Senkakus: Some Plans are too Complex to keep the Peace

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One Conflict, two Sustainable Solutions

When it comes to the Senkakus (or Diaoyu Islands, in Chinese), I’m sure there are lawyers who can make a convincing case for China’s, or for Japan’s position. The immediate problem seems to be that neither side – neither Beijing, nor Tokyo – will be prepared to have an international court – the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) would be a likely address – decide their dispute. The Economist suggested a natural solution, i. e.:

Our own suggestion is for governments to agree to turn the Senkakus and the seas round them—along with other rocks contested by Japan and South Korea—into pioneering marine protected areas. As well as preventing war between humans, it would help other species.

Hardcore ecologists may agree. If any territory that gets contested by anyone was ti be turned into ecological habitat, too, they might agree even more. But what we need in this context aren’t conservation areas. International relations need rules.

In that light, another suggestion, also by the Economist, but in another article, makes much more sense:

[..] for the majority of disputes, the courts can provide fair results. It may take decades to finish the job, but a long wait is better than the alternative. In the words of one international lawyer: going to court is always cheaper than going to war.

The Economist believes in progress. That doesn’t mean that they would never support war. They supported the war against Iraq in 2003, for example. But generally, their stance seems to be that global economic integration and growing prosperity would be the real way forward. By habitat or by law.

After all, war on Iraq looked manageable, in 2003. A war between China and Japan, one a nuclear military power, the other quite probably backed by a nuclear military power, looks very different, not to mention the impact on the global economy, even if war could be limited.

Click the blood to enter the Mukden Incident Museum

It is right to work for peace. But should we take the peace for granted?

Foarp appears to believe that, and cites two reasons:

• it is the government that drives the demonstrations in China, which in themselves fit a long running pattern for such demonstrations

• There is nothing to fight for. The islands themselves are of little or no value and are incapable of sustaining significant numbers of inhabitants.

In short, according to Foarp, the current

sudden outburst of government-directed anger against Japan is most likely an attempt at distraction from the CCP’s current problems surrounding this year’s transition of leadership in Beijing. Put simply, in observing Chinese political affairs you should never forget which hand holds the whip.

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Totalitarianism can change Public Opinion, but not Anytime

Both Foarp and I, if I remember our past discussions correctly, think of China as a totalitarian state. But that doesn’t mean that the whip is irrevocably in the hands of the CCP. The CCP did create many of the factors that make nationalism a double-edged sword for Beijing. Nationalism can be the mastic that holds the party and the “masses” together. But nationalism is also one of the few areas of “public opinion” where government censorship on “patriotic” utterances looks truly awkward, and makes the CCP’s own “patriotism” look dingy. In short: a petroleum tanker notched up to full speed over decades – think of patriotic education as the heavy fuel that drives it – can’t easily be stopped within days, or even weeks, without get into odds with people whose anger you would better agree with, for the sake of your own credibility.

Japan is no one-party dictatorship. But there are political parties which use nationalism as a whip on more moderate competitors. Yoshihiko Noda‘s decision to buy three of the Senkaku islands was most probably driven by the desire to snatch that booty away from Shintaro Ishihara, Tokyo’s nationalistic mayor, who had previously planned to buy those islands from its private owners. Depending on Japan’s future national elections, nationalists may still inherit those islands from the moderates.

Nationalism may come, in many ways, naturally. That is debatable in itself, but it’s my belief that love for ones own country, even hot-headed at times, for a limited period and under certain circumstances, can be natural. What is not so natural is the mixture of victimization and megalomania Chinese students have been fed with for many decades. It’s a rather philistine kind of megalomania, but it is too presumptuous to be considered normal. The Bangkok Post published an article by Robert Sutter on Tuesday, and it is more outspoken than what you will get to read in most cases. Above all, it describes a Chinese tendency to believe in a unity of foreign-policy principles and practice, while  from the viewpoint of the neighbours and foreign specialists, the principles kept changing and gaps between principles and practice often were very wide. And Chinese opinion sees whatever problems China faces with neighbours and other concerned powers including the US over sensitive issues of sovereignty and security as caused by them and certainly not by China.

