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Subject: Taiwan ships enter Japan waters
Zhang Fei    6/16/2008 10:28:32 AM
It's becoming clearer and clearer than Roosevelt's move to detach Taiwan, Korea and Manchukuo from Japan, as concessions to General Cash My Check, were a strategic mistake.
(Quote)
Nine Taiwanese coast guard vessels entered Japanese waters Monday near disputed islands in the East China Sea to accompany a ship of protesters angry over the sinking nearby of a Taiwanese fishing boat, officials said.

Japan immediately denounced the incident as a violation of its territorial waters, amid a spike in tensions over the islands, known as Diaoyutai in Chinese and Senkaku in Japanese. Officials in Taiwan called it a mission to uphold its sovereignty over the disputed territory.

The vessels and the protest ship were in Japanese waters for about two and a half hours near the islands, defying repeated warnings from Japanese patrol boats, the Japanese coast guard said in a statement.

Taiwan's Coast Guard Administration Vice Minister Cheng Chang-hsiung said the protesters got less than two-thirds of a mile (less than 1 kilometer) from an island in the chain, where they were blocked by nine Japanese patrol vessels. Cheng said Taiwan dispatched nine patrol vessels to protect the protesters' ship along the way.

"We did not notify Japan of the operations beforehand because the operations aimed to maintain (Taiwan's) sovereignty," Cheng said in a televised news conference.

Japan contends the captain of a Taiwanese leisure fishing boat is responsible for last week's collision with a Japanese coast guard vessel off the disputed islands. The Taiwanese captain claims the Japanese vessel rammed his craft. No one was injured in the incident. Taiwan recalled its envoy to Japan on Saturday in protest over the collision.

Japanese government spokesman Nobutaka Machimura denounced Taiwan's violation of Japanese waters.

"The violation of territorial waters was extremely regrettable. The Senkaku islands are part of Japan, and this is beyond question," Machimura said at a news conference.

Japan administers the islands, which are claimed by Taiwan as well as China. The value of the islands, about 1,260 miles (2,000 kilometers) southwest of Tokyo, has grown in recent years following the discovery of potentially rich gas reserves in the area.

Japanese public broadcaster NHK said it was unprecedented for a Taiwanese patrol vessel to enter Japanese waters. NHK said the protest ship carried around 40 activists, while the Japanese coast guard said about a dozen activists were spotted.

The small, uninhabited islands are located in rich fishing waters between the Japanese island of Okinawa and Taiwan.

The islands were seized by Japan in 1895 when it colonized Taiwan. The islets were then administered by the United States after World War II until control was turned over to Japan in 1972. But both Taiwan and China claim the islands have been theirs for centuries.
(Unquote)
 
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Nanheyangrouchuan       6/17/2008 12:16:18 AM
Hmm, the PLAN could capitalize on this by sending ships to support the Taiwanese.
 
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YelliChink       6/17/2008 8:41:09 AM
ZF you failed to notice that a Japanese court decision to the case Taipei prefecture vs Okinawa in 1944 ruled that these rocks are part of Taipei prefecture. Since all surrounding isles of Taiwan and Pescadores were returned to ROC in 1945, except these rocks, the claim of ROC to own these small islands is legit. The other fact is that the USN never drove Taiwanese fishing boats out of the area. When the US handed it over to Japan, they start to kick our fishing boats out. If military occupation justifies territorial claim, then Japan should not claim Northern Islands which are now under Russian occupation. Japanese seized these islands during the chaos of First Sino-Japanese War. They've been coveting these islands and Taiwan before then, but were unable to do anything until their victory in First Sino-Japanese War. Why not earlier? Why not later? How convenient.

The incident is triggered by Japanese Coast Guard patrol frigate that deliberately collided and sank a Taiwanese fishing boat. I don't know what kind of law enforcement is that, but the captain of that patrol frigate is now under criminal investigation for attempted murder and derelict of duty. You think that our coast guard patrol in the area should sit there and do nothing when our fishing crew are in the water? Ask yourself what will USCG do if a small US fishing boat is hit and sunk by Mexican LE ship.

BTW, last time commies' LE ship entered the area, they shot at our fishing boat.
 
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Zhang Fei       6/17/2008 11:07:32 AM
If military occupation justifies territorial claim, then Japan should not claim Northern Islands which are now under Russian occupation.

That's the usual basis - combined with the relative geopolitical heft of the claimants - for internationally accepted territorial claims. These things don't have a basis in anything more substantial than power politics. Taiwan is a de facto independent state in spite of Chinese claims to its territory not because of the amoral absurdities of international law, but because it has a military powerful enough to keep the Chinese at bay until Uncle Sam comes to the rescue. What is absurd about Taiwan's claim is that if the Japanese were to cede these islands to Taiwan, the Chinese could jump in and immediately annex them and there is nothing Taiwan could do to hold on to them. Chinese annexation and the probable building of Chinese military installations there would immediately place a physical barrier to American forces coming to Taiwan's rescue. To say nothing of the impact on Japan's willingness to get involved in a war with China over Taiwan.

And I haven't even gone over the absurdity of a territorial claim based on previous administrative divisions. By that measure, Burma, Malaysia and Singapore really ought to belong to India, given that it was mostly run by Indian bureaucrats under the auspices of the East India Company. Stuff about territorial acquisitiveness being a disqualifier for is also silly. China is the premier example of limitless territorial ambition written out of millions of square miles of Northeast Asia, but no one has actually told it to abandon its claims. (Ditto for the US, which was annexing territory even beyond the time of the Japanese annexation of Taiwan). The only reason China (unlike Japan) is the third largest country in the world is because no one stood in its way when it was massacring its way to empire across Northeast Asia.

