Asia must resist pull of nationalism

The recent visits - or invasions - depending on your point of view, by small groups of hot-headed but well-organised nationalists to isolated rocky islands shows just how intractable are questions of territorial rights in the seas around China.

Televised pictures of a Chinese police car being overturned and bashed by mobs in Shenzhen puzzled my Japanese friends until they understood that it was a Japanese car and realised how serious the situation has become.

The ferocity of feelings on all sides makes solutions difficult and helps to put into perspective some of the high-flying academic suggestions for sorting out grander issues of how to ensure peace and prosperity in the wider ocean as China grows and flexes its muscles.

International-minded statesmen are required if the Asia-Pacific region is to continue its voyage to prosperity, but instead chauvinist hoodlums and pirates are ahoy. It should be a matter of concern and shame that Hong Kong has played a role in rousing some of the passions.

South Korean President Lee Myung-bak's visit to the disputed islands known as Takeshima to the Japanese and Dokdo to Korea, and successive landings on the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, first by Chinese activists from Hong Kong and then by Japanese nationalists, demonstrate how old sores fester.

Both sets of islands were incorporated into imperial Japan by decree from Tokyo, in 1895 in the case of Senkaku/Diaoyu and 1905 for Takeshima/Dokdo. As Emeritus Professor Peter Drysdale of the Australian National University notes, neither territory "was decisively stripped from Japanese sovereignty at the San Francisco treaty conference of 1951, which legalised the post-war territorial settlement in the Far East".

Moreover, the Senkakus/Diaoyus pose an extra layer of problems because they were part of the territory of Okinawa controlled by the United States after the war. They were mapped out and returned to Japan as part of Okinawa when Washington turned over the territory to Japan in 1972.