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Edited on Sat Apr-16-05 08:13 PM by Filius Nullius
"Thousands march in Chinese demonstrations: Protestors upset with WWII history in Japanese textbooks"
The way CNN.com and other members of the mainstream media are handling the story about Chinese-Japanese tensions makes it seem that it is all about righteous Chinese indignation over revisionist Japanese history textbooks. It is not. The textbooks are a pretext for China's true intentions, which are quite sinister.
The report barely mentions the dispute over drilling in the East China Sea. This is the real reason for the bellicose chest pounding in China. They are trying to intimidate the Japanese into allowing themselves to be "whipstocked," as they say in the oil and gas industry. By drilling at an angle into the natural gas deposits that lie under the portion of the East China Sea controlled by Japan in accordance with international law, the Chinese can use what amounts to a "long straw" to suck out Japanese natural gas reserves.
This is why the Chinese have refused Japanese requests to see the records of exploratory drilling by the Chinese in the ocean floor between the two countries. When the Japanese announced they would drill their own exploratory wells, the Chinese government arranged these demonstrations as a non-too-subtle means of threatening their neighbor.
Buried in the last paragraph in the main story is a chilling quote from a marcher that makes it clear that this is all about a different kind of state-sponsored terrorism, one of which the world has not seen the likes since Hitler was permitted to march unopposed into the Sudetenland and take over the coal deposits there:
"'The Chinese people are angry,' said one marcher, Michael Teng, a graduate student at Donghua University. 'We will play along with Japan and smile nicely at them, but they have to know they have a large, angry neighbor.'"
As we approach what some experts believe is the time of “peak oil,” i.e., the crest of the petroleum/natural gas supply curve, could we be seeing some of the warning signs of the disputes that will inevitably arise around the globe as countries vie over dwindling oil and gas supplies?
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