On June 4, 2023, Xi Jinping visited a national archive in Beijing where he commented on a 16th-century Chinese diplomatic document related to Ryukyu (present-day Okinawa): “When I was working in Fuzhou, I knew that the city had the Ryukyu residence and tombs, that its connections with Ryukyu ran deep, and that thirty-six clans from Fujian had gone to Ryukyu.”
Beyond reflexive invocations of Taiwan and the complicated local relationship with U.S. basing on the island, China’s historical perspective regarding Okinawa remains poorly understood in Washington — a lack of understanding that has significant, but unaddressed, security implications.
Xi’s statement quickly attracted international attention as “the first that [he] has publicly made on the Ryukyu Islands since he took office.” Xi’s statement might be considered, on the one hand, a countermeasure to Japan’s increasingly unambiguous stance toward Taiwan, or a part of China’s “Ryukyu Undetermined Status Theory” (a doctrine claiming the San Francisco Peace Treaty, and thus Japan’s claim on Okinawa, is invalid) on the other. Yet this approach is unlikely to impact directly on Okinawan sentiment.
Rather, Beijing’s general disinformation campaign against Japan is indirectly focused on supporting pro-Okinawan independence, confirming Okinawa remains key to China’s strategic vision of its periphery. That interpretation is further supported by Xi’s timing. Although Okinawa has anchored U.S. forward presence in the Pacific since 1945, Washington’s diminished commitment to its allies suggests China’s campaign is a challenge not only to Japanese sovereignty but also to the U.S.-Japan alliance. Washington, to be sufficiently positioned to respond to China’s agenda, needs to fully understand how the tributary relationship espoused in the 16th-century documents, compounded by a straining U.S.-Japan relationship, represents significant implications for strategic alliances and cooperation in Northeast Asia.
Strategic Origins
The documents Xi reviewed at the archive originate in a centuries-long tributary relationship between China and Okinawa. In the late 14th century, the newly established Ming Empire (1368–1644) began receiving tribute missions from the Ryukyu Kingdom. Since the Ming court enforced a maritime ban restricting foreign trade to designated tributary states, Ryukyu became a privileged intermediary. Any powers seeking commerce with China had to do so through Ryukyu.
This arrangement brought considerable prosperity and left behind an archive of diplomatic documents in Chinese — like those Xi referenced. Such wealth and privileges, however, drew the attention of the Satsuma Domain in present-day Kagoshima, Japan. In 1609, Satsuma invaded Ryukyu, bringing it under its suzerainty.
Thereafter, Ryukyu entered a state of dual subordination to China and Japan. Satsuma exercised considerable control over Ryukyu’s domestic affairs, including royal succession, with Ryukyu’s kings answering ultimately to the Tokugawa Shogunate. Yet China remained unaware of this new political arrangement and continued to treat Ryukyu as a tributary state. When Ryukyuan envoys travelled to China, they wore Chinese dress; when Chinese envoys visited Ryukyu, the court adopted Chinese robes and rituals. In practice, while Ryukyu was nominally a tributary state to China, Japanese authority pervaded the island’s politics and culture.
Dual subordination ended in the late 19th century. After the Meiji Restoration, Japan abolished the domain system in 1871 and moved to incorporate peripheral territories under direct central administration. The Ryukyu Kingdom was thus placed under Kagoshima’s jurisdiction, effectively bringing it under direct Japanese control and abolishing its royal title.
Japan’s incorporation of Ryukyu was galvanized by the 1874 Taiwan expedition — a military intervention launched after Ryukyuan sailors were killed by indigenous Taiwanese; an event Japan used as a pretext to assert sovereignty over the island, thus forcing China to acknowledge Japanese administrative authority. The Qing Empire (1644–1911), preoccupied with recovering Xinjiang from Central Asian forces backed by Russia and Britain, paid little attention to these developments. Nonetheless, China’s position remained consistent: Ryukyu belonged in its sphere of influence, not as a directly governed territory but as a tributary state whose internal affairs China did not administer — a historical relationship between Ryukyu and China that remains the foundation for Beijing’s “deep connections” and claims to Okinawa.
