Opinion | Why US criticism of China’s actions in the East China Sea smacks of hypocrisy

The US says its freedom of navigation operations are demonstrations of its refusal to accept other states’ maritime claims

Yet, when China insists it does not accept Japan’s claims to the Diaoyus, it is accused of trying to change the status quo

Reading Time:4 minutes

Published: 9:15am, 10 Feb 2022Updated: 10:14am, 10 Feb 2022

At their January summit, US President Joe Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida reiterated their resolve to thwart China’s “attempts to change the status quo in the East China Sea”.

Coming from the United States, this statement is disingenuous: changing the status quo is precisely what the US is doing in the South China Sea. This also begs the questions: what is, or was, the status quo, who gets to define it, and who has tried to change it?

Japan presently administers the rocks it calls the Senkaku Islands. But they are also actively claimed as the Diaoyu Islands by China, which has in recent years increased deployment of coastguard vessels to Japan’s claimed territorial waters around the islets.

Japan’s narrative is that the Senkakus have always belonged to the Japanese and that China is trying to change the status quo by coercion. But the Chinese narrative is that, historically, the Diaoyus have been part of China, that Japan acquired them by force, and that they should be returned to China.

From China’s perspective, it is Japan that changed the status quo in 2012 by purchasing the Diaoyus from their private owners, thus “nationalising” them and excluding China’s fishing boats and coastguard vessels from what Beijing considers its waters.

China justifies its vessels’ presence in these waters by saying the Diaoyus are its “inherent territory”. By this logic, Japanese boats are fishing illegally in Chinese waters, and China is refusing to accept Japan’s claims.

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