In the East China Sea, a Far Bigger Test of Power Looms

 

The long-term goal of the Chinese was to push the United States to “the second island chain,” farther out in the Pacific, keeping American air and naval assets ever farther from the region around China’s coast.
By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON — In an era when the Obama administration has been focused on new forms of conflict — as countries use cyberweapons and drones to extend their power — the dangerous contest suddenly erupting over a pile of rocks in the East China Sea seems almost a throwback to the Cold War.
Suddenly, naval assets and air patrols are the currency of a shadow conflict between Washington and Beijing that the Obama administration increasingly fears could escalate and that American officials have said could derail their complex plan to manage China’s rise without overtly trying to contain it.
As in the Cold War, the immediate territorial dispute seems to be an excuse for a far larger question of who will exercise influence over a vast region.
The result is that, as the Chinese grow more determined to assert their territorial claims over a string of islands once important mainly to fishermen, America’s allies are also pouring military assets into the region — potentially escalating the once obscure dispute into a broader test of power in the Pacific.
Now a maritime outpost that had modest strategic significance is taking on enormous symbolic import.
South Korea, which has broader concerns about China’s regional power, is building a new naval base for 20 warships, including submarines, arguing that it has to protect vital shipping lanes in the East China Sea for its exports — including many electronics headed to China.
The Japanese, after largely depending on American bases on Okinawa to back up their own limited patrols in the area, plan to build a new army base by 2016 on a small, inhabited island near the Senkaku islands.
The Japanese are also planning to deploy more F-15s and radar planes to Okinawa and a new helicopter carrier, and, for the first time, have considered buying unarmed American drones to patrol the area, part of a three-year-long shift in military strategy to focus on their southern islands and on China.
That is part of a fundamental change in the national mind-set toward a Japan that is more willing and able to defend itself than anytime since World War II, in part because of doubts about America’s own commitment to the region.
As Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. left on Sunday for a trip that will take him to the capitals of all three major contestants — Tokyo, Seoul and Beijing — the administration’s public message is that all sides need to cool down and keep nationalistic talk from making a tense situation worse.
Mr. Biden will encounter countries that are now re-examining how civilian and military officials interact: Over the past few weeks, for very separate reasons, Japan and China have each approved the creation of a national security council.
For Japan, it is an effort to strengthen the hand of the prime minister in times of crises, a concept the Japanese body politic long resisted because of the legacies of World War II.
For China, it appears to be an effort by President Xi Jinping to exercise a degree of control over all sources of national power that his immediate predecessor, Hu Jintao, never fully mastered.
Interestingly, as China sent its aircraft carrier to another potential trouble spot, the South China Sea, its path avoided the disputed islands, perhaps a sign that the Chinese realize they may have overplayed their hand.
Still, in private, American officials say they are worried that a small incident — a collision like the one between an American intelligence plane and the Chinese air force a dozen years ago off Hainan Island — could rapidly worsen the situation.
On ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, Tom Donilon, who was Mr. Obama’s national security adviser until earlier this year and a principal architect of the administration’s approach to China, said a similar “risk of miscalculation” is what “we need to be very concerned about going forward here.”
A senior administration official said Mr. Biden’s message would be that the United States will “seek crisis management mechanisms and confidence-building measures to lower tensions and reduce risk of escalation or miscalculation.”
But one of Mr. Obama’s current advisers said, “It’s pretty clear this isn’t really about the islands.”
Declining to speak on the record about a sensitive strategic issue, the official added that it was about a desire by some in China, including the People’s Liberation Army and perhaps the new political leadership, “to assert themselves in ways that until recently they didn’t have the military capability to make real.”
The adviser added: “They say it’s in response to our efforts to contain them, but our analysis is that it’s really their effort to push our presence further out into the Pacific.”
In fact, on his last trip to Asia as secretary of defense, Robert M. Gates said in January 2011 that he believed the long-term goal of the Chinese was to push the United States to “the second island chain,” farther out in the Pacific, keeping American air and naval assets ever farther from the region around China’s coast.
Two years later, Obama officials will not utter that view in public, but it is a running theme in American intelligence assessments about the Chinese military, tempered by evidence that some Chinese officials worry about blowback if they overreach.
That has been a repeated cycle in Mr. Obama’s relations with the Chinese.
In 2010, a series of episodes, touched off by American arms sales to Taiwan and the ramming of a Japanese coast guard ship in the Senkakus by an inebriated Chinese sea captain, led China to cut off military-to-military relations between Beijing and Washington and the sale of rare-earth metals, used for electronics, to the Japanese.
Both proved temporary, and by the end of the year some senior Chinese officials, led by the state councilor, Dai Bingguo, warned that China’s actions were driving countries in the region into American hands.
“Some say China wants to replace the United States and dominate the world,” Mr. Dai wrote in an article that Mr. Donilon frequently cited. “That is simply a myth.”
But Mr. Dai is gone from power, and the Obama administration is now trying to figure out how to interpret each new Chinese action under Mr. Xi, of which the recent “air defense identification zone” was considered the most calculated and, perhaps, the most muscular.
Many countries claim such zones; China knew it was claiming it over disputed territory.
Mr. Obama’s immediate response was to send two unarmed B-52 bombers on what the Pentagon called “routine” runs over the territory; they were routine, but the timing and symbolism were lost on no one.
Now the White House faces the more complex task of its longer-term response.
To make the promise of his “Asian pivot” real, the president will have to convince Congress, and allies in the region, that he means to devote more military, diplomatic and economic attention there — not to contain China, he insists, but to preserve and extend America’s longtime role as a keeper of the peace in the Pacific.
That will be challenging at a time of Pentagon budget cuts, a national mood to focus on problems at home and a national security apparatus focused on Iran, Syria and the future of the Middle East.

