According to Sourabh Gupta, we’ve all been a bit quick to label China the neighborhood bully when it comes to the recent standoff over a Chinese trawler captain that Japan detained for fishing in coastal waters of the disputed Senkaku Island chain. The reason? The two countries already have in place coastal fisheries agreements that explicitly and wisely decouple fisheries disputes from any larger territorial disputes, for the express purpose of preventing them from triggering the kind of diplomatic incident that ultimately took place. And those agreements clearly give legal jurisdiction over any infractions off of the Senkaku Islands to [...]
There’s a conventional wisdom forming that in releasing the detained Chinese trawler captain, Japan backed down to Chinese pressure and as a result “lost” the confrontation. This is probably true from a short-term perspective, but the proof of the pudding will be whether Japan, in future, concedes on both the issue at hand — sovereignty over the disputed islands — and the broader issue that is China’s reach for regional dominance. I don’t think either of those are likely. And I think John McCreary sums up nicely why that is: The Chinese have overreached in their dealings with Japan, Southeast [...]
It seems like only last year that we were hearing warnings about how the state-capitalist model made possible by power concentrated at the top in places like China and Russia would ultimately make liberal economies a quaint artifact of the past. Now, it seems, China is increasingly going from mono to surround sound, as a marketplace of ideas emerges in its highest decision-making levels, at least when it comes to foreign policy and national security. It’s hard to imagine that this sort of policy-jockeying won’t also begin to characterize domestic economic policy, especially as the need to develop the vast [...]
