This could be one of the biggest challenges in the coming years.
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Wave of nationalism sweeps through Northeast Asia
China, Japan and North and South Korea grapple for position during a time of transition and with a new set of leaders with more hawkish backgrounds.
By Barbara Demick, Los Angeles Times
December 23, 2012
BEIJING — Both Koreas soon will be governed by the progeny of Cold War strongmen. China is in the hands of the son of one of Mao Tse-tung's revolutionary comrades. The incoming prime minister of Japan is a long-standing hawk and the grandson of one of Japan's war cabinet leaders.
The future is looking uninspiringly like the past in NortheastAsia. And although few (other than doomsday theorists) are predicting another war, the alignment of new leaders seems likely to cause some bumps in the year ahead.
"In the short term, I take a pessimistic view. Some kind of new Cold War-type confrontation could happen," said Han Yong-sup of the Korea National Defense University, speaking inSeoul this month at a conference on China's transition.
Any transition is a sensitive period, as new leaders try to establish their nationalist bona fides with their own public, and Northeast Asia is going through three simultaneously.
The Chinese Communist Party last month installed Xi Jinpingas general secretary amid an unexpectedly robust campaign to assert Chinese sovereignty in the South China and East China seas. He is to become president in March. Japan and South Korea conducted elections three days apart last week, selecting conservative governments.
North Korea's leader, 29-year-old Kim Jong Un, has been in power only a year and directed a satellite launch Dec. 12 in what many believe was an effort to assert his legitimacy as the heir to his late father, Kim Jong Il, and grandfather, Kim Il Sung.
Foreign policy analysts say that as the leaderships go through transitions, the countries are also jockeying for position in a changing world order in which China plays a newly dominant role.
China's rapid growth has it on course to become the world's largest economy by the end of this decade, and its projection of newfound power is putting pressure on all the other countries in the region.
"There is potential for rising tensions and mishandling of important relationships from every direction," said Scott Snyder of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Though family legacy may not be destiny, it is at least an interesting coincidence that all four of the new Asian leaders have significant nationalist bloodlines.
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