It is not only because it is big (the area is around 15% larger than Europe with almost a third again in population) but also because opposing ideologies, powerful rivalries and memories of outright war still lurk just beneath the surface.<\/p>\n
Europeans don’t have any kind of correlating experience – it would be unthinkable, for example, for German schoolbooks to be published which denied wartime atrocities (as happened in Japan in 2005), and just as odd to imagine Italy divided into two, with the north run by a dictatorship bent on its own nuclear programme. Which is roughly the present situation in Korea.<\/p>\n
And following anti-Japanese demonstrations in China and Korea after the ‘textbook’ incident some people thought the Chinese communist government had a hand in them too – leading to all sorts of theories. Further, though South Korea is a democratic state, unlike China, anti-Japanese sentiments have long been used by opposing domestic camps to gain political influence. Likewise in China, divergent political factions may find anti-Japanese sentiments useful in simply jockeying for position.<\/p>\n
And then of course there is the ‘difficult’ issue of China’s claim of sovereignty over Taiwan.<\/p>\n
But there are signs of detente. Last year, after the discovery of an oil field in the East China Sea, bordered by both China and Japan, Chinese President Hu Jintao and Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda issued a powerful statement outlining the contours of a “mutually beneficial relationship based on common strategic interests”.<\/p>\n
Further, Taiwan and China are now getting on to cordial terms and renewing direct shipping links after 60 years of hostility, bringing to an end the requirement that goods are carried to a halfway port.<\/p>\n
“One aspect is that the two sides are reconciling and not going back to the animosity and conflicts of the past,” KMT president Ma Ying-jeou told reporters. “The other is the economy – sea and air cargo links can greatly reduce time and expenses.”<\/p>\n
There have been problems though. A report in the Taiwan News almost two months after the signing said so far only a few ships obtained both of the licenses required by China, and that twenty Taiwanese cargo ships had been banned from entering Chinese ports, posing trouble for their owners. The matter of relaxing restrictions looks like being discussed further but it may take time. According to the Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF), President Chiang Pin-kun will begin talks with China on the matter as soon as documents are submitted by the Mainland Affairs Council.<\/p>\n
Following this, China has drilled a gas field in the East China Sea in violation of a June agreement, the Japanese ‘Sankei’ newspaper reported in January. Japan and China have held a series of high-level meetings to address their growing disputes but apparently have reached little agreement on the gas fields other than to keep talking.<\/p>\n
It may be that new alliances will find it hard to withstand this coming economic winter – or it may be that, like the penguins, a lot of friendly huddling will get most of them through the cold times.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It is not, yet, a community – you only have to look at a list of countries that comprise East Asia – China, Japan, Taiwan and Korea – and you can see why there is difficulty in considering the region as a whole.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":2344,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-2343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-asia"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2343"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2343\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2345,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2343\/revisions\/2345"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2343"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=2343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}