Chinese para-military police shelter behind a barrier during an anti-Japanese protest outside the Japanese embassy in Beijing over the Diaoyu islands issue, known as the Senkaku islands in Japanese, on September 16, 2012. Thousands of anti-Japanese demonstrators mounted protests in cities across China over the disputed islands in the East China Sea, a day after an attempt to storm Tokyo's embassy in the capital. AFP PHOTO / Mark RALSTON (Photo credit should read MARK RALSTON/AFP/GettyImages)
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- NEW: Eleven Chinese vessels are near the islands, Japan says
- NEW: Two Japanese men make a brief landing on one of the islands
- Japanese companies have suspended operations in China because of unrest
- Tensions have risen between Tokyo and Beijing over a disputed set of islands
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Tokyo (CNN) -- Tensions between China and Japan showed no signs of abating Tuesday as fresh anti-Japanese demonstrations took place in Beijing and other cities on a sensitive anniversary, and Chinese government ships sailed near a set of disputed islands.
The volatile territorial dispute between the two Asian countries has begun to hurt economic links between the world's second and third largest economies and prompted calls from the United States to prevent the situation from spiraling out of control.
At the heart of the issue is a group of small islands in the East China Sea that both countries claim sovereignty over. Japan calls the islands Senkaku; China calls them Diaoyu. They are under Japanese control, but China claims they have been a part of its territory "since ancient times."
A total of 11 Chinese government ships were near the islands on Tuesday afternoon, the Japanese Coast Guard said, adding that it had warned the vessels not to enter Japanese territorial waters.
China says it has instructed ships to carry out patrols in the area -- situated between Okinawa and Taiwan -- to support its sovereignty claims after the Japanese government announced the acquisition of several of the islands from a Japanese family last week.
China termed the deal "illegal" and sent six surveillance vessels into Japanese territorial waters on Friday, according to the Japanese Coast Guard. The move drew strong protests from the Japanese government.
The tense disagreement over the islands has brought latent anti-Japanese sentiment in China boiling back to the surface, resulting in violent demonstrations over the weekend and damage to Japanese businesses in China. Several Japanese companies have halted work at Chinese plants amid the unrest.
Hundreds of protesters -- many carrying portraits of the late Chinese leader Mao Zedong -- streamed past the Japanese Embassy in Beijing on Tuesday, the 81st anniversary of the "Mukden Incident," which set off the Japanese invasion of China in 1931.
Flanked by a heavy police presence, the Chinese demonstrators marching past the embassy were vocal but orderly, shouting that the disputed islands belong to China.
The "Mukden Incident" refers to an explosion that destroyed Japanese-owned rail tracks near the Chinese city of Mukden (Shenyang) on September 18, 1931. The Japanese accused Chinese nationalists of causing the blast and used the event as a reason to invade northeastern China.
Many Chinese people still harbor resentment over the subsequent Japanese occupation of large swathes of eastern China.
Rowdy demonstrations also took place near Japanese consulates in other major Chinese cities on Tuesday, including Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenyang, according to video footage from CNN affiliate I-Cable. But the protests appeared to be much more orderly than those that took place in many cities at the weekend, some of which turned violent.
The flurry of anti-Japanese actions in China over the past few days has prompted a string of Japanese companies to temporarily halt operations in the country.
The corporations suspending operations Tuesday at some of their Chinese factories included the auto makers Toyota, Nissan, Honda and Mazda, as well as the electronics company Canon.
Another electronics company, Panasonic, had already said Monday that it was stopping work at three plants in China after two of them were damaged Saturday amid violent protests.
Two Japanese men carried out a much smaller scale protest of their own Tuesday when they jumped from a fishing boat and swam to one of the disputed islands where they spent a short amount of time, the Japanese Coast Guard said.
The waters near the islands are likely to become more crowded in the coming days, complicating the delicate situation further, after the Chinese authorities' summer moratorium on fishing in the East China Sea ended Sunday.
Hundreds of Chinese fishing vessels are set to be active in the area -- an average of 1,000 of them fish near the islands each years, according to the Chinese authorities -- and Beijing has said fisheries patrol ships will be present to protect them.
Background: How remote rock split China, Japan
The United States, a key military ally of Japan, has called on the two sides to find a peaceful resolution to the disagreement, which is generating more and more unease in the region.
"It's in everybody's interest for Japan and China to maintain good relations and to find a way to avoid further escalation," U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Monday at a joint news conference in Tokyo with his Japanese counterpart, Satoshi Morimoto.
Despite describing the U.S.-Japan alliance as the "bedrock of peace and stability" in the Asia-Pacific region, Panetta reiterated that Washington doesn't take a position on competing sovereignty claims. He did, however, express concern about the demonstrations in China.
Panetta met with Defense Minister Gen. Liang Guanglie in Beijing on Tuesday. Following the meeting, Liang reiterated that the islands are part of "China's inherent territory."
"We reserve the right to take further actions, but we hope the issue will be properly resolved through peaceful ways and negotiations," he said, according to the state-run news agency Xinhua.
Panetta is scheduled to hold talks Wednesday with Vice President Xi Jinping, who is widely expected to succeed Hu Jintao as president of China next year.
Unrest took place in dozens of Chinese cities over the weekend. Thousands of protesters hurled bottles and eggs outside the Japanese Embassy in Beijing on Saturday.
Asia's disputed islands -- who claims what?
Messages and photos posted on Chinese social media sites showed angry mobs in numerous cities ransacking Japanese stores and restaurants as well as smashing and burning cars of Japanese make.
The authorities rarely permit protests in China, prompting suspicion that the nationwide rallies over the weekend were government-sanctioned. In Beijing, police walking alongside the demonstrators were seen to ask spectators to join in instead of blocking the street.
By Saturday night, China's state-run media had started appealing for restraint, running commentaries that condemned violence and lectured the public on the expression of patriotism.
Animosity between China and Japan over the disputed islands runs deep.
They have come to represent what many Chinese see as unfinished business: redressing the impact of the Japanese occupation of large swathes of eastern China during the 1930s and 1940s.
China says its claim goes back hundreds of years. Japan says it saw no trace of Chinese control of the islands in an 1885 survey, so formally recognized them as Japanese sovereign territory in 1895.
Japan then sold the islands in 1932 to descendants of the original settlers. The Japanese surrender at the end of World War II in 1945 only served to cloud the issue further.
The islands were administered by the U.S. occupation force after the war. But in 1972, Washington returned them to Japan as part of its withdrawal from Okinawa.
A public initiative begun in April this year by the outspoken governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, to raise money to acquire the islands for the city authorities set off a new cycle of tensions that included civilian protesters from both sides landing on the islands to stake their nations' claims.
Ishihara's move put pressure on the government of Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda to step in with its own bid, which resulted in the controversial deal last week with the Kurihara family, the private owners up until that point.
Japan's attempts to portray the purchase as a routine internal real-estate transaction, with the islands passing from one Japanese owner to another, has failed to placate the Chinese authorities.
CNN's Junko Ogura reported from Tokyo and Jethro Mullen from Hong Kong. CNN's Stan Grant, Steven Jiang and CY Xu in Beijing contributed to this report.
18 Sep, 2012
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Source: http://rss.cnn.com/~r/rss/cnn_topstories/~3/k1uV1fAr0gY/index.html
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