Combine that with a belief that China is becoming invincible. Most Chinese citizens have never been in the army. Even less have seen genuine war. War seems to be a remote thing, even if it should occur. When Yugoslavia was on fire in the 1990s, I was in China, and I was told that Europe was enviable – it had Northern Ireland, the Basque country, and Yugoslavia. There was real action in our place. And those who talked that way were no idiots who ran around in camouflage suits after hours – they were quite normal people. It became a completely different story when the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was bombed a few weeks later.

Patriotism is – in itself – a good thing. That’s why all powers, but totalitarian ones in particular, want to manipulate it to their own ends. A totalitarian political system has the most comprehensive plans. The problem with that, as Walter Sobchak famously said:

If the plan gets too complex something always goes wrong.

Tokyo, and most Japanese people, probably don’t want war. Beijing, and most Chinese people, probably don’t want war, either. But Chinese anger on Japan is not just a welcome “distraction” for Beijing, as Foarp and many commenters suggest. It is fuel that Beijing wants to harness. That, see above, is a very complex plan.

This is a league game, Smokey. Mark it zero.

A disproportionate demand for respect – and that’s what nationalism is about -, is usually based on a long, complex story. Therefore, there’s no need for anything substantial to fight over. The demands are substance enough.
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If you want a Fight, there’s Always something to Fight over

One can get too obsessed with history. It’s not the proverbial “mirror” to predict the future – but it does give us clues about human behavior – behavior that seems to make sense to contemporaries, even if it leads to war. Behavior that makes no sense to the later generations, or at hindsight, often not even in the countries who “won”.

On July 29 and 30, 1914, Russian Czar Nicholas II and German Emperor Wilhelm II exchanged several telegrams, in which they made demands on each other and at the same time assured each other that neither of them wanted a war. At the same time, Austria-Hungary was mobilizing its army. history.com has English translations of those telegrams. What history.com apparently missed: Serbia actually accepted Vienna’s ultimatum. The German emperor’s reaction:

That’s more than one could expect! A great moral success for Vienna, but with it all reason for war disappears. (Das ist mehr als man erwarten konnte! Ein großer moralischer Erfolg für Wien, aber damit fällt jeder Kriegsgrund weg.)

If all reason for war had disappeared, Vienna didn’t care, and invaded Serbia anyway. From that moment on, Czar Nicholas was under pressure from the Russian public – and Russia’s international position was at stake. Simply giving in would have been another blow, five years after the Bosnian crisis.

Neither war, nor a trade war between China and Japan, are inevitable. But status and influence in East Asia are a league game. Japan “retreated” in a diplomatic showdown about the arrest of a Chinese trawler crew in 2010.

Business concerns prevailed, the Economist noted, in September that year,

and so did China, in a sense. A bitter feud with Japan had been escalating since September 7th, when a Chinese fishing boat ran into a Japanese patrol in waters which both countries claim as sovereign territory. Today Japan released the boat’s Chinese skipper, who had been accused of bashing into the two Japanese vessels deliberately. With the release of the captain, Zhan Qixiong, the diplomatic world breathes a sigh of relief. But how to score this match? Japan comes off looking weak, as it succumbs to an avalanche of pressure.

That’s not going to work every time. Neither public pressure in China (which has long forgotten 2010 and feels “humiliated” all over again), nor public pressure in Japan should be underestimated.

Nothing to fight for?

People who feel that they are just bystanders may feel that real clashes would be irrational. People who feel that they are stakeholders may view things very differently.