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Air Defence Farce

After Challenges, China Backpedals on Air Zone
By JANE PERLEZ

Protecting the Senkakus

BEIJING — China has permitted rare street protests and sent armadas of fishing boats to show its growing national interest in a small string of islands in the East China Sea.

Earlier this year, the Chinese military locked its radar on a Japanese navy vessel.
Each step seemed like a measured escalation in the long-running territorial dispute, intended to press Japan to negotiate over jurisdiction of the islands. 

But they also seemed calibrated to avoid a sharp international backlash — or to raise expectations too high at home.
But by imposing a new air defense zone over the islands last weekend, Beijing has miscalculated. 

It provoked a quick, pointed challenge from the United States, set off alarm bells among Asian neighbors and created a frenzy of nationalist expression inside China on hopes that the new leadership team in Beijing would push for a decisive resolution of the longstanding dispute.
On Wednesday, after the Pentagon sent two B-52 bombers defiantly cruising around China’s new air defense zone for more than two hours, Beijing appeared to backpedal. 

The overflights went unchallenged, and some civilian airlines ignored China’s new assertion of air rights.
“We will make corresponding responses according to different situations and how big the threat is,” the spokesman at the Foreign Ministry, Qin Gang, said when asked about China’s lack of enforcement against the American planes.
Under President Xi Jinping, China has suggested that it intends to make a more robust defense of its national interests, including in maritime disputes, to match its rising economic and military power. 

But even some Chinese analysts say they wonder if the new leadership team fully anticipated the response to the latest assertion of rights — or had in mind a clear Plan B if it met with strong resistance.
“I believe Xi Jinping and his associates must have predicted the substance of this reaction; whether they underestimated the details of the reaction, I’m not sure,” said Shi Yinhong, an occasional adviser to the government and a professor of international relations at Renmin University.
China does appear determined to escalate the issue of the uninhabited Senkaku islands, as a way of forcing the Japanese to negotiate and give up control of territory that has symbolic and strategic value for both countries. 

In the long term, China has not tried to disguise its goal of weakening the alliance between the United States and Japan and supplanting the United States as the dominant naval power in the Western Pacific.
Beijing is especially frustrated that its previous, more cautious steps to convince Japan of the seriousness of its claim to the islands have not prompted Japan, which administers them, to negotiate in earnest.

