Tensions over disputed territories in Asian waters continue to unsettle relations and threaten stability in the region. In a Q&A, Douglas Paal analyzes the competing claims and assesses the possibility of anxieties descending into deeper conflict.
Paal argues that Asia needs to first get past leadership transitions and elections and then give measured diplomacy a chance to cool tensions. Diverting the competition for energy and for marine resources into separate dialogues is a good place to start and territorial claims should be shelved for now.
- Why are tensions over the disputed islands on the rise?
- Why are Japan and China renewing claims over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands?
- What is the situation in the South China Sea?
- With many of these claims over small rocks, what is ultimately at stake?
- Is there a risk of war?
- What should be done to reduce tensions?
- How should the United States respond to these conflicts?
Why are tensions over the disputed islands on the rise?
The common media narrative is that China is being more aggressive. But if you trace back the origins of the latest flare-ups—in the South China Sea, East China Sea, and there’s even a China-South Korea rock that they’re arguing about—they actually all started outside of China. What we’re seeing from China are exaggerated reactions, and people notice that more than what was done by the Philippines, Vietnam, Japan, or South Korea.Why are Japan and China renewing claims over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands?
The governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, has long been a controversial figure in Japan. He’s not very consequential to day-to-day government, but he’s an idea guy and has been trying to move Japanese political opinion to the right. He is quite hostile to China and would like to see the glory days of old Japan restored in many ways.
He saw an opportunity when the family that owns three of the Senkaku Islands decided they wanted to sell them. He could buy them and make them into a kind of playground for his point of view and use it to bait the Chinese.
The Japanese government responded with sort of a half measure. The Japanese didn’t say don’t do it, leave things alone; they thought that might be politically unpopular. They didn’t say go ahead and do it because they knew that would bring a lot of grief from China that they couldn’t handle.
So they came up with a middle way that was to have the government buy the islands, nationalize the islands directly from the national budget rather than from the governor’s budget in Tokyo, and keep Ishihara from having them as his playground.
Well, the Chinese see this word “nationalization,” and they say, “They’re changing the status quo, we had a deal back in the 1970s, and you’re trying to change the deal. In the 1970s, we were weak. Today, we’re strong, and you, Japan, are weaker than you were back then. The correlation of power has shifted, and you should be more respectful of our views, and therefore, we’re going to let you know.”
Before you know it, public statements become public demonstrations in the streets. The Chinese government is partly organizing and partly restraining them, because it doesn’t want to get on the wrong side of the people on the question of national pride and patriotic behavior.
China’s in a political transition—if you don’t act patriotic as a leader, and sort of feed this sentiment of anti-Japanese feeling, then you might get stabbed in the back in the in-house dealings for power in China.
There is also a kind of echo chamber. Japan is going through a political process of transitioning to new leadership, very likely an upcoming election. Everybody in Japanese political life proceeds with that as background. China has a transition preceding this, and then this issue pops up, created by someone who’s not in the national government of either.
What is the situation in the South China Sea?
In Southeast Asia, the Chinese got a lot of attention this year because they took the position of establishing a municipality in some of the disputed islands. It’s actually just a paper exercise—there are no new troops and no new civilian authorities. It’s just announcing that this territory is under a new civil organization.
China did this because the Vietnamese did the same thing in June, so the Chinese matched them. But the Chinese did it with their big media and a lot of noise, and Vietnam was never noticed as the West doesn’t have reporters in Vietnam the way it does in Beijing.
And this led to the reporting that China is upping the ante and taking an aggressive stance. But when the Chinese see these reports from Western media, they say, “Hey, we didn’t start this, they did. Don’t you ever notice that?”
So you get all these bad feelings, and even more anger builds up because China feels that it is doing the right thing to respond to what Vietnam did, and the West is blaming them for what Vietnam did. So you can see how the emotions get wrapped up. Then go back to the leadership transition and the politics, and it doesn’t get any easier. This is a time when we need to get past elections, past transitions, and allow some cool diplomacy to go to work.
With many of these claims over small rocks, what is ultimately at stake?