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Updates/Related

» Out of Hand, Beijing Cream, Sep 17, 2012
» Caught in the Screw, Nov 18, 2010

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“Political Confucianism” and the New York Times: Domestic Audience, Foreign Audience, who Cares (as long as Zhongnanhai listens)

Remarks made by U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton at Government House in Ulaan Bataar, Mongolia, on July 9, met with no friendly echo from Beijing. Clinton attended an International Women’s Leadership Forum in the Mongolian capital. Liu Yandong, apparently, didn’t attend.

Gate of New China, Zhongnanhai: for political concept deliveries, please use the back door. (Wikimedia Commons, click photo for source.)

But Zhong Sheng, an editorialist with People’s Daily, sensed a loss of face, anyway. Three days after Clinton’s speech, he had  sufficiently calmed down to ask questions: “Who gave Americans the right to arrogantly assessing the democracy status of Asian countries?” The editorial warned the U.S. that “preaching human rights and democracy” would marginalize America in Asia.

It’s true: Clinton spoke about democracy. But there seemed to be noone in the place who might have taken offense. Neither Kang Kyung-wha (from South Korea), UN deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights, nor Kim Campbell (Canada), nor Maria Leissner (Sweden), who were all present there. And Mongolia’s president, Elbegdorj Tsakhia, told the audience that

Mongolia honors and is firmly committed to human rights, equal application of law for all and an open and inclusive society, which are the fundamental principles of democracy.

People’s Daily might have criticized the Mongolian president just as well. Warnings that Mongolia might marginalize itself (in its geographic position between Russia and China) might actually have sounded somewhat more logical than levelling the admonition at Washington.

Geo-Politics: Shanghai Cooperation Organization (including China and Russia) – Wikimedia Commons (click picture for source)

But then, this would have amounted to bringing it home to the People’s Daily readership that maybe, democracy and human rights weren’t that exotic in Asia after all – and Zhong Sheng’s editorial was targeted at a domestic audience in the first place.

Targeted at a foreign audience, however, and also prompted by Clinton’s remarks, was an op-ed published by the New York Times, on July 10, i. e. one day later. The op-ed’s authors, Jiang Qing (蒋庆) and Daniel A. Bell, referring to Clinton’s speech in Ulaan Baatar, suggested that framing the debate in terms of democracy versus authoritarianism overlooks better possibilities.

It is easy to discard “political” Confucians like Jiang as nutters. After all, even in just one short op-ed, he and Bell manage to raise fundamental questions concerning their own concept without answering them. While eloquent in putting it to the NYT readership that democracy is [..] flawed in practice, they failed to tell their readers how people who represent sacred, historical and cultural legitimacy should actually be chosen.

Chinese readers may know what they meant  – after all, the CCP even defines Olympic torches as sacred -, but the average NYT reader probably isn’t quite that familiarized with sacred things, even as they pop up in the news.

But the NYT’s readers were hardly Jiang’s and Bell’s main target, just as America wasn’t really the main target for People’s Daily’s editorial on democracy and marginalization (see this post’s second paragraph). It simply looks good in Beijing when the New York Times publishes your op-ed, especially when it is in favor of “humane authority”. And if it isn’t logical, it doesn’t really matter, either.

Yellow Cat, Black Cat, White Cat – who cares, if only it’s harmonious

A concept of contending schools – striving for the approval of powers that be: local warlords, the gentry, the emperor, or the CCP – has existed long before Confucianism became a state doctrine. And it still stands. Jiang Qing doesn’t need to convince readers in North America, and he doesn’t even need to convince the Chinese “citizens”, or Chinese scholars. If the CCP buys his concept, that will be good enough.

And while Clinton’s Ulaan Baatar remarks may have been a reason for the New York Times to accept the op-ed, Jiang and Bell may find the situation in China itself comparatively promising for their efforts. As the Chinese economy slows – even if this should turn out to be a short dip, rather than a long-term trend -, China’s leaders may be more receptive of “Confucian” concepts than usual. Economic growth can’t last forever. And Confucianism – or what Jiang wants to sell as Confucianism – is still there.

