Yesterday Japan’s foreign minister Koichiro Gemba announced a new effort by the U.S. and Japanese governments to adjust the plan to relocate U.S. Marines currently stationed in Okinawa. The announcement was widely welcomed in Japan, especially in Okinawa.

The U.S.-Japan Joint Statement on Defense Posture issued on February 8 was very brief, and had very few details. It reiterates the goals of the bilateral agreement to move U.S. Marines off of Okinawa, but media reports suggest that while the total number of Marines leaving the island will remain unchanged, their destination will. The number of Marines heading to Guam is reported to be 4,700, and the remaining 3,300 will be dispersed to other bases in the Asia Pacific.

This is a considerable shift in the U.S. position on Futenma. Since 2009, the U.S. government has insisted on linking agreement on the construction of a new runway in Henoko in the northern part of Okinawa to any troop movements off island. Now, the reduction in Marines can move forward, and the Japanese government can return the land used by the Marines in central Okinawa back to commercial use. This will go a long way to meeting the governor’s hopes for economic development and job creation on the island.

Japan’s foreign and defense ministers appeared rather jubilant at the press conference announcing the new direction of talks over Futenma relocation. The important signal in the statement is the return of five facilities south of Kadena Air Base, and the timing of that base return will no longer be linked to approval of the Futenma Replacement Facility (FRF). When asked about the delinking of what the United States had referred to as an all or nothing “package deal,” Japan’s foreign minister acknowledged that Tokyo had felt “pressured” by Washington.

Yet it may be too early for celebrations. Both governments remain adamant that they need to relocate Futenma Marine Air Station, and argue that there is “no viable alternative” to Henoko bay in Nago City. Activism against this construction plan will likely remain high. Indeed as the two governments were talking this week, the mayor of Nago City, Susumu Inamine, was also making his way around Washington, meeting with think tank experts and Congressional staff on the Hill. Two weeks earlier another delegation of Okinawan politicians and civil society leaders were also here, meeting with ten Congressmen and over forty congressional staff members as well as other Japan experts. There seems little doubt that sentiments in Okinawa opposing the current relocation plan remain high.

For now, this new more flexible approach is truly welcome. For too long the two governments stuck with a plan that could not be implemented. There is still much creative thinking to be done on how to reconfigure U.S. military bases in Japan. Ultimately, we need a comprehensive approach that looks forward to the next decade and beyond, and that fully considers the political transitions underway in Japan and in Asia more broadly. Unpacking the Futenma “package” is an important first step in that direction.

Two recent studies of national cyber power have placed China near the bottom of the table. China is number 13 on the EUI-Booz Allen Hamilton Cyber Power Index, behind Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil but better off than Russia, Turkey, South Africa, and India (the United Kingdom, United States, and Australia are the top three). The Brussels-based Security & Defence Agenda groups China with Italy, Russia, and Poland in the fifth tier (the U.S. and the UK are in the third tier, below Finland, Sweden, and Israel; the top group is empty).

These are very subjective studies based on interviews, surveys, and vague metrics. Still, they cut against the grain of popular perceptions. If you were just paying attention to the almost weekly reporting in the Western press about alleged Chinese cyber espionage, you could be forgiven for thinking that China ruled the cyber waves. Yet recent writings in the Chinese press have more of a “China is vulnerable” flavor and suggest that analysts, if not characterizing the country’s cyber strategy as weak, think there is a great deal of work that remains to be done.

The work ahead is both defensive and offensive, technical and strategic. Zhang Yongfu, a professor at the PLA’s Information Engineering University, told the PLA Daily that the “cybersecurity situation” was in its early stages.  As with every other country, deciding which bureaucracies should be involved in defense and coordinating among them is difficult; cyber management, in Zhang’s words, is fragmented and ineffective.  Since a cyber event could develop over hours if not minutes, policymakers must seriously wonder if the People’s Liberation Army, Ministry of Public Security, Ministry of State Security, and Ministry of Industry and Information Technology can successfully coordinate their roles during a crisis.

