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Okinawa and Senkaku/Diaoyu Debates

The clearest case of covert meddling occurs far south of Tokyo in Okinawa, the ancient island-kingdom which is geographically closer to Taiwan than it is to the Japanese mainland. As late as 2015, prominent Chinese were asserting that the Ryukyu Islands, which include Okinawa, belonged as much to Beijing as they did to Japan. In large part, they based their argument on the fact that the chain was once a Chinese tributary state. The two countries still hotly contest this island chain, known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China. "I am not saying all former tributary states belong to China, but we can say with certainty that the Ryukyus do not belong to Japan," wrote Luo Yuan, a retired and hawkish People's Liberation Army general.¹ Chinese scholars have argued that Japan's annexation of the islands in 1879 was an invasion and that the sovereignty of the island chain is thus open to question. For the time being, the Chinese Foreign Ministry has not pressed this issue.

Hong Kong has long been a base for flag-waving Chinese activists agitating on the issue of the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands. Their appeals to a notion of Chinese brotherhood, combined with the fact the group writes in traditional Chinese characters, suggests that the main consumers of the Organizing Committee for the Ryukyus propaganda may not be on mainland China. Instead, the Organizing Committee may well be targeting supporters of the Kuomintang in Taiwan, where hard core supporters of unification have become marginalized in mainstream politics, or overseas Chinese communities.²

It is of some significance that the same individuals who make up the Organizing Committee are also listed online as serving in CCP United Front Work Department positions in Hong Kong.³ The Organizing Committee for the Ryukyus also has a robust online presence, with both a website and a Weibo (similar to Twitter) account.⁴ It is worth noting, also, that the Hong Kong-based campaign to regain the Ryukyus has not won any overt or consistent support from Beijing.

But the Hong Kong patriots' campaign has the benefit of being aligned with anti-Japanese sentiment in Okinawa itself, where both political leaders and the local media are antagonistic toward Tokyo. The local discontent is directly related to the long-standing presence of tens of thousands of US military personnel stationed on the island and the ways in which they have interacted with the indigenous population.

Operating at arm's length from the government, however, a cabal of self-styled Chinese patriots in Hong Kong has openly agitated for the Ryukus (Senkaku/Diaoyu) to be taken from Japan and to become part of China. The main group calls itself the "Organizing Committee for the Ryukyu Islands Special Administrative Region of the

Appendix 2

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