In a campaign that some have likened to the political persecution that took place under the Cultural Revolution, the 84-year-old scholar has been the target of abusive, late-night phone calls, a wave of attacks on microblogs as well as disruptions of his lectures. He has been denounced as a traitor and targeted by demonstrators.

[...]“The islands have no GDP, no tax revenues and no real value,” Mr. Mao told the Wall Street Journal, repeating public statements he has made previously. “It’s fine to be patriotic, but we have to be realistic about things.”

He took a mild swipe at political leaders of both countries, saying they shouldn’t be creating fresh tensions and instead should be working to reduce existing ones. ”Political leaders are using taxpayers’ money for pointless pursuits,” he said.

Remarks like these have touched a raw nerve.

”Those who advocate giving up the Diaoyus – aren’t they traitors? …Mao Yushi is a traitor wearing the clothes of an academic,” wrote one angry user of the Twitter-like Sina Weibo microblogging platform, where much of the criticism has unfolded.

[Source]

Reporting from a promotional event for Mao Yushi’s new book, the New York Times’ Didi Kirsten Tatlow has more on the harassment of Mao Yushi, how he is dealing with it, and what he sees as the bigger picture:

We had come to hear Mr. Mao talk about his new book, “Where Does Chinese People’s Anxiety Come From?” But the conversation moved to how the 84-year-old engineer-turned-economist, first branded a political “rightist” by the Communist Party in the 1950s, was coping.

“Of course, we’re being harassed at home, so my wife cannot sleep peacefully, and I’ve also been affected,” said Mr. Mao.

“But I feel that is a small issue,” he said. “What’s a truly big issue is how we as a society should view this bifurcation of opinion, how we can resolve this difference of positions.”

The differences speak of a society increasingly fractured into rich and poor, pro-state and pro-individual, a skewed left and right — all the issues that Mr. Mao addressed at the gathering, kept deliberately small to maintain security.

[Source]

In a follow-up New York Times’ blogpost, Tatlow explains how two Mao’s represent starkly opposed political camps within a one-party state:

The first Mao is that Mao, who commands a group of loyalists from beyond the grave and whose legitimacy is enormously bolstered by the Communist Party’s refusal to repudiate his legacy, despite some acknowledgment that he did some wrong — a legacy that includes the violence of the Cultural Revolution, which lasted about a decade and finally ended with his death in 1976.

[...]The second Mao is Mao Yushi, a popular, 84-year-old engineer-turned-economist, a figurehead for greater economic and political freedoms who is an outspoken critic of the other Mao’s legacy, which he says poisons China and must be removed. (He is not related to Mao Zedong.)

The political groups the two Maos represent work broadly like this: on college campuses around the country, and elsewhere in society, there is a “ziyou pai,” or “freedom faction,” made up of adherents of Mao Yushi’s viewpoint (he is one of its best known representatives but by no means its only one).[...]

There is also a loosely named “wumao pai,” or “50-cent faction” (named after citizens who, for a small fee or even voluntarily, “guide” public opinion on social media and in public debates in line with the government’s views). This group is very loyal to the party and mostly incorporates the Maoist rump, though there is tension, as the Maoists often accuse the party of not being Communist enough.

[Source]

Also see a 2012 article by Willy Lam on Maoist revivalism within the CCP that helps to elucidate China’s ideological split.

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The People’s Daily newspaper on page nine of Wednesday’s edition ran a lengthy and winding commentary by scholars at a prominent state-run think tank that called for a “reconsideration” of the historical status of Japan’s southernmost Ryukyu island chain, which includes Okinawa. The researchers argued foreign aggression toward China during its final Qing dynasty (1644-1911) weakened it to the point where it couldn’t sufficiently oppose aggressive Japanese inroads in the broader region.

“History’s unresolved questions relating to the Ryukyu have reached a time for reconsideration,” the commentary read.

[...]The Japanese government dismissed the commentary. “There’s no doubt that [Okinawa] belongs to Japan historically and internationally,” said Japanese government spokesman Yoshihide Suga, describing the views expressed in the commentary as “completely out of the question.”

[Source]

Japan protested the suggestion that Okinawa may rightfully be Beijing’s territory, an act that was chastised in reiterative English-language commentary from the Global Times on May 11:

The article stirred strong protest from Japan, with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe saying Tokyo “must voice its position to the world” by rejecting China’s “inappropriate claim.” The US Department of State expressed support for Japan’s sovereignty over Okinawa.

Japan’s overreaction toward the suggestion made by two Chinese scholars in State media mirrors its lack of confidence. In 1971, the US unilaterally handed over control of the Ryukyu Islands to Tokyo. There has always been a legal basis to challenge this illegal act.

[...]If Japan ultimately chooses antagonism with China, Beijing should consider changing its current stance and revisit the Ryukyu issue as an unsolved historical problem.

[Source]

As Li Guoqiang and Zhang Haipeng, the scholars who penned the People’s Daily article, were studying historical documents to strengthen the case against Japan’s soveriengty over the Ryukyu chain, Japanese politicians enraged many in China by defending certain Japanese war atrocities, and evoking the occurrence of others. Malcolm Moore reports for The Telegraph:

[...O]n Monday, a regional Japanese politician [Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto] reignited a long-running dispute by suggesting that the hundreds of thousands of women abducted from China, Korea and the Philippines and forced to work as sex slaves for the Japanese army - known as “comfort” women – was a “necessary” measure during the Second World War.

Subsequently, footage emerged on Tuesday of Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister, posing with his thumbs up inside the cockpit of a T4 training jet used by the Blue Impulse flying squad, Japan’s equivalent of the Red Arrows.

On the outside of the jet, however, the number 731 was painted prominently. Largely forgotten in Japan, the number still stirs painful memories in China.

Unit 731 of the Imperial Japanese Army was the covert chemical and biological weapons team that gathered Chinese men, women and subjected them to vivisection without anaesthesia.

[Source]

Twenty-five Okinawan women’s groups issued a joint statement demanding an apology for Hashimoto’s comments on the necessity of “comfort women”.

Following the galling comments from Japan, a hawkish Chinese military official weighed in on Okinawa’s sovereignty, echoing the view earlier expressed in the People’s Daily. The South China Morning Post reports:

Luo Yuan, a People’s Liberation Army two-star general, has said that Japan could not rightfully claim sovereignty over the islands, because they had started paying tribute to China half a millenium before they had done so to Japan.

The islands had started paying tribute to China in 1372, the general said in an interview with China News Service on Tuesday. Only in 1872, 500 years later, did Japan exploit China’s weakness to force the Ryukuyu Islands into submission, he said.