Chinese analysts are also grasping with the conundrum that if you wait until you see a problem in your networks, it may already be too late. The Pentagon’s Strategy for Operating in Cyberspace says it will employ “active defense”— “synchronized, real-time capability to discover, detect, analyze, and mitigate threats and vulnerabilities.” Former Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn III compared this to combining a sentry and a sharpshooter. This article on China National Defense News also uses the concept of active defense (积极防御), involving a reliance on cyber reconnaissance and surveillance as well as the realization that defense must be conducted at “all times and all places”, which could be read to mean “defense” in other countries’ networks.

As with most articles about cyberspace, there is a fear that China could lose control over information “nodes and infrastructure” and outside powers could distribute rumors that mislead the public. The growing dependence of the military on networks is a new vulnerability as other powers are preparing to sabotage network command, control, communications, and intelligence systems. Technology is a big concern in all of these articles: the United States has it, China does not. There are also discussions about how the PLA and others can attract and retain hacking talent.

What to make of these assessments? Someone is bound to find a quote from Sun Tzu (Here’s an easy one: “All warfare is based on deception; when we are able to attack, we must seem unable”) and suggest that these articles are meant to confuse, mislead, and lull the United States into a false sense of security. Maybe these articles are primarily focused on domestic audiences, signaling to the Chinese public that the leadership is not standing still while the United States develops a cyber strategy, or perhaps to various domestic institutions and actors that they need to get on board with the emerging strategy.

Perhaps the simplest explanation is that Chinese policymakers fear that they really are at the bottom of the table. Despite outside perceptions of the coherence and efficacy of Chinese cyber strategy, Chinese analysts are feeling increasingly vulnerable in cyberspace.

A few days ago, the Global Times posted a brief opinion piece that questioned the West’s preoccupation with the Wukan village uprising last year and concluded: “China cannot be understood by focusing on the small details, something Western media would do well to appreciate.”

Despite this sage advice, I’ve always liked details and found myself captivated by a just-released survey of 1,791 Chinese farming households across 17 provinces. Conducted by Landesa Rural Development Institute, Renmin University, and Michigan State University, the survey explored issues surrounding rural land use and retention. The survey is especially valuable because it has been conducted five times since 1999, thereby providing a sense for whether conditions have been improving or worsening over time.

Some of the most striking findings:

• There has been a steady increase since 2005 in the number of “land takings” or compulsory state acquisitions, and about 43 percent of the villages surveyed have been subjected to such land takings over the past decade.

• The mean compensation that the local government paid to the farmers was approximately $17, 850 per acre. When it was resold by local authorities, mostly to commercial property developers, the mean price was $740,000 per acre.

• When farmers are relocated or “urbanized,” only a bit more than twenty percent gained an urban hukou or registration; 13.9 percent received urban social security coverage; 9.4 percent received medical insurance; and only 21.4 percent had access to schools for their children.

• Every year, local governments appropriate land from 4 million rural Chinese.

None of this is a good deal for the farmers, and the result, according to Chinese researchers, is that land conflicts are the source of 65 percent of the more than 180,000 protests China experiences annually.

Premier Wen Jiabao, who never misses an opportunity these days to push for a bit more political reform, made the issue of farmers’ rights a central point in his early February 2012 visit to Guangdong. He noted, “The root of the problem is that the land is the property of the farmers, but this right has not been protected in the way it should be.” Wen also noted, “We must certainly protect the voting rights of farmers, and be unwavering in properly carrying out village self-governance and direct election of village committees.”

Despite Wen’s best efforts, without a real system of official accountability or the rule of law, there seems little likelihood that farmers will gain the upper hand any time soon. The Global Times notwithstanding, the details of the survey data say it all: more Wukans are on China’s horizon.

