CHINA and Japan are sliding towards war. In the waters and skies around disputed islands, China is escalating actions designed to challenge decades of Japanese control. It is accompanying its campaign with increasingly blood-curdling rhetoric. Japan, says the China Daily, is the “real danger and threat to the world”. A military clash, says Global Times, is now “more likely…We need to prepare for the worst.” China appears to be preparing for the first armed confrontation between the two countries in seven decades (see article).

China and Japan have well-known differences over history and territory—most pressingly over five islets, out in the East China Sea, which Japan controls and calls the Senkakus but which China lays claim to and calls the Diaoyus. Rational actors with deeply entwined economies are supposed to sort out their differences, or learn to put them safely to one side. At least, that was the assumption with China and Japan. But this changed in September, after Japan’s then prime minister, Yoshihiko Noda, nationalised the three islands Japan did not already own. It was a clumsy attempt to avoid them falling into the hands of Shintaro Ishihara, a right-wing China-baiter who was governor of Tokyo until late last year. Yet China insisted that the move was an anti-China conspiracy to strengthen Japan’s claim. It set out to blow a hole in Japanese pretensions to sole control of the waters and skies around the islands. Incursions by surveillance vessels came first. Then, in December, a patrol plane buzzed the islands; Japan scrambled fighter planes. This month Japanese and Chinese jets sought to tail each other near the islands’ air space. Japan, newspapers report, is considering ordering warning shots to be fired next time. A Chinese general says that would count as the start of “actual combat”. So long as China vies for control, conflict will be a hair-trigger away. This week senior American officials rushed to Tokyo to urge caution on Shinzo Abe’s hawkish new government. America is obliged to come to Japan’s aid if it is attacked, and being sucked into a conflict with China is almost too unbearable to contemplate. But in the face of repeated Chinese incursions, a Japanese reaction is understandable. Mr Abe has announced that after a decade of declining military budgets, defence spending will rise this year. This week he visited South-East Asia to shore up relations with countries that also have concerns about Chinese expansion.

Mr Abe’s aims in South-East Asia were crude. But it may be that, short of simply handing the islands over, nothing that the Japanese government could do could satisfy China. This week an editorial in the China Daily acknowledged that Japan is working to build bridges with China, but immediately dismissed the efforts as part of a “two-faced strategy”. Japan, says China, is the threat—though, unlike China, it has not picked a military fight since 1945.

Chinese diplomats accuse Japan of attempting to do down their country when it is beset by domestic challenges. Yet they bristle at the notion that Chinese incursions seek to take advantage of Japanese weaknesses, such as enfeebled governments and a sullen economy. China seems unwilling to entertain other perspectives or interests. The sources of this chauvinism are not entirely clear. It may be that the government is responding to the ultra-nationalist sentiments that people increasingly give voice to on the internet.

Horrible history

East Asian parallels from a century ago are hard to ignore. Then, as justification for continental expansion, a bullying Japan drank from a dangerous brew of nationalism and a manufactured sense of foreign aggression and victimhood. As China pursues a policy of maritime expansion, the rhetoric of victimisation is remarkably similar. The coming clash that China now talks about could be as calamitous as that previous one was. It would imperil not just China’s but the region’s peace and its momentous economic advances.

The world, including America, has a duty to warn China before it is too late, though warnings will be interpreted as conspiracies. So who in China will speak out against this unfolding madness?