Philip Stephens
Spend time in Japan with politicians and policymakers and the conversation always starts with China. After a while the talk turns to the US. Then it’s back to China. The connecting thread is anxiety. Angst about Beijing’s intentions competes with concern about waning American power.
For a European, the exchanges are unsettling. Europe, of course, itself risks being left in the shadows of history by the world’s new powers. For now, though, its organising emotions are introspection and complacency. Europe prefers to close its eyes to the shift in the geopolitical centre of gravity from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
While the US and China argued it out over global economic imbalances at this month’s gathering of Group of 20 nations in Seoul, the Europeans talked to themselves about the euro. Clutching his British pounds, David Cameron, the prime minister, remarked that the summit had allowed him to catch up on sleep lost to his new baby.
For Japan, the stakes in the global upheaval are higher and the scars of past enmities fresher. China has replaced it as the world’s second largest economy and elbowed aside the US as the region’s biggest trading partner. Beijing is building a powerful navy. It has declared the South China Sea a “core” strategic interest alongside Taiwan and Tibet. It has also – and this is what has tipped the mood in Tokyo – adopted an unapologetically assertive tone.
Europeans think of China as a competitor to the US on the global stage. For Japan, China is next door. Geography and history dictate that the challenge is territorial as well as economic. Everyone in the policymaking establishment has learnt by heart the language of constructive engagement. But it does not take long before they begin to fret about what they see as China’s hegemonic ambitions.
This autumn’s clash over the Japanese-controlled Senkaku (Diaoyu in Chinese) islands in the East China Sea crystallised the anxiety. The detention and subsequent release by the Japanese authorities of a Chinese fishing captain owed more to cock-up than conspiracy. An aide to Japan’s prime minister Naoto Kan told me Beijing had misread Tokyo’s intentions. Maybe, but confusion descended pretty quickly into confrontation.
The vehemence of Beijing’s reaction to the arrest, which included a ban on exports to Japan of rare earth minerals, seemed calculated to make a bigger point. China will not countenance challenges from lesser powers.
These territorial disputes are everywhere in Asia. Japan has separate arguments with Russia and South Korea. At least half-a-dozen states lay claim to an outcrop of islands in the South China Sea. The Himalayan land border between India and China remains a constant source of tension.
The disputes are made dangerous by old hostilities and potent nationalisms; and by the absence of anything resembling a security architecture in which they can be defused. Europeans find themselves reminded of the combustible condition of their own continent at the close of the 19th century.
Not everyone in Tokyo thinks China is aiming for untrammelled primacy. At a gathering organised by the Japan-UK 21st century group, a distinguished Japanese Sinologist handed me a copy of the 2008 partnership agreement between the two countries.
This statement proclaimed a “mutually beneficial relationship based on common strategic interests”. Regional security and prosperity, it avowed, rested on cordial ties between China and Japan. Party leaders in Beijing, my Sinologist friend said, well understood the mutuality of interest.
Others are less sanguine. Some diplomats think the force of China’s response to the fishing incident reflects a power struggle in which the People’s Liberation Army has been gaining the upper hand. Others speculate that modernisers in Beijing feel the need to play the nationalist tunes of conservative rivals. What strikes an outsider is an almost complete lack of trust. The irrefutable logic of strategic interdependence struggles to compete with the deep mutual suspicion.
This is where Japan’s most important ally comes in. The outcome of the Seoul summit seemed to confirm a conventional wisdom: the US can no longer get its way in a bust-up with China. For all the pomp and circumstance of his four-nation Asian tour, Barack Obama was seen to leave Seoul a diminished president. Well, yes and no. Even as it laments the US’s relative decline, Japan wants to hug its ally still closer. In that it is far from alone.
There have been some squalls in the bilateral relationship since the Democratic Party of Japan took office last year. A dispute over a US marine base on Okinawa has not been properly resolved. But everyone in Tokyo wants to sustain the partnership. The point was underlined by the loud expressions of relief when Washington stated publicly that the disputed Senkaku islands were covered under the two nations’ security treaty.
There you have the paradox – even as everyone talks about its relative decline, the US is more sought in the region than it has been for some time. No one thinks China can be contained. Just about everyone has decided to hedge against its rise.
Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, says she feels more welcome now than ever before. Her statement during a regional summit in Hanoi that the US has a national interest in the free navigation of the South China Sea provoked fury in China – and a fair deal of quiet applause elsewhere.
Mr Obama’s visit to Delhi was calculated to underscore the strategic nature of US-Indian ties – holding up a mirror to the permanent tension in India’s relations with China.
Elsewhere, Washington has been invited to join the East Asia Summit. South Korea has sought to refurbish its longstanding alliance. Vietnam has been making friendly overtures towards its old adversary. Indonesia, a stopover on Mr Obama’s trip, has also been tilting towards the US.
So there’s the rub. Diminished it may be, but the US remains indispensable. The harsher China’s tone, the more eager its neighbours are to get closer to the US. Japan’s anxious conversation about China is also being heard in a lot of other places in Asia. There must be a moral there for policymakers in Beijing.
[OPINION-DISCLAIMER]