Japan’s Response
Xi’s June 2023 statement triggered immediate alarm across Japan’s political establishment. The Japanese media — spanning Nikkei, Yomiuri, and Asahi — noted his “unprecedented” (irei) comments. Ambassador to China Yutaka Yokoi concluded that, for China, “the current international order is something arbitrarily created by Western nations, and that China [therefore] does not view it as ‘eternally immutable.’”
To some, this comment reflected less a challenge to Japanese sovereignty than a response to Japan’s evolving role in maintaining the international order, extending to Taiwan, “which China considers an internal affair.”
This contention of ownership is nothing new. Prior to Japan’s substantially revised stance on a Taiwan contingency — directly acknowledged for the first time in Japan’s Defense White Paper in 2022 — China’s People’s Daily infamously claimed in 2013 that Okinawa’s ownership, like the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, remained “unresolved.”
Today, Japan’s security establishment views China as an existential threat. Tokyo’s 2025 Defense White Paper indicates clearly that China represents “an unprecedented and the greatest strategic challenge” facing Japan. Defense analysts at the National Institute for Defense Studies (NIDS) warn that China focuses on eroding rival nations’ sovereignty through sustained gray-zone pressure while avoiding direct military confrontation, a strategy that one expert described as having “no boundary between China’s peace and wartime actions.”
In response, as Chinese military pressure around the island has intensified dramatically in recent years, Okinawa has assumed increased significance in Japan’s defense calculus. Japan’s Defense Ministry, for example, recognizes the strait between Okinawa’s main island and Miyako Island as “strategically important in both enabling access to the Pacific from the continent and rejecting access from the Pacific to the continent.”
Indicative of intensifying tensions, following Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae’s controversial remarks about Japan potentially responding militarily in a Taiwan contingency, China continues to amplify retaliatory pressure on Japan, including renewed claims calling into doubt Japan’s sovereignty over Okinawa. Dismissing the assertions, Chief Cabinet Secretary Minoru Kihara’s official response was simply that “there is absolutely no doubt that Okinawa is our nation’s territory.”
Furthering the argument, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) website argues that China and Taiwan only began asserting sovereignty after a 1968 United Nations survey suggested the presence of petroleum deposits in the East China Sea. Establishing historical precedent for Japan’s authority, Tokyo cites varied evidence recognizing the islands as Japanese territory — including a 1958 Chinese atlas, 1953 articles from the People’s Daily, and 1920 consul letters from the Republic of China. Summarizing Japan’s position, the ministry maintains that Japan incorporated the islands as terra nullius (“land belonging to no state”) in 1895 after surveys confirmed no trace of Chinese control.
Okinawa and the United States
Following the invasion of Okinawa in 1945 and signaling the end of the Allied Occupation of Japan, the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty established a postwar framework that still governs Okinawa’s status. This treaty placed the Ryukyu Islands under U.S. administration while acknowledging — as John Foster Dulles, an advisor to U.S. President Harry Truman, clarified — Japan’s “residual sovereignty” over the islands. In 1960, the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty extended this framework, stipulating expanded U.S. access to critical basing and ports while guaranteeing American aid if Japan were to be attacked. Then, in 1972, after nearly 27 years of U.S. administration, Okinawa was formally reverted to Japan. However, U.S. military facilities remain substantially intact in Okinawa; more than 70 percent of the U.S. military presence in Japan is concentrated in less than 1 percent of Japan’s total land.
This concentration of U.S. military forces is only one part of a complicated history and a persistent source of friction and grievances, which Beijing’s (dis)information campaigns exploit. Yet the strategic importance remains clear: Okinawa’s geographic position — roughly equidistant from Taiwan, the Korean Peninsula, and the South China Sea — makes it indispensable to any credible U.S. posture in the Western Pacific. As experimental wargaming simulations have shown, basing American forces in Okinawa is a key factor in any military dispute regarding Taiwan. However, the United States’ wavering commitment to the security of its allies and to protecting Taiwan alerts both Japan and China that this commitment may no longer be assured.