People really did not pay a lot of attention to these islands historically, whether in the East China Sea or the South China Sea, because they’re basically hazards to navigation. You want to stay away from them because you might sink your boat if you go too close.
In the 1970s, people started to say, “Maybe there’s oil and gas there.” Drilling has produced some results—it’s not stupendous, it’s not a new Saudi Arabia, but there are some results. Vietnam is taking in thousands of barrels from some of the wells the country has in its areas offshore. And so people think, “We ought to get in there before somebody else puts their straw into our reservoir and takes our oil.” So there’s a competition to get in.
Most of the big oil companies that I’ve had a chance to talk to don’t think there’s that much there, and certainly, because it’s disputed territory, they don’t want to get involved. It’s too politically risky. So you have small national companies basically getting into this at the direction of their governments. It’s probably bad energy policy, and sharp elbows are used in the fight for access.
The second category of concern—one that’s being driven by domestic changes in all the countries involved—is the need for seafood. Rising incomes in Vietnam, China, and elsewhere cause people to want to eat more seafood; they have money to buy the seafood.
China’s industrialization has basically polluted its internal waters to the point that Chinese can’t sustain the seafood there. They’ve fished out the banks along the China coast. Vietnam has done the same thing. Vietnam is a major exporter of seafood to the United States, but it has fished its area out.
They are all going farther afield, and one of the places you go is where you have outcroppings of land in the South China Sea or East China Sea, because that’s where you’ll find fish.
Is there a risk of war?
It’s not so much a risk of major conflict, because I think everybody knows it’s not really worth ruining the twenty-first century for these rocks.
But there are opportunity costs: the inability of the Japanese and Chinese to work together on things they should be working on; and the loss of market share that Japanese exporters that use Japanese trademarks will experience in China—and vice versa with Chinese products in Japan and elsewhere. There are a lot of opportunity costs in this, and it’s a distraction from effective diplomacy.
What should be done to reduce tensions?
My own view is that a lot of the fuel from the flames of these tensions in the East China Sea and the South China Sea would be taken out if we could divert the competition for energy and the competition for marine resources into separate dialogues. There could be shared resources among all the claimants with some supervisory rules and bodies to make sure countries don’t overfish and wake up in ten years and find the competition has left grandchildren without marine resources in that part of the world or elsewhere.
Energy probably should be shared. New energy drilling techniques allow you to go down a kilometer and then across a bunch of kilometers to drill in somebody else’s territory. As a practical matter, it would probably be a good idea not to try to rely on exclusive economic zones to determine some energy sharing mechanism. That would be very difficult.
But what would be really difficult is to try to settle the sovereign claims. With China rising, Japan in a difficult period, and Southeast Asia going through all sorts of change, countries are not going to willingly give up their claims on sovereignty. They might settle in the end to leave things as they are. With changing ratios of power among the various parties out there, they’re not likely to settle claims—history suggests they won’t do it. Usually these things get settled after a war, and somebody conquers it, takes it for themselves, or gives it to somebody else, as victors did after World War II.
As a practical matter, let’s just do what they’ve done for the last forty years in the region and shelve the territorial sovereignty issues and work on the functional problems. I hope that after we get past elections and transitions in East Asia, maybe we can move in that direction.
How should the United States respond to these conflicts?
My first hope is that the United States will proceed in a principled and non-prejudiced fashion, to seem like an unbiased outside party. The United States has alliances with some of these parties, and those alliances have been and should be reaffirmed whenever necessary.
At the same time, U.S. allies should not be taking Washington into dogfights where the stakes are puny. Therefore, they should be given a clear indication that while the United States gives them support to protect the wellbeing of their nation, a treaty alliance is not something you hide behind and then throw a punch at your neighbor and then wait for the United States to absorb the blowback. Washington should be giving some guidance on prudent behavior.
For the most part, Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, and South Korea share this caution. But there are elements in each country that might want to push the United States further than it finds wise to go. Washington needs to continue to have a dialogue to get the messages clear about what’s within bounds and what will be out of bounds.
