By Taylor Washburn
Nationalists are seeking leverage for the Senkaku/Diaoyu dispute. Japan shouldn’t play into their hands.
By now the narrative is familiar: China, brandishing a sheaf of faded maps and records, questions the basis of Japan’s authority over islands in the East China Sea. The dispute summons bitter memories of the Middle Kingdom’s humiliation at the hands of its neighbor starting in the late 19th century, but also heightens fears that Beijing is abandoning its decade-old mantra of “peaceful rise” to become the revisionist power its neighbors and Washington fear.
For the last year, this has been the tale of the Senkaku Islands, a remote cluster of rocks whose only mammalian inhabitants are goats and an endangered race of moles. China’s claim to the islets, which it calls Diaoyu, dates back at least four decades, but tensions have heightened since the Japanese government announced last year that it would purchase them from a private owner.
Just last week, however, Beijing opened up a new front in the dispute. On Wednesday, China’s leading state-run newspaper, thePeople’s Daily, ran a piece questioning the status of Okinawa, home to 1.4 million Japanese citizens as well as 25,000 U.S. troops. Its authors, two scholars at a government-backed think tank, surveyed the history of the Ryukyu Islands, of which Okinawa is easily the most important, and concluded that the legitimacy of Japan’s rule over the chain is “unresolved.” When pressed for comment, China’s Foreign Ministry refused to affirm that the Ryukyus are part of Japan, instead reiterating that “the Diaoyu Islands,” which sit to Okinawa’s west, “are China’s inherent territory,” and not part of the Ryukyus. This is hardly the first time that nationalists have attempted to sow doubt about Okinawa, but never before have questions about Japanese sovereignty been entertained at such a high level.
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