726 { China’s Quest
legal status quo of Japan’s hold over the disputed islands. Beijing’s response
was swift and hard. The Japanese ambassador in Beijing was summoned to
the MFA six times to receive Chinese protests. One of those summonses
was in the early morning, a move Tokyo took as a deliberate slap in the face.
Beijing broke off high-level talks underway with Japan on expanding avia-
tion routes, coal technologies, and joint development of the Chunxiao field.
Beijing also ordered all central and provincial government offices to sus-
pend interactions with their Japanese counterparts. After the captain had
been detained for several days, Chinese authorities detained and launched
an investigation of four employees of a Japanese construction company for
allegedly entering and filming in a military zone.^42 Chinese travel agen-
cies began to cancel tour groups to Japan. Premier Wen Jiabao refused
to meet with Prime Minister Naoto Kan on the sidelines of a UN sum-
mit in New York City. Instead, Wen threatened additional actions if Japan
did not quickly release the trawler’s captain. Beijing also began restrict-
ing the export of Chinese rare earths, a move that seriously threatened
major Japanese industries dependent on these exports. Japanese opinion
at the time saw this as part of China’s effort to punish Japan, although
China subsequently argued that the export restrictions were unrelated to
Sino-Japan conflict but were routine industrial policy.^43 “The de facto ban
on rare earths export that China has imposed could have a very big impact
on Japan’s economy,” said Japan’s economic and fiscal policy minister Banri
Kaieda shortly after industry executives began reporting that customs offi-
cials had begun blocking rare-earth exports.^44 The politics behind the shift
in China’s rare-earth policies are not clear. In Tokyo, in any case, the export
restriction was widely seen as part of Beijing’s campaign to force Japan to
release the captain and, beyond that, to cease contesting Beijing’s effort to
gradually change the terms of administration of the disputed territories by
establishing a permanent and significant physical presence in the seas just
off the islands. The contrast between China’s reassuring words during Hu
Jintao’s May 2008 visit and the forceful actions during the September 2010
confrontation jarred Japan.
Chinese maritime pressure in the Senkakus reached unprecedented inten-
sity beginning in September 2012 after Japan’s government purchased three
privately owned Senkaku Islands as a way of preempting a proposal by the
nationalist governor of Tokyo to purchase and then commercially develop
those islands. Beijing ignored the rationale for Tokyo’s move and declared
it a unilateral Japanese attempt to change the legal status quo of the islands.
Chinese maritime pressure on Japan’s administration of the islands intensified.
Chinese intrusion into the contiguous zone occurred almost daily and intru-
sions into the territorial sea almost five times per month. Frequent Chinese
intrusions then became standard. Beijing had established a new status quo.
As intrusions by Chinese ships into the disputed islands’ twelve-nautical-mile