The East China Sea Dispute : China’s and Japan’s Assertiveness from Mao to Xi

Chubb, Andrew (2024) The East China Sea Dispute : China’s and Japan’s Assertiveness from Mao to Xi. Asia Society, New York.

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Abstract

Xi Jinping came to power in 2012 amid a serious foreign policy crisis following the Japanese government’s nationalization of three of the disputed Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands. The move was aimed at blocking Shintaro Ishihara’s Tokyo municipal government from purchasing the uninhabited islands from their private owner and constructing a harbor and other infrastructure that would further inflame tensions. Although Beijing understood Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda’s goal was to prevent an even worse crisis, it nonetheless responded by sending maritime law enforcement ships into the Japanese-controlled territorial seas around the islands, backed by a furious propaganda wave that unleashed violent anti-Japanese protests in dozens of cities across China. The result was a fundamental change in the sovereign territorial seas around the islands from Japanese control to overlapping control — a situation that continues to bring ships and aircraft from both sides into close contact on the water, increasing the risk of an accident that could bring about armed conflict. How much of China’s behavior in the East China Sea is attributable to Xi Jinping? To what extent have Sino-Japanese action-reaction dynamics been at play versus longer-term processes of the shifting distribution of power in the region or changes in domestic politics? How important have the hydrocarbon deposits that originally touched off the dispute been, and to what extent have the area’s fisheries — or fisherfolk — been protagonists? This paper assesses these questions using a systematic time-series dataset of both sides’ patterns of behavior over the long term, from its origins in the early 1970s to the Xi era. It visualizes the historical trajectory of the Sino-Japanese disputes in the East China Sea, charting each side’s key moves across domestic, diplomatic, and physical domains and the balance between military, administrative, political, and resource motivations behind them. Quantifying the changes in China’s and Japan’s behaviors in the disputed area from 1970 to 2015 reveals six key dynamics: 1.) The East China Sea dispute began over oil and gas resources but switched toward a contest for military and administrative control as China rapidly expanded its naval and coast guard presence in the mid-2000s. 2.) China’s policy was already trending in an increasingly assertive direction well before Xi took power. China’s gray-zone assertiveness dates back to the mid-1990s, while coercive methods started in the mid-2000s. The key change Xi has overseen is China’s increasingly militarized — but also regularized — presence in the disputed area. 3.) Japan has triggered several acute periods of tension with provocative moves, but China has driven the long-term arc, with its shifts from “shelving” the dispute in the 1970s to greater assertiveness from the mid-1990s to regular coercion from the mid-2000s. 4.) The two significant periods of non–Liberal Democratic Party rule in Japan have both preceded surges of Chinese assertiveness followed by Japanese pushback, raising questions about China’s calculations regarding domestic politics in Japan. 5.) Despite several high-profile propaganda campaigns and diplomatic blitzes, most of China’s moves have been in the physical domain on the water, while Japan has focused on diplomacy and domestic administrative moves. 6.) Xi’s precise role in the escalation around the disputed islands in September 2012 remains unclear, but his centralization of power since the 18th Party Congress has coincided with a regularization of China’s assertive behaviors. A less powerful leader might, like Xi’s predecessors, find it more difficult to prevent substate actors from taking destabilizing actions in the area, as occurred several times in the 2000s.