But if China has been trying to drive a wedge between Washington and the Japanese government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, their strategy seems to have backfired, at least for now.
The United States had for months seemed reluctant to get involved or take sides in a dispute that carries so much emotional weight for China. 

And the Obama administration dodged requests by Japanese leaders to take a clearer stance in their favor.
That hesitation seems to have largely vanished since China pronounced it was expanding its hold on the region’s airspace.
With the flyover by the B-52s, the United States has shown it is more willing to work with Japan in opposing China’s efforts to unilaterally force a change in the status quo, even if the United States still takes a neutral stance in the islands dispute itself.

Hours after China declared its new air zone, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel reaffirmed that the United States would stand by its security treaty obligations to aid Japan if it was attacked.
Since Saturday, Japanese leaders have publicly emphasized the close coordination with Washington — largely to reassure their own population, which has felt growing anxiety over China’s increasingly assertive stance.
On Wednesday in Tokyo, the defense minister, Itsunori Onodera, pledged in a phone call with Mr. Hagel to work closely with the United States military by sharing information and coordinating in the surveillance of Chinese activities in the East China Sea, Japan’s Defense Ministry said.
The new United States ambassador to Japan, Caroline Kennedy, said in her first speech since assuming her post, broadcast around the world on CNN, that China’s creation of the air defense zone “only serves to increase tensions in the region.”
The Chinese action also stirred the first official negative comments about China in South Korea since President Park Geun-hye took office this year and forged a closer relationship with Beijing. 

The coordinates of the air defense zone announced by China overlap with South Korea’s own air defense zone in some places and appear created to give China an edge in a separate maritime territorial dispute with South Korea.
“We see competition and conflict in the region deepening,” South Korea’s foreign minister, Yun Byung-se, said Wednesday. 

“Things can take a dramatic turn for the worse if territorial conflicts and historical issues are merged with nationalism.”
The announcement of the air defense zone may also have created problems at home for the leadership in China, where there are expectations among an increasingly nationalist population that the country can live up to its promise of standing up to Japan.
On Chinese social media, a barrage of commentary congratulated the government on the new air defense zone and warned that Beijing should make good on threats by the Defense Ministry that aircraft give notification or face military action.
“If the Chinese military doesn’t do anything about aircraft that don’t obey the commands to identify themselves in the zone, it will face international ridicule,” wrote Ni Fangliu, a historian and an investigative journalist, on his microblog, which has more than two million followers.
The Liberation Army Daily, the official newspaper of China’s military, said in a commentary published before the Chinese government acknowledged the B-52 flights that without strong enforcement, the zone would be just “armchair strategy.”
Despite the risks, Mr. Shi, the government adviser, said that proclaiming the air defense zone was important because it represented China’s first effort to expand its strategic space beyond offshore waters since the establishment of Communist China in 1949.
The response by the United States, he said, amounted to “a negative development for a strong great-power relationship” that China sought between the United States and China.

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Paper Tiger

China's move to establish air defense zone backfires

By Simon Denyer

BEIJING — It was designed as a forceful response to Japanese assertiveness, and a robust declaration of China’s maritime claims. 

But Beijing’s creation of an air defense zone may have backfired, experts said, after eliciting a strong joint response by the United States and Japan.
Instead of strengthening China’s position, the air defense zone has unsettled and united its neighbors. 

It provided Washington with a perfect opportunity to reassure its Asian allies that it remains committed to maintaining stability in the Asia-Pacific region.
On Saturday, Beijing said any noncommercial aircraft entering a broad zone over the East China Sea should first identify themselves, and it warned ominously that failure to do so could provoke “defensive emergency measures” by its armed forces. 

The statement heightened an already tense standoff with Japan over several tiny disputed islets in the East China Sea.
But the United States called China’s bluff by sending two warplanes into the zone Tuesday, and Beijing’s response was muted. 

