CHINA’S PREMIER Wen Jiabao threatened to retaliate against Japan unless it released a trawler captain who Tokyo accuses of deliberately colliding with two Japanese coastguard ships near islands controlled by Japan but to which China lays claim.
These are the first remarks by a senior Chinese official in the deepening row between the two Asian powerhouses. While economic links between Asia’s two biggest economies remain tight, political ties are prone to strain over Japan’s wartime occupation of China, which wreaked devastation over much of the country between 1931 and 1945.
Beijing has suspended high-level contacts with Japan over the arrest of the skipper and postponed talks on increasing flights between Asia’s top economies which have close business and trade ties. The Chinese have also said that Mr Wen was unlikely to meet his Japanese counterpart, Naoto Kan, who is also in New York for a United Nations development conference.
Mr Wen made his threat on the same day as a small group of activists left Hong Kong to sail to uninhabited islets at the centre of the territorial spat between China and Japan to help assert China’s claims. Valuable natural resources are believed to lie near the islands.
“The Japanese side has paid no heed to China’s numerous serious representations, and so China cannot but take necessary countermeasures,” he told a meeting of ethnic Chinese in New York. His call for the skipper to be set free unconditionally was run on the Chinese foreign ministry website.
His rhetoric was notably patriotic and quite forceful.
“If Japan acts wilfully despite advice to the contrary, China will take further actions, and Japan must accept full responsibility for all the severe consequences,” he said. He described the East China Sea islands, called Diaoyu in China and Senkaku in Japan, as “China’s sacred territory”.
In recent months, China overtook Japan as the world’s second biggest economy and some of the sabre-rattling is due in part to China’s eagerness to assert itself as a growing economic and political power in the world.
A response from Japan came from chief cabinet secretary Yoshito Sengoku, who said: “It would be good to have high-level talks as soon as possible, on issues including broad, strategic matters.”
Meanwhile, the group of patriotic Hong Kongers set off in a fishing boat from the small island of Cheung Chau, eager to show that the area should be Chinese.