International relations from the margins: the Westphalian meta-narratives and counter-narratives in Okinawa–Taiwan relations

Abstract

This article examines competing narratives over belonging and authority at Japan’s and China’s margins by excavating the discursive practices employed by relevant state and substate actors in framing, contesting and (dis)assembling totalizing claims over Ryukyu/Okinawa and Taiwan since the late nineteenth century. Informed by the critical international relations literature on practices of statecraft and Foucauldian conceptions of power as productive and discursive, we suggest that the aforementioned ‘margins’ are sites central to the constitution, production and maintenance of Chinese and Japanese state identities, which have been repeatedly performed through violent material and discursive practices concealing these two states’ lack of ontological foundation. We look at how the state-centric narratives employed by the Chinese and Japanese authorities have worked to limit, curtail and suppress their locally generated counter-narratives in such cases as the Taiwan Expedition (1874), the Diaoyutai/Senkaku Islands dispute and boundary-making between Okinawa and Taiwan. However, these cases also show that efforts to contain resistance to the state’s inscription of boundaries separating an ‘inside/self/domestic’ from an ‘outside/other/foreign’ cannot fully succeed, not only because where there is power there is resistance but also because the state would wither away should its identity formation be successful in the terms in which it is articulated.

Introduction

During our March 2018 field trip to Pingtung County in southern Taiwan, we encountered a puzzle: on the top of a tropical hill near the battlefield of the Mudanshe Incident (an armed conflict between some aboriginal tribes and invading Japanese troops in 1874, also known as the Botansha Incident or Taiwan Expedition in Japan), a grand monument dedicated to the incident was still standing, yet its inscription was gone (Figure 1). Upon enquiry, we learned that this monument was built in 1936 to commemorate the ‘achievements’ of Saigō Jūdō as the commander of the expeditionary forces that were said to have paved the way for Meiji Japan’s eventual colonization of Taiwan following the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) against Qing China. But building the monument near the 1874 battlefield on the eve of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) was no coincidence. It was also intended to remind Taiwan residents of the imperative of standing by the ‘right side’ and to shape their identity as ‘imperial subjects’ (Ching 2001). In 1953, Pingtung County Magistrate Chang Shan-chong, a model imperial subject-turned-Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party—KMT) loyalist, changed the monument script to ‘Chéngqīng hǎiyǔ, Huán wǒ héshān’ (‘clarifying the sea and the universe, recovering our lost rivers and mountains’), praising the Republic of China (ROC) for ending Japan’s occupation of Taiwan and restoring China’s territory (although the ROC had just been replaced by the People’s Republic of China [PRC] on the mainland after a disastrous civil war). The local government decided to remove Chang’s inscription in 2016 in order to ‘recover the monument’s historical implications’ (authors’ field visit, 19 March 2018); since then, the Mudanshe Incident Monument has been a monument without an inscription. Although the Japanese inscription and the Chinese inscription disagree as to whose sovereignty claim on Taiwan is true or legitimate, they both presuppose the existence of the sovereignty-possessing state. How to make sense of the historical implications of such a monument without an inscription is, however, less straightforward; it requires us to turn our attention to practices of statecraft through relations of power (Figure 2).

Figure 1. The Mudanshe Incident Monument as of March 2018.

Figure 2. Major islands of Okinawa and Taiwan.

As RBJ Walker noted, state sovereignty is in effect an essentially uncontested concept in international relations (IR) precisely because it appears to be an essentially contested key concept. For the most part, IR academics and practitioners get on with business as usual as if the meaning of sovereignty were stable (cited in Weber 1995, 2). Critical IR scholarship has pointed out that it is not possible to speak of the sovereign state as an ontological being without engaging in the practice of stabilizing the meaning of sovereignty and statehood. Put differently, sovereignty is a site of political struggle seeking to fix its meaning so as to constitute (that is, to narrate) a particular state with particular boundaries and legitimacies. In addition, the struggle to fix this concept’s meaning is not a one-time event; it must be repeated in many forms and over various issues—concerning, for instance, national security (Campbell 1998 [1992]), intervention (Weber 1995), war (Jabri 1996) and refugees (Soguk 1999)—at numerous spatial and temporal locales so as to conceal the emptiness of the state as an ontological being. Furthermore, the stabilization of the meaning of sovereignty via practices of statecraft does not take place in a void of power relations, and such practices to narrate the state should not lead one to assume a clear distinction between those that possess power and those that comply. If power is understood in a Foucauldian sense, we submit, it is not only compatible with the definition of narrative power, namely the capacity of narratives (as discourses that connect events in a meaningful way for people to make sense of their life-worlds) to produce effects (Hagström and Gustafsson 2019; Morriss 2002, 12; Hinchman and Hinchman 2001, xvi), but also conducive to the understanding that sovereign statehood is performed through such effects without which the state will have no ontological status.

This article also responds to Blaney and Inayatullah’s (2008, 663) call for an ‘IR from below’ in which agents have a ‘multiple and complex critical vision’: they ‘live [not only] within the theory and practice of a world largely created by those “above”, but also in worlds partly defined by alternative visions that critique praxis “from above”’. We propose that the margins or border zones of sovereign states are pertinent sites for investigating such an ‘IR from below’. To illustrate, we will examine the operation of narrative power in social interactions involving non-state actors from Okinawa and Taiwan, which have historically been considered to be margins by two East Asian ‘great powers’—Japan and China. With the monument puzzle in mind, we ask the following research questions. First, how have the Japanese state and the Chinese state constructed (meta-)narratives concerning these margins in Sino-Japanese relations? Second, how are such narratives received by some sub-/non-state actors at the margins through the construction of counter-narratives? Third, as far as these interactions of power are concerned, what are the effects? We argue that what appear to be these two states’ ‘margins’ are sites central to the constitution, production and maintenance of Chinese and Japanese state identities, which have been repeatedly performed through violent material and discursive boundary-inscribing practices that work to separate an ‘inside’ from ‘outside’, a ‘self’ from ‘other’ and a ‘domestic’ from ‘foreign’, without which they would have found it hard to deny their lack of ontological foundation.

