Simon Tisdall: Pacific power play puts Japan and China between a rock and a hard place

From the Guardian:

An uninhabited Pacific reef 1,000 miles due south of Tokyo makes an unlikely battlefield. But wars have been fought over less. And Okinotori Shima, as this hazard to shipping is known, is rapidly becoming a focal point of rising tension between China and Japan…

Japan claims an exclusive economic zone around Okinotori stretching hundreds of miles in every direction under the 1982 Law of the Sea. The total area is bigger than the whole of Japan.

But China says Okinotori is just a rock. In its view, Tokyo’s attempt to control a vast area of the Pacific and its potentially rich seabed and fishing resources on the basis of a couple of wet boulders has no legal bottom.