Japan decides to risk China fallout - CIR 7 October 2004

In our 16 September issue we said that there were indications that an advisory panel to Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi intended to describe China as a military threat in a report due to be ready by the end of September. In the event the report, which will feed into a major defence-posture review that Japan is intending to complete by the end of the year, did not go quite as far as that, but there is still much in it that will anger China.

On Monday, the advisory panel made up of academics and business leaders said that Japan should consider developing the capability to strike at missile bases when it has no other means to counter missile attacks. It also recommended the deepening of weapons-related cooperation with the United States and the abandonment of Japan’s self-imposed ban on exercising the right to "collective self-defence" (that is aiding allies that come under attack).

A Japanese government official briefing on the report said: "China, by definition, is not a threat" - but for Beijing that will have taken little of the sting out of the report, not least because of the coincidence of Japan’s moves to provide itself with greater freedom of action in defence issues, including the right to participate in collective self-defence, with Taiwan’s courting of Japan as an ally.

As we have previously reported, on 10 September Taiwan’s President Chen Shui-bian told two visiting Japanese parliamentarians, Seiichiro Murakami and Ichiro Kamoshita, that both Japan and Taiwan faced the same threat from China’s military build-up and missile deployments.

Earlier in the year, on 24 July, Taiwan’s National Security Council secretary-general, Chiou I-jen, and Democratic Progressive Party MP Hsiao Bi-khim made a visit to Tokyo, the main purpose of which was reportedly to explore how Taiwan and Japan could develop cooperation on security issues.

That a collective self-defence alliance is what Taipei has in mind was also made clear by Taiwan’s new representative in Japan, Koh Se-Kai, who before flying to Tokyo on 6 July to take up his post talked about an invisible alliance between Taiwan and Japan, saying: "The United States is mandated to come to Taiwan’s defence under the Taiwan Relations Act, while Japan is also obliged to maintain regional security under the US-Japan Defence Guidelines. The two agreements weave a web of common interest shared by the US, Taiwan, and Japan."

Even the chairman of Taiwan’s opposition Kuomintang (KMT), Lien Chan, has urged a greater role for Japan in regional security. He argued recently that bilateral relations between Japan and Taiwan should no longer centre only on economic areas. He said that the two shared "a common basis in terms of geopolitics and security structure" and that both sides should begin to talk about "collective security in East Asia".

Against that background, almost the only part of the panel’s report that Beijing will have approved of was the rejection of any suggestion that Japan should develop nuclear weapons. The report said: "Japan must not possess nuclear weapons."

But this is of little practical significance. As we regularly argue, nuclear weapons are all-but unusable against a country that can retaliate in kind, so it is inconceivable that Japan could use nuclear weapons (if it had them) against China. On the other hand, Japan itself is provided with immunity from nuclear attack by China by the closeness of its military alliance with the US (which includes the stationing of large numbers of US troops in Japan). The key issue, therefore, is the attempt to widen the circumstances in which Japan could use its conventional forces (it has 250,000 military personnel and a national defence budget that is fourth in the world, behind only the US, Russia, and China).

The decision by Japan to risk displeasing China to the degree that it surely has cannot have been taken lightly. There could, for instance, be a serious economic downside to falling out with China.

Equally, given Japan’s stated desire to gain a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, there would be a serious diplomatic cost to any rift with Beijing. Even before the issuing of this report, following Koizumi’s address to the UN on 21 September, Beijing’s foreign ministry launched a scathing attack on Japan, saying that the UNSC was "not a board of directors" and its composition should not be decided "according to the financial contribution of its members".

It also said, in a reference to Japan’s perceived failure to apologize sufficiently for its actions before and during World War II: "If a country wishes to play a responsible role in international affairs, it must have a clear understanding of the historical questions concerning itself."

China’s opposition to Japan’s UNSC ambitions could be fatal given that China has a veto and that modifications to the UN Charter require a two-thirds majority of the General Assembly.

So the fact that Japan is clearly willing to antagonize China to such a degree at a time when it is already struggling to gain Chinese support on such a key diplomatic issue is an unambiguous statement of how important Japan thinks it is to reconfigure its defence posture. And even if the prime minister’s advisory panel did not overtly finger China as a military threat, it is hard to see what other driving force there could be for this decision. Joe de Courcy, Editor.