[...] The general, known for his outspoken nationalism, reasoned that the Ryukyuan people had closer ethnic and cultural ties to coastal China than they had to Japan. Their rulers were vassals of the Chinese court, he argued.

[Source]

An article on this most recent flare in Sino-Japanese diplomacy from The Guardian notes that China’s move to dispute the sovereignty of Okinawa may work against any desire to hold formal talks on the Diaoyu/Senkakus:

Analysts said China was mistaken if it believed that provoking Japan over Okinawa would add momentum to its claims to the Senkaku islands. “If China’s goal is to hold talks with Japan over the Senkakus, articles like these are counterproductive,” M Taylor Fravel, a Chinese foreign policy expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told Associated Press.

“As a result, Japan has an even stronger incentive now to stand firm with China and not hold talks.”

[Source]

For more on China’s relationship with Japan, the recent re-ignition of the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands dispute, or other territorial and maritime disputes, see prior CDT coverage.

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Xi, then, has ultimately chosen to defend the Communist Party against internal political threats rather than prepare it to face external military threats. There is little doubt the Communist Party has been sharpening its identity in a post-communist world by defining itself against the West, fanning nationalist fervor, and promising a restoration of China’s ancient grandeur. Xi thus has little choice but to keep pumping enormous resources into a war machine if he is to justify his party’s continuing monopoly on power. “This dream can be said to be the dream of a strong nation,” Xi told sailors on board the destroyer Haikou. “And for the military, it is a dream of a strong military.”

To many observers, however, his speech seemed to confirm that China’s provocations against Japan were in fact “evidence of profound domestic insecurity rather than rational policy,” a Beijing diplomat who closely studies China’s military machinations told me. “It is the fact of party control,” he says, “that makes the PLA weak. Everything else — the corruption, the risk aversion, the hierarchy — is a symptom of that.”

Then, too, there is the very real risk that if China or Japan miscalculates over the Senkaku Islands and actually does spark a war, China may lose. That, at least, is the assessment of several military analysts with whom I spoke, who believe Japan’s disciplined, professional forces would prevail even without direct U.S. intervention. More broadly, I have heard growing doubts about China’s actual fighting capabilities in some sections of the Chinese military, foreign diplomatic corps, and U.S. academia, many of whose members are revising their views on the PLA. “Our assessment is they are nowhere near as effective as they think they are,” a Beijing-based defense attaché from a NATO country told me.

What if the recent drums of war are a sign of China’s weakness and not its impressive new strength? “When Xi tells his troops to be ready for war, it’s really an admission that they’re in disarray,” says the defense attaché. “He’s saying, ‘You guys are drunk, fat, and happy, siphoning off all the money into private accounts, and you need to get real.’”

Garnaut has previously suggested that the Diaoyu stand-off marks a bid to cement Xi’s standing within the military at The Sydney Morning Herald (via CDT).

Xi’s new directives include a requirement for top military commanders to serve a stint among junior soldiers every few years, a move intended to reduce impropriety, improve discipline and boost morale among the troops. And while Xi’s predecessors also took their own symbolic actions when assuming power, The Diplomat’s Zachary Keck questions whether Xi can actually affect real change within the PLA:

Unlike Jiang and Hu, though, Xi Jinping is a princeling whose father was a commander in the Red Army during the wars that brought the Communist Party to power. This gives Xi a certain amount of respect with the military brass, many of whom he has known for years. Notably, Xi also differs from his two immediate predecessors in that he inherited the chairmanship of the Central Military Commission, the country’s top military decision-making body, at the same time that he became head of the Party in November.

All of these factors better position Xi to bring change to the military than were Hu and Jiang. Still, the order Xi issued over the weekend is unlikely to have much impact, the Rand Corporation’s Harold predicts.

“I don’t see much reason to think that 15 days out of 365 spent cleaning latrines or eating grunt rations will systematically reshape the thinking of military leaders whose perquisites are almost certainly beyond the imaginings of most enlistees,” Harold says.

“And moreover the nature of Chinese political culture, as well as the mere practical realities of how hierarchically-structured organizations like the armed forces [operate], will make it extremely difficult for the common soldier to treat the generals as genuine colleagues given that they will shortly thereafter go back to being their superior officers.”

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On Tuesday, that dispute appeared to heat up even further when the Japanese Coast Guard reported that eight Chinese patrol ships had entered waters near the islands, the largest number to appear at one time since the dispute flared up last summer. The Coast Guard said the Chinese ships converged from several different directions into waters near the uninhabited islands, known as the Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in Chinese.

The Chinese ships appeared at the same time as 10 boats carrying members of a Japanese fringe ultranationalist group also arrived off the islands. The boats were followed by Japanese Coast Guard ships apparently seeking to ensure that they did not attempt a landing, as some nationalists did last summer.

Beijing lodged a formal protest with Tokyo over the activists’ visit. From Reuters:

Beijing protested over the voyage by 10 boats carrying about 80 Japanese activists into waters near the islands, known as the Senkaku in Japan and the Diaoyu in China.

“Regarding the Japanese right-wing activists’ illegal entry into the waters of the Diaoyu islands that is causing trouble, the Chinese foreign ministry has lodged stern representations with Japan, and has strongly protested,” Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told a news conference.

Japan also protested at what it called an intrusion by eight Chinese patrol vessels into its waters near the uninhabited Japanese-controlled islands, which are near rich fishing grounds and potentially lucrative maritime gas fields.

Global Times fanned the flames of outrage at Japan’s actions in an editorial condemning the Yasukuni visit:

These visits represented the most conspicuous efforts to glorify Japanese war dead since former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi stepped down in 2006.

Abe is skirting the edge of a red line. He didn’t make a pilgrimage himself, but offered equipment for ceremonies and sent his deputy prime minister. This marks a significant step, which has left Beijing and Seoul little room for diplomatic maneuvers and little choice but to show their firm resolve.

The controversial visits once again prove that Japan is the troublemaker and provocateur in East Asia. Japan has once again been the one that broke the uneasy regional balance.

By Tuesday evening, it appeared that the Japanese activists had left the immediate area:

Japanese activists have told @rickwallaceoz they have left waters around disputed islands (also claimed by China) without attempting to land

— Mark MacKinnon/马凯 (@markmackinnon) April 23, 2013

For its part, the Japanese government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called in the Chinese ambassador to lodge a complaint about the movement of the patrol boats and threatened the use of force if Chinese boats landed on the islands. From Japan Today:

Tokyo summoned the Chinese ambassador to Japan on Tuesday after the eight state-owned Chinese ships sailed into its territorial waters. The flotilla is the biggest to sail into the disputed waters in a single day since Tokyo nationalised part of the archipelago in September.

Abe vowed to “expel by force” any Chinese landing on the archipelago in the East China Sea.

