UN’s Anan Pushes Effort For China-Japan Talks

It’s a sign of how dire the situation in Asia is that UN Secretary General Kofi Anan is now personally reportedly pressing hard to get to officials of China and Japan together to talk this week — to defuse tensions that seemingly accentuate every day.

Anan hopes to get the two countries’ officials together later this week in Indonesia, but the questions then become: a)is it too little, too late? b)will this crisis require more than an apology, but eventually need some kind of third party mediator?


In a late breaking development, China offered to repair the Japanes Embassy in Beijing, but there wasn’t any info yet on compensation, Reuters reported.


This new ice age in relations between the two countries — at their lowest point in more than 30 years — entails far more than noisy demonstrations and anti-Japanese violence in China, a demand for an apology by Japan and China’s refusal to issue one. The present crisis’ catalysts includes Tokoyo’s green-light to a controversial historical textbook, violence-laced anti-Japan demonstrations and border disputes. If this crisis grows deeper it’s likely to force the United States to take a strong stand and perhaps make some consequence-packed choices of its own.

Meanwhile, beneath the surface there are economic consequences for China and Japan that — for the moment, at least — are weathering the storm.CNN reports:

Japan has warned of economic consequences as relations slump to their lowest since the two resumed diplomatic ties in 1972.

China is Japan’s biggest trading partner, but Machimura has warned that bilateral ties, “including on the economic front, could decline to a serious state.”

Trade between China and Japan last year was worth about $167 billion. According to Chinese government statistics, Japan has invested in more than 20,000 projects in China with total actual investment of more than $32 billion.

However, Merrill Lynch Japan chief economist Jesper Koll told CNN on Tuesday that there would be “minimal economic impact” from the tensions, because both sides needed each other.

“It is a well-integrated economic relationship,” he said.

The tension between the two Asian giants helped push Japan’s Nikkei 225 average down 3.8 percent on Monday, but the Nikkei rallied on Tuesday morning.

According to CNN, Anan wants to get Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and Chinese President Hu Jintao to meet at the Asia-Africa summit which opens in the Indonesian capital Jakarta on Thursday. But the situation has not been helped by inflammatory comments, such as the ones made by a top Chinese official Monday who demanded an apology from Japan, according to the Japan Times:

“The responsibility for the current situation falls on the Japanese side,” Vice Foreign Minister Wu Dawei said at a news conference, one day after tens of thousands demonstrated against Japan in at least six Chinese cities.

He said Japan has failed to handle “historical issues correctly,” an apparent reference to new textbooks approved by Tokyo that critics say gloss over wartime atrocities by Japanese troops. Many Chinese believe Japan has never truly shown remorse for offenses it committed during its invasion of China.

“It shouldn’t be us who should apologize,” Wu said. “It is Japan who should apologize first.”

Writes Max Solivan in the Philippine Star:

There’s no doubt that the current wave of demonstrations had…the blessings of the government, much as they deny any hand in instigating them. No demonstration ever takes place in Communist China – and it’s still Communist despite its capitalistic-looking prosperity and smiling face – without government permission.

The websites buzzed with furious anti-Japanese rhetoric for weeks, even giving “demonstrators” the place and time of assembly – and nothing on the website can be placed without tacit approval of the big bosses in Beijing.

Obviously, China wants to block any prospect of Japan securing a chair in the vital United Nations Security Council (Tokyo’s latest ambition), the spectre of a Washington-Tokyo alliance against China (Beijing’s latest trauma and bogeyman), the exploration for oil in disputed waters off Shanghai, et cetera. But the demonstrations may have spiralled out of control.

Worst of all, those demonstrations – growing in scope and fury – may subtly be directed at the Chinese government itself. A repressed people may be letting off steam in the only way they find open to them, when the ultimate object of their wrath is the hegemony against which thus far, with painful memories of the Tiananmen massacre and its bloody aftermath still fresh in their minds, they find themselves helpless. Up to a point. Remember what Mao Zedong himself once warned: “All China is littered with dry faggots awaiting a spark.”

He warns that hidden dangers lurk behind the China demonstrations’ seemingly simple causes:

The Japanese textbook controversy we will always have. In the late 1970s I vividly remember the angry demonstrations in China and South Korea and the protests against the “rewriting” of history by textbook authors in Tokyo. They charged then that Japan was embarked on a new era of militarism because of phrases referring to the “invasion” of China by Japan being amended to a mere Japanese “advance” into China, et cetera. Japan’s tatamae approach and its textbook “amnesia” has long vexed this writer, and I’ve written a dozen articles assailing it over the past two decades. But this week’s riots should concern us even more greatly.

For a rise in Chinese “nationalism” and xenophobia, since China is now so economically vigorous and militarily militant, poses a danger to us all here in Asia, within this giant nation’s geographical sphere.

But not as much danger as it poses, it must be said, to the regime itself in Beijing.

So as Anan steps in to try to become the equivilent of a diplomatic marriage counselor to these two bickering governments the question becomes: are we seeing what could ultimately prove to be the makings of a political boomerang in the form of nationalist demonstrations in China?



TheNew York Times has a great Q&A on this issue.