Taiwan’s sovereignty claims over the Diaoyutai Islands (釣魚台) were reasserted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Tuesday after Chinese and Russian vessels sailed near the disputed islands.
The islands are under the administration of Japan, which refers to them as the Senkaku Islands. They sit in the East China Sea about an equal distance from the northeastern coast of Taiwan proper and Ishigaki Island in Japan’s Okinawa Prefecture.
Sovereignty over the islands has always been a contentious issue for Taiwan, China and Japan — all of whom make claims to the land — particularly in recent years as China has been ramping up naval incursions into the islands’ waters. Those incursions in recent weeks have been joined by the Russian navy.
The dispute reached a high point in June 2020, when Japan renamed the islands’ administrative area to Tonoshiro Senkaku, a move that Taiwan criticized, saying to the Japan Times that it would “not be conducive to regional peace and stability.”
However, the sovereignty debate is not that recent. In September 2012, former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) said while visiting Nantou County’s Lugu Township (鹿谷): “This has always been an issue of fishing rights. It is not a sovereignty issue... I really don’t think that ordinary people care about the islets.”
Lee made the argument in response to a proposal by then-president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) that Taiwan push its sovereignty claim by holding bilateral meetings with China and Japan before engaging in three-party talks with the two countries.
In an opinion piece published in the Taipei Times in 2012, titled “Ma needs Diaoyutai history lesson,” Chinese Culture University professor Lai Fu-shun (賴福順) cited Ma as saying the islands originally belonged to China’s Qing Dynasty and were ceded to Japan under the Treaty of Shimonoseki. Lai rejected this claim, saying that the islands are not mentioned in the treaty, nor are they included in the treaty’s map of Taiwan.
Lai said that no formal claim to the islands was made until Japan did so in 1885, before incorporating them into Okinawa Prefecture in 1890.
However, then-Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Eleanor Wang (王珮玲) said in February 2017: “Since 1971, the US has repeatedly reiterated that the transfer of administrative rights over the Diaoyutai Islands to Japan did not touch upon the sovereignty issue.”
Lee said that “ordinary people” do not care about the Diaoyutai Islands, but protests by Taiwanese over what they see as Japan’s illegal occupation of the territory, as well as numerous attempts by Taiwanese to moor small boats on the islands over the past few decades, suggest otherwise.
For some, the issue could be one of protecting national sovereignty. For others, it could be about the islands’ rich fishing grounds and oil deposits. For others still, it could be about the strategic importance of controlling the Miyako Strait. That last concern is why Taiwan should work with Japan to protect the islands and their surroundings from incursions by an increasingly aggressive China.
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, Japanese Minister of Defense Nobuo Kishi and other Japanese politicians have spoken on many occasions about the need to protect peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait and the surrounding region.
This would be best facilitated if Taiwan could put sovereignty disputes on the back burner and approach Japan about sharing access to the Diaoyutais to conduct joint drills and intelligence sharing. In exchange, Taiwan could share access to Itu Aba Island (Taiping Island, 太平島), given the mutual concerns about security in the South China Sea.
Now is not the time to fight over the Diaoyutais. Rather, it would be in Taiwan’s and Japan’s best interests to collaborate on the islands for the purpose of regional security.
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