Why China Is Demanding These Japanese Islands - Çift Dilli Altyazılar
China and Japan are the second and third largest economies in the world and two of the most powerful nations of the 21st century.
And, unfortunately, they have a major border disagreement that could be pushing them both into a cataclysmic war in the future.
Seemingly in the middle of nowhere within the East China Sea,
are a spattering of eight tiny islands and rocks that collectively make up no more than six and a half square kilometers.
Just a little larger than the size of a moderately large city airport.
Nobody lives on any of them and nobody probably ever has.
There aren't really any buildings other than a our station and there isn't any sign of life on them other than for a few seabirds.
At first glance,
these small,
empty islands and rocks seem almost completely irrelevant to the interests of the outside world and yet they are at the very epic center of the biggest
clash between the two giants of East Asia.
They are currently administered by Japan, who refers to them as the Senkaku Islands.
But China claims them for itself as well and refers to them as the more Chinese-sounding Daoyu Islands,
and presently considers them to be one of their own core national interests.
Alongside more familiar places, like the 9th, line through the South China Sea, Hong Kong, Tibet, Xinjiang, and Taiwan.
And speaking of which, Taiwan also claims these islands for themselves as well, and refers to them separately as the Tao Yutai Islands.
And all three of their competing claims here are pushing this region of the East China Sea.
into an ever deeper conflict.
One where maritime and aerial skirmishes between all three have been relatively common now for decades.
Any miscalculation or misunderstanding at any time around these islands between their ships and planes has the hypothetical potential to cascade
full-blown Third Sino-Japanese War, a war that the United States has guaranteed to support Japan in, were it to ever come to that.
But what is it about these tiny islands and rocks that makes them so valuable and geopolitically important to all three sides here in the
first place.
To begin with, it's worth covering a bit of the islands' recent history and where each side's contemporary claims come from.
According to the Chinese, the islands were initially discovered by them during the period of the Ming dynasty in 1372.
Then, nearly two centuries later from there by 1534.
All of the major islets in the group were identified and named in a Ming Dynasty era book.
And they allegedly marked the seafrontier of the Ming and later Qing dynasties as a part of the Greater Island of Taiwan.
I say, allegedly though, because they're so far as not ever.
than any archaeological evidence discovered to suggest that the Chinese ever actually inhabited any of these islands.
Which suggests that they most likely found them, but never actually settled or inhabited them.
Fast forward hundreds of years from there to 1894, and the Japanese and Qing dynasty China were fighting the first Sinoja.
Japanese War over influence in Korea.
After Qing were soundly defeated,
they were pressed into signing the 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki,
of which Article 2B reads,
quote, the island of Formosa, Taiwan, together with all islands
appertaining or belonging to the said island of Formosa,
up Taiwan should be ceded to Japan."
Both China and Taiwan currently argue that the contentious islands of today were a part of Taiwan at the time of that treaty,
and were therefore illegally annexed by the Japanese following the end of the first Sino-Japanese War.
However, Japan claims another timeline of events.
In 1885,
10 years prior to that war,
the Japanese government led a survey of the islands and found them to be uninhabited,
and argued they therefore qualified under the legal term of Terra Nulius,
essentially meaning that they were up to be claimed by anyone who found them since nobody else.
lived there or claimed them.
Japan formally incorporated the islands into their Okinawa prefecture in 1895,
just months before the conclusion of the first sign of Japanese war and the signing of the Treaty of Shimonoseki.
And thus, Japan argues that the incorporation of the Senkaku islands into the Okinawa prefecture.
close by to it time-wise,
was an entirely separate legal event to the annexation of Taiwan and the associated islands around it just a few months later.
And this is a critically important distinction, because half a century later, in 1945, following their defeat in the Second World War, the Japanese.
Japanese themselves were pressed into signing the Treaty of San Francisco in 1951,
which Pan renounced all claims and control over the island of Taiwan, and all of Taiwan's associated lesser islands to China.
China and Taiwan each claim that what they call the day- Gao Yu Islands were associated lesser islands of Taiwan,
and therefore the Japan should have seeded them over as well after the World War II peace treaty.
While conversely,
Japan argues that what they called the Senkaku Islands were never a part of Taiwan or China,
and that they were legally incorporated for from the 1895 war into Japan's Okinawa Prefecture,
and therefore they continue to remain a core and integral part of the Japanese state.
Then complicating China's and Taiwan's claims here are that they never really bothered claiming the islands until many decades later.