“We would take decisive action against any attempt to enter territorial waters and to land” on the islands, Abe told parliament in response to questions from lawmakers, adding: “We would never allow” a landing.

“It would be natural for us to expel by force if (the Chinese) were to make a landing,” he said.

Prime Minister Abe, who came to office in a landslide in 2012 on a right-wing nationalist platform, is now trying to balance his nationalist agenda with popular demands for him to fix the faltering economy and with the need to engage with China. From the South China Morning Post:

The prime minister, who has said he regretted not visiting Yasukuni during his 2006-2007 term in office, has been walking a fine line between talking tough in the territorial row over the chain of rocky islets and leaving the door open for dialogue with Beijing.

Voters want Abe to put priority on fixing the economy rather than other issues close to Abe’s heart, such as revising Japan’s pacifist constitution, an opinion poll showed this week.

Repercussions from the current dispute are being felt throughout the region. From the Wall Street Journal:

On Monday, South Korea responded to the war-shrine visits by canceling a planned visit to Tokyo by its foreign minister, where the two nations were to discuss cooperation over the North Korea crisis. This followed the news last week that China had decided to skip an annual trilateral summit with Japan and South Korea scheduled in late May, damping hopes for renewed regional dialogue.

Last year, violent protests flared up in several Chinese cities after the Japanese government announced its plan to purchase some of the disputed islands from their private owners.

Read more about the Diaoyu Islands and China-Japan relations, via CDT.

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The meeting was proposed by China and all countries within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have agreed to participate, Marty Natalegawa told reporters at a meeting of ASEAN foreign ministers in Brunei.

The agreement is potentially significant as China has insisted on handling territorial disputes bilaterally with individual countries, while ASEAN wants to speak as a group, a disconnect blamed for hindering progress on a code.

Although no date has been set, Natalegawa said the planned meeting underscored the importance of making “progress on the code of conduct and to maintain a positive atmosphere in the South China Sea”.

“About where and when and how, I think that’s something that needs to be worked out,” he added, of the meeting’s details.

Tensions in the South China Sea may have taken a backseat in recent months to ongoing tussle between China and Japan in the Diaoyu Islands, which lie in the East China Sea, but they have nonetheless lingered. Most recently, Vietnam accused China of attacking fishermen in the disputed region, charges which China defended as “legitimate and reasonable” actions against illegal activity by the Vietnamese boats.

The announcement of accelerated talks surfaced as new Chinese president Xi Jinping inspected the navy’s South Fleet in Sanya this week, where the Associated Press reports that he called on soldiers to be prepared for military conflict:

China has been bolstering its naval capabilities in the South China Sea with expanded bases and patrol missions, sometimes tangling with ships from Vietnam and the Philippines that also claim island groups in the area of crucial sea lanes and rich fishing grounds. Sanya is key to asserting China’s claims and is home to some of the navy’s most modern vessels and an extensive submarine base.

Among the ships he visited was the Jinggangshan, which last month visited the country’s southernmost territorial claim as part of military drills in the Spratly Islands involving amphibious landings and aircraft.

The visit to James Shoal followed several days of exercises and marked a high-profile show of China’s determination to stake its claim to territory disputed by Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia and Brunei amid rising tensions in the region.

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Keywords that dominated posts on Chinese blogs included positive words such as “historic”, “wise” and “great, according to data compiled by the social media consultancy Meltwater. More than 130 comments on her passing appeared on Sina Weibo every minute in the first three hours after news of her death broke.

[…] “You don’t have to worry about China, because China will not provide any new ideas to the world – not in the next few decades or century,” Hangzhou-based lawyer Yuan Yulai said quoting Thatcher in a reaction that has since been shared 7,500 times.

Kai-fu Lee, the former head of Google China and one of the most influential voices on Weibo, shared the historic picture of her and Chinese counterpart Zhao Ziyang signing the Sino-British Joint Declaration in 1984, the bilateral treaty which secured the July 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China.

“Thatcher and who?” the IT-investor and prominent commentator Charles Xue quipped, when re-sharing the photo. Searches for Zhao Ziyang, who was purged in 1989 for siding with protestors at Tiananmen Square, are still blocked in China.

At China Real Time Report, Lilian Lin explained the place of the Hong Kong negotiations in Chinese memories

Many in China know her best for her stumble outside the Great Hall of the People in 1982 during a state visit. That stumble served as a metaphor for Ms. Thatcher’s visit, which marked a rare foreign-policy setback for a leader who took on both Argentina and the former Soviet Union. Bent on pressing for continued British sovereignty for Hong Kong, she met firm resistance from Deng. Records suggest their negotiations were less than pleasant. The Daily Telegraph quoted Deng as muttering to an aide: “I cannot talk to that woman, she is utterly unreasonable.”

“The Chinese public had a very complicated mentality towards this negotiation and frictions of the two parties, “ said Wang Yizhou, professor of School of International Studies of Peking University. “ But it has been a long time and Hong Kong returned to China smoothly, so people here are more impressed with her statesmanship, which kept Britain in the top rank of the world.”

In Hong Kong itself, Thatcher’s handling of the handover still has some sharp critics. From Te-Ping Chen, also at China Real Time:

“That marked a very, very dishonorable chapter in the history of the British Empire,” said Ms. [Emily] Lau, who argues that the former British prime minister “didn’t look after the well-being of Hong Kong people.”

Still, though, Martin Lee, a former Hong Kong legislator and the city’s best-known crusader for democracy, said that those years were a time of greater optimism about the city’s political future. […]

[…] On the eve of the 1997 handover, Mrs. Thatcher sounded an optimistic note in an interview, saying that she hoped Hong Kong would one day be a model for all of China. “Chinese people will come to Hong Kong, they’ll see and they’ll say why is it different, and what is the difference?” she said. “It is the same people, the same talents, but here there is a rule of law founded on the belief that each and every person matters in personal lives,” she said. Hong Kong, she said, “is a flagship of what the China people can do.”

While former Conservative candidate Richard Harris wrote at the South China Morning Post that Thatcher “always had a soft spot for the ordinary people of Hong Kong“, Australian foreign minister Bob Carr recalled her “unabashedly racist” warnings about Asian immigration. The South China Morning Post’s Tom Holland argued that Thatcher “had thrown away her best trump card” in the handover negotiations for the sake of blocking Hong Kong Chinese immigration to the U.K.:

In 1981, her government passed the British Nationality Act, introducing a new class of British citizen and denying the right of abode in Britain to those, like the majority of Hong Kong’s population, who were merely British subjects.

Years later, Monitor asked one senior member of Thatcher’s first cabinet why she had undermined her own negotiating position in this way. He answered that at the time Britain could not possibly have accepted mass immigration from Hong Kong.

