Tourist boycott, tensions on the high seas… Five minutes to understand the diplomatic crisis between China and Japan

The leading nationality among tourists in Japan, the Chinese are beginning to desert the land of the Rising Sun. According to official figures published this Wednesday by the Japanese Tourism Agency, there were only 385,000 over a year who went to their neighbor, instead of almost a million a year earlier. A spectacular fall of 60.7% which can be explained by retaliatory measures from the Beijing government. The latter issued a warning advising against travel by its nationals to Japan and reduced the frequency of flights.

In recent months, relations between the two Asian superpowers have deteriorated particularly since Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi came to power in Tokyo. In November, just a few days after her arrival at the head of the fourth world power, the conservative declared that Japan could intervene militarily if China launched an offensive against Taiwan.

Raising awareness about Taiwan

However, Tokyo’s concerns regarding Taiwan, located barely 108 km from the Japanese island of Yonaguni, in Okinawa prefecture, are not new but have never been expressed so frankly. “Sanae Takaichi endorsed as Prime Minister a Japanese position which had already been expressed by other political leaders,” notes Marc Julienne, director of the Asia Center of the French Institute of International Relations (Ifri).

In August 2022, while Beijing was conducting a large-scale exercise around Taiwan, several Chinese ballistic missiles fell by mistake into Japan’s exclusive economic zone. This episode “made the Japanese very acutely aware that a military escalation in the region would involve their country,” believes the researcher.

The Prime Minister’s statements last November provoked the ire of Beijing, which responded with a series of economic retaliatory measures affecting not only tourism but also the export of seafood. The Asian giant even went so far as to cancel the release of Chinese films in its neighbor. At the end of January, Beijing even repatriated two pandas that it had loaned to a Tokyo zoo, leaving Japan without pandas for the first time since 1972. A strong diplomatic symbol.

Historical injuries

It’s the turn of the Land of the Rising Sun to respond on Friday February 13 by seizing a Chinese fishing boat in its exclusive economic zone and arresting its captain, a first in almost three years according to the Kyodo press agency.

Although particularly virulent, this peak of tensions between the two Asian giants is not the first. Japan and China have been in conflict for decades over the sovereignty of a tiny uninhabited archipelago: the Senkaku Islands or Diaoyu in Chinese. The hostility between the two countries also stems from the conflicts which opposed them in the 1930s and during the Second World War. “Unlike Europe where there has been real reconciliation, East Asia has not really done this work and the wounds are still very present,” explains Marc Julienne.

Failure of the Chinese strategy

If the tourism figures published this Wednesday suggest a real economic impact of Chinese measures, Beijing has nevertheless failed to make Sanae Takaichi bend. The voters seem to have vindicated the Prime Minister since her party won two thirds of the seats in the House of Representatives during early legislative elections on February 9. “It’s a snub for Beijing,” notes Marc Julienne. “The Japanese support his policy despite the retaliatory measures and the economic shortfall,” he continues. While Chinese visitors are deserting the Japanese archipelago, the number of South Korean travelers in January jumped 21.6% to reach 1.17 million, and that of Taiwanese visitors jumped 17.0% to 694,500.

Now Beijing can risk continuing the escalation using other levers of pressure on Japan which depends on Chinese supplies of critical minerals. Tokyo is therefore seeking to develop its own mineral recycling technologies and is looking for new ways to power its high-tech industry. At the beginning of February, the Japanese empire confirmed the discovery of an immense deposit of rare earths in the deep sea which could constitute, according to its initial estimates, the third world reserve of critical metals.