Routledge Security in Asia Series, no. 12. Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge, 2018. xi, 202 pp. US$170.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-138-30873-2.
The postwar Sino-Japanese relationship is often told as a history of rivalry, symbolized by a sovereignty dispute over a group of small uninhabited islands located between the two nations in the East China Sea.
Although the bilateral tension between the two largest economies in East Asia is often viewed as a threat to further prosperity in the region, in her book The China-Japan Conflict over the Senkaku/ Diaoyu Islands: Useful Rivalry Anna Costa argues that the territorial row itself has been seen as instrumental rather than detrimental in the eyes of policy elites in Beijing and Tokyo, both aiming to legitimize their own security, maritime, and foreign policies while delegitimizing the other’s counter claims.
The book, the twelfth of Routledge’s “Security in Asia” series, consists of seven chapters, providing the author’s analysis on the territorial dispute between Japan and China (chapters 1, 2, and 6), summaries of the economic and strategic value of Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands (SD Islands in the book) for the two countries (chapter 3), as well as a review of the history surrounding the territorial row (chapters 4 and 5).
In the book, Costa argues that analyzing the conflict merely from a “centrality of history” perspective as found in many traditional scholarly and media accounts, or discussing it as the two nations’ struggle to retain national pride and influence in the region, is not enough to grasp the whole picture. Instead, the author explains that the territorial row itself has been deployed by both Chinese and Japanese political leaders as a way to raise domestic support towards their foreign policies while applying pressure on the opponent at the negotiating table.
The SD Islands are a good case study for understanding multiple dimensions of the rise of China, finding themselves not only at the juncture of system and unit-level factors, but also at the juncture of a ‘useful rivalry’ that has been developing between Beijing and Tokyo, particularly in the post-Cold War era. Here, China uses competition over the islands, and Japan’s reaction, to justify the expansion of its maritime power and interests, while Japan uses China’s challenge to the islands to operate and justify a shift towards greater foreign and security policy activism—something that it had been unable to undertake during the so-called lost decades following the burst of the economic bubble in 1990 (28).
That is, China took the dispute as an opportunity to shift the balance of power in the region during the post-WWII period, insisting that Japan’s claim on the sovereignty of the islands signalled the return of Japanese aggression, and rekindled bitter memories of invasion. On the other hand, Japan, which officially maintains that “[t]here exists no issue of territorial sovereignty to be resolved concerning the Senkaku Islands” (“Senkaku Islands,” 13 April 2016, https://www.mofa.go.jp/region/asia-paci/senkaku/index.html), claims China’s insistence is a significant threat to Japan’s national security, and upholds the legitimacy of its “proactive pacifism” security policy, which aims to loosen postwar restrictions on its armed forces and expand its international security role.
To provide an overview of how Chinese and Japanese state elites have strategically exploited the existence of the conflict as a “public relations” opportunity to sell greater foreign policy activism to domestic and international audiences, the author reviews the diplomatic and geopolitical history of both countries from the Cold War period in the 1970s and 1980s to the post-Cold War era from the 1990s to 2010s. Here, the author revisits the historical events starting from the time when the controversy first emerged in the 1970s after China began to claim the islands’ sovereignty rights following the discovery of potential oil and gas reserves in the seabed around the islands, to the escalation of the conflict in the public level in 2010s after a Chinese fishing trawler collided with a Japanese Coast Guard patrol vessel in the disputed waters around the SD Islands.
The major achievement of the book is that it interprets the sovereignty dispute over the islands from a pragmatic perspective of national interests and security policies rather than emotional, conceptual discussions of national pride. That is, by looking at the dispute in relation to economic, security, and political goals pursued by political elites in Beijing and Tokyo, the author explains how the two nations gained benefits from the escalation of tensions. “[R]ises in Sino–Japanese tension cannot be explained primarily with reference to worsening mutual perceptions at the elite and popular levels, as much as the latter cannot be explained away with mere reference to the past and historical memory” (172).
Costa has also successfully compiled a chronology of Chinese and Japanese foreign policy strategies regarding the territorial row by consulting an extensive array of materials, including media reports, books, journals, and official documents, making it a useful reference in regard to not only the SD dispute itself but also the historical background of the two nations’ foreign policies and national security strategies in the postwar period.
Shusuke Murai
LinkedIn, News Editor, Tokyo, Japan