The Diplomat » Sino-Japan ties

Japan Steps Up Asia Diplomacy

diplomat_admin — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 20:58:40 +0000

Unlike many of us, Japan’s premier didn’t sit back and take it easy at the end of last year. Instead, Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda took to the road to visit two of Asia’s ascending powers. He spent Christmas in Beijing, after a planned visit for earlier in December was unexpectedly postponed by China’s leaders. But it was his trip to New Delhi on December 27–28 that really energized Tokyo’s diplomatic agenda.

Noda’s willingness to rearrange his schedule to accommodate China’s desire to change the summit dates reflects an awareness of the delicacy of the moment for Beijing. The original date of the summit coincided with the deeply painful anniversary of World War II atrocities, the day Japanese Imperial Army troops captured the city of Nanjing. Postponing a planned summit meeting like this may be unprecedented, yet it leaves us wondering why Beijing’s leaders didn’t appreciate the domestic impact of hosting Japan’s leader when they picked the date. That they saw fit to ask Tokyo to reschedule reveals perhaps a bit more confusion in Beijing than is usual. But it also reveals the efforts Japanese and Chinese governments together are making to get this important bilateral relationship back on a sound footing.

Meeting on December 26 allowed Noda and Chinese President Hu Jintao to focus on a much anticipated event, namely the death of Kim Jong-il, and the succession that was by then underway in North Korea. As it has in the past, change in North Korea opened the way for Beijing and Tokyo to move beyond some of the more difficult bilateral issues between them and concentrate on their common interests in Northeast Asia. Noda had already declared his interest in sharing information with Beijing, and on consultations that would lead to regional cooperation on managing any issues that might arise as a result of instability on the Korean peninsula.

Yet it was the prime minister’s visit to India that suggested more immediate promise. Where often the Sino-Japanese relationship seems fraught, the Japan-India strategic partnership has been a source of growing potential for Tokyo. Economic relations are growing, although private sector investment by Japanese corporations seems slower than might be expected. Japan’s assistance to India in the construction of vital infrastructure projects, most notably the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor Project, has been consistent and of obvious importance to integrating India’s growing local economies. Japan has also found a ready partner in India for diversifying their access to rare earth materials, a stinging concern since the autumn of 2010, when China abruptly reduced its exports to Tokyo of these vital metals.

Less appreciated is the growing strategic harmony between Japan and India. When I visited New Delhi in November, I was astounded at the extent of interest in the Indian strategic community in furthering bilateral cooperation with Japan on everything from the development of space technology to nuclear cooperation and cyber security efforts.

If Japan had Channelled FDR…

The Diplomat — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 08:25:05 +0000

Polls show the ruling Democratic Party of Japan’s approval rating has plunged since it secured its historic, landslide election victory last year. What do you make of the party’s performance this year?

In policy terms, there are without question remarkably few accomplishments. What I would say that they’ve done well, and something they get far too little credit for, is foreign and security policy. It’s the one area where they have a vision.

Now granted, there’s a lot of continuity from the LDP. But the Futenma (Air Station dispute) and Senkaku Islands issues notwithstanding – they did mishandle those particular issues – I think they’ve been guiding Japanese foreign and security policies along certain lines. And they’ve worked on bilateral relations with countries they need to have better bilateral relations with, such as India and Australia.

The China relationship is hard because it’s difficult to say whether we’re at some sort of inflection point. China is peacefully rising no more and that has consequences for the whole region – every country in the region is scrambling to figure out what this means. So it’s really hard to say that this has been a failure. And if anything, I think as incompetently as they handled the Senkaku issue, Japan ended up not looking too bad out of it.

I also think the new national defence programme guidelines are a sign of how pragmatic the DPJ is going to be, and I think they’ve shown that they’re open to long overdue changes in security policy. They’ve shown that the Japanese government can approach security policy in a way that isn’t necessarily driven by ideology — they’re demonstrating that they’re not crazy hawks who just want to raise defence spending or revise the constitution. They are governing the country, telling people these are changes that need to be made and that they’re just doing what needs to be done. I think this has surprised many people who perhaps although they might have expected it to happen, didn’t expect it to happen as soon as it has. So I think that they haven’t received as much credit as they deserve for being pragmatic, especially since (former Prime Minister) Yukio Hatoyama has gone.

Domestically, it’s much harder to find things to be happy about, and that’s because they’re really hurt by a lack of vision here. I think something is starting to take root and we’re seeing little changes, but it has taken them too long and, given the political situation, there’s no telling how much longer they’ll have to figure it out. It’s taken them a long time to know what to embrace, and when they’ve embraced it, they haven’t quite known how to handle it. With the consumption tax they were reacting to events and they didn’t quite know what they wanted to do. Exchange rate policy has been the same thing. They were like ‘It’s OK if the yen rises, we’re OK with that’. But then when it actually rises, they say ‘Wait a second, we need to do something about this.’ There’s a lot of flailing.