To borrow from Blaney and Inayatullah’s (2008, 670) excavation metaphor that IR ‘mining’ may help to increase the awareness that the margins have been simultaneously within and without the state, our cases on Ryukyu/Okinawa–Taiwan relations serve to uncover the representational practices about the margins which conceal their significance to the constitution of the state: Meiji Japan’s 1874 Taiwan Expedition for ‘redressing’ the killing of Ryukyuan officials and sailors, the ongoing Sino-Japanese territorial dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyutai Islands since the early 1970s, and residents of Yaeyama Islands (southwestern Okinawa) and eastern Taiwan seeking to cultivate ties across state borders. While various state-orchestrated narratives have worked to limit, curtail and suppress their locally generated counter-narratives, those at the margins do not merely accept or adjust to their environment under the state’s apparent domination. It is not impossible for them to redesign or modify their life-worlds (Agamben 1998), though such struggles for self-determination do not imply that their encounters with the state are necessarily symmetrical (Doty 1996). The remainder of this article will involve a brief discussion of why Foucauldian conceptions of power can help us better comprehend practices of statecraft for studying an IR from below, followed by three case studies on the Westphalian narratives and counter-narratives in Ryukyu/Okinawa–Taiwan relations. To be clear, we do not attempt to examine the extent to which Okinawa and Taiwan represent key sites of substantial resistance to the Westphalian narratives or argue that counter-narratives there ‘possess’ ‘more’ narrative power (for example, in the form of getting popular support). Attempts to do so go against Foucault’s non-essentialist, non-quantifiable conceptions of power. We seek to excavate these counter-narratives not because we want to know whether they have ‘succeeded’ or ‘failed’ to resist the Westphalian narratives, but because we hope to explore the possibility of envisioning a politics without presupposing the existence of a power-possessing sovereign above us all (see Ling and Nakamura 2019).

Power: from repressive to productive and narrative

The IR mainstream has not been able to integrate important developments in the conception of power since the 1974 publication of Steven Lukes’s Power: a radical view (see Barnett and Duvall 2005 for an exception). It is still typical for IR scholars to treat power as the ability of actors to influence and determine the actions of others, as expressed in Robert Dahl’s (1957) Weberian statement that power is the ability of A to get B to do what B would not otherwise do. Bachrach and Baratz (1962) went on to assert that power can be exercised even when A is unaware of its effects on B; power in this sense is the ability to shape and control the political agenda through institutional arrangements, thus silencing dissent and limiting choices by preventing issues and alternatives from entering public debate. In addition to these two dimensions of power, Lukes (1974, 23) offered a Gramscian definition: ‘A may exercise power over B by getting him to do what he does not want to do, but [A] also exercises power over [B] by influencing, shaping, and determining his very wants.’ The IR mainstream is much more familiar with the first two faces of power and to some extent familiar with the third. The ability of A to get B to act in certain ways usually refers to the ability of states to use their material capabilities to get others to do what they would not otherwise do, which in turn explains the great interest in the ‘shifting balance of power’ between the United States (US) and the PRC as is playing out in their steepening security competition and ongoing trade war (see Breuer and Johnston 2019; Gries and Jing 2019; Turner and Nymalm 2019). The ideational dimension proposed by Lukes, albeit not the same as ‘soft power’, touches on ‘the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments’ (Nye 2004, x), which helps to make sense of the global spread of such values as democracy, human rights and neoliberal economic ideology (and why they have been met with competing alternatives like the ‘China Model’ or the ‘Beijing Consensus’).

Nevertheless, the aforementioned formulations of power as domination, agenda-setting and attraction all see it as inherently repressive. Lukes (1974, 24) himself considers the third dimension of power to be the ‘most insidious’ type, for it works to shape people’s perceptions and preferences in ways that may make them accept an oppressive status quo against their own interests. Moreover, all of the formulations presuppose the existence of already formed agents with pre-given interests. These limits bring us to the fourth and a non-essentialist dimension of power, which does not treat power as merely repressive; nor is it understood in a simply material or institutional sense. As Michel Foucault (1980, 119) indicates, ‘[w]hat makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn’t only weigh on us as a force which says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms of knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than a negative instance whose function is repression.’ What does it mean to say that power is both relational and productive? For Foucault, power can neither be reduced to numbers nor ‘owned’ by success-claiming actors; ‘power relations’ do not mean the relations that people who ‘possess’ power can exert over those who do not. Rather, they run through all diffuse and contingent social relations through which systems of knowledge and discursive practices are produced, which in turn constitute agents by providing them with meanings and identities. In other words, human beings are not simply power’s intended target but also its effect (Foucault 1970, 170); knowledge is important not because it is always in the service of the strong (Carr 2016), but because it is involved in the production of truth and rationality. As illustrated in Madness and civilisation (Foucault 1965), scientific knowledge does not merely describe the world ‘as it is’ but rather constructs it and shapes the manner in which it is perceived. Truth in this sense cannot be found objectively, but is the effect of discourses as ‘practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak’ (Foucault 1972, 49).