As with U.S. European allies, the Trump administration has made demands for increased burden-sharing with Japan. Although President Donald Trump has held this position since at least 1987, when he published a full-page newspaper advertisement criticizing allied free-riding, this grievance has resurfaced with a renewed intensity in his second term, manifested in an overall trend of a faltering U.S. presence in, and weakening strategic commitment to, the Indo-Pacific. Japan’s recent defense spending increases, including its accelerated pledge to increase spending to 2% of GDP, reflect not only Tokyo’s recognition of U.S. uncertainty but also the need to adapt to ongoing Chinese pressures evidenced in President Xi’s loosely veiled claim to Okinawa.
The balance of geopolitical power in the Pacific may turn on whether the United States recognizes and is prepared to respond to the intensifying challenge being asserted by Beijing — a challenge that, to date, appears to be poorly understood in Washington.
Conclusion
History offers one answer to what a Chinese claim on Okinawa might look like. It also shows why such a claim would be untenable. The Ryukyu question was one of the key reasons the Qing Empire shifted from its earlier territorial conception (that only lands under direct Qing administration could be considered Chinese territory) toward a broader notion that all tributary states belonged to China’s domain. Although the consequences for Qing’s naval forces were disastrous, assumptions about tributary states led the Qing to intervene in France’s invasion of Vietnam in 1883 and in Japan’s invasion of Korea in 1894.
By invoking the tributary interpretation of Okinawa, Xi may be reinforcing justifications for a more aggressive posture toward Taiwan. Applying the same logic to China’s other former tributaries, such as Korea, Vietnam, or Southeast Asia, however, would destabilize the entire region. Moreover, this reasoning creates a dilemma for Beijing itself: Russia, for example, holds former Qing territories that China cannot realistically expect to reclaim.
Recognizing that reclamation is unrealistic, Beijing’s actual goal is one of equal consequence but, based on the persistent misinformation campaigns surrounding Xi’s recent comments, a goal that China evidently assumes to be achievable. Rather than seeking to reclaim its historical tributaries, China’s misinformation campaign more plausibly aims to drive a wedge between the United States and Japan by supporting Okinawan independence, exploiting local grievances regarding U.S. military bases, and cultivating a distinct Ryukyuan identity at odds with Japanese incorporation.
Clear signs of this intent are already evident. In 2023, Dalian Maritime University established a research center for Ryukyu studies, emphasizing the indigeneity of Ryukyuans, directly contradicting Japan’s long-standing policy recognizing only the Ainu of Hokkaido as indigenous. Subsequently, in October 2025, China’s deputy representative to the United Nations publicly stated that Japan should stop discriminating against indigenous people, such as those from Okinawa, provoking strong opposition from Japan.
This persistent narrative has, to date, failed to make substantive inroads within Okinawa itself. At the 2025 anniversary of the islands’ reversion, for example, a Ryukyuan royal descendant maintained that Okinawans were not a part of dual subordination and are, according to cited genetic evidence, ethnically Japanese. But as with Beijing’s military gray-zone tactics, it does not need to win this argument — only to sustain it.
History clarifies why alarmist comparisons between Beijing’s rhetoric on Okinawa and its claims on Taiwan miss the mark. Xi’s invocation of tributary history is less a claim over sovereignty than it is an attack on the U.S.-Japan alliance — driving a wedge between Tokyo and Washington to erode American power projection in the Pacific. Yet the two objectives are not unconnected.
Alliance cohesion, transparency, and interoperability in places like Okinawa ultimately underwrite deterrence over Taiwan. American support for Taiwan needs to be unambiguous, and so must its commitments to the alliances that make such support credible. The contest over Okinawan identity is not hypothetical; without a clear understanding of historical precedents, current ambiguities only give Beijing more room to operate.
