ABSTRACT
Most of the conflicts in East Asia that have regional implications, which transcend the immediate significance for the two or three parties immediately concerned, involve China directly or indirectly. But this is not true of all of them. Some such as the dispute between Japan and Russia over the sovereignty of what the Russians call the “Southern Kurile Islands” and the Japanese, the “Northern Territories”, or territorial disputes between Southeast Asian states do not involve China except that the parties to the dispute necessarily take China into account as part of the general geopolitical context within which they deal with the dispute.
