The Chinese, that’s who; GC must be peeing
in his pants with joy.
The battleground:
Chinese vessels from the oceanic and
fishing authorities are now rotating in and out of the contiguous waters of
Diaoyudao and even spending a little quality time in the territorial waters while
the Japanese Coast Guard do little to protect the Senkaku Islands but complain.
The optics:
The shutdown of public exchanges has come
totally from the Chinese side. The Noda administration dispatches its MOFA administrative vice minister to consult
with his Chinese counterpart…in Beijing! How
lame is that? MOFAs aren’t the deciders, and the Chinese MOFA is even less of
one, with the CCP breathing down its neck. In fact, I strongly suspect that relying
on diplomatic channels for communications was what got everyone into this mess
in the first place. The Japanese authorities completely failed to anticipate the
Chinese blowback when they went and consummated the Senkaku purchase and were
caught without even a Plan B. how likely is it that the Japanese side
The narrative:
China has managed to frame its offensive against
the background of the devastations wrought by the colonial powers, whilethe 19th
century geopolitical jockeying between two regional powers, one fading, the
other in ascendance, that led most famously to the Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895)
remains mostly stuck in the domestic consumption-only pages of Japanese
nationalist publications.
Why? No pain, no gain, but Japan feels it more
strongly. It hasn’t quite stopped playing touch football since August 15, 1945,
but full-contact China, after a massive growth spurt, isn’t obliging any more. More
substantively, high-profile brands are softer, more visible targets; it’s easy
to overlook that Toyota has local 50-50 JV partners, and Chinese employees and
suppliers. At the other end, Chinese exports show up behind third-country
brands, in the country-of-origin fine print. There is no Hanryu, no AKB48,
other than the occasional cineaste offering (and my beloved wushu serials, but that’s an acquired
taste), with broad cultural acceptance.
Where do we go from here? I’m not making any
predictions on the outcome of the battle, other than that hostilities will
subside, sometime, somehow. But damage, enduring, has been done to the bilateral
relationship and the war will go on, war by other means mostly, if maybe, just
maybe, not exclusively.
2 comments:
who's winning? if you ask me, i would say the Rice Country.
Anonymous:
China is rice to the south, wheat to the north. Either way, it wins.
Seriously, it depends very much on how you keep score. They certainly gained “ground” on the islands, and the economic setback will be somewhat harder to replace on the Japanese side. But long-term, Japanese businesses will not be the only foreign investors that will be more wary of eh political risk in China. More important, everyone saw the potential for enormous social instability in China under its current political system. That’s an even larger political risk to consider going forward. Whatever the shortcomings of Japan, instability is not one of them. If anything, crisis breeds social coherence in the immediate instance.
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