But, protested Monitor, the actual number of migrants would have been small. Guaranteed the right of abode in Britain, Hongkongers would have felt secure at home, and London could have got an even better deal for them in Beijing.

Yes, admitted the former minister, but that’s not how the British newspapers would have portrayed it. There was no way, he said, we were going to risk headlines in the London press warning that three million Hong Kong Chinese were heading towards British shores. It would have been political suicide.

Global Times took a somewhat different view from Wang Yizhou’s assessment that Thatcher had “kept Britain in the top rank of the world”. Her rule, it suggested, was one of the final spasms of Britain’s, Europe’s and the West’s global dominance, though she “could well enter history as a distinctive female politician” nonetheless.

A political legacy is always hard to define, and the love and hatred still felt toward Thatcher are distinct. Joining hands with former US president Ronald Reagan, she played a crucial role in the collapse of the Soviet Union. During and after the Falklands War she impressed the world with her hard-line stance, which no Western politicians could compete with afterward.

[…] Her restoration of the British economy represented one of the last glorious achievements of Great Britain, or even Europe.

[…] The moment makes the man, or in this case, the woman. After Thatcher left office, there haven’t been any “iron men” or “iron ladies,” partly because the decline in European power means they cannot uphold an iron stance. The evolution of Western electoral culture makes politicians weak at solving domestic problems.

Also at Global Times, Tian Dewen of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences credited Thatcher with pioneering Western engagement with Beijing:

Thatcher was also [one of] the first Western leaders to propose that the West should press China to engage in international system, instead of excluding it. There were ideological reasons for this. Thatcher hoped “peaceful evolution” in China through the country’s engagement in the international system. However, Thatcher’s proposal also created external conditions for China’s reform and opening-up.

[…] As a right-wing politician, Thatcher was theoretically hostile to communist ideas.

However, on the other hand, she also realized that China’s development was inevitable and the development of China was of significance to the UK.

Historically speaking, as long as any politician can recognize these development trends, he or she is a friend to China anyway.

Actress Melissa Rayworth, who played Thatcher in a state-sponsored TV film, recalled attitudes towards her somewhat differently:

For weeks, we’d been shooting pivotal scenes that chronicled Thatcher’s meeting with Deng in 1982 to negotiate the handover of Hong Kong in 1997, at that point still 15 years away. This tiny, awkward moment — a re-creation of Thatcher’s brief stumble while walking down these very steps after that meeting with Deng in the Great Hall — seemed more important to them than any of her powerful speeches.

They needed the villain to be brought low.

They saw her not as a real person but as a cartoon bad guy – the embodiment of an empire that, in their eyes, had taken a piece of China more than a century before and held the Middle Kingdom hostage when it tried to get the island back.

In any case, some of Thatcher’s influence still lingers even in the Party itself, according to The Telegraph’s Tom Phillips last year:

At Shanghai’s China Executive Leadership Academy, one of the country’s most elite Communist Party schools, Thatcher’s philosophy has found its way onto a “crisis management” course that also focuses on the 2011 UK riots.

[…] Professor Li Min, a lecturer at the institution, said when it came to crisis management Britain’s former prime minister was a model of behaviour.

Baroness Thatcher might seem an unusual choice for the curriculum of an academy grooming the next generation of Chinese leaders. But faculty directors say Shanghai’s Leadership Academy is no ordinary Party school.

“We have an open attitude towards all civilisations that are useful to us, and [we] learn from them,” explained Professor Jiang Haishan, the anglophile head of its international program.

Thatcher has also provided inspiration to China’s neighbors, according to The Economist:

[… I]n South Korea Park Geun-hye, the country’s first female leader, who has been compared to Mrs Thatcher for years and has only encouraged the comparison, expressed “great sorrow” at her death.

Mrs Park now faces her own Falklands moment with the growlings from Pyongyang; but it is Shinzo Abe, the prime minister of Japan, who has been more recently inspired by Thatcher the warrior, in his confrontation with China over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands. He admitted being moved to tears by the scene in the film “The Iron Lady” where Mrs Thatcher, played by Meryl Streep, speaks about the war in the House of Commons.

In Taiwan, meanwhile, Streep also starred in CTi News’ coverage of Thatcher’s death, replacing footage of Queen Elizabeth that had been used by mistake.

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Shigeru Iwasaki, head of the Japanese Self-Defence Forces’ joint staff, and Samuel Locklear, commander of U.S. forces in the Asia-Pacific, are expected to agree that the allies will accelerate the drafting of the plans when they meet in Hawaii on Thursday and Friday, Kyodo news agency said.

They will likely review several scenarios including one under which Japanese and U.S. armed forces conduct joint operations in case China invades the islands, Kyodo said. The Nikkei business daily carried a similar report on Wednesday.

“China is extremely concerned by these reports … The Chinese government has the determination and ability to maintain the nation’s territorial sovereignty,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said.

“No outside pressure will affect the resolve and determination of the Chinese government and people to maintain territorial sovereignty.”

Tensions between China and Japan over the Diaoyu Islands, known in Japan as the Senkaku Islands, spiked last September when Japan’s central government agreed to purchase three of the islets from their private Japanese owners. A string of anti-Japanese demonstrations ensued across China, even turning violent as angry protesters targeted Japanese-owned businesses and products. Both sides have continued to run sea and air patrols near the territory, with Japan even scrambling fighter jets on two occasions after claiming that Chinese surveillance planes violated its airspace. Reuters reported earlier this month that China’s goal in the area is to overwhelm or wear out the Japanese forces tasked with monitoring their movements.

One U.S. defense official claimed that the plans between Japan and the United States are routine and consistent with the U.S. policy of finding a peaceful resolution to the issue, according to The Wall Street Journal:

U.S. defense officials noted that the Pentagon routinely updates its military plans for a variety of potential conflicts. The official declined to give details of the plan, or say how it was being changed. But such plans generally include a variety of scenarios, from trying to repel an enemy force from taking an island to retaking islands after a conflict.

“It shouldn’t be a surprise we have a plan to defend our ally against aggression in a tense situation,” said a U.S. defense official.

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The most serious conflict involves Japan. While China’s actions in Southeast Asia cause many angry statements, most countries there lack the capacity to prevent Chinese ships from patrolling waters they claim as their own. But in Japan, China faces one of the world’s most capable maritime powers. Unlike the Philippines, which hasn’t been able to stop Chinese ships from encroaching on its territorial waters and even dropping markers onto disputed reefs, Japan has actively defended claims to several disputed islands known as the Senkaku in Japanese, Diaoyu in Chinese, and Tiaoyutai by nearby Taiwan (which also claims them, largely based on the same historical arguments used by China).

