By Greg Austin
Hainan and China’s unfinished frontier wars.
We in East Asia are indeed living in peaceful times. That is the inevitable conclusion one draws in reflecting on the archives of U.S. military intelligence files from the 1930s and 1940s. In one document, Japan’s ambition, declared in January 1941 by its foreign minister, was frightening. Fresh from negotiations with the Dutch for an oil concession in the Netherlands East Indies, and mediation between Thailand French Indo-China, he told the Diet that the whole world should accept Japan’s racial idea of “hakko ichiu” (eight directions of the world under one roof), a nationalist slogan interpreted variously as a call to “universal brotherhood” (the soft version) or Japanese military domination of East Asia, and then the world, through a sacred or holy war (the main meaning as events came to show).
In 1945, American psyops teams–foreshadowing the collapse of Japan’s militarist regime–capitalized on this phrase by telling the Japanese people that they were being invaded from “eight directions,” a rather bitter irony for them.
At a more granular level, another lesson leaps off the pages of the U.S. archives, at least for me. This is a reminder of the role of Hainan in the geopolitics of the South China Sea compared with the much less significant, at least in military terms, Spratly Islands. The history of Hainan and its strategic significance both during the long Sino-Japanese war (1931-1945), and after, is not often canvassed in current discussions of the shifting geopolitical realities.
A U.S. diplomatic cable from February 10, 1939 reports the Japanese invasion and capture of Hainan. It notes that control of the island “would have a great effect on the matter of control of the South China Sea between the mainland and the island of Luzon as well as limiting the sphere dominated by [British] Singapore.” While represented at the time by Japan’s foreign minister as intended to help “suppress the Chiang Kai-shek regime,” some in China correctly interpreted it as part of Japan’s plan for territorial expansion towards the East Indies.
This action by Japan was met with far greater concern, as reflected in the archive documents, than its annexation seven weeks later of the Spratly Islands on March 30, 1939, followed by its occupation of the Paracel Islands. Japan claimed the Spratly Islands were terra nullius prior to their being occupied by Japanese nationals in 1921, but at least two of the islands had been annexed by Britain decades earlier. These documents from 1939 cast some light on how the U.S. government viewed the sovereignty of the Spratly Islands at the time, since the Japanese annexation was protested by it. The scope of the protest however was not that Japan had no claim but that it could not annex the entire Spratly group, spread out over a vast territory and comprising quite distant groupings of reefs and islets, on the basis of prior administrative action in respect of a couple of small islands.
Read the full story at The Diplomat