Unfortunately however, this rubbish does no justice to Confucianism. Many of Jiang’s critics will whole-heartedly agree that Confucianism subscribes to authoritarianism – what Jiang likes it for is exactly what his critics will dislike it for, and this provides all the structure a debate seems to require these days. But the spectrum of Confucianism today – even among Chinese acdemics – is much broader than international publicity for Jiang and Bell seems to suggest. An international audience with an interest in what is going on among Chinese Confucians should pay attention to other Confucian schools, too.

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Related

» The Confucius Peace Prize, Dec 9, 2010
» A Continuing Debasement, Useless Tree, Dec 8, 2010
» Jiang Qing on Women and Confucianism, Inside-Out China, June 25, 2008

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Angry Citizens and Bad Religion

Scheiße, ich muss im Golf nach Hause fahren.

I don’t know who’s angrier. Is it those who wave cartoons of the prophet (Mohamed) around to make some Salafists explode – and to hurt the feelings of Muslims who may feel angry, saddened, or who won’t care (yes, that happens, too)? Or  is it the Salafists who are angrier?

Police people may be angry, too, because they have to bear the brunt of keeping idiots on both sides apart from each other – and to expose themselves to danger. Police people have more reasons to be angry than anyone else, in my view.

But I seem to understand that a free society can either live with Salafists who are handing out Korans, and with people who are waving Mohamed cartoons around, or it isn’t much of a free society after all.

Bo Xilai planned the Third World War

OK, maybe not. But he (or Wang Lijun, or whoever) wiretapped everyone, up to the collective leader Hu Jintao himself, “nearly half a dozen” (i. e. 5.9, I guess?) CCP officials people with party ties claim, as quoted by the New York Times. And the British government is soooo happy that the rule of law applies in China, and that the Heywood case is re-investigated. OK, not quite that, either – he welcomes Neil Heywood death investigation.

My theory is that Bo Xilai shagged Sarah Palin, conspired with the Nazis on the dark side of the moon, and that they will soon abduct him so that he can’t reveal their schemes.

We will never see Bo Xilai again. That’s almost for sure.

Update - Update - Update: JR Intelligence Unit spotted Bo in Syria in what appears to be an extraordinary rendition arrangement between Beijing and Damascus.

Blog and Press Review: Oh, Rule of Law!

I’m sometimes wondering if one should really make a fuss and take issue with stuff that is written by the mouthpieces of a totalitarian political system, who praise the disciplinary investigation against Bo Xilai or charges against his wife as shining examples of how rule of law prevails in China . But if one wants to take issue, the following is a great way to do so:

It’s not rule of law if everybody’s doing it and you only oust the people who piss on the shoes of the top leadership. It’s not rule of law if every case of corruption is due to a lack of personal virtue on the part of the official with nary a word about the system that allows this kind of venality to flourish. It’s not rule of law if the police chief of a major city has to threaten to defect in order to get the attention of the central government.

Jeremiah Jenne, reacting to the  Global Times‘ coverage.

But another option, if you really want to insult Huanqiu Shibao, is to quote from it:

There is no contradiction between emancipation of mind and trust in the party’s central committee. Without emancipation of minds, trust in the central committee would be mere slavish conformism. It is exactly for the diversity we have, for having other options, that we truly discover that trusting the party’s central committee, implementing the party’s road map, is more reliable than any other method other people may teach us, and more able to create the conditions that make the country and the individual develop.

相信党中央和解放思想不矛盾，没有思想的解放，相信党中央就是盲从。正是因为我们有了多元化，有了其他选项，我们才真正发现，相信党中央，执行党的路线，比任何别人教我们的方法都更可靠，更能为保障国家和个人的发展创造条件。

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Related

Dr. Zhivago lives, Andresen / RIA Novosti, Aug 12, 2011

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Chinese coverage on Kim Jong-il’s Death

A cobbler should stick to his last, they say. This blog may be no shining example for this motto, but Kim Jong-il‘s death, plus speculation, is extensively reported everywhere, and I don’t believe that I can add a lot of meaningful information here.

