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The East China Sea is one of the last unexplored high-potential resource areas located near large markets. But the development of oil and gas in much of the area has been prevented for decades by conflicting claims to boundaries and islets in the area by China, Taiwan, and Japan. Competition between China and Japan for gas resources in the East China Sea is intensifying and hampering improved relations. However, conflict is not inevitable. A compromise-joint development-is motivated by the realization that a positive China-Japan relationship is simply too important to be destroyed by these disputes. Although both agree in principle on joint development, the two sides have different interpretations of what joint development means or implies, and what area should be jointly developed. The article spells out three basic agreements in principle that are necessary before details of any solution can be negotiated. The alternative to a solution is continued mutual suspicion, unstable relations, unmanaged and undeveloped resources, and an increasing frequency and intensity of incidents, fueling nationalist sentiments and resultant political conflict.
Key words: territorial disputes, China-Japan relations, East Asian security
Introduction
Disputes over small islands and ocean space are usually ancillary at most to more fundamental geopolitical dialectics. However, in certain situations of big-power rivalry and competition for scarce petroleum resources, such issues may become the tail that wags the dog of international relations. The intensifying competition between China and Japan for gas resources in the East China Sea could become just such a situation.
The East China Sea is thought to contain up to 100 billion barrels of oil equivalent. It is one of the last unexplored highpotential resource areas located near large markets. The development of oil and gas in much of the area has been prevented for decades by conflicting and overlapping claims to boundaries in the area by China, Taiwan, and Japan. Indeed, the Japanese government has until now refused to let companies explore and develop the resources in the area because it feared that these acts would adversely affect its relations and negotiations with China on boundaries.
But China has been drilling ever closer to the "median" line between undisputed territory of both countries that has been unilaterally declared as the boundary by Japan, and is now...