Gov. Blinky Ishihara wants to buy the Senkaku Rocks

[Yokohammer]

It'll be like swatting flies.

There'll never be enough hands or fly swatters.

[Russell]

It'll be like swatting flies.

There'll never be enough hands or fly swatters.

Don't be so sure...

Defense Academy Dorms Crowded as Japan Faces China Tension

[Samurai_Jerk]

Vietnam riots: China ships to evacuate workers

China is sending five ships to evacuate Chinese nationals from Vietnam following a wave of anti-Chinese riots.

The Chinese government has already evacuated more than 3,000 people, Chinese state-run media report.

The first ship set sail on Sunday, while 16 critically injured Chinese nationals left Vietnam on a chartered flight, Xinhua news agency said.

Two Chinese workers have been killed and dozens more injured in unrest over a Chinese oil rig in disputed waters.

On Saturday the Vietnamese government called for an end to the protests.

Officials said "illegal acts" would be stopped as they could damage national stability.

However, dissident groups have urged people to rally again in major cities on Sunday and the authorities broke up some anti-China protests in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.

[Yokohammer]

So ... the fave vacation destination of a couple of our members might be a bit rough for a while.

Thanks again, China, for being a bully and acting like you own all of Asia.

Not that it hasn't happened before ... but look where that went ...

[Samurai_Jerk]

So ... the fave vacation destination of a couple of our members might be a bit rough for a while.

Thanks again, China, for being a bully and acting like you own all of Asia.

Not that it hasn't happened before ... but look where that went ...

Anything that brings prices down for tourists is good. Especially since they aren't targeting Westerners.

[Yokohammer]

So ... the fave vacation destination of a couple of our members might be a bit rough for a while.

Thanks again, China, for being a bully and acting like you own all of Asia.

Not that it hasn't happened before ... but look where that went ...

Anything that brings prices down for tourists is good. Especially since they aren't targeting Westerners.

Well yeah ... but if things get really rough you're not going to want to be there regardless of who they're targeting.
It probably won't get that bad, but you never know.

[Russell]

Yep, I wouldn't want to go there with my family, since they look more like Chinese than I do...

[Samurai_Jerk]

Yep, I wouldn't want to go there with my family, since they look more like Chinese than I do...

Going to Vietnam with a wife or girlfriend is pointless anyway.

[matsuki]

Yep, I wouldn't want to go there with my family, since they look more like Chinese than I do...

Going to Vietnam with a wife or girlfriend is pointless anyway.

Which is why I'm confused Coligny does it so much??

[Coligny]

Need someone to carry the luggage... I'm not used to travel light...

[matsuki]

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-27474393

Just another China tangent but I wonder how long it is before all this build up explodes and China starts getting hit with sanctions and possibly some military intervention.

[Samurai_Jerk]

Need someone to carry the luggage... I'm not used to travel light...

That's what she said.

[legion]

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-27474393

Just another China tangent but I wonder how long it is before all this build up explodes and China starts getting hit with sanctions and possibly some military intervention.

either that or they realise their demographic implosion is going to make Japan's look like a stroll in the park and today's belligerence is going to be tomorrow's stick to beat them with

unfortunately the cultural revolution deprived them of the education needed to see past immediate self interest

[Russell]

Unfortunately the cultural revolution deprived them of the education needed to see past immediate self interest

That is a very good point!

+100

[wagyl]

Unfortunately the cultural revolution deprived them of the education needed to see past immediate self interest

That is a very good point!

+100

I think a careful examination of the evidence will show that the problem of failing to see past immediate self interest existed well before the Cultural Revolution.

[Russell]

Unfortunately the cultural revolution deprived them of the education needed to see past immediate self interest

That is a very good point!

+100

I think a careful examination of the evidence will show that the problem of failing to see past immediate self interest existed well before the Cultural Revolution.

I have the impression that this condition is more common among Chinese than other folks, the notable exception being educated Chinese people.

And it is known that the Cultural Revolution was not very conductive to the widening of one's world view.

But yeah, I don't have any evidence. I am not a social scientist, after all...

