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	Forecasting America's Destiny ... and the World's

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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 20-Apr-05
Neither China nor Japan backing off from increasing confrontation

Web Log - April, 2005

Neither China nor Japan backing off from increasing confrontation

As conflict increases, America's Pacific strategy is coming apart at the seams.

Japanese lawmakers said Tuesday that they plan to visit Yasukuni Shrine, which honors Japan's 2.5 million war dead from World War II. But the infuriated Chinese say some of the dead being honored were war criminals who committed atrocities against the Chinese.

This follows three weekends in which tens of thousands of Chinese students violently rioted against the Japanese embassy and Japanese businesses in several large cities in Eastern China.

Japan has demanded that China apologize for the violence, and China has refused. China blames the violence on Japan for refusing to face up to its history and show proper contrition for its actions in WW II.

The level of mutual acrimony between Japan and China has been increasing steadily and openly for weeks, so much so that an alarmed United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan asked the leaders of the two countries to meet and resolve the dispute. Such a meeting could take place later this week at the Asia-Africa summit, which opens in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, on Thursday.

However, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi put such a meeting in doubt by saying, “A meeting that becomes an exchange of criticism is not constructive."

The Wall Street Journal reports that American foreign policy is being affected by the dispute:

The turn in Japan-China relations threatens to draw in the U.S. Stretched militarily in the Middle East, the U.S. is strengthening its longstanding security alliance with Tokyo, hoping Japan will help contain East Asian trouble-spots such as North Korea and Taiwan. But promoting Japan as a power in the region has stoked fears in the Chinese leadership that the reinvigorated security ties will be refocused to stifle China's ambitions. Those concerns may slow down Washington's plans. "[Beijing's] opposition to the alliance is making China a problem," says Denny Roy of the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, a think tank for the U.S. military's Pacific Command.

China already failed to meet Washington's fond hopes and expectations when it didn't convince North Korea to abandon its plans to acquire nuclear weapons. But North Korea has increasingly adopted a hard line against negotiations after walking out of the nuclear non-proliferation talks. It's now believed that North Korea already has 6-8 nuclear weapons, as well as the missiles to deliver them as far as Japan or even California.

And now, North Korea has suddenly shut down its main nuclear reactor, evidently in order to remove spent plutonium and reprocess into weapons fuel into six to eight additional nuclear weapons. "We don't know the state of readiness of their reprocessing facility," says an official of the International Atomic Energy Agency, but "if it's fully operational, then they have a reprocessing capability that can separate the spent plutonium in a matter of months."

Generational Dynamics predicts that North Korea will start a war to reunite South and North Korea under North Korean control, that China will start a war to return Taiwan to Chinese control, and that China and Korea will get revenge against Japan for the latter's actions prior to and during World War II. These wars could begin next week or next year, but they're coming with 100% certainty. (20-Apr-05) Permanent Link
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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 20-Apr-05 Neither China nor Japan backing off from increasing confrontation

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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 20-Apr-05
Neither China nor Japan backing off from increasing confrontation