This understanding of power points to the important role of narratives as storytelling and knowledge production. Narratives are ‘discursive formations that put in motion a series of political claims about international relations’ such as ‘who can act, in what conditions and under what circumstances’ (Moulin 2016, 138). The typical IR story about the Peace of Westphalia, for example, is a narrative that describes the emergence of sovereign states and the modern international system in 1648 made possible by the relevant European parties’ upholding of the principle of sovereign independence and territorial integrity. In this Westphalian narrative, states are autonomous, centralized and territorially bounded, and their internal differences are homogenized by nationalism. Seeing IR as narration recognizes the relational nature of the discipline’s knowledge production (see Winkler 2019; compare Gustafsson et al 2019). ‘We’ (IR researchers) do not simply narrate things and peoples in global politics; rather, we must be reflexive about ‘our relations with those that are part of our research designs and about the consequences of what we say and do’ (Moulin 2016, 138) to our ‘research objects’. The following three sections will offer examples of what international relations would look like if seen and narrated from the unspoken, unauthorized margins.

The states and their margins (i): the Botansha/Mudanshe Incident

Before the advent of the Westphalian narrative in East Asia, the Ryukyu Kingdom was one of the small political entities able to exist at the margins of the much larger ones with a relatively high degree of autonomy. When the first unified kingdom took shape in the early fifteenth century, it was already paying tribute to Ming China. In 1609, the Satsuma Han (today’s Kagoshima Prefecture) conquered Ryukyu, and the kingdom was forced to pay heavy taxes to the Shimazu Clan that ruled Satsuma; since then, Ryukyu had entered into a double tributary relationship with both China and Japan: the Ryukyuan king continued to receive imperial investiture from the Ming and Qing courts, while sending tributary missions to Satsuma (and eventually to the Edo Bakufu).

The arrival of Western colonialism and imperialism in East Asia did not simply indicate the waxing and waning of European and Chinese material capabilities; it also marked a sharp transformation of region-wide systems of knowledge and discursive practices. Before the nineteenth century, the interactions of political entities were supposed to follow the Confucian rituals, now increasingly supplanted by Westphalian international law. Not unlike the emphasis on the inside/outside distinction (Walker 1992) in the Westphalian states system, there is also an inner/outer aspect to the Confucianism-informed tribute system. However, what is considered close/near or distant/far in the latter follows a logic different from that of the former. As Wang Hui (2011, 235) has noted, the tribute system allows a ‘significant degree of ambivalence and flexibility between inner and outer’, whereas the principles of Westphalian sovereignty require a clearer demarcation between inside and outside, producing ‘an absolute opposition between independence and unification, with no in-between grey area allowed’. Although such ambivalence and flexibility had enabled Ming–Qing China and Tokugawa Japan to maintain peaceful relations over Ryukyu for more than two-and-a-half centuries, the existence of this grey area was increasingly hard to tolerate for the new Meiji government. To borrow from Fukuzawa Yukichi’s well-known remarks, it was imperative for the ‘half-civilized’ Japan not to be mistaken as another China or Korea by the European imperialist powers. Meiji leaders and intellectuals started narrating their Asian neighbours in the light of Westphalian international law so as to present their nation as equal to the European powers, and, in so doing, turned themselves into imperialists (Myers and Peattie, 1987).

In December 1871, 54 out of 66 Ryukyuan survivors of a shipwreck accident in southern Taiwan were killed by the aboriginal Kuskus tribe. The remaining survivors were rescued and compensated by local residents and Qing officials, and they were escorted to Ryukyu’s trading mission in Fuzhou and later back to Naha in July 1872. While shipwrecks and similar incidents in this area were not uncommon in the nineteenth century, this tragedy was appropriated by the Meiji government to reinforce its sovereignty claim to Ryukyu. When Yanagiwara Sakimitsu (who later became Japan’s minister to China) was sent to question Zongli Yamen (the foreign affairs office of the late Qing dynasty) ministers Mao Changxi and Dong Xun about the killings, his Chinese counterparts replied that ‘there are two kinds of savages on this island. One type has come under our rule, which we called “ripe savages”, and the other is beyond our influence, and we have no means of controlling them’ (cited in Suzuki 2008, 150); since ‘all the murderers are “[raw] savages”, so we regard them as beyond the reach of civilizing, and thus difficult to rule properly’ (cited in Wang 2011, 236). The Qing officials were merely stating that some ‘savages’ at that time were beyond China’s influence (and thus the Qing court was not liable for their wrongdoing); the highly flexible inner/outer distinctions actually meant that ‘raw savages’ could become part of China once they accepted Confucian teaching. For Yanagiwara, the aforementioned admission that some Taiwanese aborigines were outside Chinese influence indicated that some parts of Taiwan might not be within Chinese sovereignty, and thus might be open to colonial conquest: ‘Taiwan was in danger of being occupied by foreign powers wanting to punish the savages … posing a threat to our southern waters and islands. For this reason, we are preparing to send an expedition [to Taiwan] immediately’ (cited in Suzuki 2008, 151).

In the aftermath of the 1874 Taiwan Expedition—the first overseas use of force by the Meiji government—a treaty was concluded to end the standoff between China and Japan, and Qing officials accepted that the expedition was a ‘just act’ to redress the grievance of ‘Japanese citizens’ who were ‘wantonly harmed’ by Taiwanese aborigines. Japan speeded up the process of eliminating the ‘grey area’ by prohibiting Ryukyu from sending tributary missions to China in 1875 and eventually turned it into Okinawa Prefecture in 1879. The Mudanshe Incident likewise prompted the Qing to strengthen its administration in southern Taiwan and its controls over the aborigines, a step towards place the entire island under Chinese sovereignty in accordance with the Westphalian standard (Lin 2006).

