By Kerry Brown
China and Japan’s rhetoric towards each other more resembles playground insults than rational, mature foreign policy.
There is one word so far that hasn’t been applied to the current, escalating arguments between Japan and China, and that word is “infantile.” That the world’s second and third largest economies, and two major geopolitical players, are embroiled in nasty insult matches with each other is bad enough. But the real bankruptcy of this rhetorical battle has been best illustrated by the bizarre attempts by ambassadors and agents of each country to set out their respective cases in the international “court of public opinion.”
First, there’s the irony of the Chinese government in particular utilizing the readership reach of newspapers like the New York Times externally while giving these papers huge problems when covering stories and getting journalists accredited within China. Beyond that, there is the tenor of the message. The acme of this was Chinese Ambassador to the UK Liu Xiaoming’s quite extraordinary attempt to convey the conflict between China and Japan in terms lifted from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter stories: “In the Harry Potter story, the dark wizard Voldemort dies hard because the seven horcruxes, which contain parts of his soul, have been destroyed. If militarism is like the haunting Voldemort of Japan, the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo is a kind of horcrux, representing the darkest parts of that nation’s soul,” Ambassador Li wrote on January 1 in the British paper TheTelegraph.
Read the full story at The Diplomat