Is it Europe before the first world war or the second? Analysts disagree, but all see the escalation of military threats between the two industrial giants China and Japan over disputed islands in the East China Sea with growing alarm. The latest crisis was caused by China's decision to extend its "air defence identification zone" (ADIZ) over a group of uninhabited islands which Japan calls the Senkakus and China knows as the Diaoyutai. Several overflights later, not least by a pair of US B-52 bombers, and nothing much has changed, except that a hairtrigger that originally was to be measured in hours and governed by the speed of boats, has now become a matter of seconds.
Few can say what prompted the latest Chinese move. This is a time when the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, is attempting to drive major economic reform and the announcement may be a sop to the military, when its voice in the national debate could be weakening. It is hard to avoid the conclusion, though, that the declaration was a way of testing the waters for a reaction – which they duly got. The state-run China Daily accused Japan and the US of overreacting, saying that if the world's sole superpower needed multiple ADIZs to fend off perceived threats, China should be allowed theirs. Besides, they claimed the measure was not targeted at any particular country.
This is not how it is seen in Japan, which has witnessed a growing number of confrontations, or "incidents", over islands in which Beijing showed little interest for much of the last decade. For Japan, the dispute over the islands is part of a major naval push to extend China's maritime influence beyond the first island chain of the Pacific. China claims the status quo was changed by Japan's decision to nationalise the islands. What they don't want to admit is that this was done to stop the islands being used by Japanese nationalists on madcap flag waving stunts.
The land to which the islands are closest is neither Japan nor China, but Taiwan – with which Tokyo has few problems. Last year Taiwan showed the way out of these disputes by signing an agreement with Tokyo which sidestepped the issue of sovereignty and divided the fisheries to mutual benefit. This model, first applied in the North Sea, is the only rational way out of these disputes – although it is not one that Britain is particularly keen on applying to the Falklands. China and Japan agreed in 2008 to co-operate on the joint development of the East China Sea. Further talks have never been pursued and, to date, not even a hotline exists between the two powers to avert another incident in the sea or in the air. It is time for people in China and Japan to turn down the volume of simplistic nationalist rhetoric and to pursue pragmatic dialogue.
