Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal last week, described the leadership role he expects Japan to assume in Asia.
“I’ve realized that Japan is expected to exert leadership not just on the economic front but also in the field of security in the Asia-Pacific,” he said.
Japan’s concerns regarding the rise of China as a diplomatic and military presence in the region stem from the economic growth of China since 1978 at roughly 10 percent per year, according to the World Bank.
China has become the second largest economy in the world and has attempted to create a larger diplomatic impact emblematic of this rise.
In contrast, Japanese economic growth has stalled in the last two decades. The growth of China and the stagnation of Japan have led to conflicting visions regarding the roles of each country in the Asia-Pacific, especially within the past five years.
The largest issue illustrating this conflict between China and Japan is the dispute for ownership of a group of eight uninhabited islands, currently administered by Japan. These islands, referred to as the Senkaku islands by the Japanese and the Diaoyu islands by the Chinese, are located in the East China Sea, east of the Chinese mainland and southwest of Japan’s Okinawa province.
What makes ownership of these islands so contentious is the natural resources found in the waters around these islands.
Marianne Lavelle and Jeff Smith of National Geographic note that the offshore areas around the islands contain considerable deposits of oil and national gas potentially totaling four to five times the resources of the Gulf of Mexico. With large economies requiring a great deal of access to energy, these resources are highly valued by both Chinese and Japanese officials.
Thousands of Chinese citizens have organized boycotts of Japanese goods, ransacked Japanese businesses in China, and staged protests outside the Japanese embassy in Beijing, according to Brian Spegele and Takahi Nakamichi of The Wall Street Journal. There seems to be little chance of a resolution for this conflict in the near future with both Chinese and Japanese naval forces scheduled to stage exercises in the region.
Luckily, economic concerns seem to unify Japan and China. As Martin Fackler and Ian Johnson of The New York Times write, “according to Japan’s Finance Ministry, China was Japan’s largest trading partner last year, and Japan is China’s second-biggest trading partner after the United States.” Furthermore, the pair notes that “Japan is also China’s largest outside investor, with Japanese companies directly or indirectly employing about 10 million Chinese, according to a Japanese lobby group.” With these statistics in mind, it is hard to see how China or Japan could initiate a conflict with the other without inflicting severe economic harm upon itself.
This is reassuring considering the security obligations between Japan and the United States. Article V of the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security, signed by the United States and Japan in 1960, obligates the United States to assist Japan in the event of an attack upon Japan. However, if a Chinese-Japanese conflict were to occur, the potential for any disruption of the over $500 billion US-China economic relationship would prove to be disastrous for the United States, which holds China as its second-largest trading partner, third-largest export market and largest source of imports, according to Wayne M. Morrison of the Congressional Research Service.
Although a conflict between China and Japan seems unlikely in the short term, it is essential for U.S. diplomats to continue to remain closely attuned to the potential of war between China and Japan because of the enormous costs a conflict would hold.
Vinod Kannuthurai is a public policy leadership major from Hazlehurst.
