Kerry on Mission To Ease Chinese Territorial Claims

On his visit to Beijing this Friday, the U.S. secretary of state will attempt to ease the claim of the People’s Republic [of China] that threatens not only Tokyo and Manila, but also American supremacy.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s visit to China, scheduled for this Friday, in Beijing, looks tense. Chinese territorial claims to almost all of the South China Sea — 3.5 million square kilometers — and to the Japanese Senkaku Islands (Diaoyu, in Chinese) should be at the heart of the Sino-American talks. Last week, Washington made its voice heard through Daniel Russel, the number-two of the U.S. Department of State: These Chinese claims are provocative and violate international law. The emergence of China as a maritime military power in the Asia-Pacific threatens American supremacy; consequently, the U.S. has reinforced its diplomatic and military alliances, from Japan all the way to Australia, passing through the Philippines, Myanmar and Vietnam. Barack Obama must also visit this area soon, in the wake of Kerry’s trip.

This strategic “game” between China and the U.S. takes place against a backdrop of tension between Beijing and its neighbors. Tokyo and Manila are not hesitating to speak openly about the risk of a conflict breaking out.

“At what point do you say, ‘Enough is enough’? Well, the world has to say it — remember that the Sudetenland was given in an attempt to appease Hitler to prevent World War II,” said Filipino President Benigno Aquino to The New York Times at the end of January. He outlined a comparison between the annexation of Czechoslovakia by the Third Reich in 1938 and China’s claims to the offshore islands of the Philippines. The Chinese Navy seized the Scarborough Reef by surprise in 2012, which China continues to occupy. Manila has initiated arbitration proceedings to the United Nations, based on the U.N. Convention on Law of the Sea in 1982. Beijing, however, refuses to undergo the procedure.

Fishing Waters Rich in Oil

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe also spoke, most recently at the Davos Summit, about the possibility of a war, but this time by drawing a comparison to the period between 1914-18.

“Britain and Germany — like China and Japan — had a strong trading relationship. But in 1914, this had not prevented strategic tensions leading to the outbreak of conflict,” he said in response to a journalist’s question about the possibility of a Sino-Japanese conflict. Such a conflict “would be a great loss not only for Japan and China but for the world and we need to make sure such a thing would not happen,” according to the Japanese prime minister, who also has ambitions to amend the pacifist constitution of the archipelago. To justify this measure, he cited the accelerated growth of China’s military budget, which has become, according to him, a “source of instability in the region.” Japan and China are fiercely competing for sovereignty of the Senkaku Islands. Tokyo claims that it will never let go of these fishing waters rich in oils, while days hardly go by without Beijing sending fleets to taunt the Japanese coastguard off of the small, uninhabited islands.

“Military expansion will contribute nothing to China’s future, its economic growth or prosperity,” said Abe to CNN at the end of January.

Aquino and Abe are not alone in their fears of a storm brewing in the horizon.

“The memory of 1914 may trigger the most concern in East Asia,” wrote former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer in a recent article devoted to the 1914-18 centenary. “All the ingredients of a similar disaster have accumulated: nuclear weapons, the rise of China as a global power, unresolved territorial and border disputes, the division of the Korean Peninsula, historical resentments, an obsession with status and prestige and hardly any cooperative conflict-resolution mechanisms. Distrust and power politics are the order of the day.”

Communist Power, Heir of the Imperial Throne

The subtle mixture of inferiority and superiority complexes that characterize Sino-Japanese relations, combined with powerful patriotic myths — could these be the seeds of a future conflict? Beijing’s response to the bold historical parallel drawn by Abe is worrying. Qin Gang, Chinese spokesman, responded that the young Prussian empire in 1914 was not “worthy” of comparison to China by Prime Minister Abe because in fact, “China has long since been a great power in history. By the Han [206 BC to 220 AD] and Tang [618-907] dynasties, China was already a major global power. So there’s no such thing as the so-called problem that China is rising to become a world power.”

Presenting itself as an heir to the imperial throne, the communist power would therefore be ensuring the rightful retaking of the station that history has bequeathed to it…. The U.S. does not see the issue in the same light. The situation was summed up in the beginning of the month in a more sobering way by Matt Salmon, a Republican representative in the U.S. Congress, quoted by The Associated Press: The Chinese “want to see what [they] can get away with, and if the U.S. has the guts, the cojones, to challenge [them].”