While other disputes have ended after a few days or weeks, this one has continued now for months. In February, Japan claimed that a Chinese frigate had locked weapons-targeting radar on a Japanese destroyer and helicopter. Almost every few days, Japanese media report on Chinese ships—especially China Marine Surveillance survey ships—sailing without permission inside Japan’s territorial waters around the islands. (At least twenty-eight such violations have been reported since the issue heated up last autumn.) Last year, these tensions helped prepare the way for the election of a nationalistic Japanese prime minister.

It would be easy to blame China’s current leaders for all these problems, but their origins predate the People’s Republic of China and unite many ethnic Chinese from around the world. Although historical records are sketchy, many Chinese are convinced that old maps and mentions of the islands in imperial records imply historical Chinese control. In 1895, China and Japan fought a war and Japan annexed the islands, having declared them uninhabited and belonging to no one. Part of the Ryukyu chain, the islands were administered by the United States after World War II. In 1972, Washington returned the Ryukyus to Tokyo, including the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands.

[...]

How all this has come to pass is drawn out in several important new books. They come at the Chinese puzzle from very different perspectives and at times are in sharp disagreement. But at heart they share a common idea: China is burdened with historical baggage that makes its rise less linear than many imagine. By extension the authors imply that the current troubles aren’t inevitable and may be more manageable than some would believe.

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The officials, including “flag officers” — those at the rank of admiral — told Kyodo it was an “emergency decision”, not a planned action, and was taken by the commander of the frigate, the report said.

[…] The Chinese officials told Kyodo that on January 30 the frigate and the Japanese destroyer were three kilometres (two miles) apart in international waters some 110 to 130 kilometres north of the outcrops, the report said.

The commander of the frigate directed his vessel’s weapons-targeting radar, based on the Chinese military’s rules of engagement, without seeking instructions from the fleet command or navy headquarters, Kyodo cited the Chinese officers as saying.

It was not known if the commander had been reprimanded, Kyodo said.

According to Kyodo, Japanese defense officials see the about-turn as a sign “that China is either playing mind games or is softening its stance toward Japan.” The latter interpretation would conform to recent suggestions that, from Beijing’s point of view, the Diaoyu stand-off was largely a tool to consolidate Xi Jinping’s new leadership.

Updated: China has dismissed the Kyodo report. From Zhang Yunbi at China Daily:

The Ministry of National Defense has rejected the Japanese media’s latest “hype” over the alleged naval “radar lock-on” incident and warned of a hidden agenda behind Tokyo’s recent reports.

In the latest chapter of the radar “drama”, the Tokyo-based Kyodo News Agency released an article on Sunday quoting unnamed Chinese officials who reportedly admitted to “locking radar on Japanese ships”.

Beijing previously dismissed the allegation as groundless, while the ministry denied the Kyodo report, reiterating on Monday that “the facts are clear”.

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Post tags: diaoyu islands, east china sea, Japan, Japan relations, military affairs, navy, PLA, Xi Jinping
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“Hen na gaijin” raises the issue of the South China Sea. How likely is a clash over territorial disputes there or the East China Sea?

The danger is not of a strategic decision but of a mistake – a miscalculation, an error, a clash – and that danger gets larger as more vessels crowd into a confined space. Importantly, it can be said that Chinese leaders, even the more hawkish wing, do not actively seek a conflict simply because the Party’s operating principle is to control – and a conflict, by definition, has too many variables it cannot control. The Party knows that one of the few things more destabilizing than a conflict would be a conflict in which it loses.

At the Sydney Morning Herald, John Garnaut offers an explanation for Beijing’s willingness to risk such a conflict. According to sources said to be close to new president Xi Jinping, the stand-off has served as a means for Xi to consolidate his standing within the military, akin to Deng Xiaoping’s 1979 invasion of Vietnam.

“To sort the horses from the mules you need to walk them around the yard,” said the friend.

[…] A second associate of Mr Xi, a retired officer who is the son of one of the People’s Liberation Army’s top commanders, said pushing the PLA onto a war-footing – even an artificial one – was the first and most important stage in his consolidation of political power.

[…] The associates of Mr Xi say the dispute is moving into a less dangerous phase following his successful demonstration of military authority and his appointment as President on Thursday, which was the third and final of his formal leadership titles.

[…] Few believe a senior Chinese leader would deliberately trigger a war, as Deng did with Vietnam after securing a green light from Washington. But Mr Xi’s mobilisation of the military for war preparations may have served a similar purpose.

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According to the plan, the Ministry of Railways, which has long been at the center of controversy for being both a railway service provider and a railway industry watchdog, will be broken up into administrative and commercial arms.

[…] Other ministries and commissions to see a reshuffle are the Health Ministry and the National Population and Family Planning Commission, which will be merged into a new National Health and Family Planning Commission.

The status of the existing State Food and Drug Administration will be elevated to a general administration in order to improve food and drug safety.

The country’s top oceanic administration will be restructured to bring its maritime law enforcement forces, currently scattered throughout different ministries and departments, under the unified management of a single administration.

The National Energy Administration will be restructured to streamline the administrative and regulatory systems of the energy sector.

Two media regulators, the General Administration of Press and Publication and the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, will be merged into a single entity to oversee the country’s press, publication, radio, film and television sectors.

At the Associated Press, Louise Watt outlined the reasoning behind the changes:

This time, the streamlining plan includes guidelines to restrict and better define the central government’s responsibilities, limiting its issuing of permits for projects, the setting of standards and other policies that have slowed decision-making.

“Departments of the State Council are now focusing too much on micro issues. We should attend to our duties and must not meddle in what is not in our business,” Ma Kai, secretary-general of the State Council, or Cabinet, told the legislators. He said that overlapping government functions has often led to buck-passing.

[…] The public has been complaining about government inefficiency and for that reason “we should dare to push ahead with cracking the tough nut of structural reform,” the state-run Jinghua Daily quoted Wang Feng, an official in the Communist Party office involved in drafting the reform program.

But Wang Xiangwei cautioned at the South China Morning Post last week that the rearrangements could bring their own problems:

Some analysts, including Wang Yukai , a professor with the Chinese Academy of Governance under the State Council, told state media that five super ministries created under reform measures in 2008 produced mixed results. Indeed, how to force the bigger ministries to deregulate and decentralise may prove to be an even more arduous task for Li in years to come.

The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) is the earliest example of a super ministry. It was formed in 2003 and evolved from the State Planning Commission, a key ministry in the days of the planned economy.

Its purpose is to draft national economic and social development plans and undertake various economic reforms. But in reality, it has become a super powerful ministry with broad regulatory powers covering all the major industries.

Some cynics argue that it has been the biggest stumbling block to structural reforms.

