Taiwan, China, and other things. Recovered from the defunct TypePad platform.
Chinese unilaterally declare Japanese air-zone as their own.
If he were an honest man, Joe Hung of Taiwan's China Post would now write a column apologizing for being hoodwinked by claims of "China's Peaceful Rise".
IF he were an honest man…
UPDATE: Ha. Missed this quote from Yang Yujun of China's Ministry of War:
China "has always respected the freedom of over-flight in accordance with international law".
Sure. With exactly the same respect it affords the territory of its neighbors.
Encouraging, but the man's not out of the woods yet.
Very unfortunate that the Kan administration of Japan is attempting to classify "information which is merely embarrassing to the government" as a "national security secret".
Story at The Japan Times.
I can certainly understand why he did it. Must be demoralizing to spend hours chasing a Chinese fishing boat which has rammed two coast guard vessels . . . only to see the Japanese government let the perp walk.
UPDATE (Nov 10/2010): Thought so.
"He was aboard a patrol boat for many years, and I suppose he might have felt righteous indignation about the fact that his colleagues' clash with a Chinese ship at the risk of their lives was hidden from the eyes of the public," a JCG official said.
Japan Probe, on the Chinese fishing boat "collision" with Japanese coast guard vessels near the Senkaku Islands in October:
According to international rules, ships that are in risk of collision should turn to the right. In the video, the Chinese ship is very clearly veering to the left: straight into the Japanese ship.
I've indeed confirmed that this is true. Here's Rule 15 of the International Regulations for the Prevention of Collisions at Sea:
When two power-driven vessel are crossing so as to involve risk of collision, the vessel which has the other on her starboard side shall keep out of the way . . .
Let me remember now . . . port is left, starboard is right. Got it. Pretty commonsensical. If a ship is on your starboard (right) side, you're not supposed to steer LEFT because that might, y'know, cause your ship to RAM into the other one.
(Image from Rule 15 explanation of the International Regulations for the Prevention of Collisions at Sea)
Of course, if that's your intention all along, then go for it. Just don't forget to gun the motor!
Which brings me to Rule # 8e of the regulations, unmentioned in the Japan Probe blog entry:
If necessary to avoid collision or allow more time to assess the situation, a vessel shall slacken her speed or take all way off by stopping or reversing her means of propulsion. [emphasis added]
All that black diesel smoke suddenly belching from the Chinese boat at 1:29 . . . Sure looks like an intentional acceleration to me.
Postscript: I've added new related updates at the end of this post, as well as this one.
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87% of Japanese view China as untrustworthy.
Which reminds me: Not content with snatching Taiwan & Tibetan flags, Chinese ultranationalists have decided to bring some joy into their dreary little lives by snatching Japanese flags as well.
UPDATE: The Chinese Communist Party spends millions on propaganda to inculcate rabid anti-Japanese sentiments in its citizens . . . then spends millions more to PROTECT Japanese against those very same citizens.
UPDATE (Nov 9/2010): The Chinese Communist Party is so concerned about the anti-Japanese Frankenstein's monster it created, that it fills the stadium with well-behaved astroturfed government workers to prevent racial violence against Japanese spectators.
During the Senkaku incident of September 2010, newspapers mistakenly claimed that a Chinese fishing vessel "collided" with two Japanese coast guard vessels.
Now the video has leaked, so we can all decide: Collision…or deliberate ram?
You make the call: (It's an 11 minute video, with the impact taking place at 2:18. There's little of interest beyond the 5 minute mark, but knock yourself out if you like.)
Another video shows the Chinese ship ramming (sorry, "colliding with") the second ship. This one has English subtitles:
No wonder the current Japanese government wanted to keep these under wraps — for they clearly show that Prime Minister Naoto Kan released guilty men under pressure from the Butchers of Beijing.
Best thing Japan can do now is release ALL the tapes in the interests of transparency. We've got all the money shots now, but for completeness sake the rest need to be made public.
