THE DIAOYUS

THE DIAOYUS: TAIWAN'S, CHINA'S, OR JAPAN'S?

Nobody wants to ask an international court to find out

Cyril Pereira

Asia Sentinel, August 25, 2012

Considerable heat has been generated on the streets of Chinese cities recently with enraged mobs burning Japanese cars while a fishing boat load of purported heroes from Hong Kong planted China and Taiwan flags on the disputed Diaoyu islands in the East China Sea.

Apart from plentiful bluster and jingoism there is neither clarity nor consensus over the legal merits of the claims by Taiwan and China. Japan controls the island cluster which they refer to as the Senkakus.
Chinese Imperial maritime logbooks going back to the 1400s refer to the Diaoyu Islands as navigational landmarks. Imperial Japan formally incorporated the Senkaku Islands as national territory on 14 January 1895, converting their prior terra nullius (no man’s land) status.

After Japan’s WWII surrender to America, the Senkakus were administered as part of the Okinawa Prefecture under the United States Civil Administration of the Ryuku Islands from 1945 to 1972 when they reverted to Japan under the Okinawa Reversion Treaty ratified by the US Congress in 1971.

The UN Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East (ECAFE) report of 1969 raised the potential of large oil reserves around the Senkaku/Daioyu archipelago. That energized the territorial claims between Taiwan, China and Japan, which continues unresolved.
Since 1972 the civic administration of the Senkaku Islands was placed under the mayor of Ishigaki but he is not permitted to develop them or initiate commercial activity without clearance from the central government.

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