The Defense Ministry merely said it had identified and monitored the planes, while the Foreign Ministry stressed that the zone was purely defensive and offered to strengthen communications with other regional players to maintain peace and security.
“We hope relevant countries do not make too much of a fuss about it, panic and read too much into it,” spokesman Qin Gang said.
Paul Haenle, director of the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy in Beijing, said the mild reaction was surprising. 

“It is almost as though they hadn’t anticipated the U.S. response and didn’t know what to do,” he said.
In Chinese eyes, the standoff began last September, when Tokyo purchased three of the Senkaku islands from a private Japanese landowner. 

In response, Beijing stepped up its own claims to the rocky landmasses, increasing sea patrols and pressing Japan to accept that the territory is disputed.
Japan, like numerous other countries, already has its own air defense identification zone. 

The country increasingly has used the zone as an excuse to warn or intercept Chinese planes in the area, according to military experts in Beijing. 

In September, Japan threatened to shoot down Chinese drones flying over the disputed islands; China warned that downing the drones would constitute an act of war.
The Chinese military had been considering establishing its own air defense zone for some time, and this increased tension may have tipped the balance, experts said.
“Japan has been acting more and more confrontational with regards to the Senkaku islands, so China had to roll out its own measures to balance it out,” said Zhou Yongsheng of the Center for Japanese Studies at the University of International Relations in Beijing. 

“Whenever Chinese aircraft entered Japan’s zone, they would dispatch fighter jets to intercept us, which put us in a very passive position.”
Popular sentiment within Japan and China has also become increasingly hostile toward the other country. Rising nationalism in China is now coupled with genuine concern about the intentions of a more nationalist Japanese government under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. 

His government has raised military spending since coming to power last December.
Zhu Feng, professor of international studies at Peking University, said China had established the air zone to “curb the arrogance of the Abe administration.” 

Zhao Chu, a military affairs columnist, said China was responding to Japan’s more aggressive enforcement of its own zone.
“But the primary cause is that China needs a stronger foreign policy at present because an appeal for that has been gathering momentum in Chinese society for over a decade,” Zhao said. 

“It’s a hawkish voice that now dominates Chinese society.”
Beijing’s actions appear to fit into a recent pattern, experts said. 

Reluctant to be seen as the initial provocateur, China tends to respond forcefully to any provocations from others and to use those provocations to advance its own claims even more strongly.
But China may have overplayed its hand with Saturday’s relatively aggressive Defense Ministry announcement, which appeared to blindside regional neighbors as well as Washington, experts said.
Two cabinet secretaries, Secretary of State John F. Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, both made strong statements criticizing the move. 

Vice President Biden will also convey the administration’s concerns when he meets separately with the leaders of Japan, China and South Korea on a week-long trip to Asia starting Sunday, officials said.
Under President Obama, the United States has announced a “strategic rebalancing” — or pivot — toward Asia, a move that many in China see as an attempt to encircle and contain its rise. 

But when Obama, distracted by the federal government shutdown, failed to attend two important summits in Asia last month,doubts surfaced about the depth of the U.S. commitment. 

Biden will try to reassure the leaders of Japan and South Korea during his trip, but this week’s events may already have done the job for him.
Hagel called his Japanese counterpart, Itsunori Onodera, on Wednesday, described China's move as “a potentially destabilizing unilateral action” and commended the Japanese government “for exercising appropriate restraint,” spokesman Carl Woog said in a statement.
Acting on instructions from their government, Japan’s two biggest commercial airlines announced they would not relay plans to fly through the Chinese zone, while Onodera told reporters Wednesday that Japanese Self-Defense Forces jets would continue to operate in the East China Sea, without reporting their flight plans to Beijing.
“This announcement and quick U.S. response have clarified the U.S.’s siding with Japan much more than the past,” said Mathieu Duchatel of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute in Beijing. 

“So there is some degree of miscalculation” by China.

Japan has voiced concern for years about what it sees as China’s increasing maritime aggression, but in recent days those concerns have been echoed by Taiwan and South Korea. 

