Striking the right balance
- By Shen Dingli
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E-mail China Daily, February 14, 2014
US Secretary of State John Kerry is due to address the tense regional security situation during his talks in Beijing on Friday.
Three issues will be high on his agenda: Japan's territorial disputes with China and the Republic of Korea, China's air defense identification zone, and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
On the first two there are wide gaps between China and the US.
At present, Japan's disputes with China and the ROK have seriously destabilized Northeast Asia, with far-reaching ramifications. Both China's Diaoyu Islands and the ROK's Dukdo Island fell into the hands of imperialist Japan as a result of its aggression. Though Japan put different names on the islands, such colonial occupation ought to have been reversed.
The rift between Japan and the ROK, the two main allies of the US in the region, naturally bothers the US greatly, as it is undermining the US' geostrategic interests in Northeast Asia.
However, the dispute between China and Japan over the Diaoyu Islands is far more serious, as it is more likely to flare up into physical conflict between the two Asian giants. Despite China's decades-long self-restraint regarding this issue and its long-standing proposal to "shelve" the dispute in the interests of better relations between the two countries, Japan took the initiative to change the status quo that existed by "nationalizing" the three main islands in 2012.
The US is now caught somewhere in between. Yet it should be pointed out that the US too is to blame for the present situation, as it caused the discord between China and Japan in the first place by handing these Chinese islands, which it was in possession of at the end of World War II, to Japan in 1972 instead of returning them to China.
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