And the worst thing? Attempt to cover it all up by maintaining the current fiction that the tapes are part of "an ongoing judicial investigation" and cannot be released. Because in case Prime Minister Kan hasn't noticed, the case ceased to be a judicial one the day the Chinese took Japanese hostages in order to get Captain Ramboat back.
UPDATE: Good story, bad headline — Senkaku collisions video leak riles China. (Bad headline because the story itself makes it clear that China doesn't seem too "riled". And of course, the two ramming incidents were more than mere "collisions").
Nonetheless, it seems the Japanese government is blustering about prosecuting those whose only crime was revealing the totality of Kan's surrender on this issue. Idiots.
UPDATE #2: Great stuff from the Afterword of this post by Ampontan:
"Had the Kan government been born with a spine, they would have done [what Adlai Stevenson did at the U.N. during the Cuban missile crisis]. They could have shown the world what the Chinese did, just as the world saw what the Soviets were doing in 1962."
UPDATE (Nov 9/2010): Japanese government seizes YouTube records to find identity of leaker. Dunno how well that's gonna go over — freeing Captain Ramboat but punishing the guy who revealed C.R.'s guilt.
UPDATE #4: Prosecutor's office bombarded with over a thousand requests from the Japanese public to drop the inquiry against the leaker.
Meanwhile, opposition parties in Japan grouse that the government has shown them less footage (6 minutes in total) than were leaked to the public.
Beijing graciously releases Japanese chemical munitions removal specialist from captivity.
Advice to the Japanese government: When you're in a hole, stop digging. The CCP has demonstrated its eagerness to take hostages, so stop providing them with the hostages it so desperately craves.
They want 65 year-old chemical shells removed from their soil? Let 'em clean 'em up themselves.
No need for them to be on the Japanese dole, now that they're a big, rich, powerful country.
Resumes rare earth shipments to Japanese high-tech industries. (The four Japanese hostages it took earlier have still not been released, however.)
On a somewhat-related topic, there's one irony I've been meaning to mention regarding Taiwan's involvement in the Senkaku affair. Taiwan's Chinese Nationalist Party will enthusiastically spend tens of thousands of dollars to defend the "right" of a Taiwanese citizen to hoist the R.O.C. flag on Japanese soil.
Yet that same party is willing to spend MILLIONS to prevent Taiwanese citizens from hoisting that very same flag on their OWN SOIL (at least when Chinese Communist Party apparachiks come-a-callin').
Curious, is it not?
They'll take the whole archipelago. Chinese ultranationalists at Taiwan's China Post salivate not just over the Senkaku Islands, but over ALL the islands in Japan's Okinawa Prefecture.
The Senkakus? Merely an appetizer.
UPDATE: In claiming the Senkaku Islands for "China", the China Post of Taiwan refers to a Japanese map from 1783 (on which the islands are given the same color as China).
Hayashi Shihei, Japan's first cartographer, positioned the Senkakus as belonging to China in the eighteenth century.
This all leads to a place where the Chinese ultranationalists of the Post most certainly did intend to go. Because interestingly enough, that very same map represents Taiwan with an entirely different color from China. (China & the Senkaku Islands are colored pinkish-red on the map, while Taiwan is colored yellow.)
Ergo, if you believe the Japanese map is irrefutable proof of China's ownership over the Senkakus, then you must also hold it to be irrefutable proof that Taiwan is an country independent of China.
Q.E.D.
(Hat tip to Ampontan, who was the first to make this observation)
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Beijing's bellicosity wins friends and allies – for America. Danke schoen, Kaiser Hu Jintao.
Incidentally — and I speak only hypothetically — if China is justified in waging economic war against Japan over the Senkaku Islands, wouldn't America be justified in waging economic war against China for its currency manipulation? Robert J. Samuelson at the Washington Post seems to think so.
[Let's be clear though on this last point: As an economic subsidiary of Communist China, Taiwan would suffer terribly from a Sino-American trade war.]