The anger from South Korea is particularly notable, because Seoul, under President Park Geun-hye, has drawn closer with Beijing while sparring with Japan over historical issues.
On Wednesday, South Korea’s foreign minister, Yun Byung-se, said in a speech that China’s announcement had “made already tricky regional situations even more difficult to deal with.”
In the past few months, China had been working hard to reassure many of its Asian neighbors that its rise not only did not threaten them, but would actually be to their benefit. 

China’s leaders made successful visits to Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam and offered billions of dollars in trade and investment. 

Now, those reassurances may look less convincing.
“This will inject a large dose of anxiety and uncertainty into countries in the region about China’s rise,” said Haenle of the Carnegie-Tsinghua institute.
The episode also appears to underline China’s sometimes confusing foreign and strategic policy stance, with the armed forces often adopting more hawkish positions than the Foreign Ministry. 

That, said Haenle, was precisely why President Xi Jinping announced earlier this month that he would establish a new high-level committee to better coordinate national security policy.

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Flight of the B-52s

Joint patrols of the Senkakus would send a stronger message.
The Wall Street Journal

A U.S. Air Force B-52 Stratofortess is being refueled by a KC-135 Stratotanker 

Full credit to the Obama Administration for showing solidarity with Japan as it seeks to defend itself against China's aggression over the Senkaku Islands. 

On Tuesday a pair of B-52s flew unannounced—and unchallenged—through an "air defense identification zone" covering the islands that was unilaterally declared by Beijing late last week. 

Maybe President Obama's pivot to Asia means something after all.
The flight of bombers comes after more than a year of Beijing brinksmanship with Tokyo over the uninhabited Japanese islets, which is designed to change the status quo on the sea and in the air around them. In its response to the flight, the Chinese Foreign Ministry backed down somewhat, saying "we will in accordance with different situations take corresponding reactions." 

But the real test of the air defense zone will come in the next few days or weeks when the People's Liberation Army uses it to challenge Japanese forces as they patrol the Senkakus.
The U.S. can help to deter an armed clash by making more concrete its treaty obligation to assist Japan in defending the islands. 

The best ways to do that are joint sea and air patrols with Japanese forces. 

If Beijing challenges those patrols, it would be taking on both countries at once—a security trip-wire similar to the stationing of U.S. forces on the Korean Peninsula.
This could lead to an eruption of Chinese anger, and the U.S. might pay a short-term price in economic and diplomatic retaliation. 

Washington could pre-empt that to some extent by cancelling next week's visit of Vice President Joe Biden to Beijing. 

But allowing China's aggression to succeed means running a high risk of future conflict, accidental or intentional.
It isn't clear why Chinese leaders are acting belligerently. 

One theory is that they feel their rising economic and military power entitles them to restore the tributary system by which their imperial predecessors dominated East Asia. 

Others think their lack of domestic political legitimacy makes them eager to stir up nationalist sentiment. Maybe it's some combination of the two.
In any case they miscalculated this week by assuming their intimidation would succeed. 

As long as Beijing continues its bullying, the aim of U.S. policy should be to make sure that China's provocations are met with further demonstrations of solidarity and resolve.

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China overplayed its hand on the Senkaku islands

By David Pilling

About a year ago, I was in the office of Albert del Rosario, the foreign minister of the Philippines. 

What, I asked, would Manila say if Shinzo Abe, then running for prime minister of Japan, carried out his pledge to amend the pacifist constitution and “rearm”? (In fact, Japan is already fully armed, but its constitution bars use of force except in self-defence.) 

I fully expected him to reply that this would be a regrettable move. 

Not only would it be enormously provocative to China but memories of the country’s invasion of the Philippines were surely just as raw in Manila as they were in Beijing and Seoul. 

Not a bit of it, he said. 

“We would welcome that very much. We are looking for balancing factors in the region and Japan could be a significant balancing factor.”
Those remarks, echoed by Indonesia’s foreign minister, came back to me this week as China and Japan squared off dangerously over Japan's Senkaku islands in the East China Sea. 

At the weekend, Beijing took many by surprise when it announced the creation of an “air defence identification zone” covering the Senkaku islands.