[Russell]

China’s actions at sea and Europe’s history

One of the men ultimately responsible for the diplomatic and military showdown taking place right now in the South China Sea is an English lawyer, famed for a massive treatise he wrote by hand in Latin and mysteriously acquiring a now-famous Chinese nautical map. Though he’s been dead for 360 years, the legal arguments that John Selden laid out to justify countries snatching up oceans as if they were swaths of land are very much alive and kicking.

And that’s a very big deal, because China’s apparent embrace of Selden’s ideas is leading to a head-on collision between America’s belief that the world’s waterways should be open to all and China’s insistence that it can take exclusive control of portions of them. That is to say, what’s at stake in the fight over China’s dispatch of an oil rig to waters off the coast of Vietnam is not a few barrels of oil but rather whether the global system that has driven the rise of the West lives or dies.

“Chinese behavior calls into question the core principle of the freedom of navigation to favor a conservative, continental approach to the sea,” said Alessio Patalano, a specialist on East Asian maritime issues at King’s College London.

All this has come to a head this month because of Beijing’s dispatch of a deep-water oil rig to waters 120 miles off the coast of Vietnam that both countries claim. Chinese and Vietnamese ships have repeatedly clashed; violent riots have erupted in Vietnam targeting Chinese-owned businesses. The United States has admonished Beijing for “provocative” and “aggressive” behavior, and the incident is souring relations between the two biggest powers in the world.

So what’s all this have to do with the long-dead English lawyer? It goes back to a sordid legal duel between the English and Dutch in the early 1600s. The Dutch were the pre-eminent global trading and naval power of the day; the English were not. And nobody was more threatened by the Dutch rise than the English—in 1667, the Dutch would sail up the Thames River and burn the whole fleet.

Wanting to make sure that the world’s oceans were kept open for business, the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius wrote “The Open Sea” in 1609. He argued that no one nation can own the high seas, because they are the common inheritance of all mankind. “Every nation is free to travel to every other nation, and to trade with it,” he insisted. It was a blatantly self-interested legal argument for a trading power stuck in a tiny bit of land off the North Sea, but it packed a legal punch.

England sought a legal answer to Grotius, and by 1635 it had one when John Selden finally published a direct rejoinder: “The Closed Sea.” Selden argued that waters off the coast of a kingdom, such as the waters that the Dutch and English were supposed to share, could in fact be claimed as national territory. “The Sea, by the Law of Nature or Nations, is not common to all men, but capable of private Dominion or proprietie as well as the Land,” he wrote.

King Charles I loved the idea, because it gave him a way to push back at the Dutch and expand royal power and reach at a time when Parliament was getting uppity (it would behead him just a few years later). “The King of Great Britain is Lord of the Sea flowing about, as an inseparable and perpetual Appendant of the British Empire,” Selden wrote.

It wasn’t an entirely novel idea: Older empires including Rome, Spain, and Portugal had also tried to fence off bits of the sea to keep out military and commercial rivals. But Selden’s treatise stood for centuries as the ultimate attempt to rebut Grotius, whose ideas essentially form the basis for modern international law and the law of the sea.

Ironically, the British themselves abandoned Selden’s notions in favor of Grotius’s as soon as the Dutch took over the British crown in the Glorious Revolution. After that, Britain was as interested as anybody in promoting free and open seas underpinned by the unhindered passage of traders and war ships. And they did so for a few centuries, before grudgingly passing the baton to the United States in the early 20th century.

This all matters today, because like a zombie Selden’s ideas are clawing their way out of the grave thanks to China. Its appropriation of many of the same legal arguments that Selden made for King Charles to wield against the Dutch are now being turned against Beijing’s neighbors in the western Pacific—and against the United States.

Chinese leaders increasingly speak of “territorial integrity” when talking about the South China Sea, which they pretty much claim in its entirety with the “nine-dashed-line,” a vague map that seems to label most of that sea as Chinese territory. For years, Chinese scholars have pushed the notion of “blue territory,” or offshore islets and surrounding waters that should be as much a physical part of China as what’s behind the Great Wall. Last week, China’s top general said as much at the Pentagon.

