Kerry Fails To Keep a Lid on Chinese Ambitions

John Kerry’s talents as a bomb defuser seem not to have been enough to improve the situation for America’s allies in Asia. The U.S. secretary of state, in talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping, attempted to speak up for the neighbors of the world’s second-most power, who are anxious about the increasing confidence of the People’s Republic’s territorial claims in the China Seas. However, only in relation to North Korea does there appear to have been any tangible progress.

The U.S. still hopes that Beijing, sole heavyweight ally of Pyongyang, will increase its cooperation in persuading Kim Jong Un’s regime to abandon its nuclear program. The discussions with Xi Jinping “[were] very constructive … very positive, and I’m glad we had an opportunity to dig into the detail of some of some of the North Korea challenges,” stated Kerry after the meeting.

He failed to mention, however, the relations between Beijing and any of its other neighbors around the China Seas. Beijing claims all but the entirety of the South China Sea, including some zones very far from its coasts, to the particular consternation of the Philippines and Vietnam. Yet the greatest deterioration in relations over the past year has been with its more northerly neighbor, Japan. Kerry has again warned that the islands whose ownership China disputes with Japan are covered by the security treaty envisaging U.S. intervention in the case of an attack by another nation, but this warning does not seem to have made much of an impression on the Chinese leadership.

If Kerry is a watcher of Chinese television, he won’t have noticed anything new of late. “The Anti-Japanese Knight,” a recent serial dramatizing the Japanese army’s invasion of China in the 1930s, is a hit, in the same vein as a host of series broadcast by the People’s Republic since the 1970s. In “The Anti-Japanese Knight,” a kung-fu master uses supernatural powers to rip the bodies of Japanese soldiers into fountains of blood. But another war, this one diplomatic and led by be-suited Chinese diplomats, has also burst onto the screens. Though more muted than its dramatized counterpart, it does as much to reflect the violence of current anti-Japanese feeling.

Japan Behaving Badly

After the Munich Security Conference, the Chinese Deputy Foreign Minister Fu Ying, stated that Sino-Japanese relations were “at their lowest ebb.” At Davos, a member of the Chinese delegation remarked that both Shinzo Abe and Kim Jong Un were “troublemakers,” tarring the Japanese prime minister with the same brush as the inflammatory North Korean leader. In retaliation, Abe has attempted to depict the Chinese state as aggressively militaristic, implying similarities between its attitude and that of Germany’s toward Great Britain in the lead-up to World War I.

Recent tension between China and Japan spiked following the announcement by the People’s Republic on Nov. 23, 2012 of the establishment of an aerial defense zone covering some disputed islands in the East China Sea. The year-long nadir in relations between the region’s two economic heavyweights is due to a quarrel over a small, uninhabited archipelago, controlled by Japan under the name of Senkaku and claimed by Beijing, where it is known as Diaoyu.

While in 2012, the Chinese leadership was happy to let thousands of protesters bombard the Japanese embassy with eggs and plastic bottles, Beijing has now adopted a more moderate strategy focusing on perceived Japanese misbehavior. This is especially so since the visit by Shinzo Abe, who is known for his unapologetically nationalist views, to the Yasukuni shrine on Dec. 26. This cenotaph honors 2.5 million people who have died for Japan, including, controversially, 14 war criminals condemned to death after 1945.

In capitals across the world, Chinese diplomats normally famed for their discretion went on the offensive. In an opinion piece for the Daily Telegraph, the Chinese ambassador to London, Lui Xiaoming, alluded to the evil Lord Voldemort from the Harry Potter series in his denouncement of the Japanese prime minister’s militaristic tendencies. The ambassador to Ethiopia took the opportunity of a press conference to brandish a photograph showing Abe on board a Japanese fighter plane bearing the number 731; Japanese Military Unit 731 was infamous for carrying out human experimentation during the Second World War.

Increasingly self-assured, China is quickly learning the art of soft power and, despite the “pivot” toward Asia, becoming an ever more formidable opponent of the U.S. in the region.