Did China Overplay Rare Earth Hand?

diplomat_admin — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 03:37:36 +0000

Up until a recent territorial spat between Japan and China, most people probably knew little, if anything, about the 17 elements known collectively as rare earth metals. But news that China had halted exports of these metals to Japan at the height of a row over the detention of a Chinese fishing captain—and Japan’s subsequent capitulation over the issue—have underscored just how economically vital they are.

China has officially denied suspending exports to Japan, blaming instead stricter controls and overzealous Chinese suppliers. However, export quotas this year were 24,280 tons, down from 31,310 tons in 2009. And some reports have said there are more cuts to come, with officials suggesting that the need to check environmental degradation and a possible price collapse mean an additional 30 percent cut is necessary next year.

So why all the fuss? The problem is that China has gradually acquired more than a 90 percent share of the exports of these metals, which have proved to be a critical ingredient for green energy and high-tech products ranging from wind turbines and hybrid vehicles to mobile phones and guided missiles. Their importance stems in large part from the fact that in many industries, there’s currently no viable substitute.

Ironically, many of the rare earth metals—divided into rare earth elements (LREE) such as cerium and neodymium, and heavy rare earth elements (HREE) such as terbium, dysprosium and yttrium—aren’t actually all that rare. There are also significant rare earth deposits in Australia, India, Mongolia, Namibia, Thailand and the United States. The problem is that there’s little profit in rare earth mining unless it’s combined with downstream processes such as alloy processing.

And this is where China has stepped in. Lax environmental controls, unorganized labour, subsidies and a lack of oversight have allowed China to secure about 95 percent of global exports, despite the country holding only about 37 percent of the world’s deposits.

In many respects this shouldn’t have come as such a surprise. After all, Deng Xiaoping set the agenda almost 20 years ago when he stated that rare earths will be for China what oil was for Saudi Arabia. Soon after these remarks, China began to flood North American markets with cheap rare earth oxides both light and heavy. By 2002, Mountain Pass in the United States—which only a decade prior had stood as the world’s largest producer of rare earths—was shut down.

Today, a single mine at Bayan Obo in Inner Mongolia produces about 50 percent of the world’s rare earths, mostly LREE. The rare earths produced here are a by-product and are therefore particularly cost effective by industry standards. Most of the world’s HREE, meanwhile, come from lateritic ion adsorption clays located in Southern China.These clay-based deposits don’t require the cracking of the complex mineralogy that characterizes bedrock deposits found in other parts of the world.

How to Improve China-Japan Ties

Richard Weitz — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 02:59:14 +0000

Promoting global economic recovery and managing the consequences of climate change might officially top the agenda at this week’s Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) in Brussels. But most international attention has been focused on something quite different—whether Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao would actually speak to each other.

The two did reportedly meet for almost half an hour after dinner last night, the kind of exchange that's essential if the two sides are going to start addressing lingering tensions over the September 8 incident in which a Chinese fishing trawler collided—the Japanese say deliberately—with two Japan Coast Guard patrol boats sent to escort the vessel from disputed islands in the East China Sea. The uninhabited islets (Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China) are controlled by Japan, but also claimed by China and Taiwan.

The Japanese initially detained the crew before releasing most of them several days later. But they kept the captain for further questioning and possible trial. The Chinese government responded with increasingly vehement protests and warnings, with authorities eventually arresting four employees of Japan’s Fujita Corp, as well as an accompanying Chinese worker, on September 20. The Chinese accused them of supposedly entering and filming a restricted military zone in Shijiazhuang.

The Japanese have since released the captain, but the Chinese continue to detain one of the four Fujita employees. Yoshiro Sasaki, Hiroki Hashimoto and Junichi Iguchi returned home this weekend, but Sadamu Takahashi remains in custody pending further investigation.

Although the four Fujita employers were detained as possible Japanese spies, they were actually assessing whether to bid on a Japanese government project to construct a facility to dispose of chemical weapons the Imperial Japanese Army abandoned in China at the end of World War II. Ironically, then, the September 25 arrests have actually highlighted an area of past Sino-Japanese conflict in which the two countries are now cooperating—chemical weapons.

The Imperial Japanese Army, which brutally occupied much of China in the years leading up to 1945, left hundreds of thousands of chemical weapons shells on Chinese territory after Japan surrendered. But it’s only relatively recently that the two countries have begun eliminating these weapons, following years of delays.

The Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), which took effect in 1997, requires its parties to destroy any chemical weapons they abandoned on the territory of another country. Japan has accordingly committed to paying all the costs associated with eliminating the former Imperial Japanese Army’s stockpile, including excavating the weapons, transporting them to a disposal point and eliminating them in an environmentally acceptable manner.

What China Needs to Learn

Minxin Pei — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 02:38:50 +0000

The measure of a great power is not how it flexes its muscles, but how it refrains from doing so. But if that’s the standard by which we judge China’s handling of its recent confrontation with Japan over the detention of the captain of a Chinese fishing trawler in waters around the disputed Diaoyu/Shenkaku Islands, Beijing has clearly failed the test.

Instead of demonstrating its restraint and patience, the Chinese government needlessly escalated tensions. Even though it succeeded in forcing Tokyo to back down and release the detained captain, China gravely damaged its ties with Japan and sullied its image as a responsible great power.

To be sure, Japan wasn’t blameless (despite the portrayal of Japan as a victim in this diplomatic brawl by a sympathetic Western media). Indeed, Tokyo’s decision to detain and charge the captain was ill-considered and set off the confrontation with Beijing in the first place. Considering the hyper-sensitivity routinely displayed by Beijing on issues of sovereignty and territorial disputes, Japan’s best course of action after its patrol boats intercepted the Chinese trawler would have been quick expulsion—of everybody. (Although that said, in light of their penchant for blunders of all kinds, Japanese leaders perhaps deserve some slack).

However, Beijing’s reaction to Tokyo’s misstep was totally disproportionate: it cut off official exchanges at the ministerial level, disinvited Japanese young people to the Shanghai Expo and imposed an effective ban on the shipments of critical rare earth materials to Japan. The Chinese Premier also directly called on Japan to release the captain ‘immediately’ and refused to meet Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan at the United Nations in New York. Thus, instead of pursuing a quiet diplomatic route to seek the release of the captain, the Chinese government raised the stakes to a level that ensured an outcome that would make Japan lose face and Beijing look like a bully.

With the world anxiously watching what kind of great power China is going to be, Beijing needs to reflect on its own mistakes and learn valuable lessons that could help it reassure its jittery neighbors and avoid making similar costly mistakes in the future.

Why Japan-China Spat Hurts Both

Richard Weitz — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 03:08:18 +0000

Tensions in the current spat between China and Japan keep rising. On Sunday, China’s senior diplomat, Dai Bingguo, escalated his country’s dispute with Japan over the arrest of Zhan Qixiong, the captain of a fishing boat that collided with two Japanese Coast Guard ships on Tuesday.

The Japanese authorities have charged the boat’s captain with deliberately ramming the two Japanese ships after refusing either to leave the area or allow them to inspect his vessel. After a Japanese court on Friday authorized a ten-day extension of Zhan’s detention, Dai summed the Japanese ambassador to China, Uichiro Niwa, and urged the Japanese government to avoid ‘misjudgements’ and find a ‘wise political resolution’ to the crisis by releasing Zhan.

The collision, which didn’t result in any casualties, wouldn’t have attracted so much attention if it hadn’t occurred near disputed islands (referred to as the Senkaku Islands in Japan and the Diaoyu Islands in China) in the East China Sea. China. Japan and Taiwan all claim sovereignty over the uninhabited islands, which are located west of Japan's Okinawa island, east of China's south-eastern Fujian coast and northeast of Taiwan.

Yet the ongoing dispute is less about the actual islands than the East China Sea itself. In addition to rich fishing areas, the ocean seabed is thought to hold large deposits of oil and natural gas (estimated at over 100 billion barrels of oil and 7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas), which make it a tempting prize for both energy-poor Japan and energy-hungry China.

According to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which entered into force in 1994, a country’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) extends 200 nautical miles from its shoreline. In addition, a country’s EEZ can extend to the outer limit of the continental shelf that the country sits on if that outer edge is less than or equal to 350 nautical miles from the country’s shoreline. Unfortunately, the treaty’s language is unclear when discussing which countries have access to certain islands, such as those in the East China Sea.

The sovereignty dispute over the East China Sea concerns a body of water that separates eastern China from the southern islands of Japan. At its broadest point, the East China Sea is only 360 nautical miles wide; at its narrowest point, it is only 180 miles wide. The potential problems with such a scenario are clear.