“I want to underscore, finally, that for the territory, which has passed down by our ancestors into the hands of our generation, we cannot afford to lose an inch,” Gen. Fang Fenghui said of the disputes in the South China and East China seas. His U.S. counterpart, Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the U.S. move to the Pacific is designed to protect freedom of navigation and trade.

Beijing’s interest in trying to turn its near seas into Chinese territory is, at root, all about security. For centuries, leaders in Beijing worried mostly about securing their flanks on land from barbarians, Mongols and the like. No real threat came from the sea until the British and other Europeans suddenly showed up in gunboats in the mid-1840s and opened a century of humiliation by seizing Chinese territory, grabbing trading privileges, and eventually carving up the ancient empire.

As Peter Dutton, the director of the China Maritime Studies Institute at the U.S. Naval War College, told Congress earlier this year, China is now seeking to secure its seaward flank by grabbing an offshore belt of territory. That explains, in large part, the aggressive moves to place oil rigs in Vietnamese waters, build military installations on islands off the Philippines, and establish air defense zones over islands run by Japan.

“The Chinese have long felt vulnerable from the sea, and their current maritime strategy seeks to reduce that vulnerability by extending a ring of maritime control around China’s periphery,” Dutton testified.

Chinese foreign ministry officials and scholars have since the beginning defended the placement of the oil rig on the grounds that it is close to an island that they say is an integral part of China, though Vietnam claims the islands, too. Similar arguments prevail in Beijing over the legality of building airstrips next to the Philippines or aggressively patrolling the Senkaku Islands that are in dispute with Japan. Official Chinese media now uses the phrase “territorial integrity” to describe China’s efforts to exert control over things that aren’t really territory and which aren’t, technically speaking, an integral part of China.

And that explains the mounting unease in Washington, which for decades has sent warships into waters claimed by friends and foes alike to assert the international right to freedom of navigation, which is the linchpin of America’s ability to be a global superpower.

More

In effect, China is just emulating US foreign policy, but without the firepower to back it up (yet)...

[Coligny]

In effect, China is just emulating US foreign policy, but without the firepower to back it up (yet)...

Are you really sure if that ?
They copy everything and can start mass producing anything overnight...

[Mike Oxlong]

China Attacks!

Or not...

[Russell]

Vietnam threatens legal action against China

Vietnam’s prime minister said Thursday for the first time that his country is considering legal action against China over its sovereignty claims in the South China Sea, a move that Beijing would likely fiercely oppose.

China claims nearly all of the South China Sea as its own, bringing it into conflict with the far smaller nations of Vietnam, the Philippines and three others that have rival claims. Beijing also has a territorial dispute with Japan over a cluster of islands in the East China Sea.

Last year, the Philippines filed a complaint against China before an international tribunal in The Hague to challenge the legality of its claims, antagonizing China.

Beijing wants any disputes with countries to be resolved bilaterally even as it continues to engage in what many in the region regard as provocative assertions of its sovereignty in the waters.

Link

I wish them all of luck. At least it is a bit of a loss of face on China's part, if many countries take legal action against them.

[Russell]

MSDF ship to join intl disaster drills in South China Sea

The Defense Ministry will dispatch the Maritime Self-Defense Force transport ship Kunisaki to an international disaster-response drills to be held in the South China Sea, The Yomiuri Shimbun has learned.

The Kunisaki will transport about 140 personnel of the U.S. and Australian forces in the search-and-rescue drills to be held in Vietnam, Cambodia and the Philippines.

This is the first time that the MSDF’s transport ship will be engaged in such a task as carrying as many as 100 U.S. and Australian troops.

“This is not a military exercise, but a training for humanitarian assistance,” said a senior ministry official.

However, the planned drills will likely display the solidarity of Japan, the United States and Australia in the Southeast Asia to China, which has been intensifying naval advances in the region.

According to the ministry’s Joint Staff Office, the drills dubbed “Pacific Partnership” started in 2007 at the initiative of the U.S. Navy, and the SDF takes part in the exercise every year.

