720 { China’s Quest
not to nurse hatred but to better “look forward to the future.” In contrast to
earlier warnings about the danger of revived Japanese militarism, Hu lauded
Japan’s adherence to the “path of a peaceful country over the past six decades
and more.” The Joint Communiqué signed by Hu and Fukuda stated that
China “values Japan’s status and role in the United Nations and is willing to
see Japan play a bigger and more constructive role in international affairs.”
Hu and Fukuda agreed to increase the exchange of high-level visits in the
security sector to “promote mutual understanding and trust.” This would
lead later in 2008 to the scheduling of a friendship visit by a Japanese warship
to a Chinese harbor—the first such visit since 1945. The Joint Communiqué
also pledged to make the East China Sea “a sea of peace, cooperation and
f riendship.”^26 This provision would lead to an agreement later in the year
for Japanese investment in a joint development zone in a rich natural gas
field on the Chinese side of the mid-line in the East China Sea claimed by
Japan as the boundary. In sum, Hu’s 2008 visit was an impressive attempt
to reassure Japan of China’s friendship. Unfortunately, before the projected
friendship visit by the Japanese warship and joint development project in the
East China Sea could occur, another eruption of anti-Japanese nationalism
made both of those gestures of reassurance appear as traitorous weakness to
much Chinese anti-Japanese patriotic opinion. Starting in December 2008,
tension flared over the Senkaku Islands, and by 2013–2014 it would carry the
two countries into a tense and increasingly militarized confrontation in the
East China Sea.Intensification of the Territorial ConflictChina and Japan dispute ownership of a cluster of five small islands situated
170 kilometers northeast of Taiwan, about the same distance northwest of
Japan’s Ishigaki Island at the southern end of the Ryukyu archipelago, and
330 kilometers from the coast of continental China. China contends that the
islands—known as Diaoyu in Chinese and Senkaku in Japanese—are Chinese
territory stolen by Japan in the 1890s and definitively transferred back to
China by the Cairo Declaration of 1943. Tokyo contends that the islands were
administered by no state until incorporated into Japan as part of the Ryukyu
archipelago in the 1870s—that is, well before the 1894 Sino-Japan war. The
Cairo Declaration has nothing to do with the Senkakus, Japan insists. The
United States administered the islands until 1972, when it handed the Ryukyu
Islands, including the Senkakus, over to Japan. There had been flare-ups of
tension over the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands in 1970–1972, 1978, 1990
and 1996–1997, but the growth of maritime capabilities of both China and
Japan along with the growing energy needs of both those countries in the
twenty-first century increased the sharpness of the confrontation over these