Hamilton Spectator : Enshrining good relations

Enshrining good relations

China is overlooking a lot to stay on a peacefulcourse toward great power status ...but Japan's new PM could scuttle all that.

by Gwynne Dyer | September 30, 2006

'We just ignore them!" said the man at the think tank in Beijing, a senior adviser to the Chinese foreign ministry, and burst out laughing. He laughed because it is a long and daunting list of people to ignore.

He has to ignore the American journalists and academics who predict an eventual war with China, the U.S. armed forces, who are transferring more and more hardware to the western Pacific and the Bush administration officials whose search for allies in Asia to "contain China" culminated in not-quite-an-alliance with India last year.

He also has to ignore their counterparts in the Chinese military-industrial complex, who try to use all that as evidence that China must pour more resources into defence. He is a busy man.

The reason he (and most of the Chinese foreign policy establishment) deliberately ignore them all is because taking the "American threat" seriously and trying to match it would just play into the hands of the hawks on both sides.

There is no objective reason that makes a U.S.-Chinese clash inevitable, but preparing for it -- or even talking too much about it -- actually makes it more possible.

I heard the same argument from half a dozen other influential foreign policy analysts in Beijing two weeks ago, which should have been reassuring.

It would have been, if not for the fact that every one of those experts, having patiently explained that there were no threats on the horizon that could deflect China's "peaceful rise" to great power status, then added: "except Japan."

That is quite an exception, since Japan has the world's second-biggest economy and is right on China's doorstep.

Which brings us to Shinzo Abe, the new prime minister of Japan. Elected leader of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party on Sept. 20 and formally installed as prime minister Tuesday, he is the youngest man (52) to occupy the office since the Second World War. He only entered parliament 13 years ago and got his first cabinet-level job just last year.

The people around Abe are uncompromising nationalists who insist Japan must become a "normal" country, which means it should stop apologizing for the Second World War, rewrite school textbooks omitting all the material about war guilt and Japanese atrocities, and rewrite the "peace" constitution so that Japan's euphemistically titled "Self-Defence Forces" can legally become ordinary armed forces, able to be deployed overseas.

This group, long a minority faction within the LDP, first gained power with the choice of outgoing prime minister Junichiro Koizumi as leader five years ago, but Abe takes a harder line. He has even said it is, "not necessarily unconstitutional," for Japan to develop a nuclear deterrent.

He advocates even closer military ties with the United States and worries aloud about the intentions of a stronger China.

He not only irritates the Chinese, whose relations with Japan are at the lowest point in decades after five years of Koizumi, he actually frightens them.

No sane Japanese wants to turn the country's giant neighbour and biggest trading partner into an active enemy and Abe isn't mad. But it wouldn't be the first time a government has talked itself into a needless military confrontation.

Symbolism matters.

If Abe continues Koizumi's habit of making annual visits to the Yasukuni shrine -- which is devoted to the souls of Japan's millions of war dead, including 14 leaders who were hanged as war criminals after the country's defeat in 1945 -- then many Chinese will conclude he is a real threat.

Koizumi's official visits as prime minister outraged people all over Asia whose countries were occupied by Japan during the war, but the Chinese in particular went ballistic.

Abe has refused to say whether he will copy Koizumi, but he visited the shrine privately as recently as last spring.

If he visits again as prime minister, Sino-Japanese relations will get even worse and it will get still harder for the sensible people in Beijing to ignore the rhetoric of the American hawks and the warnings and pleas of their own hawks.

With a little bad luck, we could be as little as a couple of years away from the start of a new Cold War in Asia.

Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.