The Economist (via CDT) also argued recently that “super-sized” ministries might fail to deliver promised benefits.

Bloomberg News examined the restructuring of responsibility for China’s maritime security, which comes after an alleged radar-lock incident raised questions about Beijing and Tokyo’s grip on events around the disputed Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands.

The State Oceanic Administration will oversee the coast guard, fisheries law-enforcement and the smuggling police, which now fall under separate ministries, a report to the National People’s Congress, the country’s legislature, said yesterday. The administration also has a law enforcement arm.

The decision signals that China wants to better organize its maritime assets as it wrangles with Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam in territorial disputes. The U.S. has expressed concern that an accident or miscommunication could lead that sparring to escalate further.

“The recent tension has convinced the central authorities to better coordinate those agencies,” said Jean-Pierre Cabestan, head of the department of government and international studies at Hong Kong Baptist University. “There’s been growing concern among observes including foreign governments about whether those agencies were coordinated or not. We have evidence that they are not.”

At The Wall Street Journal, Colum Murphy described the break-up of the colossal railway ministry, which currently employs over two million people, runs its own police force and courts, and oversees spending greater than China’s official military budget.

Currently, the ministry both regulates and operates China’s rail system, which has made for a murky structure and impeded both competition and financing.

[…] Under the new blueprint, the Ministry of Transport will absorb administrative duties including overseeing technology and safety standards and service and railway-project quality. A new entity, China Railway Corp., will focus on operational and commercial areas such as management of freight and passenger business as well as railway construction. Given the ministry’s problems, such a move was widely expected.

[…] “The large railway system is critical to China’s economy—and will become even more so with the economy’s shift from coastal areas inland,” said Gerald Ollivier, senior transport specialist with the World Bank, adding that the current multiplicity of roles at the ministry creates “some conflicting objectives.”

Assessments of the restructuring’s likely implications for family planning were somewhat divided. One source quoted by Michael Martina and Sui-Lee Wee at Reuters stressed continuity:

A recently retired official from the Family Planning Commission who maintains close ties with the agency, said the merger does not mean the commission’s power will be reduced.

“For such a long time, hundreds of millions of people had to have contraception and birth control, this kind of work is necessary. But it’s possible that there will be fewer things done by force,” the retired official said.

But some other observers argued that the changes herald the end of China’s ‘One Child Policy’, whose harsh enforcement and demographic effects have grown increasingly contentious. From Laurie Burkitt at The Wall Street Journal:

While the family planning agency will still exist, merging with the Ministry of Health, leaders have preserved it merely as a face-saving measure, said Wang Feng, a population expert and director of the Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy in Beijing. “The way to interpret this is that the laws are in effect, but the judges and the policemen have all been fired,” Mr. Wang said.

Cheng Li, a political expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., said, “This is a signal to an end of a policy that in reality isn’t in line with China’s other reforms.”

[… But] “The family planning and one-child policy has been running for so many years, and it is in the constitution as state policy,” said Li Jianxin, a population expert from Peking University. “So I guess it might not be this easy for the new leaders to just simply put an end to it.”

Though their anticipated absorption by the Ministry of Culture did not materialize, two major media regulators are to merge. But the China Copyright and Media blog cautioned that halving the number of organs was unlikely to mean less intervention:

[…] As had been anticipated, the General Administration of Press and Publications and the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television will merge into a new body, the State Administration of Press, Publications, Radio, Film and Television (guojia xinwen chuban guangbo dianying dianshi zongju 国家新闻出版广播电影电视总局). The National Copyright Administration, a subordinate department of GAPP, will also be brought into the SAPPRFT, an unfortunate moniker if ever there was one. […]

It should not be expected, however, that this merger will lead to any form of liberalization or deregulation. It is likely that cultural and media policy will remain in line with the Central Committee Decision on Cultural Reform of late 2011, which aimed to combine commercial success with enhanced political control. Also, problems of administrative overlap and dual licensing remain, particularly in the field of Internet management, as the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology maintain their respective Internet portfolios.

Or, more succinctly:

China’s new ministry: State Administration of Press Publication Radio Film and Television.Netizen: too long, but we know you’ll cut it!

— Kai-Fu Lee (@kaifulee) March 10, 2013

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Post tags: coast guard, corruption, diaoyu islands, drug safety, family planning, food safety, GAPP, Japan, kai-fu lee, Ma Kai, maritime security, media regulation, Ministry of Health, Ministry of Railways, National Development and Reform Commission, National People's Congress, NDRC, one-child policy, philippines, railway safety, railways, SARFT, State Council, State Family Planning Commission, State Food and Drug Administration, super-ministries
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A daily stream of bulletins announce ship deployments into the East China Sea, naval combat exercises, the launch of new warships and commentaries calling for resolute defense of Chinese territory.

“The operational goal in the East China Sea is to wear out the Japanese Maritime Self Defence Force and the Japan Coast Guard,” said James Holmes, a maritime strategy expert at the Newport, Rhode Island U.S. Naval War College.

It wasn’t until China became embroiled in the high stakes territorial dispute with Japan late last year that its secretive military opened up.

Now, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is routinely telegraphing its moves around the disputed islands, known as Senkaku in Japanese and Diaoyu in Chinese.

Earlier this week, a former Chinese defense ministry official sought to dampen speculation that a war would break out over the disputed islands, while China’s current ambassador to Japan cautioned that a high-level summit on the issue was still “unlikely.” See also previous CDT coverage of the Diaoyu Islands and other territorial disputes.

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Post tags: diaoyu islands, Japan relations, maritime security, People's Liberation Army, territorial disputes
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Tension behind China and Japan may currently be high amid some speculation of armed conflict between the nations, but Qian Lihua, a member of the 12th National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, said in an interview with Xinhua, “It is not rational or true that China and Japan are doomed to fight a war.

“A military solution is the last resort to settle problems. We should not talk about war and military actions in such a careless way when the two countries just have problems.”

China values its relations with Japan and has always targeted settling disputes peacefully through dialogue, said Qian, who used to head the foreign affairs office under the Ministry of National Defense.

“Once we sit down and talk, there will always be a way out,” the official added.

Despite these claims, tensions continue as Japanese automakers post lower sales in China. Another Xinhua article reports that National People’s Congress spokesperson, Fu Ying, blames Japan for the current dispute:

However, “one hand alone can’t clap,” Fu said, quoting a Chinese proverb to indicate that Japan has failed to engage in negotiations.
She said the Japanese government’s move to “purchase” part of the Diaoyu Islands last year went against the consensus reached by the two countries, which in turn shook China’s basis for maintaining restraint.

“If the other party chooses to take tougher measures and abandon consensus, ‘it is impolite not to reciprocate,’ as another Chinese proverb says,” she said.