Narrating Ryukyu as an integral part of Japan’s sovereign territories was not without resistance. Ryukyuan officials were among the first to urge the Meiji government not to disrupt the existing Qing–Ryukyu rescue assistance mechanism and refused to justify the Taiwan Expedition by withholding a memorial service for the deceased Ryukyuans. Following the termination of tributary relations with China and the abolition of the kingdom, Ryukyuan envoys to Beijing frequently petitioned Zongli Yamen and carried out hunger strikes calling for China’s intervention. In protest against a pending treaty between the Qing court and Japan whose ratification would lead to the partition of Ryukyu,¹ one of these envoys, Rin Shikō, went so far as to commit suicide (Hiyane 2015). Although Rin’s hope to restore the kingdom through external interventions diminished following China’s defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War, the fact that the Japanese state had to continue its consumption of the Botansha Incident decades after the establishment of Okinawa Prefecture in the construction of Ryukyuans’ Japanese identity reaffirms Foucault’s observation that where there are social interactions, there are relations of power which traverse what is happening and produce effects unexpected by those seeking to dominate. An example of such consumption is the relocation of the victims’ graveyard to downtown Naha in 1899. Rather than offering his prayer for them or expressing his sorrow, Okinawa Governor Narahara Shigeru in the epitaph only described the victimization of 54 Okinawans in Taiwan and the heroic action of the imperial military in punishing the crime committed by the villains (Matayoshi 2018, 278). In the first memorial ceremony (and those that followed on 4 April annually as a prefectural event), Narahara praised the Taiwan Expedition (which led to Taiwan’s eventual annexation and turned those savages into ‘Japan’s slaves’) and stressed that his audience shoud ‘contribute to the country’ (Matayoshi 2018, 279). The discursive construction of Taiwan as an ‘undeveloped land’ (mikai no ji) and a ‘demons’ island’ (oni ga shima), and of Taiwanese aborigines as ‘headhunters’ (kubikarizoku) and ‘barbaric savages’ (yaban), started to take root in Okinawa (Matayoshi 2018), which worked to justify Japan’s colonization of Taiwan and (as will be discussed later) to create hierarchy among those at the margins of the Japanese empire.

If the Taiwanese aborigines are represented as barbaric and backward in the Meiji Japanese narratives, those of the history textbooks approved by the ROC and the PRC are resolved and vigorous. Both narrate the Mudanshe Incident as modern Japan’s first armed invasion of Taiwan as a violation of Chinese sovereignty (Satoi 2006; Sung and Wu 2013).² The instruction manual of the second-grade junior high school Chinese history textbook (2002 edition) edited by the Eastern China Normal University, for example, describes that Taiwan had belonged to Fukien Province since Emperor Kangxi’s ‘retaking’ of Taiwan from Koxinga’s successors; moreover, its ‘rich resources’ and ‘important strategic location’ made it a target for Western colonial powers (Satoi 2006, 59–60). The US was said to have territorial ambitions on Chinese Taiwan as early as the 1840s and, following an 1867 shipwreck incident in southern Taiwan and the killing of its seven remaining members of crew, the US Navy dispatched 181 marines to Hengchun, only to be ‘expelled by Taiwanese people’. And Japan allegedly imitated this approach to invade Taiwan (Satoi 2006). The Chinese possession of Taiwan’s sovereignty is narrated as a naturalized and timeless fact, and the contemporary PRC–US–Japan great power rivalry is projected back to the nineteenth century. Similarly, several junior and senior high school history textbooks published in Taiwan highlight aboriginal tribes’ ‘fierce resistance’. The 2003 edition published by Chien-hong specifically praises aborigines’ ‘heroic resistance’, which ‘eventually secured [Chinese] sovereignty over Taiwan’ (Satoi 2006, 63). Narrating them as patriotic warriors is not only anachronistic (throughout Qing rule the notion of citizenship never took root in Taiwan); it also glosses over the fact that the same people were considered ‘raw savages’ by Qing officials.

Dominant as these mainstream state-centric representational practices may appear, counter-narratives generated by members of the relevant local communities and beyond have been emerging, reminding us that where there is power, there is resistance (Edkins 2019). For instance, Hua A-tsai (aboriginal name: Valjluk Mavaliu) collects accounts of the unfortunate encounter between the Kuskus tribe and Ryukyuan shipwreck survivors from local (Kuskus) perspectives. Contrary to the barbaric ‘headhunter’ image in mainstream narratives, Hua argues that Ryukyuans were provided with food, water and shelter by the tribe upon their arrival, and the tragedy occurred only after they escaped at night, which was seen as an insult to the host (Miyaoka 2017, 299). In her oral history research Kao Chia-hsing (Lianes Punanang) maintains that, from the locals’ standpoint, it was the intruders’ violation of their traditional customs and communal laws combined with miscommunication that led to the tragedy. Furthermore, the Mudanshe Incident did not end with Japan’s ‘victory’; it was heavy casualties on both sides that pushed them to end the state of belligerence. Rather than representing a shameful episode in Taiwan’s modern history, for Kao, Sinvaudjan ancestors succeeded in defending the aboriginal community and earned their honour (Kao 2008a; 2008b). Their counter-narratives seek to turn some historical baggage into an educational and tourism resource that reconnects local residents with various actors in Taiwan and Okinawa. These include exhibitions and symposiums, dance and stage plays, picture books, meetings with the victims’ offspring to seek reconciliation, and a memorial park that expresses remorse for the Ryukyuan victims and pays respect to the ancestors who died defending the homeland (authors’ field visit, 19 March 2018; Miyaoka 2017). Considering the emergence of various ‘history issues’ that have plagued relations among East Asian states since the end of the Cold War (Gustafsson 2014), such reconciliation efforts by and between the margins merit more systematic attention in IR (for a recent example in anthropology, see Kamizuru et al 2017). The next section will turn to how narrative power operates in the headline-catching Sino-Japanese island dispute and to what effect.

