I wish people would actually do research before they wrote on this topic. Really. It's all over the web. It's not difficult to find. I've written on it extensively on my blog and so have many other bloggers.

The Senkakus were never "traditionally" part of Taiwanese territory. They were never thought of as part of Taiwan (which was never thought of as part of China until the late 1930s). The Senkakus were unincorporated territory when the Japanese started thinking about grabbing them in the 1880s. The islands were formally incorporated in Jan of 1895.

The "dispute" began not in some distant past but quite artificially in 1971. In 1968 announcements of oil and gas deposits in the area around the island were made by japanese scientists. After that both the ROC government on Taiwan and the PRC government in Beijing decided to attempt to annex these islands to China -- which, despite the claims about "navigational records" never thought of them as part of "China."

How do we know this? Because until 1969 maps and texts produced by both Chinese governments explicitly name these islands as Japanese territory. Here as some links:

Ampontan has a good set of links to old maps and history here:
http://ampontan.wordpress.com/2010/09/24/coming-attractions/

Washington Times excerpt of 1969 PRC map showing PRC thought Senkakus were Japanese:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/sep/15/inside-the-ring-145889960/
Only after that did PRC maps change.

1953 Renminerbao piece on the Senkakus not only defines them as part of Okinawa chain and as Japanese but uses Japanese names for them as well:
http://michaelturton.blogspot.com/2008/06/1953-renmin-ribao-says-senkakus-part-of.html

Here's the Taiwan Maps Blog with an extensive list of maps and texts showing that no one in China thought of the Senkakus as Chinese until the announcement of oil there in 1968.
http://tw.myblog.yahoo.com/jw!ARR7CzOBSEbGZjQIIAbtkQ--/article?mid=1582

Again the same blog with a series of Taiwan ministry of defense research institute maps that show the Senkakus as Japanese until that magic change after 1971
http://richter.pixnet.net/blog/post/18881937

There are a couple of other issues I'd like to highlight here. First, using a Qing dynasty claim to support the current PRC claim is like arguing that Turkey owns Egypt because the Ottoman empire once did. The Ottomans are gone and so is their sovereignty. The Qing are gone and their empire has dissolved into independent states. The difference is that after 1911 Chinese nationalists decided to inflate China out to the old borders -- much as if Turkish nationalists had decided to reconstruct a Greater Turkey along the old Ottoman lines, and were currently trying to annex Serbia, Greece, Egypt, and Jordan. Thanks to lazy analysis in the west, the mystique of China, and Chinese propagandizing, everyone accepts this as normal.

We are still living with the consequences of this very conscious decision of post-Qing Chinese leaders to attempt to reconstitute the Qing empire as if it were "China", this post-Qing Chinese re-expansionism and will be for another 50 years, through the next several rounds of hegemonic warfare. The key point is that discourse like that of this piece normalizes claims as "traditional" when all are twentieth century and the important ones are post-war.

The second point, as Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou rather openly demonstrated in a recent interview with AP, (http://michaelturton.blogspot.com/2010/10/ma-and-senkakus.html), ardent Chinese nationalists believe that the Senkakus and Okinawa are one and that Okinawa was "stolen" from "China". Hence discourse that normalizes a Chinese claim to the Senkakus also, at least in right-wing Chinese minds, also normalizes a claim to Okinawa.

I certainly hope that next time a writer at FP puts his hand to the tiller on this one, he will check whether the ground has been plowed before.

Michael Turton
The View from Taiwan

THE SPRATLY ISLANDS: "In 1998 when Chinese and Japanese naval vessels fought over a disputed reef, more than 70 sailors were killed." - incorrect. It was in 1988, between Chinese and Vietnamese navel forces.