Ng Han Guan/Associated Press
Anti-Japan demonstrations outside the Japanese embassy in Beijing in September.
BEIJING — A group of Chinese scholars, analysts and military officials convened on a recent morning in a spartan schoolroom to draw attention to China’s simmering territorial dispute with Japan. Participants spoke in urgent tones. Reporters took notes. A spirit of solidarity reigned.
But the deliberations were not about the barren rocks in the East China Sea that are known as Diaoyu in China and Senkaku in Japan and over which the two nations have been sparring with competing naval patrols.
Instead, the group gathered at Renmin University focused on a far more enticing prize — Japan’s southernmost island chain, which includes the strategic linchpin of Okinawa, home to 1.3 million Japanese citizens, not to mention 27,000 American troops.
The Chinese government itself has not asserted a claim to Okinawa or the other isles in the Ryukyu chain. But the seminar last month, which included state researchers and retired officers from the senior ranks of the People’s Liberation Army, was the latest act in what seems to be a semiofficial campaign in China to question Japanese rule of the islands.
A magazine affiliated with the Chinese Foreign Ministry published a four-page spread on the issue in March. The People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s official newspaper, weighed in next with a lengthy op-ed by two prominent scholars at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Two more pieces appeared in Global Times, another state newspaper.
And a week before the seminar, a hawkish Chinese military official argued publicly that Japan did not have sovereignty over the Ryukyu Islands because its inhabitants paid tribute to Chinese emperors hundreds of years before they started doing so to Tokyo. “For now, let’s not discuss whether they belong to China — they were certainly China’s tributary state,” the official, Maj. Gen. Luo Yuan, told the state-run China News Service. “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.”
On Sunday, another senior Chinese military official appeared to back off those remarks. The official, Lt. Gen. Qi Jianguo, a deputy chief of staff, assured a conference in Singapore that China’s position on the islands had not changed. “Scholars are free to put forward any ideas they want,” he said. “It doesn’t represent the views of the Chinese government.”
But almost all the voices in China pressing the Okinawa issue are affiliated in some way with the government. Many of them, including General Luo, are known for spouting nationalistic views that can go beyond the official line — and for being called on to do so when it serves a wider propaganda goal.
In this case, the goal may be to strengthen China’s claim on the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands, more than 250 miles west of Okinawa. Tensions have been running high since September, when the Japanese government bought three of the islands from a private owner. Japan said it did so to prevent them from falling into radical nationalist hands, but the move prompted days of street protests in China.
Analysts say that Beijing may be raising the prospect of a simultaneous dispute over the Okinawa chain to strengthen its negotiating hand and convey to Japanese officials that the Chinese government must contend with nationalist public sentiment, too.
At the Renmin seminar, Zhang Shengjun, deputy dean of the school of political science and international studies at Beijing Normal University, said that questioning the ownership of Okinawa was useful for projecting China as a regional power.
“People think that China’s foreign policy has only one face — wanting a harmonious world,” Mr. Zhang said. But the Okinawa issue, he said, was helpful in showing the “black face” of Chinese foreign policy. In Chinese opera, the black face is a reference to a tough, bold character.
Noboru Yamaguchi, a retired Japanese Army general and now a professor at the National Defense University in Tokyo, said the Chinese approach might backfire. It will make the Japanese resist Chinese efforts to get control of the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands even more, he said, and it will have broader effects. “I don’t think it is wise for the Chinese to do this, because it hurts their reputation in the international community,” he said.
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