An Urban's Rural View

As recently as a few years ago, no expert on Asia took seriously the possibility of Japan and China going to war. The two countries had coexisted peacefully since 1945 and in recent years had conducted an enormous and mutually beneficial trade. Armed conflict between them seemed as unlikely as snow at the equator.

Not so these days. To be sure, war remains far from the only or even the most likely outcome. But Sino-Japanese relations have so frozen over that no one can rule out the possibility.

At the Davos confab in Switzerland the other day, Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe noted that Germany and Britain were each other's largest trading partners in 1914. Then an Austrian archduke was assassinated by a Serbian nationalist, touching off World War I, four years of Germans slaughtering Brits and Brits slaughtering Germans.

Abe's point, which owing to a mistranslation was widely misunderstood, was that a profitable trade doesn't necessarily stop countries from blundering into hostilities. And if anything, there's more real anger between China and Japan than there ever was between Germany and Britain. That boosts the chances of events spinning out of control and disrupting the uneasy peace.

Come to think of it, snow falls regularly at a couple of places along the equator -- Mt. Kenya and the Ecuadorean Andes.

Should American farmers and agribusinesses care about this potential for conflict on the other side of the world? Well, in 2012 China ranked first among America's biggest agricultural export markets (http://tiny.cc/…). Japan was fourth. Between them they bought $39 billion in American ag products, 28% of our export total. That a China-Japan war would affect those exports no one can doubt.

So what's going on, anyway? One source of tension is historical. Japan still refuses to acknowledge some of the atrocities its troops committed in China in the 1930s. China refuses to forget.

Indeed, China's leaders habitually whip up nationalistic, anti-Japanese feelings to mask inadequacies in their own performance. Meanwhile, Japan's leaders recklessly inflame Chinese opinion with their insensitivity, as Abe did recently when he visited Yasukuni Shrine, which inters Japan's World War II war criminals.

The other source of tension is territorial -- a dispute over three islands and two rocks dividing the Pacific Ocean and East China Sea. Japan, which controls them, calls them the Senkakus. To China, which claims them, they're the Diaoyus.

The more China's economy, military and national self-confidence grow, the more insistent its territorial claims become and the more provocative its behavior in pressing them. As I noted in this space more than a year ago (http://tiny.cc/…), Japan has accused China's navy of locking fire-control radar on a Japanese naval vessel and a Japanese military helicopter.

Last November China declared an "air defense identification zone" over much of the East China Sea and demanded foreign aircraft file flight plans. The Chinese zone overlaps a similar zone Japan imposed in 1968, including the disputed islands. The U.S., which has a treaty obligation to defend Japan if attacked, expressed deep concern at China's unilateral attempt to change the status quo in the East China Sea.

Neither side wants war. China dismissed Abe's World War I analogy. On the contrary, China's foreign minister said: "Peace is assured."

And so it would be, if only both sides would stop behaving recklessly. Until they do, the unfortunate truth is, as vice president Biden put it, "This action has raised regional tensions and increased the risk of accidents and miscalculations."

Urban Lehner

urbanity@hotmail.com

(ES)

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