The states and their margins (ii): the Senkaku/Diaoyutai Islands dispute

The narratives employed by Japan and the ROC/PRC about the disputed islands, named the Senkaku Islands by Japan, the Diaoyu Islands by the PRC and the Diaoyutai Islands by the ROC, are informed by the same Westphalian logic that denied Ryukyu’s ambivalent in-betweenness: the islands in question must be either part of a sovereign entity or outside of it; they cannot be otherwise. This has been the case following the discovery of potential oil and natural gas reserves near the islands in the late 1960s. Since the early 1970s, Taipei and Beijing have maintained that these islands were first discovered, named and used by the Chinese during the Ming Dynasty but they were ceded to Japan, as Taiwan’s appertaining islands, under the Treaty of Shimonoseki that concluded the First Sino-Japanese War. Therefore, Chinese sovereignty over the islands should have been restored following the end of the Second World War and Japan’s subsequent renunciation of all claims over Taiwan in the San Francisco Peace Treaty. In refutation, the Japanese government has argued that its survey found the islands with no signs of formal control and thus it proceeded to incorporate them into Okinawa Prefecture in January 1895 on the basis of terra nullius.³ Following the postwar US occupation of Okinawa, the islands were leased to the US Civil Administration of the Ryukyu Islands as a shooting range for the US military. In May 1972, the US handed over the administrative rights of the islands to Japan along with Okinawa. Since then, Japan has (re)gained physical control of the Senkakus, but that status quo has been contested by the ROC/PRC, leading to various maritime confrontations (and at times violent demonstrations) in the past four decades.

The onset of the island dispute may have been triggered by the discovery of potential energy resources, but it is the Westphalian narrative that gives meanings and significance to these uninhabited islets (Hagström 2012). The state actors involved have sought to narrate the Senkaku/Diaoyutai Islands to the effect of eliminating their ambivalent status and pinning them down inside the respective sovereign domain. Given that the Diaoyutai issue was first raised by Taipei, this section will mainly focus on how ROC officials and state-censored media constructed such narratives in the early 1970s, as well as why and how these narratives have been received by their intended audience. Friction between the ROC and Japan formally surfaced in August 1970, after a state-owned petroleum company signed a series of agreements with American companies to explore petroleum and natural gas in waters north of Taiwan, including the area around the Senkaku/Diaoyutai Islands. Alerted by the Japanese Foreign Minister’s statement that the sovereignty of the Senkakus belonged to Japan, the ROC Legislative Yuan scrambled to ratify the 1958 Convention on the Continental Shelf (at that time the ROC was still a member of the United Nations [UN] and diplomatically recognized by Japan) and passed a statute governing the prospecting and exploration of undersea resources. Although the aforementioned ratification meant that the ROC could make an effective legal claim to those potential resources even without possessing the sovereignty of the Diaoyutais, some lawmakers and pundits conflated the ROC’s ‘sovereign rights’ in international law over undersea resources in the islands’ surrounding seabed areas with its ‘sovereignty’ over the islands themselves (Youth Daily News 1970; Zhili Evening News 1970). Media in Taiwan started depicting a greedy Japan that, lured by rich undersea resources, was now rushing to assert its sovereignty over the Senkakus at the expense of the ROC. As a China Times (1970) editorial put it:

We believe firmly that, if the Sato [Eisaku] government wants to transform Japan from an ‘economic great power’ to a ‘political great power’ in the 1970s, Japan should have contributed more to international affairs of common concern and fulfilled its duty as a great power rather than repeating its historical mistakes in pursuit of territory, when it just recovered from [war] wounds. This issue involves little benefits [for us], but it matters greatly for our country’s sovereignty and commonly observed international principles.

To make matters worse, in early September some journalists from Taiwan erected a ROC national flag on the islands, which prompted the Japanese Foreign Minister to issue another statement that reaffirmed Japan’s sovereignty over the islands, followed by the US Ryukyu authorities’ removal of the flag. Believing that the ROC flag was ‘torn down’ by ‘them’ on ‘our’ territory as a sign of the revival of Japanese militarism, overseas Chinese in the US (mainly students from Taiwan and Hong Kong) initiated the Baodiao (‘defending the Diaoyutais’) movement, and various demonstrations were held outside Japanese consulates. Hundreds of scientists, engineers and education professionals signed a petition to Chiang Kai-shek, urging his government to ‘resist new Japanese aggression’ and not to participate in a plan to jointly develop East China Sea maritime resources with Japan and South Korea (Central Daily 1971). Chiang’s aide Chang Chun replied that the Diaoyutais had been Taiwan Province’s appertaining islets and their sovereignty belonged to China; as far as territorial sovereignty was concerned, Taipei must strive to preserve even ‘inches of soil and pieces of stone’ (Central News Agency 1971).

The Diaoyutai issue emerged at a time when the ROC was losing worldwide diplomatic recognition to the PRC (including its loss of UN membership in October 1971), which called into question the claim that the ROC was the true representative of the whole of China as well as Chiang and his KMT’s authoritarian rule in Taiwan. The Diaoyutai issue provided Taipei with a stage of legitimacy performance, for the dispute allowed it to claim credit as the genuine defender of China’s national interests and world peace by taking on Tokyo and Beijing simultaneously. Framing the island dispute as the ‘second Manchurian incident’ (Chunghua Magazine 1971) worked to confirm Japan’s supposedly fascist/militarist identity that required resistance and unity under the leadership of the ROC, which, unlike the PRC, was the only trustworthy and legitimate Chinese government with true nationalist credentials (Youth Daily News 1971).

