Monday, May 30, 2005
Sino-Japan gas field dispute deepens
David Pilling & Mure Dickie / Beijing/Tokya May 30, 2005
Japan raised the temperature ahead of Monday’s talks with China over a disputed gas field when it described Beijing’s handling of the issue as outrageous.
Shoichi Nakagawa, Japan’s trade and industry minister, accused China of hypocrisy for exploiting the disputed gas field in the East China Sea even as it agreed to dialogue.
“While shaking hands with the right hand, they are dealing a blow with the left,” said Nakagawa who has used the gas issue to assert what he says are Japan’s trampled territorial rights. “Work is proceeding (on the gas field). That is a big problem from the viewpoint of Japan-China friendship,” he said.
The dispute over gas and territorial rights has become one focal point of bitter arguments between China and Japan. Anti-Japanese riots swept China last month, plunging relations between Asia’s two most important economies to what most regard as a 30-year low.
Although riots have subsided after signs that Beijing was trying to cool the tension, problems flared again this week when Wu Yi, China’s vice premier, snubbed Junichiro Koizumi, Japan’s prime minister, by cancelling a meeting at the last minute.
The gas dispute, which will be discussed in a two-day meeting in Beijing beginning Monday, centres on the Chunxiao field, which has estimated reserves of over 1,600 billion cubic feet of gas. The field lies well within China’s self-declared economic exclusion zone (EEZ), but straddles the two countries’ territories as defined by Tokyo.
China’s drilling installation is only 4km from the median line that Japan claims is the internationally accepted standard for determining sea rights, prompting complaints that China is in danger of sucking gas from Japan’s side of the reserve.
“We want them to stop this project until we have sorted this out,” said one senior Japanese official. He accused China of lying to its own people by staking a claim to an extended EEZ based on its continental shelf, a definition he said that had not won out in international arbitration in three decades.
China has denounced moves by Tokyo to grant private companies the right to explore for gas in the disputed areas, saying that border differences should be resolved through diplomatic negotiations.
“We consider this kind of action by the Japanese side is a provocation against the rights and interests of China and against the principles of international relations,” foreign ministry spokesman Kong Quan said this week. “We have already expressed opposition to Japan and reserve the right to respond further,” he said.
China has proposed joint development of resources in areas of the East China Sea, but Japan has described those offers as “vague and insincere.”
Mr Nakagawa, who last month called China a “scary country”, also denounced the venue of the talks, saying they should be in Tokyo as they had been in China last time. The two sides met in Beijing last October for talks that one Japanese official said “ended in total failure”.