As the article below (and this one – https://chindia-alert.org/2012/09/27/japanese-car-plants-in-china-whos-feeling-the-heat/) demonstrates so clearly, today no country is an island. Economic inter-dependency means that compromise and pragmatism must win the day. However, the enmity between China and Japan goes back to the late 19th Century when Japan joined the eight nations that sacked Beijing, followed by the yet-to-be admitted by the Japanese atrocities of the Sino-Japan war.
We can only hope that common sense will prevail. From afar (in the UK) one cannot see why China and its neighbours, including Japan, cannot agree to sharing the bounty of the sea and that underwater. Why should lines drawn on a map dictate that oil, gas or whatever lies beneath belong to one nation and not another? But then I was trained as an engineer and not a politician or lawyer!
NY Times: “After allowing anti-Japanese demonstrations that threatened to spin out of control, China has reined them in and turned instead to hard-edged diplomacy over disputed islands in the East China Sea to lessen any potential damage the conflict might have inflicted on the nation’s softening economy and a delicate leadership transition.
With relations between the two Asian powers at a low point, China decided to go ahead with a scaled-back reception here on Thursday night to honor the 40th anniversary of the resumption of their diplomatic ties on Sept. 29, 1972. A member of the Politburo’s Standing Committee, Jia Qinglin, attended with several other Chinese officials.
But Beijing sent a not-so-subtle message to Tokyo by not granting clearance to the plane that would have brought in an important Japanese guest, the chairman of Toyota. Other Japanese attended the event, though, and at the United Nations in New York, the two sides met in private and sparred in public.
Around the disputed islands in the East China Sea, called the Diaoyu by the Chinese and the Senkaku by the Japanese, a large flotilla of Chinese patrol boats was being monitored Friday by about half of Japan’s fleet of coast guard cutters, the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun reported.
The protests in more than 80 cities, including in urban centers where Japanese car dealerships and electronics plants were damaged, suggested that the Chinese leadership approved the outpouring of nationalism in part as insulation against criticism of the party itself during the transition of power that formally is scheduled to take place at the 18th Communist Party Congress, now set to begin on Nov. 8. But the protests threatened to turn against the Chinese government itself, diplomats and analysts said.
Even though China has overtaken Japan as the biggest economy in Asia, Beijing’s handling of the dispute, precipitated by the Japanese government’s decision to buy three of the islands from their private Japanese owners, highlighted the interdependence of the Chinese and Japanese economies, and the limitations on what the leadership could allow.
Notions of punishing Tokyo economically for buying the islands, whose status was left unclear after World War II, are unrealistic, said Hu Shuli, editor in chief of Caixin Media and one of China’s chief economic journalists. So many Chinese workers are employed at Japanese-owned companies, she said, that any escalation of tensions leading to a boycott of Japanese goods could lead to huge job losses.
This would be disastrous in an already shaky Chinese economy, Ms. Hu wrote in the Chinese magazine Century Weekly.
At a time when overall foreign investment in China is shrinking, Japan’s investment in China rose by 16 percent last year, Ms. Hu noted. The Japan External Trade Organization reported $12.6 billion of Japanese investment in China last year, compared with $14.7 billion in the United States.
Not just China, but all of Asia, could face a serious economic downturn if Japanese investments in China were threatened, said Piao Guangji, a researcher at the China Academy of Social Science.”
via China Alters Its Strategy in Dispute With Japan – NYTimes.com.
See also:
CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 