“We wish Japanese society and all sides could listen attentively to the voice of the Chinese people and put what happened in the past and what is happening now in perspective, so the two countries find a basis for the dialogue,” said Fu.

While the dispute remains unsolved, China’s envoy to Japan, Cheng Yonghua, said that a high-level summit between the top leaders of the two nations is unlikely. From The South China Morning Post:

“The atmosphere facing bilateral ties between the two countries is at a very critical point now,” Cheng said on the sidelines of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference annual session on Sunday.

“There are no plans now to hold a high-level bilateral summit between leaders of the two nations.”

Mainland observers said the island dispute’s impact on bilateral exchanges was wide-ranging, so a high-level summit was unlikely in the coming months. “Some academics have also refused to attend conferences hosted by Japan,” said Professor Da Zhigang , an expert in Japanese affairs at the Heilongjiang Academy of Social Sciences.

“There is no official order banning us from participating in the events, but the atmosphere between the two nations has made it difficult for us. It is embarrassing if we criticise Japan, but it is also out of the question for us to support Japan.”

Anti-Japanese sentiment has also escalated due to the territorial dispute. According to the China Policy Institute Blog, China has handled these outbursts of anti-Japanese sentiment through appeasement and repression:

Based on its foreign policy and domestic considerations, Beijing has adopted three different types of approach to public expressions of anti-Japanese sentiment and opinion: 1) tolerance or leniency, 2) tight control or suppression and 3) a two-pronged approach. When the political leadership had more incentive to burnish its nationalist credentials and appeared to lack internal consensus concerning the conduct of its relations with Japan, the authorities displayed a greater tolerance of or a more lenient attitude towards public anti-Japanese outbursts. However, when the leadership pursued a moderate and cooperative approach to Japan and had greater concerns about social stability, it sought to suppress or control anti-Japan public sentiment, voices and actions to avoid jeopardizing its efforts to maintain good relations with Japan as well as social stability. By contrast, when the leadership sought a tougher stance in the handling of dispute with Japan, it adopted a two-pronged approach to nationalist outpourings by selectively allowing (or tolerating) some mass anti-Japanese protests to increase pressure on Japan whilst simultaneously making efforts to avoid such outbursts from spiraling out of control.

The authorities’ suppression and tight control of nationalist sentiment has led to a narrowing of political opportunity for the nationalistic public to make their voices heard. However, Beijing’s tolerance or selective allowance of anti-Japanese popular protests for its domestic and/or international gains caused the Chinese government itself to face a dilemma by leading to a widening of political opportunity for the public to affect the government’s policy towards Japan. Anti-Japanese popular nationalism was able to play a greater role in China’s approach towards Japan when the public took advantage of the political opportunity created by the authorities’ tolerance to express their nationalist feelings and opinions in a collective way and to push Beijing into displaying a more assertive stance in the handling of relations with Japan.

Dispite efforts by the Chinese authorities to ease them, anti-Japanese sentiment in China still remains quite strong, which significantly limits Beijing’s available options to ease tensions over the territorial row. By appearing too keen to re-engage with Japan, Beijing may suffer a backlash from an angry public. There are few signs of the mounting tensions being defused so far. The diplomatic tit-for-tat between Beijing and Tokyo seems likely to continue until the two sides find a mutually acceptable resolution of the dispute which would save their faces in front of their peoples.

Read more about the Diaoyu Islands dispute, via CDT.

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Post tags: cheng yonghua, diaoyu islands, Fu Ying, Japan, maritime disputes, territorial disputes
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It is not that China believes it would lose such a spat; the country increasingly enjoys strategic superiority over the entire region, and it is difficult to imagine that its forces would be beaten in a direct engagement over the islands, in the South China Sea or in the disputed regions along the Sino-Indian border. However, Chinese officials see that even the most pronounced victory would be outweighed by the collateral damage that such a use of force would cause to Beijing’s two most fundamental national interests — economic growth and preventing the escalation of radical nationalist sentiment at home. These constraints, rather than any external deterrent, will keep Xi Jinping, China’s new leader, from authorizing the use of deadly force in the Diaoyu Islands theater.

But Xi does not seem blind to the principles that have served Beijing so well over the last few decades. Indeed, although he recently warned unnamed others about infringing upon China’s “national core interests” during a foreign policy speech to members of the Politburo, he also underscored China’s commitment to “never pursue development at the cost of sacrificing other country’s interests” and to never “benefit ourselves at others’ expense or do harm to any neighbor.”

Of course, wars do happen — and still could in the East China Sea. Should either side draw first blood through accident or an unexpected move, Sino-Japanese relations would be pushed into terrain that has not been charted since the middle of the last century.

However, understanding that war would be a no-win situation, China has avoided rushing over the brink. This relative restraint seems to have surprised everyone. But it shouldn’t. Beijing will continue to disagree with Tokyo over the sovereign status of the islands, and will not budge in its negotiating position over disputed territory. However, it cannot take the risk of going to war over a few rocks in the sea. On the contrary, in the coming months it will quietly seek a way to shelve the dispute in return for securing regional stability, facilitating economic development, and keeping a lid on the Pandora’s box of rising nationalist sentiment. The ensuing peace, while unlikely to be deep, or especially conducive to improving Sino-Japanese relations, will be enduring.

Chinese state media reports China’s ambassador to Japan is still ‘optimistic’ about ties, Xinhua reports:

 Chinese Ambassador to Japan Cheng Yonghua said Sunday that he is optimistic for the future of China-Japan relations, despite the lingering tension between the two nations.

“What the two countries need to do now is to improve crisis control and avoid accidents getting out of hand,” said Cheng, who is in Beijing for the annual session of the 12th National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, the country’s top political advisory body.

He said the disputes over the Diaoyu Islands, which were triggered by Japan last year and have not been well handled by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s administration, “is the biggest challenge in improving China-Japan relations.”

“As the saying goes, whoever started the trouble should end it,” the ambassador said.

Despite attempts to cool down the Diaoyu Islands dispute, AP reports China has issued another attack on Japan over the disputed region. This statement comes days ahead of the opening of the Chinese national legislature’s annual session:

The spokesman for the legislature’s chief advisory body, Lu Xinhua, told reporters at a Saturday news conference that if any unintended clash occurred as a result of their patrol boats and planes operating close to one another, Japan would “be held solely responsible for all consequences.”

Read more about Diaoyu Islands dispute, via CDT.

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The authorities in Pyongyang said scientists had set off a “miniaturised” nuclear device with a greater explosive force than those used in two previous nuclear tests, in 2006 and 2009.