But to commemorate the old gangsta, who reportedly presided over the death of some two million people soon after succeeding his holy father in 1994 (due to ill-judged economic reforms and poor harvests), here is a historical icon:

Another boring Day at the Supreme Commander’s Office

Let’s hope that he won’t soon be missed for his, umm, restraint.

From Sichuan Province, China, Adam Cathcart is logging Chinese coverage on Kim’s death, plus updates, in this (probably only initial) blogpost.

The tag to follow there should be North Korea.

For some more folksy reactions in China, there’s a random collection on Sinostand.

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Updates

» Voice of Korea, JR’s Soundfiles, recorded Dec 19, 2011
[Update, Dec 23, 2012: soundfile now removed. Please contact me by email or comment if you are interested in the soundfile - JR
Former link: soundcloud.com/jr_s-soundfiles/voice-of-korea-kim-jong-il]

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Taiwan’s Presidential Election Trends, according to the Prediction Future Markets

I’m not sure if Taiwanese opinion polls benefit experienced Taiwanese readers – to someone like me, who is no close observer, most of them seem to be of little use.

Look at those included in the chart underneath, for example. They are all pan-blue sources: the China Times, United Daily News, and Apple Daily. The Apple Daily may not be very China-friendly, but according to Wikipedia Chinese (as of today), they are said to have close connections to president Ma Ying-jeou‘s staff, and Apple Daily’s numbers of December 3 would seem to confirm that.

Opinion Polls, all Pan-Blue Sources, Nov. 16 to Dec. 7, 2011

Yes – 47.04 per cent of the interviewees would vote for Ma Ying-jeou, 36.9 per cent for Tsai Ing-wen, and 12.11 per cent for James Soong Chu-yu, according to Apple Daily, which published a poll completed on December 3 (see Ma’s best number ever in the chart above – if Wikipedia quoted them correctly).

For the numbers included in the chart, and beyond (back to July 1, and including sources other than pan-blue), see “Three-Way Race, Wikipedia”.

Polls seem to be much more part of the “spin-doctoring” in Taiwan, than they are in most European or North American countries. 47.04 per cent for Ma Ying-jeou – not even a distant watcher can take that forecast serious.

Evidence so far suggests that prediction markets are at least as accurate as other institutions predicting the same events with a similar pool of participants, Wikipedia (English) of today suggests.

So there might be alternative sources. And there are prediction markets forecasts for Taiwan’s presidential elections in January, too. Here, the picture is very different: there, Tsai has been more likely to win the elections of the time, ever since October 26, 2011 – the  market forecast is run by the National Chengchi University (國立政治大學). What looks particularly plausible there is that Ma’s chances fell, just as Soong Chu-yu’s were rising. This would seem plausible because Soong’s People-First Party is “bluer” and closer to China than Ma’s KMT, and unlikely to draw support from any other party than the KMT.

The Economist, not necessarily a fan of Tsai Ing-wen, quoted the Chengchi University numbers, too, on November 19:

A prediction market run by National Chengchi University, accurate in the past, says the probability of his winning the election dived from over 59% on October 16th to under 42% on November 14th; Ms Tsai stands at 49%. Opinion polls in the island’s media, which usually leans towards the KMT, also show slumping popularity, though Mr Ma still leads by a few percentage points.

[Update, Dec 13: XFuture and the National Chengchi University prediction markets are basically identical, according to Echo Taiwan]
Echo Taiwan has also turned to a future market for clues (there are links within his paragraph – see there:

Xfuture, the future market website, claimed to be more accurate than most opinion surveys conducted by media in Taiwan, is conducting surveys in the form of stock exchanges for the upcoming legislative and presidential elections. There are 3 contract groups for the president election. I am sharing the timeline of one of them, The Estimate of Vote Percentage (2012總統選舉投票率預測), for all three candidates: Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文, DPP), Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九, KMT) and James Soong (宋楚瑜, PFP). The data covers the period from 9/1/2011 to 12/2/2011 for both Tsai and Ma. Soong was not included into this contract group until 11/4/11. At the time of preparing this post (12/2), the data show a profile of Tsai : Ma : Soong = 51.0% : 37.1% : 12.5%.

