China sneezes, Asia shivers

WHEN he woke up in Lilliput, bound by a lattice of slender ligatures, to find dozens of tiny men disporting themselves on his chest, Lemuel Gulliver let out a roar “so loud that they all ran back in fright”. Another waking giant, China, seems these days to be adopting a similar foreign policy. It has found it just as effective. But as Gulliver discovered, it has its drawbacks.

The loudest roar has been aimed at Japan. After a Chinese trawler on September 7th rammed two of its coastguard vessels in waters off the disputed, Japanese-administered, islands known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China, Japan detained the captain for a fortnight. China’s reaction was, in the words of Seiji Maehara, Japan’s foreign minister, “fairly hysterical”. And Mr Maehara saw signs of Chinese pressure “in various places”.

Indeed, as Chinese officials issued dire warnings of unspecified consequences if their skipper were not freed, some odd things started happening. Sino-Japanese trade was held up by unusually thorough customs inspections. Exports of rare earths were subject to an unannounced weeklong ban. And it was hard to see the detention of four Japanese construction-company employees on mysterious charges of photographing military facilities as mere coincidence.

Japan seemed to take fright. On September 24th local prosecutors freed the captain. Bizarrely, they cited the importance of relations with China, as if the foreign ministry had subcontracted its diplomatic responsibilities to a low level of the judiciary. China refused to be mollified, insisting it was owed an apology and compensation. Japan’s prime minister, Naoto Kan, smarting from criticism for the climb-down, demanded that China pay for the repair of the damaged boats. But after the initial exchange of indignation, tempers seemed to cool (and China released three of the four Japanese detainees). Just as well. A crowded calendar of multilateral talkfests looms. After the Asia-Europe meeting in Brussels on October 4th come, in a few weeks, the G20, East Asian and Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summits. It would be embarrassing if all were dominated by speculation about whether the Chinese and Japanese leaders shake hands.

As diplomatic trials of strength go, this one seems fairly easy to score: China 1, Japan 0. Mr Kan’s administration has appeared unco-ordinated, confused and weak. It has made a mockery of the idea of judicial independence, and managed to make China seem to have greater respect for legal process. China, on the other hand, has forcibly demonstrated that it regards the islands as its own, despite Japan’s control of them, and has shown that it has the commercial and diplomatic clout to make its point.

The message was heard elsewhere. Members of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN), alarmed by China’s vague, unexplained but sweeping claim to sovereignty over most of the South China Sea, encouraged America to involve itself in the issue. In July Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state, obliged. She told a regional forum in Hanoi that the sea was an American national interest, and made an oblique rallying-call to unity among China’s various rival claimants for bits of the sea.

A mild iteration of this was included in a draft of the joint statement to be issued after the second America-ASEAN summit—held by President Barack Obama in New York on September 24th. The draft deplored the “use or threat of force by any claimant attempting to enforce disputed claims” in the sea—ie, it was a warning to China. When the statement emerged, however, cooler heads in ASEAN prevailed. It avoided mention of the sea at all, merely reaffirming “the importance of regional peace and stability, maritime security, unimpeded commerce, and freedom of navigation”. Also motherhood and apple pie.

India, too, has been watching carefully. Manmohan Singh, the prime minister, has voiced concern about China’s maritime ambitions. His government has been worried by China’s provocative refusal to give a proper visa to an Indian general, apparently because he served in a “disputed” region, Kashmir. China has in the past couple of years seemed eager to prod the two countries’ huge but dormant territorial quarrels—over what India thinks of as Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh—back into life.

As a vigorous rising power, China is predictably prickly about its sovereignty. But it must be debatable whether its “victory” over Japan has really furthered its own interests. As Japan’s Mr Maehara puts it, its behaviour over the disputed islands gave “quite a few countries a glimpse of the essence of China”. It is fair to guess they did not entirely like what they saw.

China sneezes, Asia shivers

To list some of the effects of China’s fierce—almost bellicose—reaction: forcing America to confirm that its security treaty with Japan covers conflict over the disputed islands; concentrating Japanese minds on seeking other sources of raw materials such as rare earths; and pushing South-East Asian countries closer to America. As China’s own officials might say: it picked up a rock only to drop it on its own feet.

Japanese officials see this in terms of the growing clout of China’s armed forces, a power struggle ahead of the transfer of leadership to a new generation at the next Communist Party congress in 2012 and the search for something (such as nationalism) that might give the party a new source of legitimacy. But perhaps such rationalisations miss the point. The second time Gulliver wakes up in Lilliput, it is after passing out, having drunk wine laced with a sleeping-draught. A curious Lilliputian, inspecting his comatose form, puts the sharp end of his half-pike a good way up his nostril. It tickles. Gulliver sneezes violently. Sometimes, awakening giants simply can’t help themselves—which was of scant comfort to the Lilliputians. The Economist