“It was confirmed that the nuclear test that was carried out at a high level in a safe and perfect manner using a miniaturised and lighter nuclear device with greater explosive force than previously did not pose any negative impact on the surrounding ecological environment,” KCNA, the North’s official news agency, announced.

The agency said the test had been in response to “outrageous” US hostility that “violently” undermined the regime’s right to peacefully launch satellites – a reference to the condemnation and tighter sanctions that greeted Pyongyang’s successful rocket launch almost two months ago.

For the latest updates, see liveblogs at NKNews.org and Reuters.

After some initial confusion, China’s Foreign Ministry expressed “resolute” opposition to the test (Chinese), which has placed Beijing in an awkward position. From Jane Perlez at The New York Times:

The nuclear test by North Korea on Tuesday, in defiance of warnings by China, leaves the new Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, with a choice: Does he upset North Korea just a bit by agreeing to stepped up United Nations sanctions, or does he rattle the regime by pulling the plug on infusions of Chinese oil and investments that keep North Korea afloat?

[…] The Obama administration excoriated Mr. Hu [Jintao] after North Korea’s second nuclear test in 2009, accusing him of “willful blindness” to the country’s actions.

“With Hu out of the picture the administration is intent on determining whether Xi Jinping will prove more attentive to U.S. security concerns,” Jonathan D. Pollack, director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution said. “How Xi chooses to respond will be an important early signal of his foreign policy priorities and whether he is ready to cooperate much more openly and fully with Washington and Seoul than his predecessor.”

China’s patience with its wayward satellite had already been wearing thin: an editorial in the state-run Global Times early this month urged that North Korea “must pay a heavy price” for a third nuclear test. From Christopher Bodeen at The Associated Press:

“Perhaps Kim Jong Un thinks Xi Jinping will indulge him. Perhaps he’s in for a surprise,” said Richard Bush, Director of the Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C.

[…] “At the start, China gave him a warm welcome and, I think, some aid. But we got no gratitude. They take us for granted,” said Jin Canrong, an international affairs expert at Renmin University in Beijing. “China tried to get closer to him, but it was not successful. China has become very disappointed.”

Yet Beijing also sees Pyongyang as a crucial buffer against U.S. troops based in South Korea and Japan. It also deeply fears a regime collapse could send swarms of refugees across its border. For those reasons, Beijing is unlikely to cut Pyongyang adrift, even if it pushes North Korea harder to end its nuclear provocations and reform its broken-down economy.

The New York Time’s Perlez had also examined the debate prior to the test:

For all the concern in some quarters about North Korea’s wayward behavior, that dread of losing a buffer still prevails among China’s most influential policy makers, particularly in the military, according to Jia Qingguo, a professor at Beijing University’s School of International Studies who is a proponent of a new policy toward North Korea.

“It’s better than before, but it is still difficult to overcome” the mind-set, he said. “A lot of people are taking the very old-fashioned belief that North Korea is a strategic buffer, and they still believe American invaders would march over North Korea to come to China.”

[…] Despite the strains, many analysts are convinced that China remains a firm ally of North Korea. China was only blowing off steam by allowing news media criticism of Pyongyang, said Stephanie Kleine-Ahlbrandt, North East Asia director and China adviser for the International Crisis Group in Beijing.

“The traditionalists in the People’s Liberation Army and the International Liaison Department of the Communist Party control foreign policy [on North Korea],” she said. “The political relationship between China and North Korea right now is at a low point, but China’s longstanding priorities on the Korean Peninsula of no war, no instability and no nukes remain in that order of priority.”

Tuesday’s detonation may force China’s hand. Global Times’ Wang Zhang and Hao Zhou reported on February 5th that Beijing had been “diplomatically cornered” by the threat of the test:

[… A] South Korean embassy official told the Global Times that Seoul is well aware that North Korea rarely listens to Beijing’s advice. What South Korea expects is just pressure from China in line with the other participants of the Six-Party Talks to deliver a clear message before it attempts an audacious and defiant third nuclear test, the official said.

“This is a grave test of China’s diplomacy,” said Zhang Liangui, a professor on Korean Peninsula issues at the Party School of the Communist Party of China Central Committee.

If China fails to persuade North Korea to give up its plan for a fresh nuclear test or fails to deliver immediate and severe sanctions that could substantially hit North Korea after the test, China will forever lose the chance to play a dominant role on the Korean Peninsula nuclear issue and all the previous efforts to realize the denuclearization of the peninsula will have been in vain, Zhang said.

But the diplomatic mushroom cloud may have a silver lining. From The Economist, on February 2nd:

Now, more than ever, China might want to seem a contributor to regional peace. Its belligerence over the disputed Senkaku or Diaoyu islands has brought relations with Japan to their worst level since 1945, with China now considering Japan’s proposal for a summit between its prime minister, Shinzo Abe, and the Communist Party leader, Xi Jinping. China’s assertion of territorial claims in the South China Sea has soured relations there, too. The Philippines has been provoked into asking a UN tribunal to rule on whether part of China’s claim has a legal basis.

On both those issues China will find it hard to offer concessions. This week Mr Xi growled that “no country should presume that we will engage in trade involving our core interests or that we will swallow the ‘bitter fruit’ of harming our sovereignty, security or development.”

North Korea offers a chance for China to seem flexible without jeopardising any “core interests” and, indeed, to enhance its own security at the same time. The new treatment of North Korea could also strengthen China’s relations with South Korea, which were damaged by the failure to join the widespread international condemnation of the North for attacks on the South in 2010. And it would offer what Zhu Feng, a scholar at Peking University, calls “a new platform for China and the United States to get closer”.

In any case, many Chinese netizens appear to have lost patience. From Liz Carter at Tea Leaf Nation:

Writer and critic Yao Bo took to Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter, asking, “Who can North Korea threaten with its nuke? It can’t reach America, and it doesn’t have any grievance with Japan. They share a language and culture with the South Koreans. What can they do besides threaten China? There are still people saying this is a good thing, and they must be mentally ill, beyond hope. Raising a mad dog to protect your house really is the logic of a patriotraitor [slang for a traitor who pretends to be a patriot].”

[…] Even Hu Xijin, editor of China’s party-line, state-run news organization the Global Times, remarked on Weibo, “North Korea just experienced a ‘man-made earthquake,’ which is likely a nuclear test. North Korea is headed down the wrong path. Its people will pay the price for the country’s mistakes. The legitimacy of North Korean rule should be reconsidered.”

Siegfried S. Hecker, former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, recently gave a detailed guide to what to expect from a North Korean nuclear test at Foreign Policy, based in part on his own observations from past visits to North Korean nuclear facilities. At The New York Times last month, David E. Sanger and William J. Broad discussed what the United States and Iran would hope to learn from the test and its aftermath. See more on North Korea and nuclear weapons via CDT.

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