In a commentary in the Financial Times today, Asia Editor David Pilling argues that the current Sino-Japanese island dispute is difficult to settle historically, because both sides wish to apply current notions of sovereignty to a time before the rise of the modern nation-state.
Pilling writes:
I offer no opinion as to whose legal claim is stronger. But I suspect that something deeper is at stake. Before westerners brought their guns and opium to east Asia, the idea of a nation state was not well established. “Back then, people didn’t really have the concept of sovereignty, rather there was suzerainty,” says Min Gyo Koo, an expert in international affairs in Seoul. China was self-evidently the dominant civilisation, he says. As such, it collected tribute from surrounding kingdoms, such as Ryukyu, which later became known as Okinawa when it was annexed by Japan.
Jonathan Fenby, a historian of China, puts imperial China’s likely relationship with the Senkaku/ Diaoyu islands thus: “Things like exercising practical sovereignty over a rocky island didn’t matter. So long as people recognised the innate superiority of the Chinese system, that was enough.”
It’s an important point because trying to base contemporary claims on the past can be