TOPIC: Fears grow of clash as Japan and US stoke war of the skies with China

US B-52s and Japanese civilian aircraft fly through Beijing’s ‘air defence zone’ over disputed islands

The looming struggle for regional supremacy in the Asia-Pacific is not simply a clash over strategic stretches of land and sea, but also over the skies above them. This week, the US and Japan have both defied new Chinese demands by flying aircraft, unannounced, into disputed airspace over a cluster of controversial islands in the East China Sea.

On Saturday, Beijing published a map of its new “air defence identification zone”, with rules requiring foreign aircraft to notify the Chinese military before entering the area. The zone overlaps with an existing Japanese air defence zone, and takes in the islands known to the Chinese as Diaoyu, and to the Japanese as Senkaku, which are subject to competing claims from the two Pacific nations

www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/fears-grow-of-clash-as-japan-and-us-stoke-war-of-the-skies-with-china-8967912.html

Oh dear, haven't Japan and China been rattling sabers for last what, fifty years or so? What the hell is their problem? History? Some rural small islands? Come on... Stupid people on both shores.

I really have hard time understanding these political struggles.

To understand why we have these disputes over bit of rocks which are insignificant in themselves, you have to put yourself in the mind of the things which are in charge.
They have a mind set and are limited to that mindset and can only see the world from that point of view.
Our leaders have been selected through a system which promotes, the most competitive to the top. They don't know, and are unable to think about concepts like cooperation, they will work with another only so long as it serves their own interest, as soon as it does not they will have no compunction about stabbing the other in the back.
From this mindset of competition everything is used to further your own position.
So when a government ratchet up a dispute over ownership of a rock, may they have several motives. They may not be interested in the rock at all, but want to use it as a negotiating chip over another matter. So say China may eventually settle the dispute with Japan over the Rock when trading terms between the two countries are settled more in Chinas favour. Or it maybe distraction China is fed up with the criticism of its human rights, and will back down over the islands when human rights are less reported.
Or it could be like Argentina, and Britain use the Falklands, or Britain and Spain use Gibraltar, that when the economy is not doing well, and the government is under criticism they ratchet up the dispute to distract the population, and rally them around the flag.
The thing is that often the governments do not want to come to a full settlement over these areas of dispute, because they are so useful a tool in their competitive world.
It is only occasionally like when the Russians felt they needed to show the Germans they were a strong military power, and chose to do it by eating a good chunk of Finland would the scum that run us choose to loose these tools.

You're absolutely right... There's not much any sense in political chess game anyway. These concepts just go way over my understanding because my mind does not work in that way. Same kind of profiting and backstabbing goes on in smaller scale too. But when governments play political chess, there's people in between who will get hurt if things turn sour.

Just like what happened between Soviet Union and Finland during WWII. Small get eaten if somebody can profit from it. Off topic, but its a small miracle we didn't end up like Baltic states, annexed by Soviet Union. And darn I'm happy about that.

Just how long have China and Japan had this thing going on? Haven't they had wars or either words or fights for last how many centuries?