There is nothing unusual about establishing such a zone. Many countries have them, including Japan and the US. 

Yet the move is provocative because China’s zone overlaps Japan’s. 

From now on, Beijing says, aircraft entering the zone will have to identify themselves to Chinese authorities or face unspecified “emergency defence measures”.
Mr Abe denounced the move, which he said had no legitimacy. 

Washington, too, has strongly objected. 

It sent two B52 bombers across the zone – without telling Beijing in advance – to underline its displeasure. 

Japan’s two main civilian airlines initially complied with the order but, under pressure from Tokyo, resumed flying across the zone on Wednesday without informing Chinese authorities.
China’s aim appears to be to change the facts on the ground – or, in this case, in the air. 

Its new zone challenges Japan’s longstanding de facto control of the islands, which it incorporated into its territory in 1895. 

In the short term, Beijing hopes to force Japan to admit that sovereignty over the islands is in dispute, something it refuses to acknowledge. 

In the longer run, China may seek to drive a wedge between Japan and the US. 

Although Washington takes no position on the islands’ sovereignty, it says they fall under the remit of the US-Japan security treaty. 

That implies it would come to Japan’s aid if the islands were attacked. 

Yet China cannot be the only country to wonder whether Washington would really risk American lives to defend a few barren rocks.
On the face of it, this is a good fight for Beijing to pick. 

One might advise it to do exactly the same as a way of ratcheting up pressure on Japan and advertising its regional ambitions. 

After all, one might argue, there is little love lost for Japan in the region.

Washington is desperate for Seoul and Tokyo to get along. Instead, they are barely on speaking terms. 

Park Geun-hye, the president, has refused to meet Mr Abe until he has developed a “more sincere” attitude towards Japanese history. 

She instead made a high-profile visit to Beijing.
Yet other Asian countries, even ones that suffered at the hands of Japan’s Imperial Army, do not harbour the same bitterness. 

Many of the region’s nations, including the Philippines, Vietnam and India, have become increasingly wary of a rising China as it becomes more assertive about its territorial claims. 

They have encouraged the US to “pivot” back to the region. 

And many of them have edged closer diplomatically to Japan, an important – in some cases, the most important – investor in their economies. 

In an unprecedented diplomatic charm offensive, Mr Abe has visited all 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in his first year in office. 

Japanese companies, backed by the government, have sharply stepped up their presence in Indonesia, the Philippines and Myanmar. 

The latter, until recently firmly in China’s orbit, has slipped out of its diplomatic grasp as it opens up to the west.
The hedging against China is not just commercial. 

Many countries in the region, including the Philippines and Vietnam, are stepping up military co-operation with the US. 

Japan has supplied ships to Manila to patrol waters disputed with China, and is in discussion with Hanoi to do the same. 

Even South Korea has objected strongly to China’s new exclusion zone. 

China’s lack of soft power was on display in the days after Typhoon Haiyan ripped through the Philippines. 

The US sent the USS George Washington, Japan sent 1,000 self-defence troops and plenty of money. China’s initial contribution, a mere $100,000, was widely condemned as petty and mean-spirited.
One could argue that, as China’s economy grows, it is only natural that its regional footprint will also expand, not always to the liking of its neighbours. 

After all, as long ago as the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, the US declared Latin America off-limits to European powers. 

Yet Beijing may be overplaying its hand. 

In Japan, China’s action may make it easier for Mr Abe to scrap a self-imposed ban on collective self-defence or even eventually to ditch the pacifist constitution. 

Whether regional leaders like his nationalistic sentiments or not, many of them will be hoping he does not blink.

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China Qualifies Air-Zone Threats After U.S. Challenge

Beijing Qualifies Its Threats Over New Air-Defense Zone After Uncontested Flight of American B-52s
By JEREMY PAGE

BEIJING—The U.S.'s flying of B-52 bombers uncontested through China's new air-defense zone is challenging Chinese efforts to assert its power, prompting Beijing to qualify a threat of action against any planes that didn't comply.

