Post/Colonial Geography, Post/Cold War Complication: Okinawa, Taiwan, and Hong Kong as a Liminal Island Chain

ABSTRACT

This essay engages in border studies by articulating a “liminal island chain,” linking Okinawa, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, as a frontier of democracy in the rise of a new Cold War. Tracing the theoretical evolution from boundary to border and bordering in the recent scholarship, it aims to counter the island chain idea in international relations theory with an indigenous settler colonial perspective on the one hand, and to approach democracy as a political rhetoric deployed in Taiwan’s and Hong Kong’s anti-China protests since 2014 that constructed a biometric, emotional, and civilizational border against China on the other. By taking the Protect Diaoyutai (Baodiao) Movement of the early 1970s that linked Okinawa with Taiwan and Hong Kong as a critical conjuncture of Cold War bordering, the essay adopts a cultural studies approach to consider the implications of multiple bordering in East Asia as congealed in the social movements in Hong Kong and Taiwan, then and now, to offer an analysis of the unfolding of the new Cold War. By conceptualizing Okinawa, Taiwan, and Hong Kong as unwieldly liminal island chain as produced by post/colonial geography and shaped by post/Cold War entanglements, the essay hopes to unveil how multiple bordering is at work in East Asia, and to usher in a trans-local imagination of the democracy to come.

Notes

1. While the Diaoyutais/Senkakus issue has been framed by competing states as an issue of territorial sovereignty, Okinawan scholars such as Arasaki (2013) and Chiyo Wakabayashi (2012) have invoked the notion of the “sphere of life” to refer to this area and to counter state-based territorial claims. As I discuss below, this notion suggests a radical democratic approach to the issue that is trans-locally grounded. On the Diaoyutais/Senkakus dispute, there have been numerous publications on the topic in English, Japanese, and Chinese. For some recent accounts of its origins and historical developments, especially after 2012, see Szanto (2018); Li (2014); Yabuki (2013); Toyoshita (2012).

2. Kimie Hara’s work (2017) is an outstanding exception in the IR literature, because it attempts to explain the territorial disputes in East Asia through the vantage point of San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1952. But even so, the analytical impulse is to explain how these islands were divided by an incoherent post-war international system, rather than linking the disputes from the struggles of the islands themselves.

3. My usage of “liminality” is literal with the intent to depict a condition that is experientially ambivalent, in between, and complex. Liminality is not simply negative, but rather rich with the possibility of becoming, and not being fixated to a particular identity and position. For discussion of liminality in geography, see Downey, Kinane, and Parker (2016).

4. The Brookings Institute, an U.S. think tank at Washington D.C., identifies Asia as “a frontier of democracy” and in its website runs features articles on Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, and Indonesia under this title. But whenever China is invoked in this column, it is cast as the opposite of democracy. See “Asia: A Key Frontier of Democracy,” Brookings Institute, https://www.brookings.edu/series/asia-a-key-frontier-of-democracy/.

5. Despite the protests of local residents, the Japanese government continues to build an ammunition depot in Miyako Island, after successfully installing a new military radar in Yonaguni Island in March 2016. As Shinichi Fujiwara of Asahi Shimbun reported, “It was envisaged that missile units would be introduced to Miyakojima, Ishigakijima and the Amami-Oshima islands as Chinese vessels and aircraft use those areas to reach the Pacific, while a coast monitoring corps was eyed on Okinawa’s Yonagunijima.” These moves no doubt will push the Yaeyamas to the frontline of military conflict.

6. Lu (2006), a China historian in Taiwan, wrote in 1972 that the key to the Diaoyutais dispute lies in the Okinawan independence. The late Baodiao activist Wang (1996) also contended in 1970 that Japan’s move on the Diaoyutais is an imperialist act subsequent to its takeover of the Ryukyus.

