by KENT EWING
Where can the national flags of the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China (or Taiwan), officially regarded by Beijing as a “renegade province”, fly side by side? On barren, uninhabited islands also claimed by Japan, of course.
At least for the time being, it seems only the Japanese can succeed in uniting mainland Chinese with their fractious kin in Taiwan, while also bringing on board Hong Kong, another problematic relation, and Macau, an apolitical gambling mecca.
Hong Kong reverted from British to Chinese rule in 1997, and Macau was handed back to the China by Portugal in 1999.
The ongoing dispute over these potentially resource-rich islands – known as Diaoyu in China and Senkaku in Japan – is a perennial issue that China’s leaders use as suits their purposes, to stir up anti-Japanese sentiment and boost nationalism among Chinese everywhere.
Two Sino-Japanese wars (1895-1896 and 1937-1945), the Rape of Nanking (1937), Japan’s de facto colonization of Taiwan (1895-1945) and its brutal occupation of Hong Kong (1941-1945) – all these dark memories were just beneath the surface when Chinese activists last week hired fishing boats for a quixotic, flag-bearing mission to these rocky outcrops in the East China Sea.
Japan’s ultimately failed ambition to rule over all of Asia – which ended with two nuclear clouds over the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945 – somehow becomes emotionally tied to a political sea stunt with no practical significance.
The islands are at present a privately owned part of Okinawa Prefecture, but Beijing and Taipei also claim them and strenuously objected to a recent statement by Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda that his government was considering purchasing them.
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