I find this to be a shallow "just-so" take on geopolitics. Many of the disputed islands have strategic economic & military value in their territory. There's a lot of googlable analysis on how these islands are valued but it honestly seems a little laughable to suggest that China or the other Asian countries will just accept losing some "useless islands". Given the secretive nature of CCP behavior I don't think I can prove that their dispute isn't driven by "keeping the face" playground psychology, but more practical & sensible motivations are apparent and I can meta-comment that it seems very unlikely that this dispute would confound experienced diplomats for this long if it was as simple as keeping face.

If you look for critical analysis of many high-stakes geopolitical disputes you can usually find a very practical and utilitarian motivation behind it. An explanation that relies on popular stereotypes is basically the opposite of that.

I mean, just compare the advantage of (I'm taking the point of vue of Japan here):

- being friend with all your neighbors and having a couple less islands, to which you could go in vacations just fine anyway, or

- having your islands but being enemy with everybody, spoiling your gross product on arms race and exercises, creating an atmosphere of hate for your resident foreigners, hindering international commerce, voting laws to reinforce government coertion...

They could negociate to buy the rare earth or any other useful resources around these islands, if they belonged to a foreign but friendly neighbor.

Your perspective on the pros and cons in this dispute are very personal and don't involve a lot of geopolitical factors. The ability to go to a few islands for holiday is not a significant geopolitical benefit. Creating an atmosphere of hate for your resident foreigners is not a serious geopolitical disadvantage (citizens of both China and USA are hated in many places yet they both remain powerful and wealthy countries). Countries don't threaten expensive and risky military action because they are worried about a lack of friendly holiday destinations.

The discovery of important resources like natural gas and fish near eg. the Senkaku Islands seems more on the mark but is also more serious than "you can just buy these useful resources". Obviously a substantial amount of resources will cost a lot of resources to buy if you don't own it, but also resource ownership fuels domestic economic growth that supports the happiness of your citizens and strengthens your ability to defend and sponsor your interests in future conflicts.

Either way, settling this conflict by surrendering these islands will not on their own establish friendly relations between China and its neighbors. China is in deeper economic competition with countries like Japan beyond these islands. More conflict will need to be resolved before you can claim that settling the island dispute will result in a foreign but friendly neighbor.

I was not clear, I am not advocating for any of these countries to change the status quo, I'm just advocating for them to accept the status quo.

That's why my arguments look like shallow, it's because indeed it really is a shallow problem.

Japan would gain everything to accept that these Russian-controlled islands are Russian after all, China would better accept that Senkakus are not Chinese, and so on.

They do not loose anything, and they -- as I said -- gain the privilege to be able to spend their vacations there, buy resources extracted there, and many new friends as well as a largely more peaceful atmosphere towards their resident foreigners.

The only reason they don't do that is an irrational one. As I said, again, it's just to not loose face. Lol.

> They do not loose anything

Yes they do. Although the Senkaku Islands' "status quo" is controlled by Japan, China loses potential wealth if they cede control of the islands. Not gaining potential resources is practically indistinguishable from losing resources.

Obviously you can't count everything as "potential wealth", but China evidently thinks it has a realistic shot at claiming the wealth of these islands and is rationally reluctant to lose such a practical opportunity.

This is an interesting conversation, thank you. You are considering what I say and replying to it rationally, that's refreshing, as it's rarer and rarer on HN for this kind of hot subjects.

My point of view is that a change of the status quo is an outlandish impossibility.

It would mean a really nasty, bloody conflict, and it is not even sure that anything good would result for the winner in total.

This is based on this assumption that I only considered either 1/ they keep disputing the status quo (but not changing it) or 2/ they accept it and build on it.

Maybe it is not very clear for the Senkakus example, as Japan is only "loosely" controlling it.

But it's much more obvious for the Northern Territories, the islands North of Japan that are controlled by Russia: Russia has bases, even cities on it, and is plentifully in control.