China's Defense Ministry said Wednesday it had monitored and identified the U.S. aircraft inside the zone over the East China Sea during the over-flights Tuesday, and the Foreign Ministry said that enforcement of the zone's rules would vary according to circumstances.

"We will in accordance with different situations take corresponding reactions," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang.
The muted response suggested to some analysts that China wouldn't attempt, in the short term, to repel U.S. and Japanese military planes entering the zone without obeying its rules.
It stood in contrast to the announcement Saturday that Beijing had declared the Air Defense Identification Zone over an area that includes islands at the center of a territorial dispute between Beijing and Tokyo.
The Defense Ministry said the armed forces would take unspecified "defensive emergency measures" against aircraft that didn't identify themselves and obey instructions from Chinese authorities.
By sending the B-52s into the zone—even at the farthest edge from China according to the Chinese military—the U.S. sent a clear message that Washington would stand by its ally Japan—including over threats to the disputed islands it controls but which Beijing contests.
"The U.S. military is flying where they've been flying before, flying as usual. There's been no change," Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera told reporters in Tokyo.
"The Chinese action is a unilateral one, and the U.S. shares this view," he said.

The U.S. military countered China's latest move to lay claim to disputed islands with the establishment of an air defense zone in the East China Sea by flying B-52 bombers over the area. Paul Burton, Asia-Pacific director at IHS, tells Deborah Kan why this move has escalated tensions in the region.

Though Beijing didn't interfere with the U.S. sortie, the prospect of Chinese intercepts of U.S. and Japanese air forces is raising the risks for all sides, by increasing the likelihood of a collision or a miscalculation that could quickly escalate into a broader military crisis.
The rising tensions come just ahead of a visit by U.S. Vice President Joe Biden to China, Japan and South Korea next week.
"The vice president will make clear the US has a rock solid commitment to our allies" in his conversation with China's leaders, said a senior administration official.
"The United States also believes the lowering of tension in this region is profoundly and deeply in the American interest."
Mr. Biden is scheduled to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang.
A second official said that Mr. Biden would also try to clarify China's intentions in setting up the air-defense zone and try to make the case that the action isn't in China's interests.
Rather it has become part of "an emerging pattern of behavior that is unsettling" to China's neighbors.
The official said talks among all the parties could help to "cool down tensions."

The U.S. moved to try to counter China's bid for influence over increasingly jittery Asian neighbors by sending a pair of B-52 bombers over disputed islands in the East China Sea. There has been a muted response from China, Jeremy Page reports.