For two decades spent mostly under house arrest, Aung San Suu Kyi was the icon of the Burmese democracy movement, and one of the most famous figures in the world. Jailed in her house, and with the regime totally in control, she had little chance to even engage in politics, and as an icon she remained almost completely above criticism. It was rare that any Burmese democracy advocates, inside or outside of the country, would voice even the mildest criticism of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

But over the past year, as she has been released from house arrest and returned to leadership of the National League for Democracy, Suu Kyi has had to make the shift from icon to working politician, a difficult transition that even some of history’s greatest figures, like Nelson Mandela, took time to master. In the London Review of Books, I analyze this transition, and discuss how — and why— Suu Kyi is no longer above criticism in her movement. You read the entire piece here.

Jared Mondschein looks at the key stories in Asia behind the headlines.

Another Unfortunate First for China – Already the largest consumer and producer of coal in the world, China has now reached another milestone with one of the dirtiest of energy sources: It now imports more coal than any other country. Japan had been the top importer of coal since 1976, but China’s rapid economic growth and consequent energy demand have forced Beijing to seek energy sources wherever they can find them. Even more concerning: China’s coal consumption is projected to increase every year for the next fifteen years.

Unreliable Chinese Statistics in Social Media? – China-based DoNews reports that Sina Weibo, China’s alternative to Twitter, broke Twitter’s record for the most number of posts per second over the Chinese New Year, with an average of 32,312 posts per second (Twitter’s record was 25,088 from a December showing of “Castle in the Sky” on television in Japan). A recent HP Labs paper on Sina Weibo, however, leads to questions about the authenticity of the record: The study found that almost a third of all posts and almost half of retweets were actually spam. It might be worth waiting until authorities crack down on spammers as thoroughly as they do on dissidents online to recognize the record officially.

Tone Deaf Global Times Editorial of the Week – As Josh Kurlantzick noted last week, China’s image in the Philippines–where many pined for a U.S. exit only twenty years ago–is deteriorating. With the recent announcement of discussions on increased security relations between Washington and Manila on the heels of the U.S. “pivot” to Asia, the nationalistic Global Times has decided that China has had enough: “Well-measured sanctions against the Philippines will make it ponder the choice of losing a friend such as China and being a vain partner with the United States. To this end, China may consider cooling down its business ties with the Philippines.” It’s doubtful, however, that the government will heed advice from the Global Times on this matter: In China’s ever important quest for resources, the Philippines is a growing source of key commodities, including iron ore, copper, and nickel.

Preparing for Conflict – A lot of headlines are coming out of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s congressional testimony on worldwide threats on Tuesday. While U.S.-based media highlighted his remarks on Iran, Clapper also made interesting remarks on the countries east of Iran, specifically India and China. He argues in his prepared remarks that the Indian Army doesn’t believe a conflict with China is imminent but is still “strengthening its forces in preparation to fight a limited conflict along the disputed border.” Could this be the latest pressure point in Asia?

 Chinese Soft Power in Taiwan – Beijing has been quite open about the fact that it hopes that increased economic ties between Taiwan and the mainland will bring about closer political ties and eventually unification. The Washington Post profiles Tsai Eng Meng, a Taiwanese businessman who “can’t wait” for unification but who also happens to be the third-richest person in Taiwan, with major business interests in the mainland through his Want Want Group. Tsai denies that his pursuit of closer ties to the mainland is based on financial interests, but it’s hard to believe that he and other wealthy Taiwanese citizens supportive of unification merely want to, as the Post writes, “help Taiwan get over its wariness of the mainland.” According to one poll, wariness of the mainland–despite ever-increasing economic ties–actually increased in 2011 from the year before.

This week the China-watching twitterverse was surprised to discover that Hu Xijin, the editor of the Global Times, was now tweeting. That the editor of the Global Times, an “angry government mouthpiece”  that supports China’s policy of Internet censorship, was accessing a site blocked in China raised a few eyebrows and provoked several people to ask what VPN (a Virtual Private Network) he was using to evade the controls. Somewhat defensively, Hu responded to a characterization of him by The Wall Street Journal‘s ChinaRealTime blog as a “staunch defender of China’s need to censor” by tweeting that he supported the gradual lifting of controls and believed “speech freedom is inevitable in China.”

