East Asian elections over but territorial disputes still simmer

Muscle-flexing over the archipelago of disputed islands in East Asian seas featured prominently in the political campaigns that have brought forth new leaders for China, Japan and South Korea.

But don’t expect an end to the posturing and provocations just because the political season is over, Asia watchers say.

China claims that a handful of rocks in the East China Sea is a part of its ancient heritage. Known as the Diaoyus, they are a strategic component of China’s mission to project an image of power throughout the region. Japan, which calls the islands the Senkakus, insists the territory has been under its control for more than a century, and Tokyo stands defiant against what it considers China’s menacing incursions.

Japan and South Korea are engaged in an emotional battle over another set of uninhabited outcroppings in the Sea of Japan that have provided a stage for nationalist gestures by both sides.

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In the South China Sea, contested claims to the land and resources of three other island groupings pit China, Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei in various constellations of conflict.

Fresh from last month’s Communist Party congress that anointed nationalist Xi Jinping to the leadership, China last week staged a flyover of the East China Sea islands. That provoked Tokyo to scramble fighter jets and denounce the action as the first violation of its airspace in half a century.

Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party swept to power on a nationalist platform that vowed to defend the nation’s territorial integrity and consider revisions to constitutional language that renounces war as a sovereign right of defense.

Newly elected Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has made it clear that the dispute over the islands would remain a central element of Japan’s foreign policy. Just hours after the polls closed on Sunday, Abe attested to the importance of strong ties between China and Japan -- a mutually beneficial relationship for which, he said, China “lacks understanding.”

South Korea’s president-elect, Park Geun-hye, focused her foreign policy platform on a vague pledge to work for better relations with North Korea. But as an ally of outgoing South Korean President Lee Myung-bak and his conservative party, she can be expected to toe his nationalist line on the territorial dispute with a Japanese leadership seen by many Koreans as insufficiently remorseful over World War II atrocities. Abe recently visited Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine honoring Japanese war dead, including some convicted of war crimes.

Much is at stake if Asia’s three economic giants continue to choose a path of confrontation. Japan and China traded $350 billion in goods last year, and $1.2 trillion in exports plies the shipping lanes along the East Asian coast en route to and from the United States and its Far East partners.

The United States takes a neutral position in the territorial disputes, encouraging the rivals to seek peaceful means of resolving ownership and rights to the fisheries and mineral wealth in the 200-mile exclusion zones around the islands. But Washington also has treaty obligations to come to the defense of Japan, South Korea and the Philippines. The pacts threaten an untenable conundrum if the standoffs escalate, possibly forcing a choice between conflict with China, its most important market, or reneging on defense commitments to democratic allies.

“It remains to be seen once these newly elected leaders are actual acting officials which direction they’ll head,” said Mike Kulma, a director and East Asia policy expert at the Asia Society. “Like in our campaigns, there is a lot of rhetoric about China and other countries. But once someone comes into office they have an incredible tendency to moderate.”

Park, the daughter of long-ruling strongman Park Chung-hee, has expressed an ardent defense of South Korea’s territorial integrity. But Kulma pointed out that she gave priority during her campaign to boosting domestic economic performance and seeking a better relationship with communist-ruled North Korea. The dispute with Japan over the tiny islands that Seoul calls Dokdo and the Japanese know as the Takeshima is at best the third priority for Park, who won’t take office for more than two months, Kulma noted.

The island dispute causing the most concern in the region is the spat over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islets, which have already been the scene of tense displays of maritime might and symbolic occupation.

“China has effectively contested Japanese administrative control over the islands, and I don’t see the Chinese going back to the status quo ante,” said Bonnie Glaser, senior Asia advisor for the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Beijing has studiously avoided crossing any “red lines” that could compel U.S. actions in defense of Japanese sovereignty, she said. Instead of deploying warships to assert its claim to the islands, Glaser said, China has been patrolling with fisheries enforcement vessels, though some are armed and operate in a paramilitary manner.

China’s aggressive effort to challenge Japan’s sovereignty over the islands since they were reclaimed from stateless obscurity in 1895 has already cost the two nations lost trade and investment, Glaser said. That has cut into Chinese trade revenue as well as Japanese, she said, “but I don’t know if it hurts enough that China will have to recalculate what it is doing.”

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A foreign correspondent for 25 years, Carol J. Williams traveled to and reported from more than 80 countries in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America.