ABSTRACT
Tension was reignited in April 2012 when the then Tokyo governor, Shintaro Ishihara, announced that Tokyo planned to purchase three islets of the disputed Diaoyu Islands, and followed by the then Noda administration’s nationalization announcement in September 2012. China adopted a complex suite of countermeasures, and the Sino-Japanese relations took the hardest hit since the normalization in 1972. The latest round of tension demonstrates again the intractableness of this issue. A transformation is discernible that recent frictions also touch on structural issues that were dormant for decades, such as the Taiwan issue, and the competition for Chinese representativeness by two polities across the Taiwan Strait, which has been reflected in their overlapping sovereign claims over the Diaoyu Islands. The cooperation between Taiwan and Japan to deal with fishery issues in the Diaoyu Islands waters also sent an alarming message to China, causing China to speculate whether the two were plotting further cooperation behind the scenes. The Chinese efforts to obtain effective control over the Diaoyu Islands area have triggered vigorous reactions from Japan. The change in the status quo also poses challenges to the US-Japan security cooperation, raising questions if the US-Japan security alliance hits a bottleneck and if both need to consider new roles and strategy for further cooperation. Besides hard measures and an assertive position, China needs to steer carefully through the troubled waters, when rising public sentiments, challenges to the post-WWII arrangements and eventually, Japan’s war responsibilities remain the ultimate conundrum in the course of China’s quest to become a regional and global great power.
