BEIJING, Sept. 13 (UPI) -- China has put on hold territorial and resources talks over the disputed Diaoyu Islands until Japan releases the captain of a detained Chinese trawler.
The 14 crew members of the fishing boat were flown home on the weekend from the Japanese island Ishigaki, near Okinawa Island, where they were held along with the captain after last week's collision with two Japanese coast guard vessels in waters near the islands in the East China Sea.
Chinese foreign ministry officials also said they oppose the ongoing investigation by Japanese authorities concerning the incident.
No injuries were reported in the collision but minor damages were done to the ships, the Japanese coast guard said at the time of the incident.
On the weekend, the boat was towed to the area where the incident happened to re-enact the collision as part of the investigation.
But Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said the investigation is "illegal, invalid and in vain" and could raise tensions between the two countries.
"Japan will reap as it has sown, if it continues to act recklessly," Jiang said.
Jiang demanded that Japan immediately return the captain, who could face criminal charges, Japanese authorities said. The investigation is trying to establish whether the captain deliberately rammed the coast guard vessels in an attempt to flee the area.
Japanese authorities said they can hold Capt. Zhan Qixiong, 41, until next Sunday, after which they must lay formal charges or let him go. The vessel will be released to a substitute Chinese crew, who will sail it to China.
The Diaoyu Islands -- known as the Senkaku Islands in Japan -- are claimed by both China and Japan, as well as Taiwan.
Japan controls the 2.7 square miles of islands that lie 106 miles north of Japan's Ishigaki Island and 200 miles from the Chinese mainland. They are also 116 miles northeast of Keelung city on northern Taiwan.
Disputes over who owns the five islands and three rocky outcrops are not new and predate the second world war. At the end of the war in 1945 they were under U.S. jurisdiction as part of the captured island of Okinawa. But they have been under Japanese jurisdiction since 1972 when Okinawa was returned to Japan.
The issue of ownership rose up the diplomatic priority level after a 1969 report by the U.N. Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East suggested the possibility of large reserves of oil and natural gas in the vicinity of the archipelago.
Since then, the islands have had periodic incursions by Chinese and Taiwanese fishing boats.
They also have become the focus for political activists.
In 2004 Japanese police arrested seven Chinese activists after they had been on the islands for about 10 hours. A month later a member of a Japanese right-wing group rammed a bus into the Chinese consulate in Osaka, Japan, to protest China's claims to the islands.
