Traditionally, the dispute about the Senkaku/Diaoyutai island chain is seen as a bilateral argument between Japan and the Chinese Communist Party. That’s certainly how the CCP-led regime sees things, and the resultant military buildup (Jamestown Foundation [1]) has led some to wonder if this dispute could get out of control.
Far fewer people, analysts included, remember that there is a third claim to these islands – Taiwan’s claim. More to the point, while the CCP has responded with military deployments and harsh words, the island democracy known as the Republic of China has taken a decidedly different approach – and with much better results:
Taiwan and Japan agreed on various amendments to regulations on fishing operations in waters near the disputed Diaoyutai Islands (?????) — known in Japan as the Senkaku Islands — in the East China Sea during their latest round of bilateral fishery talks that concluded on Friday in Tokyo.
During the fourth meeting of the Taiwan-Japan fishing commission, the two sides agreed to make some amendments to the fishing regulations applied to Taiwanese and Japanese fishing vessels operating in a designated area in the East China Sea where both are allowed to operate freely, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement on Saturday.
…
The establishment of the fisheries commission was part of a historic fisheries agreement signed by Taiwan and Japan in April 2013 on fishing rights in the East China Sea near the disputed islands. (Source: Taipei Times [2])
It should be noted that this bilateral commission has done its work almost simultaneously with the CCP’s arms buildup near the island chain.
Comparisons like this should be remembered in what has become the great Republican foreign policy debate: Are democracies abroad worth defending? Or (in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan) building?
More specifically, the next time the CCP plays the nationalist card (Taipei [3] Times [4]), we should remember that there is another way – indeed, one could argue another Chinese way – to handle disputes like this.
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