The PRC government must be cautious in how it handles these problems and is necessarily slow to involve PRC officials. The use of non-officials keeps the issue alive without implicating the government directly. The more interesting question is not why the PRC allows non-officials to act but why the Japanese government allowed them to land on an island it controls. It obviously decided that to prevent them from landing would heat matters up more than allowing them to land would and Japan wants to minimize the inevitable friction the interlopers cause.

As China, Taiwan and South Korea consider how ordinary citizens can best take part in deciding serious criminal cases, they should study the Japanese model. In 2009, Japan, after years of careful planning, introduced a system that provides for six laymen to join three professional judges in adjudicating issues of both guilt and punishment. Thus far, this system appears to be successful.

To what extent should ordinary people decide the guilt and punishment of alleged criminals? Is criminal justice too serious to be left to career judges?

What can a government do when it believes a foreign government has unjustly detained one of its nationals? This month’s dangerous dispute between China and Japan understandably focused attention on their conflicting claims of sovereignty over the uninhabited islets known as the Diaoyu or Senkaku. Yet the methods used by China to free a fishing trawler captain from criminal investigation in Japan are undoubtedly being studied by countries that have similar problems in China and elsewhere.