Employing the Westphalian narrative could not save the ROC from losing its China seat at the UN, but it was effective in tying the PRC’s hands. Now, as the internationally recognized ‘real’ China, Beijing could not help but carry on Taipei’s territorial claim,⁴ which paved the way for recurring Sino-Japanese confrontations over the disputed islands in the decades that followed. While the narrative employed by the ROC retained support from some Baodiao activists, others were critical of the KMT’s authoritarianism and demanded the resumption of negotiations between Taipei and Beijing for China’s unification. But for some student activists, the meaning of Baodiao was not limited to Chinese nationalism or the nation-state. For instance, Kuo Song-feng, a student from Berkeley, questioned the pursuit of Taiwan’s de jure independence and the rejuvenation of a great China. For him, it was more urgent to identify with Third World peoples and their anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggles; the Taiwan question, then, was not merely a national question and must be understood within the context of such struggles against colonialism and capitalism (Lin 2014). Although the Baodiao movement eventually degenerated into a nationalist movement advocating China’s unification, its impact on cultural and political movements in Taiwan in the 1970s cannot be overestimated. Students’ social and political awareness increased through their participation in campus democracy and community service, which accumulated in mounting challenges to the KMT’s one-party rule and contributed to democratization in Taiwan in the 1980s (Lin 2014, 93).

Civil society in contemporary Taiwan is relatively unconcerned with the Diaoyutai issue. Despite the ROC government’s maintenance of its sovereignty claim since June 1971, to the authors’ best knowledge, there have been no recent opinion polls measuring popular support for the claim in Taiwan. For fishermen in Yilan, Taiwan’s northeastern county, the protection of traditional fishing rights near the islands is more important than claiming sovereignty over them. In this regard, the fishery agreement concluded between Taipei and Tokyo in April 2013, which in effect puts aside their different sovereignty claims and permits Okinawan and Taiwanese fishermen to share fishery resources and fishing grounds in waters near the Diaoyutai/Senkaku Islands, is the first step in a positive, de-Westphalian direction. While the general public in Okinawa, including those in the Yaeyama Islands, do not question Tokyo’s narrative that the Senkaku Islands are Japanese territory, they do not necessarily welcome the island dispute’s securitization and value friendly ties with both mainland China and Taiwan (Mita 2013; authors’ field visit, 27–29 March 2017).⁵ Indeed, it is helpful to recall Foucault’s analysis that power is a productive network that runs through all interaction, which ‘traverses and produces things’ such as harmony across borders (see the next section).

Even leaders of the Chinese state and the Japanese state might have found a temporary exit from the Westphalian narrative in their interaction. In a 1972 meeting between Premier Zhou Enlai and Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei, Zhou contended that their discussions on diplomatic normalization would go nowhere if the Senkaku/Diaoyu issue were brought up in the meeting. Tanaka was said to concur with Zhou, and they came to an agreement to leave the issue to the future generations of both nations.⁶ For foreign policy pundits of Japan–PRC relations, this was a creative way to avoid direct confrontation between the two by putting a thorny diplomatic issue on the shelf. Yet the Zhou–Tanaka solution is not entirely novel for those living at margins characterized by ambivalence and flexibility.

The states and their margins (iii): border-crossings

As far as Okinawa–Taiwan relations are concerned, the Westphalian narrative has not been able to dictate the unfolding of vibrant people-to-people exchanges across state borders, especially those between the Yaeyama Islands and Yilan, Hualien and Taitung Counties (which are themselves the respective margins of Okinawa and Taiwan). After all, such exchanges are not new to local residents. Since the turn of the twentieth century, massive flows of personnel, goods, services and information between southwestern Okinawa and northeastern Taiwan had made their local communities prosperous and increasingly dependent on each other. This interconnectedness was so extensive that it was faster for Yaeyama residents to follow the latest fashion in mainland Japan through Keelung (Taiwan’s then-largest port, with direct ferry services to and from Kobe) than Naha, Okinawa’s prefectural capital (Matsuda 2013, 55). The ‘progress’ of colonial Taiwan clearly impressed those who were also from the margins of the Japanese empire. During his visit to the Yonaguni Island (the westernmost end of Okinawa with the closest direct distance to Taiwan—111 kilometres) in December 1931, an Ishigaki-based journalist was surprised by a local woman who was able to communicate with him in fluent Japanese rather than the Yonaguni dialect; upon enquiring, the journalist discovered that she had been to Taiwan and learned ‘standard’ Japanese there (Matsuda 2013, 60). In fact, it was not unusual for Okinawans (particularly those from Yaeyama) to study and work in Taiwan; men typically worked as civil servants, clerks, fishermen or factory workers, while women served as housemaids for mainland Japanese families in big cities such as Taihoku (Taipei) and Keelung. A colonial and gendered division of labour was clearly visible.

The generally unfettered movements of people, goods and capital should not lead one to romanticize pre-war Okinawa–Taiwan relations as a sort of ‘golden age’ between the margins, for various forms of violence unleashed by Japanese imperialism and colonial capitalism, both structural and direct, abounded. Such violence against the colonized came as much from the colonizer as from the ‘in-between’. For the colonial authorities, Okinawans were categorized as naichinin (‘people from mainland Japan’), which in turn encouraged them to look down upon, rather than rally behind, hontōnin (‘people from this island’, including both ethnic Han Chinese and Polynesian aborigines), even though the former themselves were also the victims of Japanese imperialism (Matayoshi 2018).