Later, after World War II, the States occupied the modern Okanama prefecture of Japan
for more than 20 years until 1972, which, according to Washington, included the disputed Senkaku or Dao Yu Islands.
Throughout most of that period, the Chinese never challenged the American decision.
to link the islands with Okinawa and Japan.
Although, presently, the People's Republic of China cites that Taiwan, or the Republic
of China, never formally made that challenge because they depended so much on the United States themselves for international support.
You see,
China and Taiwan play a complicated game over their respective ownership claims to these islands, because they sort of agree and sort of disagree.
The People's Republic of China agrees that the islands fully belong to Taiwan,
but since they also argue that Taiwan fully belongs to China,
they argue that the islands belong to fully Republic to them as well by proxy.
Meanwhile, Taiwan, or the Republic of China, of course, claims the islands for themselves as well.
But they must balance their own very difficult geopolitical position here,
between asserting independence from the rest of China, who technically supports their claims over the islands.
while simultaneously contesting control over the islands from Japan,
whose most significant ally, like themselves, is also the United States, and who definitely more supports Japan on this issue.
And then, not helping the Chinese claims even further are the fact that there are several maps which reply to Japan.
published within China throughout the 1950s and 60s that clearly show the islands as belonging to Japan,
like this People's Republic of China map from 1969 that clearly labels them as the Japanese identified Senkaku Islands,
or this world atlas published within China in 1960s.
that also clearly shows them labeled as the Senkaku Islands and belonging to Japan.
However, everything began to change in 1968, when a UN survey was conducted in the
area around the islands that revealed there could possibly be an amount of oil reserves there.
Three years after that,
ending In 1971,
the People's Republic of made its first formal claims to what they called the Dao-U Islands,
just as the United States was preparing to end its administration over Okinawa and return the prefecture to Japan.
Japan refused all the claims and has continued to administer what they call the Senkaku Islands
for the power of the half-century now ever since the US transferred them back over in 1972,
with both the PRC and ROC claiming them independently ever since.
And as for the United States,
their government has repeatedly affirmed that the islands are in fact a part of Japan,
and as such, they fall beneath the 1960 Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the U.S.
and Japan,
a treaty that requires the United States to come to Japan's defense in the event that any of her islands,
including the Senkaku's, come under foreign attack or occupation, including from China.
So that's the history, but what's really at stake here?
For both Tokyo and Beijing, along with Taipei, quite a lot in fact.
You see,
the utility in the islands isn't really in their tiny land area,
but in the highly strategically valuable maritime and airspace borders, they would grant to whomever controls them.
The primary legal agreement that regulates the maritime borders of countries around the world is the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea,
or Unclose.
This document usually enables countries to claim exclusive economic zones, or EECs, out to 200 nautical miles from their coastlines.
But, under special conditions, these zones can be extended well beyond that limit to match a country's continental shelf.
When the shelf extends beyond those 200 nautical miles,
the East China Sea between the islands of Japan and the Asian mainland of China is only 360 nautical miles.
wide, and that means, based on the 200 nautical mile limit of each country, a medium line
would have to be drawn between their respective EEZ boundaries here.
This is the legal position taken by Japan.
This is their defined medium line across the East China Sea that divides believe should be the Chinese and Japanese EEZs,
running perfectly through the center between Japan's Ryukyu Islands in the east and China's continental coastline in the west.
However, the Chinese take a very different legal approach to this issue.
According to Beijing, their own EEZ within the city.
Even East China Sea should extend well beyond the normal 200 nautical mile limit from their coastline,
because they argue that China's continental shelf extends beyond it towards the Okinawa trough here,
which they argue marks the boundary between the Chinese and Japanese continental shelves.
Conversely, Japan, of course,
has a different legal view of the geography here,
and claims that the Okinawa trough is simply an incidental depression within a continuous continental shelf between China and Japan,
and that the Okinawa trough's presence is therefore legally irrelevant.
Ultimately, this all just really means
that Beijing's claims,
EZ here looks more like this,
extending well beyond the Dao Yu or Senkaku Islands and placing around 40,000 square kilometers worth of potential EZ area in dispute between themselves and Tokyo,
an area that is roughly the same size as the Netherlands.
This is a single significant dispute,
because whoever controls an EEZ possesses the exclusive rights to all the resources within that EEZ, like oil and gas, minerals and fish.
Ever since 1950, around 5% of all the fish caught in all the world have come from the East China Sea.
worth around $300 billion dollars in total over that whole span of time.