The Kunisaki is scheduled to leave the U.S. Yokosuka Naval Base in Kanagawa Prefecture on Thursday with the U.S. and Australian personnel on board. It will arrive in Vietnam on June 6.

The vessel will then travel to Cambodia and the Philippines for drills to confirm the procedure of medical assistance in the event of a major disaster through July 15.

Link

This is actually a smart move.

[matsuki]

I still don't understand why Vietnam hasn't taken control of or destroyed the oil rig...

[Samurai_Jerk]

I still don't understand why Vietnam hasn't taken control of or destroyed the oil rig...

You don't!?

[matsuki]

I still don't understand why Vietnam hasn't taken control of or destroyed the oil rig...

You don't!?

They have a navy, yes?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Vietnam_Navy

Incursions of foreign fishing boats and such is one thing but to tolerate them building a fucking oil rig on your shit??

[Yokohammer]

I still don't understand why Vietnam hasn't taken control of or destroyed the oil rig...

You don't!?

They have a navy, yes?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Vietnam_Navy

Incursions of foreign fishing boats and such is one thing but to tolerate them building a fucking oil rig on your shit??

Take control ... destroy ... act of war.
One does not enter into such an undertaking lightly, especially if one is unsure if anyone will be covering one's ass when the shit hits the fan. Clearly not Russia. The US? I kinda doubt it. I'm pretty sure there are some frantic behind-the-scenes negotiations going on right about now.

[Samurai_Jerk]

I still don't understand why Vietnam hasn't taken control of or destroyed the oil rig...

You don't!?

They have a navy, yes?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Vietnam_Navy

Incursions of foreign fishing boats and such is one thing but to tolerate them building a fucking oil rig on your shit??

Take control ... destroy ... act of war.
One does not enter into such an undertaking lightly, especially if one is unsure if anyone will be covering one's ass when the shit hits the fan. Clearly not Russia. The US? I kinda doubt it. I'm pretty sure there are some frantic behind-the-scenes negotiations going on right about now.

Exactly. I don't think Vietnam want's to give China an excuse to bomb and/or invade them.

[Wibble]

They have a navy, yes?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Vietnam_Navy

Incursions of foreign fishing boats and such is one thing but to tolerate them building a fucking oil rig on your shit??

That one was dissolved 40 years ago. Current navy is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_People's_Navy
2 submarines and 7 frigates (5 of them Russian ones from the 60's) versus this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ac ... Navy_ships
Supposedly there's more than 50 Chinese ships including some navy around the rig, so without being best bum-chums with the US, there's not a lot they can do.

[matsuki]

Take control ... destroy ... act of war.

The invasion by China isn't?

One does not enter into such an undertaking lightly, especially if one is unsure if anyone will be covering one's ass when the shit hits the fan. Clearly not Russia. The US? I kinda doubt it. I'm pretty sure there are some frantic behind-the-scenes negotiations going on right about now.

Exactly. I don't think Vietnam want's to give China an excuse to bomb and/or invade them.

Understood...but we're already past the invasion point.

They have a navy, yes?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Vietnam_Navy

Incursions of foreign fishing boats and such is one thing but to tolerate them building a fucking oil rig on your shit??

That one was dissolved 40 years ago. Current navy is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_People's_Navy
2 submarines and 7 frigates (5 of them Russian ones from the 60's) versus this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ac ... Navy_ships
Supposedly there's more than 50 Chinese ships including some navy around the rig, so without being best bum-chums with the US, there's not a lot they can do.

So two d00ds and a pellet gun vs. a mob with guns...grrrreat. I bet that Anti-China expansion alliance sounds pretty good to Vietnam at this point.

[Samurai_Jerk]

There's a difference between setting up an offshore oil rig in your territorial waters and a million troops pouring across your border.

[matsuki]

There's a difference between setting up an offshore oil rig in your territorial waters and a million troops pouring across your border.

Indeed...but it's obviously quite a blatant "fuck you" to Vietnam that needs answerin'