The unstoppable march of China? Stable nations with booming economies don't get into fights over small groups of islands (we should know) - Mail Online - Steve Doughty's blog. Economists talk an awful lot of rubbish, and they probably talk more rubbish about the Far East than any other part of the world.
In the late 1980s, every day brought new dire warnings from highly-trained and deeply knowledgable experts on how Japan was going to take over the world. Japanese expansion was unstoppable and the West was doomed. You could not argue with these people. You could point out that Japanese prosperity from the 1950s onwards was based on exports to the West, and so if western economies collapsed it was unlikely that Japan would continue to boom, but they wouldn’t listen. You could tell them about the 'Yellow Peril', a scare as popular among our Edwardian predecessors as climate change is with people who should know better today. Genocide. An utter lack of remorse. and why there could be a terrifying new war between Japan and China.
By Max Hastings Published: 00:02 GMT, 20 September 2012 | Updated: 11:55 GMT, 20 September 2012 A few years ago, nobody in Asia gave much thought to the Senkaku islands.
They form a cluster of eight pimples in the East China Sea, mid-way between Taiwan and Japanese Okinawa, devoid of people, culture and — by all accounts — beauty. Yet suddenly, they have become the focus of a dispute between China and Japan which is growing so bitter that doomsters fear Beijing might even go to war over them. The dispute is one of a dozen involving islands off the Asian mainland — some claimed by Vietnam, others by South Korea, others again by the Philippines — in which China is wielding a big stick. Japanese Firms Hunker Down in China Amid Protests. China and Japan: two nations locked in mutual loathing.