This would be a game changer. It’s part of a high stakes international poker game between superpowers that is being surveyed very closely. Ultimately, China wants to see the reunification with Taiwan, but the overlap and maneuvering in Asia, after sixty plus years of relative stability is starting to adjust slightly. And Okinawa is a big piece, a fulcrum over a wide range of geographic and economic interests that have been essentially managed by the United States as a fallout from its defeat of Japan after WWII.
Okinawa was seen as the forward departure point for an invasion of Japan, though the A-Bomb scuttled the invasion, the island remained as a central component of American military strategy in the region. For China, you have to question whether the posturing, though serious at some point, is part of this larger context in which military spending is used to help inflate their economy and in a sense keep world demand for natural resources and tech products at a level that would prevent a crash or hard landing.
It is not a far reach to consider the noise coming from Beijing is timed to frame other issues, in particular the Iran-Syria scenario which China would like to resolve through their “soft power” while some elements in the leadership hanker for some form of militarized intervention as an affirmation of national pride and capability.
( see link at end) …The Global Times, the newspaper run by China’s Communist Party, ran an editorial this month suggesting that Beijing challenge Japan’s control of Okinawa, part of the Ryukyu island chain.
Why would China want to start a fight over Okinawa? At the moment, China, Taiwan, and Japan are engaged in a particularly nasty sovereignty dispute in the East China Sea over five islands and three barren rocks called the Senkakus by the Japanese and the Diaoyus by the other claimants. The disputed chain is north of the southern end of the Ryukyus and about midway between Taiwan and Okinawa….
The Senkakus are administered by Japan, which appears to have a stronger legal claim to the chain than the other two nations. The United States, which takes no position on the sovereignty issue, returned the islands to Tokyo at the same time it gave back Okinawa in 1972. The People’s Republic of China made no formal claim to the Senkakus until 1971.Read More:http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/gordon-g-chang/china-now-claims-japan%
( see link at end) …In a fiery editorial earlier this month, the Global Times newspaper urged Beijing to consider challenging Japan’s control over its southern prefecture of Okinawa – an island chain with a population of 1.4m people that bristles with US military bases.
“China should not be afraid of engaging with Japan in a mutual undermining of territorial integrity,” the Communist party-run paper declared.
Major General Jin Yinan, head of the strategy research institute at China’s National Defense University, went even further. He told state radio that limiting discussion to the Diaoyu was “too narrow”, saying Beijing should question own
ip of the whole Ryukyu archipelago – which by some definitions extends beyond Okinawa.While the Chinese government has offered no endorsement of such radical views, their open espousal by senior commentators is likely to be deeply unsettling both to Japan and other neighbouring nations.Read More: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9692e93a-d3b5-11e1-b554-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz221UgS8Nf
ADDENDUM:
…(see link at end)…Dan (not his real name) is a member of the US Marine Corps. He’s based in Camp Foster, a military base near to Futenma, on Okinawa Island.
The Japanese military is pretty limited and the country has quite a peaceful mindset today. In the US, every police officer has a gun. Here, there’s one gun for a whole unit, and it’s another one that has the pepper spray. So I think we come in quite useful to them. For example, we’re particularly watchful of what’s going on in North Korea.
It has to be said that Okinawa Island is a key spot for the US in the Pacific zone. Closing bases here would mean moving 30,000 to 40,000 people; it’s a big task; not something you can do overnight. But it’s true we don’t do much here. We do daily training exercises and often go off to train in Australia, Thailand etc., My work is mainly a computer job.
I went along to the demonstration and spoke to some of the locals. They told me that what bothers them most is the noise of the fighter planes taking off and landing. Another big issue, which I do understand, is that the base takes up a massive amount of space, leaving the town overcrowded. Read More:http://observers.france24.com/content/20100506-american-soldier-japan-only-minority-think-we-monsters-okinawa-futenma
…(see link at end)…Defenders of the alliance argue that it has done more than keep the peace: it has enabled Japan to keep its military spending low, and attract global status in other ways, notably economic. Nonetheless, some in Japan feel the country has subordinated itself to America, and this has riled nationalists. And in Washington, DC, critics accuse Japan of “cheap-riding” on American security guarantees.
It is against this backdrop that the new government’s review of the Futenma accord raised hackles in Washington. Adding to the sense of drift was Tokyo’s decision to end an eight-year maritime refuelling mission for troops fighting in Afghanistan this month. It has also promised to investigate secret agreements in the 1960s and 1970s that enabled nuclear-armed American warships to enter Japan.
Above all, since the DPJ took power, it has been unclear how its goal of partially balancing Japan’s ties to America with closer ones to China would affect the American alliance. The 50th anniversary of the security treaty might be a good chance to update the accord to reflect China’s rise. But security analysts say the Futenma dispute threatens the mutual trust needed for such an undertaking. Read More:http://www.economist.com/node/15271146
( see link at end) …Chinese questioning of Japanese sovereignty over Okinawa is based on the prefecture’s roots in an independent state known as the Ryukyu Kingdom that won control of the archipelago in the 15th century.
Ryukyu kings paid formal tribute to Chinese emperors, a practice allowing lucrative trade that continued even after the kingdom was conquered by a Japanese feudal domain in 1609. Okinawa only officially became part of Japan in 1879.
For some in China, this history is enough to render illegitimate Japanese rule over a strategically important archipelago seen as the biggest impediment to the expansion of Chinese naval power in the Pacific.
Tang Chunfeng, a former official at the Chinese embassy in Tokyo, is one of those campaigning for China to rethink its acceptance of Japanese rule over Okinawa, saying past restraint has “done a lot of harm”. Read More:http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/9692e93a-d3b5-11e1-b554-00144feabdc0.html#axzz221TnEbUS