The Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands have brought China and Japan into a bitter dispute for many decades. With regard to the real question of who owns sovereignty over the islands, the two claimants can not come to terms on several critical issues, such as whether the islands were terra nullius when Japan claimed sovereignty in 1895, whether Japan returned the islands to China after the Japanese defeat in WWII, and how their maritime boundary in the East China Sea should be demarcated according to international law. There is no ready solution to the longstanding stalemate, but the pending dispute could be shelved and managed from escalating into a military conflict.
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Dr. Zhongqi PAN is an Associate Professor at the School of International Relations and Public Affairs in Fudan University. He received his Ph.D. in international relations from Fudan University in 1999. He was a visiting scholar to Lund University (2006), the John K. Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University (2004), the Henry L. Stimson Center (2001), and University of Tokyo (1999–2000).
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Pan, Z. Sino-Japanese Dispute over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands: The Pending Controversy from the Chinese Perspective. J CHINESE POLI SCI 12, 71–92 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11366-007-9002-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11366-007-9002-6