How Asia can defuse island disputes

By April 1972, as the United States prepared to return to Japanese administration the eight uninhabited islets known as the Senkakus in Japan and the Diaoyus in China, the Sino-Japanese dispute over their ownership had reached fever pitch. Nationalism was in full flight not only in Japan, but also in mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. When the Harvard Club of Japan invited me to lecture on the controversy, mine was the only voice in the country, other than that of a Kyoto University philosophy professor known for his communist sympathies, to publicly suggest that Japan had less than an airtight case to support its claim.

Several weeks later, as I stood with my apparently even-tempered Chinese escort on a hilltop overlooking Beijing's Ming dynasty tombs, I asked his views on the subject. This sent him into a frenzy. "We will fight the Japanese aggressors to the death to defend every inch of our sacred soil," he said. Yet, when I pointed out to him that, just days earlier, Japan had resumed control of the islands, my escort suddenly reverted to his previous equanimity. "Well," he said, "Chinese are patient people. We can settle this problem any time in the next 500 years!"

I thus witnessed the two sides of contemporary China's attitude towards international relations - righteous nationalism and rational pragmatism. Several years later, Deng Xiaoping advised leaving the Senkaku/Diaoyu dispute to the next generation, which might prove wiser than his generation. Afterwards, in finding an imaginative solution to the even more sensitive problem of Hong Kong's future, Deng showed how to turn nationalism into pragmatism to the benefit of China's development and its foreign policy. Unfortunately, neither his successors nor their Japanese counterparts have shown similar wisdom in their ever more intense island dispute, and East Asia now confronts an increasingly grave security crisis.

New leaders are about to emerge in northeast Asia. Will they muster the innovation, boldness and domestic political power required to meet the region's most dangerous challenge to peace in over half a century?

Prospects are discouraging. No far-sighted, strong Deng-type leaders are on the horizon in China, Japan or South Korea. Playing the nationalist card is more attractive to domestic contenders for power than taking the career risks of advocating enlightened compromise. Yet, nationalism is a dangerous game whose political, economic, diplomatic and military costs are daily more obvious. Perhaps the only hope is that the situation is becoming so serious that it may drive Chinese and Japanese elites, desperate to avoid disaster, to solutions previously deemed unlikely.

Northeast Asians might profitably seek to emulate the policies of post-second-world-war Western Europe. China and Japan should follow the model of France and West Germany in determinedly leading their people away from historic grievances and towards a regional community that creates institutions for co-ordinating policies and forging co-operation. This would be a complex, lengthy process, but an urgent first step might be the establishment of a regional tribunal for the settlement of East Asian territorial disputes.

To be sure, the International Court of Justice is fully capable of resolving the host of island ownership conflicts that plague the East China Sea and the South China Sea. Yet East Asians have tended to distrust international judicial and arbitral tribunals as Western dominated.