A very long discussion in the December 2011 issue of Foreign Affairs Review, the journal of the Foreign Affairs University, provides some context for what Hu’s tweeting might be about. The article, entitled “Global Politics in the Web 2.0 Era” is a discussion about how communication technologies are changing politics. The cases cited are the usual ones—the protests after the Iranian elections, the Arab Spring, SMS being used to organize protests against Philippine President Joseph Estrada, the Obama campaign’s use of Facebook and other social media—and political dynamics described are also now well known—web 2.0 empowers the individual to spread information, flattens hierarchies, and lowers the cost of mobilizing groups. Democratization and the growth of civil society are trends difficult to control, and as a result China must have a strategy for bringing about gradual change.

Online expression by Chinese netizens, according to the article, can be “immature, aggressive, or empty.” But if China can develop an effective legal system and internal controls, resolve complaints from society, urge people to contribute policy suggestions and better understand national conditions, and strengthen the capacity of the state and the Party, then web 2.0 technology should be viewed “at least [as] an opportunity that outweighs the challenges.”

There is a foreign policy component of the strategy as well. China must defend its Internet sovereignty. It must raise cybersecurity. It must be on guard against a Wikileak-style strategic crisis. It has to be vigilant against malicious rumors and outside interference. China must oppose America’s Internet Freedom agenda, but it also must do more than be reactive. The Chinese government must develop a diplomacy 2.0. The United States and Europe are already using microblogs like Sina Weibo to spread their message within China. During bilateral exchanges, diplomatic negotiations, and international conferences, Chinese officials should use Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to spread their policy views. Use of social media will be an important part of building soft power.

Two years ago the Beijing-based techology analyst Bill Bishop argued that it would be hard for China to build soft power successfully without a global Internet strategy: hard to win hearts and minds when you censor Twitter and Facebook, language would be a barrier, and no major Chinese Internet firms would succeed in foreign markets. This seems right, but perhaps the Chinese have lowered their sights. The goal may be to stay safely in the Chinese Internet (and ensure the safety of the Chinese Internet from the outside) while only occasionally dipping in and out of the Internet in the West. At this point it is hard to tell if Hu Xijin thinks he can actively engage outside of China. As Tom Lasseter notes, right now Hu is only following one account on Twitter: The Global Times.

Over the past year, Myanmar’s rapid pace of reform has surprised nearly everyone — activists in the country, foreign observers, and many in the U.S. government.  With change apparently coming so quickly, nearly everyone who watches the country has been trying to explain the reforms, often crediting years of Western sanctions, or Asian nations’ engagement policies. Neither seems, to me, to be correct. Instead, it is important to examine several critical domestic factors that lay behind this change. I examine these factors in a new CFR Expert Brief “How Myanmar Changed and What it Means.”

You can read the whole brief here.

As the Guardian reports, the Thai government has become the first nation in the world to publicly endorse Twitter’s choice to censor certain types of messages in certain countries. In this case, that would mean censoring messages that fell afoul of the kingdom’s draconian lèse-majesté laws, which have been used increasingly harshly in recent years – most recently, against an underage college student and an elderly man with cancer. He allegedly sent four text messages insulting the king, and was given twenty years in jail, even though the government could not prove he had actually sent the messages.

The decision is not a major shock for Thailand; the governments of both the previous Democrat party and even the current Puea Thai party have been pouring ever-more resources into hunting for online content supposedly defaming the king. Thai leaders seem to have little understanding of how these witch-hunts are damaging their global image, and putting them in the same category as major media abusers like Vietnam and Saudi Arabia. China quickly jumped to support the Twitter policy as well.

But it’s a very worrisome move from Twitter. A major part of its appeal in closed countries is the idea that it provides an outlet for unpopular views, which could be repressed if spoken in other forums. But now, in Thailand — and probably numerous other countries — Twitter will simply keep those unpopular views out of the Twitterverse, giving a major win to censorship.