I'm not sure what your point is here. That the Wuhan lab shouldn't be called out for likely causing a global pandemic? It's being done in a very fair and non-aggressive manner. I don't really see what other approach could be said to take into account this stereotype more.

To keep it simple: are there benefits of calling them out?

Are you really just in search of scientific truth, and is this science useful in this context of present and maybe future crisis?

My point is that actually it (the calling out) is done aggressively, and it was especially when Trump was president. And maybe China is afraid to be shamed and discredited on the international scene, which would delight geopolitical enemies like US, or having to repay colossal sums of money to the world. And thus they would be refusing even the possibility of a lab leak.

If China was given a more relaxed treatment (but is it even possible? isn't the world out to find scapegoats and make them feel shame or get them to pay?), maybe they would have more willingly investigated the origins of the virus, even probably as a simple consequence of their other ongoing scientific investigations on covid.

I may seem unduly focused on the concept of shame in this comment, but this is precisely why it is an Asian problem. It is not obvious for Westerners that shame or discredit would be that much important. The money problem only adds to it.

But what's even more important here to figure out a solution, is that the investigations about the virus origin will likely not help at all to solve the crisis.

Solutions are more in studying the variants, preventing the spread, and developping vaccines and antivirals.

Developing effective preventive solutions require that you understand the problem. If the problem is a lab leak, then policies that address insufficient lab safety standards are warranted. Frankly, the Chinese government should feel ashamed and discredited if it was a lab leak under its responsibility. Any US involvement in the lab leak should be investigated and uncovered as well. China would have no qualms pointing fingers at the US if the roles were reversed, and they'd be right to do so. Being sensitive to shame has never been a reasonable excuse for covering up the truth. Coddling China is not only unjust, it damages our ability to prevent this from happening again.

This is also one thing that I dispute: knowing the origin will not make the world better, because a lab leak is theoretically impossible anyway, given the lab safety standards.

So I doubt that knowing the leak would change the outcome in the future or prevent the mistakes.

It is also highly plausible that China has already taken steps, internally. Like, the Wuhan lab is closed now.

So, in the light of this fact, too, calling out China will not make them do more than they already did to address the issue.

If the problem is the lack of enforcement of security (maybe because of deeper lingering problems, like the fact that local authorities are too much autonomous, behave like little tyrants themselves, etc), then adding even more security policy will not do anything.

If the answer is to change the whole way China is administered, this will just not happen (unfortunately).

> because a lab leak is theoretically impossible anyway, given the lab safety standards

It's obviously not impossible because we're seeing evidence that it is possibly a lab leak, that's the whole point of the Vanity Fair article. This reasoning works backwards from a theory where a lab leak is "theoretically impossible" but obviously if a fair and impartial investigation revealed that it was a lab leak, then logically that theory is wrong. If theories about lab safety are wrong, that's very important information.

> It is also highly plausible that China has already taken steps, internally. Like, the Wuhan lab is closed now.

That doesn't help other labs overseas. Other countries also perform bio-research in labs and any safety discoveries can prevent similarly bad outcomes internationally as well. If a fair and impartial investigation reveals that foreign labs are susceptible to the same lab leak that caused this pandemic, that's really valuable and essential information in preventing the next pandemic. Whether or not the origin is a direct consequence of Chinese government carelessness or whether it's an accident that could happen to other labs or whether it's not a lab leak at all, we need to know the truth.

> If the answer is to change the whole way China is administered, this will just not happen (unfortunately).

Not with that attitude. If your only response to bullies and bad actors is absolutely nothing, of course they won't change, they have no reason to change. The international community should impose punishments for China's bad behavior and non-cooperation.

You would be correct if there was something that could be done internationally, but nobody was able to do anything for the repression of Hong-Kong protests (and in this case it was a very voluntary thing, not a lab mistake).

China has bazillions of elite scientists (heck, they even consider that Harvard is low-ball compared to the entrance level of their top-notch national universities), so if anything, I would advocate to get them to cooperate in the global fight against the virus (medications, vaccines, mechanisms of illness, variants, etc).