Thursday, November 14 – The Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis (CCA) has released “The East China Sea Dispute: China’s and Japan’s Assertiveness from Mao to Xi,” authored by Andrew Chubb, CCA Fellow on Foreign Policy and National Security. In the paper, Chubb uses a new dataset to shed light on territorial disputes over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands.

“Given the contentious 20th-century history between the two countries, including Japan’s invasion of China during World War II, the islands hold particular political significance in China as a symbol of Japan’s alleged unrepentance and ongoing aggression. On the Japanese side, meanwhile, the islands are a focal point for concerns about the seaward expansion of China’s military and administrative power,” writes Chubb. “Against this backdrop, avoiding unintended escalation and controlling incipient crises requires understanding the long-term trajectory and drivers of China’s and Japan’s behaviors in the East China Sea dispute.”

How much of China’s behavior in the East China Sea is attributable to Xi Jinping? To what extent have Sino-Japanese action-reaction dynamics been at play? How important have the hydrocarbon deposits that originally touched off the dispute been? This paper answers these questions using a newly compiled dataset of both Japanese and Chinese patterns of behavior from the origins of the dispute in the 1970s to the Xi era. Chubb’s research reveals six key dynamics:

1. The East China Sea dispute began over oil and gas resources but switched toward a contest for military and administrative control as China rapidly expanded its naval and coast guard presence in the mid-2000s.
2. China’s policy was already trending in an increasingly assertive direction well before Xi took power. China’s gray-zone assertiveness dates back to the mid-1990s, while coercive methods started in the mid-2000s. The key change Xi has overseen is China’s increasingly militarized—but also regularized—presence in the disputed area.
3. Japanese actors have triggered several acute periods of tension with provocative moves, but China has driven the long-term arc with its shifts, from “shelving” the dispute in the 1970s to greater assertiveness in the mid-1990s to regular coercion starting in the mid-2000s.
4. The two significant periods of non–Liberal Democratic Party rule in Japan have both preceded surges of Chinese assertiveness followed by Japanese pushback, raising questions about China’s calculations regarding domestic politics in Japan.
5. Despite several high-profile propaganda campaigns and diplomatic blitzes, most of China’s moves have been in the physical domain on the water, while Japan has focused on diplomacy and domestic administrative moves.
6. Xi’s precise role in the escalation around the disputed islands remains unclear, but his centralization of power since the 18th Party Congress has coincided with a regularization of China’s assertive behaviors. A less powerful leader might, like Xi’s predecessors, find it more difficult to prevent substate actors from taking destabilizing actions in the area, as occurred several times in the 2000s.

Read the full paper here. Members of the media interested in interviewing Chubb should email [email protected].