Note that I say this not out of any special sympathy for Japan, but to point out the futility of trying to gain territory via  claims of superior morality.  The traditional means of doing so is via war or threats of war. Even Taiwan itself was seized by Han Chinese from aborigines who were practically wiped out.
 
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YelliChink       6/17/2008 5:54:36 PM


Note that I say this not out of any special sympathy for Japan, but to point out the futility of trying to gain territory via  claims of superior morality.  The traditional means of doing so is via war or threats of war. Even Taiwan itself was seized by Han Chinese from aborigines who were practically wiped out.

Everybody has their own national interests based on multiple factors. Ours on those rocks do not include to get those rocks now. Some day, but not today, and peaceful means without a time table preferred. There are more problems between Japan and us about EEZ in the Philippine Sea, and Japanese are extremely stubborn and hardcore when you try to deal with them. Yeah, right, you people have to drop two nukes to persuade them to stop fighting.

As for Taiwan aborigines, there were plain aboriginals and mountain aboriginals. Plain aboriginal tribes were still distinct during early Japanese rule, and was assimilated into Han during early 1900s. As a matter of fact, people whose last name Pan are most likely descendants from plain aboriginals. Guess what drove them to be assimilated. Imperial Japanese Colonial Government had an assimilation plan as well as discriminating policy against both Han and aborigines. The ones that against aborigines are especially draconian, since then Japanese rulers thought they are barbarians, and Han people are merely inferior. The assimilation policy, which put against aborigines, drove them into assimilation with Han, and caused  a small war between a mountain aboriginal tribe and Imperial Japanese Army that ended up with the tribe to be wiped out. The colonial history of Taiwan showed that it's more like Han kill Han and aborigines kill aborigine instead of the other way around before Japanese rule. Both Qing and Japanese authority had rules that Han and aborigines can't cross their own lines. There is a reason why mountain aborigine tribes support KMT more than DPP. Only one Aboriginal MP in Legislative Yuan is not KMT/Blue, and she is seriously against Japanese right winger.

There is still a document about land trading between Han and aborigine in early Qing that has survived to this day. How did Han seized land from aborigine tribes? Much the same way how Dutch colonists grabbed New Amsterdam aka New York City.
 
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Zhang Fei       6/17/2008 9:31:06 PM
Japanese are extremely stubborn and hardcore when you try to deal with them. Yeah, right, you people have to drop two nukes to persuade them to stop fighting.

Way less hardcore than the Germans, who lost 10% of their population, and more civilians than Japan lost in total dead (2.5%, civilians and military) during WWII, before surrendering. The Senkaku Islands are Japan's much as Taiwan belongs to the Han Chinese - via the right of conquest. The odds of Japan surrendering those islands are about as high as the odds of China surrendering its claim to Shandong province.
 
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Zhang Fei       6/17/2008 9:50:26 PM
the Qing Dynasty, which during 200 years of nominal control had left the east of Taiwan alone, mounted a program to assert its authority over the entire island. This led to numerous clashes between Chinese forces and aboriginal groups in eastern Taiwan.

The bloodiest of these occurred in 1878 when the Sakizaya and Kavalan tribes, based in the Hualien area, lost a major battle to Qing forces, which was followed up by the attempted genocide of the Sakizaya, in what became known as the Takobowan Incident. To escape this ethnic cleansing, the surviving Sakizaya fled, many of them seeking sanctuary among the much larger Amis tribe. It is thought that, out of fear of revenge killings or further genocide, the surviving Sakizaya hid their identity from then on, with the consent of the accommodating Amis.

I'm quoting this passage simply to point out that genocidal policies (by which I mean actual slaughter rather than assimiliation) have been a tool of Chinese statecraft for quite a while, including on Taiwan itself. The talk of land trades etc is just silly - the question is whether the trades were conducted at swordpoint - sell or fight - get token compensation or nothing at all, and lose your life and all your possessions in the process.
 
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YelliChink       6/18/2008 9:53:50 AM
I'm quoting this passage simply to point out that genocidal policies (by which I mean actual slaughter rather than assimiliation) have been a tool of Chinese statecraft for quite a while, including on Taiwan itself. The talk of land trades etc is just silly - the question is whether the trades were conducted at swordpoint - sell or fight - get token compensation or nothing at all, and lose your life and all your possessions in the process.

If general Custer had won Little Bighorn, we would have more to discuss. When you are at war with tribes like that, every adult male members are supposed to be warriors, the end result would always be "genocide," since most adult males were killed in the process. In the case of Sakilya and Kalavan, young tribal leaders wanted war and threatened old people either to support or leave and the made their last stand in their villages. These tribes are no Hawaiian, but more like Native American tribes. Forced sale under swordpoint? You need to see the list of killed Han settlers. Honestly they aren't the kind of people you want to mess with. Scam is more common than force in the case of how Taiwanese aborigines lost their lands.

When Han flooded into Taiwan at the rate that exceed total number of aborigines each year, you get the result. It doesn't take much time before all lands were flood with Han. Qing actually took actions to limit the numbers, but in no avail.
 
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