In 1935, prompted by the colonial government’s forced merger of pineapple canneries, 330 migrants from central Taiwan arrived at Ishigaki Island for pineapple plantation; they also intended to bring with them water buffaloes. The reception of these newcomers by Ishigaki residents, however, was not welcoming. Sixty water buffaloes could not be disembarked, and the cannery hiring Taiwanese farmers was almost forced to burn all of the carried pineapple seedlings, despite the fact that both buffaloes and seedlings were proven healthy and their movements had taken place within Japanese territories: that is, they should have been exempted from quarantine measures (Miki 2010, 101–103). Against the backdrop of an unjust colonial hierarchy, these migrants were not merely at the receiving end; they adopted such strategies as appropriation for surviving colonialism (Bhabha 1994). To de-escalate a crisis in which Taiwanese farmers were surrounded by hundreds of Ishigaki residents over a bodily harm incident, Rin Patsu, a leading figure of the aforementioned cannery, resorted to a familiar Japanese state narrative that Taiwanese were also the ‘Emperor’s children’, and Taiwan as the ‘launching pad of the Nanshin [South-forward] Policy’ had been hosting numerous fellow Japanese citizens, including ones from Yaeyama. It is unclear whether this mimicry appealed enough to his intended audience, but Rin made sure to recast his focus on the interconnectedness between Okinawans and Taiwanese in the second half of his speech: ‘if Taiwanese people in Yaeyama were harmed and unfortunate losses of life occurred, their families would not necessarily restrain themselves from taking similar measures to seek revenge against those Okinawans residing in Taiwan’ (Miki 2010, 108–109). The second half must have made sense to the angry crowd, who receded afterwards. In fact, Taiwan became the designated shelter for residents of Yaeyama towards the end of the Second World War.

Discrimination against Taiwanese migrants and their offspring exacerbated following Japan’s defeat in 1945 and the subsequent creation of state borders separating Okinawa and Taiwan (Matsuda 2012). The civil rights and access to public resources of those intending to stay in Yaeyama were denied because they were turned into ‘foreigners’ (ROC citizens) overnight. To complicate the matter, if these migrants and their younger generations decided to acquire Japanese citizenship to make their life in Okinawa easier, they would first need to renounce their ROC citizenship and obtain the relevant documentation from Taipei. Unfortunately, this was the last thing the authoritarian KMT would agree to amid its lost cause of fighting the numerically superior Chinese Communists. Matsuda Yoshitaka recounted an encounter between an Ishigaki city councillor and four ROC officials in Taipei: when asked to permit the renunciation of ROC citizenship by Taiwanese migrants and their offspring, the latter repeatedly demanded that the visitor ‘return these people to us’ because ‘we have the conscription system’ and ‘it is necessary [for them] to protect the country’ (Matsuda 2012, 176–179).⁷ The issue at hand is not simply that these Taiwanese migrants had hardly or never been under the ROC’s jurisdiction. The violence of the Westphalian narrative inflicted upon them cannot be overemphasized, for ‘these people’ suffered double discrimination because of their non-Japanese identity while being objectified as potential resources for the needs of the ROC state.

The seemingly dominant Westphalian narratives employed by the Japanese state and the ROC state notwithstanding, neither has achieved the status of Gramscian ‘common sense’ in the thinking, doing, being and relating of those involved in contemporary Okinawa–Taiwan relations. Rather, these state-centric, top-down narratives have been joined with some counter-narratives that celebrate diversity, co-existence and mutual learning at the margins (Matsuda 2012; authors’ field visit to the Ishigaki and Yonaguni Islands, 27–29 March 2017). In recognition of Taiwanese farmers’ contribution to local agriculture and economic development, a monument was erected in Nagura (where pineapple plantation started on Ishigaki Island) in 2012, and the Yaeyama–Taiwan Friendship Interchange Association (YTFIA) was established the following year. Through a series of activities such as exhibitions, publications, symposiums, field trips, film screenings and dance performances, the association seeks to increase local residents’ awareness about past people-to-people exchanges with Taiwan and interest in promoting such interconnectedness further. The YTFIA also encourages high school graduates to pursue their college education in Taiwan (YTFIA 2015), noting the latter’s geographical proximity and the absence of universities in Yaeyama.

This brings us back to interactions between Yonaguni Island and Taiwan. Shortly after Japan’s defeat, the two sides were put under the respective administrations of the US military and the ROC, but fishermen, immigrants and trade brokers had been able to cross the newly imposed yet ambiguous borders with relative ease. The island was so thriving that it became a ‘Second Hawaii’ because of its intermediary role in the ‘informal’ trade networks connecting Hong Kong, Taiwan, Okinawa and mainland Japan (Matsuda 2013). The end of unfettered movements between Yonaguni and Taiwan contributed to the former’s decline; by 1990, its population had already shrunk below 2000. To address the downward trend of depopulation and rising commodity prices, Yonaguni Town Hall had proposed twice since 2005 to establish a ‘Border Interchange Special Zone’, including the opening of Nanta Port for ferries to and from Hualien City and the transit of clearance ships in cross-Taiwan-Strait trade,⁸ but these proposals were rejected by Tokyo on technical grounds (Masuda 2013). Although the town hall had set up a liaison office in Hualien (Yonaguni’s first and currently only sister city) in 2007 to promote bilateral exchanges, Tokyo’s cold shoulder meant that not only investment prospects but also direct transport connecting Yonaguni and Taiwan became very difficult to bring into being. Not unlike some other communities in Okinawa Prefecture, Yonaguni residents as a whole eventually accepted the deployment of a coastal monitoring and early warning station with 150 Self-Defence Forces (SDF) troops to the island in March 2016 in exchange for ‘base economy’.

