China's Territorial Disputes (7 page)

Factor 3: the size of the win-sets depends on the strategies of Level I negotiators

Obviously, each Level I negotiator has an interest in helping the other get the final deal ratified. A chief negotiator whose political standing is high at home can more easily secure ratification of his foreign policy initiatives.
¹³
Also, each negotiator has a strong interest in the popularity of his counterpart, since Party B’s popularity increases the size of his win-set, and thus both the odds of success and the relative bargaining power of Party A, who can now drive a harder bargain.
¹⁴
Since popularity always gives a negotiator or politician, elected or otherwise, special advantage over his or her domestic opponents in manipulating win-sets, changing preferences, or assembling coalitions, it is little wonder that statesmen and politicians desire to hold summits or high-profile meetings with foreign statesmen and politicians whenever an agenda can be determined, in order to bathe in the floodlights of media attention. The relevance for our study of highlighting the visibility or influence of leaders, or the absence thereof, lies in their ability to promote “reverberation,” or apply foreign pressure or inducement to change the preferences of the country or countries they are negotiating with, to increase their own bargaining power and facilitate agreement by expanding the foreigners’ domestic win-sets.

The purpose of promoting “reverberation” thus is to achieve what Putnam refers to as “synergy,” or the exploitation of joint gains or mutual benefits to create conditions favorable to cooperation. However, negotiators must also recognize that reverberation can also be negative, in the sense that foreign pressure may create a domestic backlash. This can be especially so if the source of that pressure is viewed by domestic audiences as an adversary rather than an ally,
¹⁵
which is typically the case with boundary negotiations. The decision to reverberate through pressure, inducement, or not at all, lies in the preferences of leaders or negotiators for or against an agreement, and the cost-benefit calculations that they make to assess what impact the failure or success in concluding an agreement may have on their political standing back home. If threats must be made, how credible must they be, or if trade-off among different interests and side-payments to compensate the losers must be made, how enticing must they be, in order to induce the other disputant or disputants to come to the table? In other words, a smart and experienced negotiator must take all these factors into account, and figure out how much the disputant or disputants rate the absolute cost of an agreement, or a non-agreement, if he is to fulfill his undertaking successfully.

My study thus predicts that, regarding territorial sovereignty disputes, the abatement of memories of historical grievances, insularity of a particular regime type to popular and interest group pressures, low quotient requirements for legislative votes on ratifying agreements, high economic dependency and expected gains from trade between two disputant countries, and leaders’ willingness to find a compromise solution for the dispute at hand, will push the “political indifference curves” away from Ym for negotiator Y, thus widening the win-set for possible agreement with negotiator X. Conversely, the intensification of memories of historical grievances, propensity of a particular regime type to yield to popular and interest-group pressures, high quotient requirements for legislative votes on ratifying agreements, low economic dependency and expected gains from trade between two disputant countries, and leaders’ unwillingness to find a compromise solution for the dispute at hand, will push the “political indifference curves” in the direction of Ym for negotiator Y, thus reducing the win-set for possible agreement with negotiator X. This is also the case for negotiator X.

Extending the Putnam hypothesis, I pose further questions for investigation: do the different priorities attached to sovereignty claims, economic resources, or security interests by both state and society, and the varying degrees of willingness to make concessions on some but not on all issues, somehow serve to sabotage talks even before they begin, especially if public opinion is vocal and inflexible? Also, if the proposed talks are multi-issued because many aspects of a dispute, involving territorial sovereignty, economic resources and security matters, are strongly interlinked, then will de-linking the issues one by one for the purpose of negotiation increase the chances of resolving the conflict? De-linking simply means dividing up a problem to make it possible for countries to agree on issues on which they have common interests, and limiting disagreement to those issues on which they truly disagree.
¹⁶
In other words, would negotiating first on the issue where the least disagreement prevails widen the win-set of at least one contentious issue between the disputants, and thereby hopefully achieve some concrete results that would accumulate goodwill among the elite and the masses on all sides that would facilitate further negotiations? Or are territorial disputes a “zero-sum” game in which bargaining is essentially distributive and one party can only gain at the expense of the other?