Cutting off Iranian oil imports has put Tokyo in a difficult position. The United States and its European allies have already agreed to up the ante on sanctions against Iran, but the domestic costs that Japan has to bear in order to cooperate are higher.

Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda’s government has indicated its desire to cooperate, and last December the Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced new restrictions on the operations of 106 entities as well as one individual with potential links to proliferation-sensitive activities in Iran. But the real effort now is to reduce Japan’s oil imports from Tehran, and to negotiate an exemption from more stringent restrictions on Japanese banks included in the new U.S. sanctions law.

Rebalancing Japan’s energy supply is even more delicate at the moment, as most of the nations’ nuclear power plants remain offline. Efforts to compensate by increasing access to overseas sources of supply, including oil and LNG imports, have ensured Japan’s national power supply since the disasters of March 11 last year. The Institute of Energy Economics, Japan estimated an additional twenty-nine million kiloliters of demand for crude and heavy oil since 2010, and an added cost of 3.3 trillion yen, or $43.2 billion, for imports of fossil fuel for thermal plants. Thus, suddenly imposing more severe oil import restrictions would be difficult and expensive at a time when the economy is fragile.

Japan has been decreasing its reliance on Iranian oil steadily since the 2006 sanctions took effect. Since 2007, Japan has reduced its imports from Tehran by roughly 40 percent, according to the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. Roughly 500 barrels per day of Iranian crude oil imports have dwindled to 316 barrels per day over this period. That works out to be an 11 percent annual rate of reduction, which by 2010 had brought Japan down to the third largest importer from Iran after the European Union and China. In contrast, South Korea’s crude oil imports from Iran increased by 20 percent in 2011, and China’s imports rose by 30 percent.

Tokyo now must accelerate this rate of reduction to satisfy U.S. legal requirements and the rising political interest of the U.S. Congress. Japan has already promised to do so, but what remains to be negotiated is the speed of those reductions. Officials from the Japanese government are expected to visit Washington, DC, on Thursday to discuss how much faster Japan must cut its imports.

Part of that answer depends on alternate suppliers. Japan has already diversified its sources considerably. In 2010, Iran accounted for only 9.6 percent of Japan’s oil imports, with Saudi Arabia (28.8 percent), the UAE (20.4 percent), and Qatar (11.8 percent) taking a leading role as Japan’s crude oil suppliers. The continued cooperation of alternative crude oil suppliers, of course, will be critical to sustaining Tokyo’s ability to meet its energy needs and find alternative source of supply. Foreign Minister Koichiro Gemba’s visit to the region from January 5 to 12 demonstrates how keenly Tokyo depends on their willingness to continue upping their production.

Two additional challenges are also in the mix for Tokyo. The first is the financing of oil imports from Iran. Annually, Japan’s oil trade with Iran runs around one trillion yen, or $13.1 billion. On January 19 the Nikkei Shimbun reported that 80 to 90 percent of those transactions are done by the Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi UFJ, and the remainder by the Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation. An exemption of Japan’s banks from immediate affect of the new sanctions law, therefore, would allow Tokyo to manage the risk involved for two leading financial institutions as it moves forward in reducing its Iranian oil imports.

Beyond these specific calculations on the new sanctions, the deeper challenge for Japanese policymakers is the domestic politics of the sanctions debate itself. The growing perception in Japan is that cooperation in the sanctions effort against Iran only benefits other economic competitors, most notably China. In 2006, the Japanese government at the urging of the Bush administration ended its petroleum development project at Azadegan, seen to be one of the most promising untapped oil fields in Iran. Almost immediately thereafter the Chinese government concluded a deal with Tehran to take over the development project, ensuring that Beijing would have preferential access to the long-term oil stream that would result.

