that Taiwan would be a peacemaker not a troublemaker. You can look for that one in the memory hole too, next to the entry for pragmatism. It's a solid bet that no one in the international media will raise a peep about that.

Probably the least provocative thing the government has done is suggest an essay competition on the issue....

I'm not the only one who has noticed the government's apparent strategy here. I didn't have a chance to comment on it but Apple Daily ran a piece last week arguing that the government is using the Senkaku issue to irritate Taiwan-Japan relations. Yep. Recall that with the beef issue DOA, the Ma government was temporarily out of irritants to perturb its relations with the US. Making trouble in the Senkakus hits both nations at once....

• US and Japan have a security treaty. If war breaks out over the Senkakus, the US is pledged to defend Japan and has placed the Senkakus under the umbrella of that treaty. Making trouble in the Senkakus dangles that possibility before US eyes. Remote, but there it is.
• Flogging the Senkaku issue also dangles another appalling possibility before US eyes: that of Taiwan-China cooperation on political and military issues, especially related to Chinese territorial expansion. Of course there is no public support for such actions in Taiwan and the chance of such cooperation is remote, but whether Washington will understand that in an election year when attention spans are narrowing drastically as the election looms is another question
• It is obvious that kvetching at Japan over the Senkakus irritates Taiwan-Japan relations. Wasn't it especially pettily delightful to summon the Japanese Ambassador? How they must have enjoyed that, like small children furtively knocking over someone else's sand castle on the beach.

In the short term it is likely that this will blow over, as it did a couple of years ago when a Chinese "fishing boat" skipper rammed a Japanese ship in the area. However, with China expanding its military and Japan determined to defend its sovereignty over the Senkakus, the long-term prognosis doesn't look good.

MEDIA NOTE: The international media is studiously avoiding commenting on the history of the dispute. This creates a false balance between Tokyo and Beijing that, by omitting the spuriousness of China's territorial claim, actually serves Beijing by giving its claim the same weight as Japan's....

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Daily Links:

• Export orders deteriorate more than expected. It's a good thing ECFA has saved our economy, otherwise exports would be declining, orders would be falling, prices rising, wages stagnating, and we'd have no FTAs with major trading partners....Oh, wait a second....
• Sadly, female smoking in Taiwan on the rise.
• Taiwan parties gearing up for 2014 elections
• The obligatory paragraph. Man, that is one naive reporter.

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