To recapitulate briefly, the two-level game hypothesis predicts a stronger Level

I bargaining position with a smaller Level II win-set and a weaker Level I bargaining position with a larger Level II win-set. In the former case, agreement is harder to achieve and be ratified, but negotiators can argue to their opposite numbers that, because their negotiating positions are tightly constrained by uncompromising domestic constituencies, it is impossible for them to yield anything more, thus achieving a better bargain for their state. In the latter case, agreement is easier to achieve and be ratified, but negotiators may reveal to their opposite numbers that, because their negotiating positions reflect the relatively flexible attitude taken by domestic constituencies, they could afford to forgo some negotiating advantages and be made to yield more. In a way then, having a small win-set corresponds to developing a “high-risk high-return” negotiation strategy, while having a large win-set corresponds to developing a “low-risk low-return” negotiation strategy. However, if the win-sets were to get progressively smaller, we can assume that the risks to be taken to achieve a “winner-takes-all” resolution become very high. With very politically charged issues such as those touching on territorial sovereignty, disputes can become deadlocked for decades if leaders facing domestic constraints lack the will to push for a negotiated resolution and yet cannot bring themselves to abandon outstanding claims or resolve the disagreement through force, for fear of incurring unacceptable costs or involving an external military power. If this was indeed the quandary with at least some of the cases to be studied, how then were negotiators finally persuaded or not persuaded to move away from this mode of non-withdrawal, non-confrontation, non-negotiation? How exactly does the size of the win-set, as determined by the unity or divisiveness of domestic public opinion, the different priorities of state or societal actors, and other psychological, cultural and environmental factors, explain the non-confrontation, non-negotiation and non-abandonment stance taken by contesting countries in a particular dispute? These factors will be raised and examined in my study.

2 The two-level game hypothesis

1    Robert D. Putnam, “Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The Logic of Two-level

Games,”
International Organization,
summer 1988, vol.42, no. 3, 427-460. Article appears in the appendix of Peter B. Evans, Harold K. Jacobson and Robert D. Putnam (eds)
Double-Edged Diplomacy: International Bargaining and Domestic Politics
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 431-468. The basic concepts and terminology employed and explained in this section are derived from the listed article. All page-number references to the Putnam article are from the
Double-Edged Diplomacy
book.

2    Putnam, “Diplomacy and Domestic Politics,” 443.

3    
Ibid.,
439.

4    
Ibid.

5    
Ibid.,
438.

6    
Ibid.

7    
Ibid.

8    
JMd.,
443.

9    
Ibid.,
446.

10    
Ibid.,
444.

11    
Ibid.
, 448.

12    Helen V Milner,
Interests, Institutions, and Information: Domestic Politics and Inter-national Relations
(Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), chapter 3, “A Model of the Two-level Game,” 67-98.

13    Putnam, “Diplomacy and Domestic Politics,” 451.

14
腿
.,
452.    
'

15    
ML,
456.

16    Roger Fisher,
International Conflict for Beginners
(New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 94-95.

3 The Diaoyu/Tiaoyutai/Senkaku Islands dispute

Introduction

The recurring dispute over the Diaoyu/Tiaoyutai/Senkaku rocks conducted between Japan, (the People’s Republic of) China and Taiwan/Republic of China raises important issues of territorial sovereignty claims, access to maritime (fisheries and petroleum) resources, and the strategic sensitivities of these countries. The relevance of the dispute lies in its implications for the wider context of the countries’ approaches to other outstanding maritime and island disputes, and the way in which the issue has been, and will be, exploited by domestic political groups to further their own objectives, in spite of attempts by the governments to play down the incidents in the interest of overall foreign relations, economic ties and regional stability.

