Writes analyst Sherwood Zhang of Matthews Asia Funds (bold highlights mine)
It’s no wonder some pundits began calculating the potential economic impact that strained China-Japan relations may have on Japanese firms. But during my recent week-long visit in Shanghai, my on-the-ground observations following the protests left me feeling as if the concerns might be overstated. An executive of a Japanese restaurant chain operator told me that physical damage to the firm’s stores during the protest was actually quite limited compared to the impact that followed anti-Japan protests in 2005, which were sparked by controversies surrounding a shrine for Japan’s war dead. I also visited a popular Japanese retail store where customers were picking through the season’s new arrivals with no obvious concern for politics. In this globalized economy, boycotting Japanese business interests is no small feat as so many firms are intertwined. One Taiwanese leasing company I met with, which provides much-needed funding for small businesses in China, actually counts a Japanese financial institution as a strategic shareholder. These types of partnerships and joint ventures exist in nearly every sector in China, spanning food and beverage to auto manufacturing.At the end of my trip, I noticed one last bit of encouragement—a wedding ceremony held at my Shanghai hotel. Seeing the photograph of a happy union between a Japanese bride and her Chinese groom on a television monitor in the hotel lobby gave me some hope for greater harmony between the people of China and Japan.
I have been pointing out that the Senkaku-Scarborough controversial disputes have been about concealed national political agenda and how the Chinese government has had a hand in agitating nationalist uproar, for reasons other than history and oil-gas-natural resources than as cover to or as distraction of the current economic woes, to suppress dissent and as pretext to inflate the system.
The world of politics is a world of smoke and mirrors.
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