The economic reason aside, the SDF deployment was justified by its proponents on the basis of Yonaguni’s geographical proximity to the Senkaku Islands and the necessity of checking China’s assertive military activities in and beyond the East China Sea (Kubo and Kelly 2016). The deployment serves as a recent illustration that the constant articulation of danger through practices of statecraft as a ‘boundary-producing political performance’ makes a state’s identity possible (Campbell 1998, 62). However, Yonaguni residents’ continued promotion of cultural exchanges (with Tafalong Elementary School) and sports events with Hualien residents on an annual basis despite long travelling hours required to reach the other side of the ocean (first author’s field visit to Hualien, 21 March 2017) means that the Westphalian national security narrative has not fully succeeded in enforcing closure on the community that is said to be threatened.⁹

Conclusion

This research has attempted to answer the call for an ‘IR from below’ by excavating voices and experiences of substate actors from the margins of the Japanese state and the Chinese state, which so far have been rendered largely invisible under state-centric IR. While the ability of states to use their capabilities, be they material or discursive, to get substate actors to do what they would not otherwise do is part of such voices and experiences, it is equally important to recognize that some substate actors in Okinawa and Taiwan have developed their own counter-narratives to appropriate and circumvent (if not dissolve) the Westphalian (meta-)narratives. Without ontological foundation, apart from the various and repeated practices of statecraft that constitute their reality, ‘states are (and have to be) always in a process of becoming’ to the extent that they would wither away should such practices fully succeed in fixing their identity (Campbell 1998, 12). Power runs through these interactions, providing the meanings, norms and identities that not only constrain but also constitute actors. Rather than asking who the powerful are or ‘what the sovereign looks like from on high’, Foucault (2004, 28) suggests that ‘we should be trying to discover how multiple bodies, forces, energies, matters, desires, thoughts and so on are gradually, progressively, actually and materially constituted as subjects’.

So what would happen if we were to start thinking about politics without assuming the existence of pre-social, power-wielding authority above us, namely, what if we ‘cut off the King’s head’ (Foucault 1980, 121)? Or, recalling our encounter in southern Taiwan, how could we make sense of the historical implications of a Mudanshe Incident Monument without an inscription? Consider Slavoj Žižek’s (1993, 1) description of a picture taken following the overthrow of Nicolae Ceaușescu in Romania in December 1989: ‘the rebels waving the national flag with the red star, the Communist symbol, cut out, so that instead of the symbol standing for the organizing principle of the national life, there was nothing but a hole in its centre’. Žižek points out that it is the symbol (be it the red star, a nationalistic monument or the sovereign) that we put at the centre of the social order that conceals the emptiness and incompleteness of the latter. An ‘IR from the margins’ excavates the possibility of not substituting the sovereign with anything at all, but rather remaining in a state of nothingness; it offers narratives that decentre the Westphalian way, recognizing fluidity, ambiguity and incompleteness as our condition of being. Last but not least, the understanding of power as relational and productive and the corresponding focus on the capacity of narratives to produce effects have not only pointed to the ‘contingent social processes that produce particular kinds of subjects, fix meanings and categories, and what is taken for granted’ (Barnett and Duval 2005, 57), but also revealed the complicity of the IR discipline in these processes. To practise state-centric ‘IR from above’, then, is not simply a methodological choice but a political decision about which IR scholars cannot claim innocence.

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Grant-in-Aid (15H01855) and (16K21495) as well as Ryukoku University Socio-cultural Research Institute. We also thank Karl Gustafsson, Linus Hagström, the Cambridge Review of International Affairs editors and reviewers for their professional comments and various generous individuals for assisting our fieldwork in Okinawa and Taiwan. Without them this article would not have taken its current shape. We dedicate it to LHM Ling, who encouraged us to embark on this journey.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ching-Chang Chen

Ching-Chang Chen is an Associate Professor of International Politics in the Department of Global Studies at Ryukoku University, Kyoto and Visiting Research Fellow in the Studley Graduate Programs in International Affairs at the New School, New York. He received his PhD from Aberystwyth University. His recent publications appear in such volumes as China and International Theory: The Balance of Relationships (Routledge, 2019), Asia in International Relations: Unlearning Imperial Power Relations (Routledge, 2017), The Palgrave Handbook of Disciplinary and Regional Approaches to Peace (2016) and Critical Imaginations in International Relations (Routledge, 2016). Email: [email protected]

Kosuke Shimizu

Kosuke Shimizu is Professor of International Relations in the Department of Global Studies, Director of the Afrasian Research Centre and Dean of Research at Ryukoku University, Kyoto. He received his PhD from the Victoria University of Wellington. His recent English publications include Critical International Relations Theories in East Asia (Routledge, 2019) and ‘Materializing the “Non-Western”’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 28:1 (2015). Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 The Qing court eventually did not ratify this treaty that would have given China control over the Miyako and Yaeyama Islands.

2 Although post-martial-law Taiwan has experienced several pro-de-jure-independence administrations, this does not alter the fact that the island has been under the jurisdiction of a Chinese political regime since October 1945.

3 While the Chinese claim regarding effective control is at best dubious and the Treaty of Shimonoseki does not in fact mention the disputed islands, there was merely a three-month difference between the acquisition of the islands and the end of the First Sino-Japanese War; that is, the Japanese claim of terra nullius is not flawless.

4 The ROC Foreign Ministry formally declared sovereignty over the islands on 11 June 1971. The PRC followed suit on 30 December in the same year.

5 To be sure, Ishigaki residents elected a conservative, pro-state mayor, but this does not mean that people there invariably see China as a major threat that requires a militarized response (Higa 2018).

6 Officially, Tokyo insists that there is no written record that can prove the existence of such an agreement (Hagström 2005).

7 Taipei did not agree to accept Taiwanese migrants’ applications until its loss of the China seat in the UN.

8 Before May 2008, direct trade across the Taiwan Strait was prohibited and sea and air transport had to go through a third place such as Hong Kong.

9 During our second field visit to Yonaguni (23–24 March 2018), fundraising posters for a big earthquake that hit Hualien in early February were visible in virtually the entire island’s public space, more than necessary should such fundraising be on purely humanitarian grounds.