On Ozawa's statecraft

Over at 空, Ken Tanaka wonders about my criticism of Mr. Ozawa's remarks in China in this post, echoing the questions of several commentators to the same post.

Let me be clear: Japan has no choice but to have cordial and constructive relations with China, the same as for the United States, Australia, India, and other countries in Asia. I have little quarrel with the substance of Mr. Ozawa's visit, insofar as there was substance. (A summary at the DPJ website contains lots of talk of intellectual and cultural exchanges and declarations of intention to cooperate on issues of shared concern.) And there is certainly nothing wrong with opposition leaders meeting with heads of state.

My issue remains Mr. Ozawa's style. Apparently it was not enough for Mr. Ozawa to take a low-key visit to Beijing, praise Mr. Fukuda for his own overtures to China and congratulate the prime minister for seeing the wisdom in the DPJ's China policy, say a few speeches, and go home. Instead, he had to travel with some 400 people (originally intended to be an expedition of 1000, according to Mainichi) and speak in unrealistically effusive terms about the Sino-Japanese relationship.

I prefer statesmanship that prioritizes substance over rhetoric. As President Bush has illustrated time and time again during his presidential term, rhetoric often raises expectations to unreasonable heights. The difficulties still present in the Sino-Japanese relationship — which will be on full display over the next couple of weeks in the lead up to Mr. Fukuda's visit — do not merit the flights of fantasy in Mr. Ozawa's Beijing remarks. Speak softly, with an eye firmly to national interests.

I'm also dismayed because Mr. Ozawa has failed to provide a more comprehensive vision for Japanese foreign policy. We're left to guess on the basis of his speeches and actions: strict constitutionalism (the basis for his opposition to the MSDF refueling mission), strict UN-centrism (the basis for his suggestion that the GSDF can participate, armed, in ISAF), and now, apparently, deference to China. For all the rhetoric from Mr. Ozawa since July, there's been remarkably little effort on his part (and the part of his DPJ colleagues) to outline a strategic vision for Japan, one that includes a realistic vision for the US-Japan alliance — the Koizumi-Abe LDP has left them plenty of room to do this — that squares with the Sino-Japanese relationship.

I think the DPJ has been poorly served by Mr. Ozawa, whose gaze is fixed squarely on the tactical, on short cuts to power, when what it needs is a strategic visionary who can elaborate a vision for Japan's domestic and foreign policies that is more than just a rejection of whatever the LDP has argued. It's not a matter of having detailed plans for every aspect of Japanese governance.

As Mr. Koizumi showed, a vision presented in a compelling and easy-to-understand way can make up for deficiencies in the details.

Ozawa glorifies the Sino-Japanese relationship

I was way off target in my hopes that Mr. Ozawa would be reasonable on his trip to China.

"The intensely cold period in Sino-Japanese relations has been surmounted, and the warm period has advanced," he said. "Both of our countries must bear a great responsibility politically, economically, and even for the global environment, and there are infinite ways we can cooperate."

I am certainly no China hawk, and think that the more cooperation with Beijing the better, but to go to Beijing and to talk of boundless cooperation and of the "world-historical role" of the Sino-Japanese relationship is irresponsible (and delusional). There are real clashes of interests between Japan and China — materially, over energy resources, and politically, over the political future of Asia. Japan must work to resolve these issues, of course, but it does no good to pretend that Chinese and Japanese interests neatly coincide. Cooperation with China may be necessary, but this is not a time to make a virtue of necessity.

How, I wonder, will this play back home, where the Japanese people have mixed feelings about their giant neighbor? According to the Cabinet Office's latest foreign policy survey, 63.5% of respondents said that they felt little or no affinity with China, up slightly from the 61.6% who responded that way in 2006. For that matter, how will it play within the DPJ, which has its fair share of China skeptics and hawks?

Does Mr. Ozawa suspect that hugging China close will endear Mr. Ozawa and the DPJ to the electorate? Or will it have the opposite effect of making Mr. Fukuda look just right when he visits China later this month, falling somewhere between Mr. Koizumi's deliberate and repeat provocations of Beijing, Mr. Abe's lukewarm embrace, and Mr. Ozawa's unabashed cozying up to Beijing?

I guess there's another explanation for Mr. Ozawa's behavior. Perhaps he's not so much cozying up to Beijing as attempting to pay tribute to the legacy of Tanaka Kakuei, his political father, who restored Sino-Japanese relations thirty-five years ago (the ostensible occasion for this visit). Not that it makes it any more excusable.

Ozawa, posturing

I was apparently mistaken to think that Mr. Ozawa might use the occasion of a visit to China to find some common ground with Mr. Fukuda by staking out a shared position on Japanese China policy.

Mainichi reports that Mr. Ozawa plans to use the trip as an opportunity to criticize the Fukuda cabinet's approach to a range of issues, from the six-party talks to the Taiwan Straits dispute. It's anyone's guess the direction from which Mr. Ozawa will criticize the government. Will he attack from the right, criticizing the government for not taking a firm stand in support of Taiwan and moving away from support of the abductees? Or will he come from the "left," calling for a more positive contribution to the six-party talks and kowtowing to China on Taiwan?

Meanwhile, the Upper House Management Committee has approved the trip, despite the fact that Mr. Ozawa will be taking twenty-four members of the Upper House with him while the Upper House is still in session. (The group also includes twenty-one Lower House members.) It's not entirely clear to me why he's traveling with such a large group of Diet members, and I think the LDP and Komeito are right to criticize the DPJ for taking a trip this size while the Diet is still in session. Whatever the DPJ thinks of the anti-terror law currently under consideration by the Upper House, it is disrespectful to the legislative process to pull a considerable number of its Upper House caucus out of deliberation.

I am certain Mr. Ozawa sees this as a convenient way to run out the clock to December 15th and hasten the point at which the government has to decide whether to extend the Diet session once more — and it is this kind of posturing that is what's wrong with the political system today.

Ozawa to China

Despite the extension of the Diet session, Ozawa Ichiro, DPJ president, will still be going to China with nearly fifty DPJ members of the Diet from 6 to 8 December. Mr. Ozawa will meet with Hu Jintao and mark the thirty-fifth anniversary of the normalization of Sino-Japanese relations.

Mr. Ozawa's visit comes just as turbulence in Sino-US relations continues following China's denying port visits to US Navy vessels. The Chinese government has evidently explained its reasoning for its decisions, suggesting that US arms sales to Taiwan led China to turn the warships away.

Foreign Minister Yang's purported explanation that the denial was the result of a "misunderstanding" has been dismissed, but I wonder whether Foreign Minister Yang was being sincere, in that the decision without the Foreign Ministry's input, leaving the foreign minister to try to explain it in Washington. In other words, the decision to welcome the Kitty Hawk, then the decision to turn it away, then the last-minute decision to permit its entry could reflect not Chinese inscrutability but infighting within the government and between the CCP and the PLA fueled by Chinese insecurity. Now, granted, it is reasonable to question whether Beijing's sense of insecurity is justified, but I still think it would be a mistake for the US (and Japan) to overreact to China's actions.

And so will Mr. Ozawa address this affair, which has drawn in Japan, when he meets with President Hu? Will Mr. Ozawa use the occasion to present a positive vision for Japanese Asia policy that aims to coax China to play a more responsible security role in the region? Perhaps Mr. Ozawa and Mr. Fukuda could work together on an Asia initiative, seeing as both see the value of reorienting Japan's foreign policy away from the US to some extent. In doing so, will he be able to strike the proper balance, approaching Mr. Hu not as a supplicant but as a fellow great power interested in the maintenance of order and stability in the region?