However, despite the obvious overlap between the EEZ of China and of Japan, the Chinese government claims an extremely large area of the East China Sea through its Law of Natural Prolongation. China asserts that its EEZ extends all the way to the Okinawa Trough, which is located just off the Japanese coast, with Chinese representatives arguing that the Trough doesn’t follow the Japanese coastline very closely. In the eyes of the Chinese, this proves that China and Japan are not located on the same continental shelf, and that China’s Law of Natural Prolongation therefore applies. In addition, Chinese representatives cite the use of the islands by Chinese fishermen since the fifteenth century to bolster their ownership claims.

Japan Embracing China?

The Diplomat — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 01:47:43 +0000

Since Japanese Prime Minister Hatoyama and his Democratic Party of Japan came to power last year, Japan’s foreign policy appears to have shifted from being US-centric to more Asia-centric. Hatoyama has also talked about an East Asia Community. Is this realistic?

Hatoyama’s foreign policy goals are interesting. I don’t think his foreign policy has shifted from one side to another—I think what he’s trying to do is find a balance somewhere between the United States and Asia. Asia certainly features a lot more than it perhaps has done in Japanese foreign policy, although since Junichiro Koizumi, if you look at subsequent Liberal Democratic Party prime ministers, they were very actively trying to re-engage with Asia and China and make amends for that period under him when things were going fairly badly. In a sense, Hatoyama is carrying on that trend. But he’s also harking back to the ‘good old days’ of his grandfather’s time, when there was clearly a pro-China policy.

So, I think he’s trying to play both camps and balance the various issues with the United States and getting himself into hot water. At the same time, he’s trying to re-engage with Asia and find a balance between the two. This isn’t easy, but I think he’s doing his best. Of course, this notion of the East Asia Community is nothing new; he’s trying to reinvent concepts that have been used before. The most recent iteration of this was the East Asia Summit a few years ago, which failed for all sorts of reasons. He’s following a theme that makes sense and that many people have thought should be in place anyway in Northeast Asia in terms of a financial community, leading to a political and security community.

When Hatoyama talks about these concepts, he talks about a common currency and the need for a security framework, but it’s still a little bit vague at the moment. I think maybe he’s feeling his way with this idea and there’s a lot of work that needs to be done to put the flesh on the bones. And from the point of view of China, both Hatoyama and the principle are welcome, but I think there’s caution there for obvious reasons.

Interpretation of history has long been a sticking point between China and Japan. Do you expect the recent agreement by historians that Nanjing was an act of Japanese aggression to allow bilateral relations to move forwards?

There’s been a great deal of media coverage of the results of this joint history project, and I’ve looked at both the Chinese version and the Japanese versions. Symbolically, it’s the culmination of a project that was put in place a few years ago, when Shinzo Abe became Japanese prime minister and, in fact, the project was finished about a year to 18 months ago. The academics on both sides had finished their work, but they were waiting for the right time to publish the results. Clearly the right time was a point at which a new government was in place in Japan.

Is Japan’s Future Sustainable?

diplomat_admin — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

By the second quarter of this century, Asia will be the centre of gravity of the world economy and China will be leading the world. But while the US used ‘democracy’ as its defining diplomatic principle in the 20th century, the big question is–what will China use?

‘Sustainability’ would be a good one. CO2 emissions per capita in China will still be far below those of the US around 2030 and an affluent China will lead developing countries in advocating sustainability.

So how will Japan define itself to survive the next several decades–will its diplomacy emphasize democracy or sustainability? Of course, it must choose sustainability. Prime Minister Hatoyama has declared a goal of a 25% reduction of greenhouse gases compared with 1990 by 2020. This is a 180 degree shift in policy compared with the LDP’s ‘no policy’ approach to climate change for the last decade.

But is Japan a leader in sustainable technologies and their dissemination? The ratios of new wind power installations in 2008 were 31% in the US, 23% in China, and 1% in Japan. By this measure, Japan is 8th in the world. Meanwhile, China’s target for renewable energy is 15% of all its energy consumption by 2020. Japan must realize that it is not at present at the forefront of renewable technologies and their dissemination.

The DPJ is now planning to use both environmental taxation and emissions trading to meet the 25% reduction policy target. At present, it seems that the two approaches are being tackled by different teams. But as both policies increase the price of carbon emissions, they should be designed by the same unit of the government as should other policies such as subsidies and investment in a green new deal. In other words, key policies must be coordinated to make them more effective and synergistic.

The DPJ’s manifesto also pledges to lift the gasoline tax, a move that will increase the consumption of gasoline and thus emissions of carbon dioxide, SOx, and NOx. The Hatoyama administration must explain how it feels such a policy is consistent with its environmental policies.

If Japan is to survive, it must have sustainable environmental policies suited to the next few decades.

Tatsuyoshi Saijo is a professor at Research Institute of Sustainability Science, Osaka University