NEW YORK/BEIJING — US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has urged China and Japan to let “cool heads” prevail in a dispute over a cluster of East China Sea islands, but her pleas fell on deaf ears as Chinese and Japanese diplomats again traded fierce words. Clinton met Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi on the sidelines of this week's UN General Assembly meeting in New York and said it was important to cool the quarrel over the islands that has soured ties between Asia's two largest economies, a senior State Department official said. The uninhabited islets, whose nearby waters are thought to hold potentially rich natural gas reserves, are known as the Diaoyu islands in China and the Senkaku islands in Japan. They have been under Japan's control since 1895. “The secretary ... again urged that cooler heads prevail, that Japan and China engage in dialogue to calm the waters,” the official told reporters. “We believe that Japan and China have the resources, have the restraint, have the ability to work on this directly and take tensions down, and that is our message to both sides.” Yang, however, used a portion of China's annual address to the UN General Assembly Thursday night to forcefully restate Beijing's stance that the islands had belonged to China from ancient times and were seized in 1895 after Japan defeated the Qing Dynasty in a war. Yang also condemned the Japanese government's purchase of the islands earlier this month from their private owner, a step that sparked protests across China and prompted Beijing to curb bilateral trade and tourism. “The moves taken by Japan are totally illegal and invalid,” he said of the purchase, which Tokyo says was done to ease the dispute by preventing the islands' use by Japanese activists. “They can in no way change the historical fact that Japan stole the Diaoyu and affiliated islands and that China has sovereignty over them,” Yang told the General Assembly. Japan restated Tokyo's position that no sovereignty dispute exists and that Japan began surveying the islands a decade before deciding to incorporate them in 1895, and there exists no evidence that the islands belonged to China. “It has only been since the 1970s that the government of China and the Taiwanese authorities began making their assertions on territorial sovereignty over the Senkaku Islands,” said Kazuo Kodama, Japan's deputy UN ambassador. “Before then they did not express any objections.” China has declared the islands “sacred territory,” and Taiwan has also asserted its own sovereignty over the area. China's UN Ambassador Li Baodong accused the Japanese envoy of “resorting to spurious, fallacious arguments that defy all reason and logic”. “The recent so-called purchase of the islands is nothing different than money laundering,” he said, accusing Tokyo of buying stolen property when it acquired the islands this month. Continuing the barrage of rhetoric on Friday, Assistant Foreign Minister Le Yucheng told a forum i n Beijing o n the 40th anniversary of China-Japan diplomatic ties that the island purchase decision was “like lobbing an atom bomb at China”. — Reuters