Today too most Japanese watch Chinese efforts to ensure its oil supply in Iran as well as efforts to negotiate preferential treatment from other alternative suppliers, and see direct competition to Japanese interests. Chinese premier Wen Jiabao’s visit to the capitals of Saudi Arabia and the UAE on the heels of Foreign Minister Gemba upped the ante, and resulted in a deal with Saudi Arabia for development access to the Manifa oil field. Within Japan, while the government does its best to cooperate with Washington on the most recent round of sanctions, critics charge that China seems to be—yet again—eating into Japan’s energy supply streams (at much lower cost, by the way) and getting immediate gains from Japan’s decisions. It doesn’t help that South Korea remains cautious about cutting its imports from Iran, and that India has flat out refused to curtail its Iranian oil purchases. South Korean president Lee Myung-bak’s upcoming trip to Saudi Arabia and the UAE reveals the heated competition for crude oil among Asia’s leading economies.

Over the last several years, Tokyo has become one of Washington’s closest allies in the effort to gain international support for the sanctioning of Iran’s nuclear program, both through the United Nations and now with the United States and the EU. Yet we should remember that Japan has much at stake, especially this year. Ensuring that Tokyo can manage a reduction in its imports is one important piece of the puzzle. Allowing a graceful exit for its banks, already significantly engaged in cooperating with existing sanctions and major financial partners in the U.S. domestic market, is an important step in ensuring continued Japanese cooperation over time. At all costs, U.S. policymakers must ensure that Tokyo’s cooperation in nuclear nonproliferation efforts in Iran does not exact a higher economic or political cost than Beijing, Seoul, or Delhi’s lack of cooperation.

Water is an issue that preoccupies Chinese officials throughout the country, but nowhere perhaps as much as in Beijing. The already water-scarce capital has been suffering a continuous and precipitous decline in water availability over the past decades, as both population size and income levels have grown dramatically. Caixin magazine has a terrific new piece that details not only the current crisis but also the historical challenges Beijing has faced. The piece also explores what the capital should be doing but isn’t. Experts, for example, have been pushing pricing reform, water conservation, and recycling. Some of this is being done, but not enough. Instead, Beijing’s plans center on desalination, exploiting karst resources, and the South-North Water Diversion, each of which, as the article discusses, brings with it additional economic and potentially serious environmental costs.

Lest the Caixin article leave you too pessimistic, you can check out the testimony from my panel on China’s water issues from last week’s Economic and Security Review Commission hearing on “China’s Global Quest for Resources and Implications for the United States” down in D.C. Both of my co-panelists, Grace Mang and Jennifer Turner, raised a couple of potentially game-changing initiatives by the Chinese that could transform the way they do business related to water resources. Ms. Mang and Dr. Turner focused on the nexus of energy and water, and their take on the situation was decidedly upbeat.

Ms. Mang, who is the China program director at International Rivers Network, highlighted Sinohydro’s efforts to develop a strategy for environmental corporate social responsibility (CSR). Since Sinohydro, according to its own estimates, commands a 50 percent share of dam-building globally, what the company does in terms of CSR matters a lot. According to Ms. Mang, Sinohydro just passed an environmental policy that will make it the world’s leader in environmental CSR in the hydropower industry. She suggests that it would be “prudent for traditional dam builders and funders to take notice and try to meet China’s challenge to do better.” While I think it is probably a bit early to be calling on the international community to match Chinese standards, I agree that the aspirations of Sinohydro are inspirational and should be tracked carefully.

Dr. Turner, who heads the Woodrow Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum, focused on the development of shale gas as an alternative to water-demanding coal. Of course utilizing shale gas presents its own environmental challenges—it is water-intensive up-front and water pollution can be a serious problem. Nonetheless, given the choice between adding more coal to China’s energy mix and pushing forward with shale gas, Dr. Turner is probably right that, if managed properly, the latter is a very attractive option both for water and climate change concerns.

For my own part, I’m not quite as confident as Ms. Mang or Dr. Turner about China’s capacity to change the way that it does business—and my own testimony on China’s management of its shared trans-boundary water resources reflects my ambivalence. The seeds of change are everywhere, but whether they can take root and blossom in an often very harsh and arid policy environment will depend on careful tending over time.