Anti-Japan riots mask deep anxiety

[dArKeR]

Recently, anti-Japanese demonstrations in China have brought Sino-Japanese relations to their lowest point in decades. China believes that the Japanese government's whitewash of its wartime atrocities in China in its high school textbooks and Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's visits to the Yasukuni Shrine indicate that Japan is eager to return to nationalistic militarism.

China also regards disputes over the sovereignty of the Tiaoyu islands and the US-Japan security alliance's move to publicly identify Taiwan as a joint security concern as attempts to encircle China. As for Japan, it believes that its revised history textbooks and Koizumi's shrine visits are purely domestic affairs, and also a first step toward making Japan a normal nation. The Tiaoyu islands dispute and the US-Japan Joint Declaration on Security identifying security in the Taiwan Strait as a "common strategic objective," in Japan's view, represent a shift from a passive to an active posture in national defense policy.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/edit/archives/2005/04/27/2003252203

[teryang]

1. There is no mask about it

The anti Japanese riots reflect Chinese anxiety.

I don't know that Chinese anxiety is based upon "prejudice," it is based upon historical experience. The Chinese government is manipulating the innate prejudices that arose from that experience. There is prejudice and then there is unfair prejudice.

Japan blundered when it publicly took up the neo-con position on Taiwan. That has always been the Japanese position and the US position they just didn't discuss it in public. The question is why did the neo-cons and Japan recently begin publicly discussing a decades old secret policy decision? I think the answer is clear, it is meant to roll back increasing Chinese power and revanchism. This was a tactless blunder. The type that Wolfowitz, Bolton and company have been wont to make.

The destabilizing influence in Asia is the erosion of American power not the growth of Chinese power, the latter was recognized more than three decades ago. The traditional American role of honest broker has been abandoned because the American neo-cons want a new unrealistic role trying to reverse the tide of history with a depleted military and resource base. Not only is the base depleted, it has been misallocated and squandered in a strategic plan of tactical dispersion in Asia that cannot possibly be maintained during a war in east Asia. This is the archipelago of bases in southwest and central Asia that has been pushed by big oil, and the aerospace defense contractors. The logistical infrastructure is promoted and maintained primarily by the US Air Force which has virtually no understanding of ground warfare in Asia. This strategy has forced planners basically to strip American forces in S.Korea. Naval projection capabilities in East Asia are now diverted to the Persian Gulf area despite high visibility surge exercises meant to disguise weakness in East Asia.

A war in east Asia over Taiwan could possibly last as long as ten years as far as the American involvement goes. Then it would be lost. It could only last this long because it is primarily a stand off naval/air engagement. A protracted Taiwan engagement would present the threat of Chinese land forces threatening western land marches toward central Asia to open new fronts. A land based conflict wouldn't last two years. Americans won't tolerate dying in central or east Asia very long. Solution get Japan to do it. The Japanese are blundering into a very rigid security alignment that can only have a bad outcome.