Here, too, Ma’s rate is falling, as Soong’s is rising.

Echo Taiwan’s post also contains guesses and clues as to which events of the past two months may have led to the shift in Tsai’s favor, plus links to further posts by other bloggers. Just as there, the Economist’s Nov 19 article attributes some cause for Ma’s troubles to events prior to Soong entering the race:

But Mr Ma’s popularity was falling even before Mr Soong’s formal candidacy. He dropped a bombshell on October 17th by saying that he favours signing a peace treaty with China within the next decade, provided the public and parliament supported it. It was the first time that Mr Ma had given a timetable for negotiating such a hugely sensitive issue, and it has whipped up alarm in the media and among a China-wary public. The DPP accuses Mr Ma of steering the island towards unification. Mr Ma later backtracked, suggesting, among other things, that a treaty would need a referendum.

Only to backtrack once again, shortly after that. Ma had apparently become dizzy.

Early in October, political commenter Wong Chong Xia warned the KMT that

Ma Ying-jeou’s support rate never exceeds a ten-percent lead over Tsai Ing-wen, and the pan-green camp’s voting rate has always been stronger than the pan-blue camp’s, and past experience shows that when it is a one-on-one race, and the pan-blue camp’s lead isn’t better than ten per cent, it is the loser when the ballots are counted on election night.

I don’t know if the future markets include reflections of the phenomenon observed by Wong, and I can’t tell Wong’s observation itself is correct – but at the moment, Tsai looks like the more likely winner of next year’s presidential elections.

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Related

» Closing in on the Presidency, Nov 25, 2011

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Updates/Related

» Election Campaign Coverage in China, Taipei Times, Dec 12, 2011
» Presidential Debate, PTS TV / Youtube, Dec 2, 2011

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Chinese War Hero: Third Party, Third World War

Yes, I know why an old Zhang-Zhaozhong related post of mine is currently among the top posts. Zhang Zhaozhong (张召忠 / Zhāng Zhàozhōng), a professor with the National Defense University (国防大学)  told a Chinese television audience that “China would not hesitate to protect Iran with a third world war” if the West should launch an attack on the Islamic Republic.

But then, while we’ve heard American and British officials say that “all options are on the table”, even the Economist, which was quite supportive of the invasion of Iraq some eight years ago, described in one of its most recent editions why military options didn’t look like convincing:

Yet the arguments against an attack are still overwhelming, even for Israel. A sustained bombing campaign would take weeks and set off a firestorm in the Middle East, with Iran counter-attacking Israel through its proxies. It would do nothing to help regime change in Tehran. The economic consequences could be catastrophic. And to what end? A successful campaign would still only delay Iran, not stop it. The technical difficulties for Israel’s armed forces of carrying out such a broad mission over such a long time are immense. Indeed, the suspicion is that Mr Netanyahu would be betting that what Israel started, America would feel forced to finish.

Barack Obama should make it very clear to Mr Netanyahu that he would not do that. At the same time, he should pursue two courses: pushing sanctions, on the one hand, and preparing for a nuclear-armed Iran on the other.

I’m too busy to look Zhang’s statement up in the Chinese media now. But what I do know is that the professor’s statement  – even if correctly quoted in our media – doesn’t spell a binding Chinese commitment to defend Iran – and as long as an attack on Iran isn’t seriously on the cards anyway, any third party can easily threaten a third world war over it, and try to become a celebrated anti-imperialist hero in the Middle East.

But above all, some people at home, in front of their television sets, will feel very important.

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Related

» Russia warns West, Reuters, December 1, 2011

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