When a fishing boat packed with sign-waving young Chinese activists arrived on July 4 at a disputed island group south of Japan, escorted by five white-painted coast guard and fishery patrol ships, it touched off an instinctive reaction by hawkish American and allied commentators.
Here again was the rising power of communist China flexing its maritime muscles against its neighbours in the pursuit of a wider band of potentially oil-rich zones in adjacent waters, in this case around the islands called the Senkaku group by the occupying Japanese and the Diaoyutai by the Chinese.
It turned out, however, that the activists and the escorting patrol boats came from Taiwan, the island domain of the vestigial Republic of China, protected by the same US Seventh Fleet whose freedom of movement and control in the western Pacific the communist mainland is seen to be set on challenging.
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The Chinese republicans claim as much territory as their communist rivals. ''From the perspective of history, geography and international law, the Nansha [Spratly] Islands, as well as the Xisha [Paracel], Zhongsha [Macclesfield Bank] and Dongsha [Pratas] island groups and their surrounding waters are all undoubtedly an inherent part of ROC territory,'' the Taiwanese Foreign Affairs Ministry said this week.
Far from being a simple picture of a big, aggressive power trying to overawe its small and weak neighbours, resisting their efforts to form a united front so it can pick them off one by one, the maritime disputes of south-east and east Asia are a tangle of claims, in which American allies and protectorates are pitched against each other, as well as China. [my emphasis]