7. Hamakawa (2007) notes that as early as 1884 the Governor of Okinawa Prefecture had proposed to the Cabinet to erect national markers on the Senkaku islands, the proposal was not accepted until January 11, 1895, when Japan was clearly winning the war against China, to include Kuba Island and Uotsuri Island within the jurisdiction of Okinawa Prefecture. Former Japanese diplomat Ukeru Magosaki (2012, 67–68) also indicates that it was because the Shinomoseki Treaty of May 1895 which concluded the first Sino-Japanese War did not include the Diaoyutais/Senkakus as part of the territory that Qing China ceded to Japan that the Meiji government “officially included it in the Japanese territory” to “prudently ensure of the erasure of the traces of the Qing Chinese governance on it.”

8. (2005) (2012). Okinawan identity is also formed in a complex relation to nearby archipelagos: the Amamis, Yaeyamas, and Sakishimas. See Yamazaki (2018).

9. (2020).

10. On the diverse political implications, including ethnic tension, of Baodiao movement from the 1970s onwards, see Wang (2013) and Honda (2019).

11. In 1996, Hong Kong activist Chen Yuxiang, in the attempt to swim to the shore of Diaoyutai from a motor boat, drowned in the ocean, and became the first person to have sacrificed for the Baodiao cause.

12. See Shen (2017); Wang (2015); Huang and Li (2009).

13. The Koza uprising took place on the night of December 20, 1970, when the Baodiao activists were gathering in Princeton, was a spontaneous protest against U.S. military occupation in Okinawa. The uprising was occasioned by a hit and run accident in Koza (now Okinawa City) where an Okinawan was run over by a car driven by an American soldier. The witnesses of the accident crowded the scene, sparking a clash between Okinawans and U.S. military police. The uprising is deemed a symbol of Okinawans’ wrath and resistance of U.S. occupation.

14. While given the state of current affairs, the choice for independence seems obvious and desirable for people in Taiwan and Hong Kong, it is less so in Okinawa. Though Okinawans also have a clear sense of identity different from Japanese and a group of independence activists that formed the Kariyushi Club (formerly Ryukyu Independent Party), the demand for Okinawan independence is not as loud as expected.

15. On Dulles’s vision of Cold War geopolitics, see Immerman (1992).

16. In “DaMainland to me,” Hawaiian poet Joseph Balaz’s reverses the relationship between islands and continents to assert an identification with Hawaii as the mainland and homeland.

17. It is important to take a longer view on such historical transitions, as they tell stories of resistance and incomplete control that “sovereignty transition,” often understood as a one-time event, tends to conceal.

18. I put the “native” in quotation mark to signal the complex articulation of the term in Taiwan because the native now refers to both the aboriginal communities that despite intermarriage with the Han settlers are Austronesian in origin and the Han settlers who came to Taiwan before 1949, who are better known as benshengren (people of Taiwan province) as opposed to waishengshen (people from other provinces) that came with the KMT regime after 1949. During Japanese colonisation, the distinction of identity in Taiwan is made between “people from the inner land” (naichijin) and “people of this island” (hontojin). The spatial distinction is critical to the articulation of identity. Yet, while the ethnic labels of bensheng and waisheng are still in use today, both groups have become “native” after 70 years of localisation. Thus, while Baodiao’s nationalist politics has the potential to unite ethnic differences, it also conceals the ethnic hierarchy and social inequality in the making of the “native.” On the liminality and intimacy between Okinawa and Taiwan, see Matsuda (2019).

19. For other variants of radical democracy and their relations to Laclau and Mouffe, see Little and Loyad (2008).

20. The media covered Hong Kong protestors’ waving of British and American flags and considered that an invocation of nostalgia, resistance, and call for help. See for instance Coulson (2019); Sum (2019); Torres, Davies, and Yiu (2019).

21. Though what is described here are fluid situations that may change over time, the sentiment built over these bordering acts will not vanish overnight. Likely, it will linger a while longer as or than the pandemic.

22. This idea of re-ordering the state and re-othering the citizenry is borrowed from Chu and Hsu (2018), who argue that Kinmen and Matsu islands in the evolution of cross-Strait relations take on the function of “double bordering.” This idea is further developed in Chu’s Ph.D dissertation (2019).

23. For a transcription of Pompeo’s speech, see https://www.state.gov/communist-china-and-the-free-worlds-future/, accessed July 26, 2020.