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June 22, 2005
Brothers again
Interesting little twist, following up from yesterday's post:
China called on Japan yesterday to respect the rights of Chinese fishermen, including those from Taiwan.
"The Chinese side is strongly dissatisfied with Japan's forcible expulsion of Taiwan fishermen from Chinese territory around the Diaoyu Islands," Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said yesterday at a regular briefing.
"For Japan to forcibly expel Taiwanese fishermen doing their work from that area is a violation of China's rights and sovereignty," Liu said. "We ask that Japan pays attention to the Chinese side's concerns and practically and prudently handles the related problems."
There's something kind of neat about this. Here you have a cluster of uninhabited islets, contested by China, Taiwan, and Japan. The Taiwanese send a frigate or two to escort some fishing boats as a demonstration of sovereignty. And then China speaks up on the side of the Taiwanese, some of whom, after all, consider themselves the rightful government of all of China. It seems that when it comes to territorial disputes with Japan, Chinese sovereignty -- no matter what side of the civil war you were on -- is still a strong unifying force.
So perhaps this is the solution to China-Taiwan tensions: vilify Japan. It's one of the few things that pretty much all of East Asia can agree on these days, after all. But what of Japan itself? Wouldn't it be bad if all the states of East Asia were able to put aside their differences at the exclusion of one of their own? Nah. Unlike China and everyone else in East Asia, the Japanese haven't been sufficiently repentful anyway. They pretty much deserve all the unconstructive condemnation they can get.
Posted by Daniel Widome at 04:47 PM to Asia