The timing, method and intensity of the claim, when it was periodically reasserted, were dictated not only by the positions of the three countries on the sovereignty question, but more importantly, by domestic factors not fully within the control of the governments. These factors include the rise of nationalism or irredentism on China, the competition for legitimacy on Taiwan between separatist and pro-unification forces involving the powerful fishing lobby, and the influence of right-wing nationalist groups in Japanese politics. While the original dispute in 1970-1972 arose as a result of contending claims to oil deposits found under the sea-bed adjacent to the Senkaku rocks, it was magnified by Taiwanese student demonstrators in North America and Taiwan. These “Protect Tiaoyutai” activities started the trend of popular protests by Taiwanese, Hong Kongers and overseas Chinese over the controversy. The 1978 incident was caused by members of a Japanese right-wing nationalist group, the
setrenKat,
erecting a lighthouse on the biggest of the rocks. They did this to promote efforts by rightist Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) negotiators to the China-Japan Peace Treaty in Beijing to pressure the Chinese government to concede sovereignty over the Senkakus in exchange for the inclusion of an “anti-hegemony” clause in the treaty against the Soviet Union. The 1990 incident was the result of another right-wing group - the
Nihon Seinensha
(Japanese Youth Federation) - planting border markers on one of the disputed rocks, which invited the attention of Taiwanese athletes and journalists, who then attempted to land on the rocks but were driven away by the Japanese coastguard. The noisiest Chinese uproar was over an attempt in 1996 by the
seinensha
to build and repair a lighthouse on another one of the rocks, in which the first fatality occurred that was directly related to the dispute.

This chapter attempts to explore and evaluate the purpose and activities of nationalist forces in China, Taiwan and Japan in involving themselves in this particular dispute, and how their actions provoked similar activities by nationalist groups in the other countries to uphold their territorial sovereignty. This is where the framework of two-level games should prove illuminating in analyzing state-society interaction within the matrix of state-to-state bargaining or negotiation.

Were the rhetoric and activities of the Chinese irredentists, Taiwanese nationalists, and Japanese imperialist forces aimed at pressuring their respective governments into adopting domestic and foreign positions more amenable to their own objectives? Knowing that their mere appearance on the islands would certainly draw unfavorable responses and challenges from the governments and nationalist forces of the other disputant countries, were their strategies of provocation attempts to target their opponents for “negative reverberations” in order to force their own governments to uphold publicly their own demonstrations of national sovereignty? In the face of actions taken by domestic social forces to push for confrontation, the Janus-like position taken by all three governments to stake their claim, but at the same time seek out other governments to establish “synergistic linkages” to negotiate economic and non-sovereignty issues, deserves great attention.

Of the unresolved claim to the Diaoyu/Tiaoyutai/Senkaku rocks, many questions can be asked. Why is it not possible for a claimant country to forego or divide the claim? If the answer is to be found in the politics of state-nationalism, with cultural biases, memories of past wars and perceived present injustices as its basis, then why did none of the disputant governments take unilateral military action to settle the dispute in their favor? Perhaps they regarded the risk of confrontation as so jeopardizing to overall military security, economic ties and regional stability that it was not worth the returns to their country to secure their claims to tiny bits of uninhabited rock? Where the priorities of both state governments and societal pressure groups are so far apart on whether to maintain normal neighborly relations or to assert unilateral sovereignty, can government negotiators hope to compromise, even if there are overlapping win-sets or common grounds on areas of joint economic development, for fear of creating adverse political opinion at home? How far can “unofficial” or “semiofficial” talks continue before surfacing into “official” negotiations, which may then incur the ire of a nationalistic public? Could it be that the mutual distrust and lingering hostility among the people of the disputant states are so deep that the “homogeneous” position taken by pressure groups or social forces on the issue at hand makes it impossible for negotiators on one side to appeal to or take advantage of a possible breach or division of public opinion on the other side to begin dialog? Were the nationalist groups which spearheaded the claims, especially the Japanese ones, working in tandem with their own governments by offering them the opportunity to follow up on the claims if the private forays were not successfully opposed, and the plausibility of denial of foreknowledge and involvement if they were? Is the latest Senkaku incident the harbinger of worsening relations between the three East Asian countries? Should the region become more unstable and neighboring countries more distrustful of one another, would armed confrontation be more likely, now that it is more difficult to justify putting a lid on the provocative actions taken by domestic nationalist groups in the name of preserving good inter-state relations?