Woudhuysen



Japan and China – could tension between them lead to war?

First published by The Voice of Russia, September 2012
Associated Categories Speaking - Audio and Video Tags: ,

Japanese and Chinese diplomats met on Wednesday for urgent talks over a group of disputed islands in the East China Sea. Those negotiations, on the fringes of the UN General Assembly meeting, seem to have had little success. At the heart of the dispute are five small, largely barren islands, called Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China.

The latest row over them began this month when the Japanese government said it would buy three of them from a businessman. That move triggered angry protests in cities across China, forcing Japanese businesses there to close and a warning from China that economic ties could be affected.

So does this tussle over the islands illustrate that relations between Asia’s two biggest economies are at a particularly low ebb — or is this a minor blip in their often stormy relations?

Voice of Russia’s Hywel Davies discussed this with his guests: Professor James Woudhuysen of De Montfort University in the UK; Dr Ramon Pacheco Pardo, of Kings College London; on the line from Hong Kong, Andrew Leung, an independent expert on China; and Professor Yuriy Tavrovskiy, Moscow’s Russian Peoples’ Friendship University.

Share Button

0 comments

Comments are closed.