This makes the East China Sea one of the most productive regions in the world for fishing.
And of course, that fact alone makes the sea and the borders of clashing EEZs across it geopolitically controversial.
But beyond the fishing,
there's also the fact that the United States estimates there could be as much as 200 million barrels of oil and up to 60 billion cubic feet worth of natural
gas down there, which isn't really very much on a global scale, but still valuable nonetheless in us.
bestially valuable to China and Japan, who are, respectively, the world's number one and four greatest importers of hydrocarbon energy resources from abroad.
The have built a large number of offshore drilling platforms just to the west of the median line claimed by Japan,
while both sides since 2008 have been jointly developing a field that was roughly discovered directly across that line.
But of course, this issue extends well beyond just resources in the East China Sea.
While Japan has been committed to peace for decades now,
ever since the end of World War II, and has consequently never made any economic or military use of the decision.
dispute Senkaku or Daou Islands.
The Chinese have,
of course,
taken a very different approach elsewhere,
like in the South China Sea,
where Beijing has been rapidly and aggressively constructing military bases bristling with weapons across many of the tiny islands there.
Where the Chinese to ever take control of the Senkaku or Daou Islands.
how you islands.
The fear in Tokyo would be that they would end up following the same kind of fate as the islands in the South China Sea,
and rapidly militarized and transformed into Chinese military outposts.
Where this to happen, it would place the Chinese Navy within striking distance of Japan's critical maritime import lanes.
With very few domestic oil and gas reserves of their own,
the Japanese have long been forced to import nearly the entirety of their oil and gas supplies from abroad,
and these resources almost all come from around the Persian Gulf.
On the backs of tankers across the Indian Ocean, the South China.
China Sea, and eventually the East China Sea, before finally reaching the Japanese mainland.
The hypothetical presence of Chinese naval and air facilities on the Senkaku Islands could,
potentially, be used to directly threaten these critical import routes in the event of conflict in the future, and that reason.
is strong enough from Tokyo's perspective to never voluntarily surrender them.
But of course,
the same reality is true of China,
who also imports the overwhelming amount of their oil and gas from the exact same sources as Japan does from around the Persian Gulf.
Were the Japanese,
or even worse,
United States ever to militarize these islands,
they would be the closest hostile foreign bases to China's own critical energy import lines through the same sea.
And that is precisely why in order not to anger Beijing, the Japanese have just never really done anything with any of these.
islands.
And while they still control them, they can also simultaneously deny the Chinese the ability to use them offensively.
The status quo, as it is, is best for Japan.
Nonetheless, Beijing has been almost continuously testing Tokyo's resolve to maintain the status quo.
Before 2012,
The islands themselves were owned privately by various Japanese entities,
but in September of that year,
the government itself purchased many of the islands directly, which sparked mass anti-Japanese protests across nearly 100 cities throughout China and Taiwan.
In the years since that purchase,
the frequency of China naval vessels entering the contested waters around the islands has skyrocketed,
and China unilaterally decided to implement an air defense identification zone where it is,
extending well out across the East China Sea and the contested islands.
This means that China expects all foreign aircraft flying through the zone to identify their flight path with Chinese authorities,
while following all given Chinese instructions over radio.
Of China's claimed aid is here, directly overlaps with Japan's claimed aid is, as well as South Korea's and Taiwan's.
And over the past decade,
Chinese aircraft,
along with Japanese,
American, and South Korean aircraft have all repeatedly flown through these conflicting air zones and refused
to cooperate, while the United States has warned all of its own commercial airlines to avoid flying through this area if at all possible.
It was in response to these aerial provocations that the Japanese finally constructed a radar station on one of the Senkokayans.
Lagu Islands in 2016, in order to better detect Chinese aircraft who were violating their aid is.
And then,
just last year in 2021,
China passed a brand new law that authorized the Chinese Coast Guard to utilize lethal force against anyone violating China's legal jurisdictions,
and especially within the disputed waters between themselves and Japan around the Senkaku or Daoyu Islands.
The geographic claims over these islands and the waters surrounding them are pushing both Beijing and Tokyo into making increasingly bolder and more dangerous moves.
While an outright conflict has isn't erupted over this issue yet, it could ultimately just be a matter of time.
Fueling the crisis even further are the fears on both sides of overfishing.
As I mentioned previously, 5% of all the fish caught in the world come from the East China Sea alone, and that's a lot.
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Çeviri Dili
Türk
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