Experts said Beijing is unlikely to back down and will scramble its jet fighters more often than in the past to escort U.S. and Japanese planes in the area, without trying to force them to land or leave.
"If the U.S. continues to sends its aircraft without following the rules, we'll send our military planes to escort them, not to repel," said Shen Dingli, an expert on international relations and Chinese foreign and defense policy at Fudan University in Shanghai.
"China does not under any circumstances have the right to expel any aircraft outside its own airspace," he said.
"But we'll escort them to show there is a cost. If the U.S. sends one, we'll send two, and we have 1,000 waiting."
He and other analysts said China had probably not intercepted the B-52s to avoid a direct confrontation with a more powerful military force and to show its willingness to resolve difference over the zone in talks with U.S. officials.
Beijing's announcement of the air-defense zone raised tensions with Japan and also unnerved several Southeast Asian nations locked in territorial disputes with China in the South China Sea.
Beijing's image was already battered by its initially small offer of aid to one of those nations, the typhoon-damaged Philippines.
Compounding the tensions, China on Tuesday sent its sole aircraft carrier to the South China Sea for training exercises under escort of four warships.
"Its deployment does not contribute to collective efforts to strengthen regional stability and instead serves to threaten the status quo," said Raul Hernandez, a spokesman for the Philippines' Department of Foreign Affairs.
In Beijing's contest with Tokyo over the Japanese Senkaku islands, military experts have said China lacks the air power and sufficiently experienced pilots to mount a daily challenge to the better trained, technologically advanced U.S. and Japanese air forces.
Accidents have strained relations before.
A Chinese jet fighter collided with a U.S. Navy EP-3 surveillance plane off Hainan Island in southern China in 2001, and after the U.S. plane made an emergency landing on Hainan, Chinese authorities detained the aircraft and its crew until the U.S. apologized.
Adding to the current risks, both China and Japan regard the airspace immediately surrounding the disputed islands as their national airspace and reserve the right to shoot down any unidentified aircraft that enters.
The standoff over the islands reflects the changing geopolitical dynamics of Asia, as China seeks to displace the U.S. as the dominant military power in the region, and Washington tries to shore up defense ties with allies concerned about China's rise.
The U.S. has taken China's announcement of the air-defense zone as an opportunity to demonstrate its commitment to Asia and still unrivalled military capabilities after U.S. influence in the region has recently appeared to be on the wane.
Japan's Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, has made a point of taking a stand against China's recent assertiveness in the region, and has called repeatedly for broader interpretation of Japan's pacifist constitution that would allow it to help an ally under attack.
Chinese President Xi, meanwhile, has cast himself as a charismatic strongman intent on reclaiming China's prominence in the world.
As part of that, he has taken a more confrontational approach to territorial disputes in the East China Sea and the South China Sea.
The Chinese strategy, analysts said, is to challenge Japan's control of the islands without provoking an actual military conflict and to raise the costs to Washington to get it to push Tokyo to acknowledge the dispute and start negotiations.
China's move to announce the new air-defense zone "is a deliberate calculated act to break the present Sino-Japanese stalemate over the Senkaku Islands," said Carlyle A. Thayer, an expert on Asian maritime security at the Australian Defence Force Academy.
"China's actions are carefully calibrated. They are designed to push the envelope of China's claims while appearing defensive."
On the domestic front, a risk for Mr. Xi is that his rising personal power has raised expectations with a highly nationalistic domestic audience, leaving him vulnerable should China come out worse off in the dispute.
In China's relatively open online forums, some Chinese citizens criticized the military's failure to stand up to the U.S. on the B-52s while others questioned the decision to establish the air-defense zone in the first place.
"The immediate reaction [from U.S.] with both words and action shows the adventurism in China's decision over the air-defense zone, and the passive and embarrassing consequence resulting from that," Pan Jiazhu, a well-known columnist on military issues who goes by the pen name Zhao Chu, wrote on his verified account on the Twitter-like Sina Weibo microblogging service.
Internationally, meanwhile, China needs to show it has sufficient military muscle to enforce the zone while also reassuring neighbors, especially in Southeast Asia, where China is also involved in territorial disputes, that the zone doesn't threaten their interests.
"It will be very important for China to establish [the zone's] credibility," said Wang Dong, a Northeast Asia security specialist at Peking University.
At the same time, "China needs to make a good case why it's defensive and limited and why it should not be seen as aggressive."

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U.S. affirms support for Japan in island dispute with China

BY MARK FELSENTHAL AND DAVID ALEXANDER

The United States pledged support for ally Japan on Wednesday in a growing dispute with China over islands in the East China Sea as senior U.S. administration officials said China's claim to air space over the islands had unsettled its neighbors.
U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told his Japanese counterpart in a phone call that the two nations' defense treaty covers the small island group where China established a new airspace defense zone last week and "commended the Japanese government for exercising appropriate restraint," a Pentagon spokesman said.
U.S. Vice President Joe Biden is due to visit China, Japan and South Korea during a week-long trip and will seek to ease tensions heightened after China demanded that airplanes flying near the islands identify themselves to Chinese authorities, senior U.S. administration officials said.
China's declaration raised the stakes in a territorial standoff between Beijing and Tokyo over the Senkaku islands.
The United States defied China's demand on Tuesday by flying two unarmed B-52 bombers over the islands without informing Beijing. 

Flights of Japan's main airline similarly ignored Chinese authorities while flying through that air space.
China's defense ministry said it had monitored the U.S. bombers. 

A Pentagon spokesman said the planes had not be observed or contacted by Chinese aircraft.
Some experts say the Chinese move was aimed at eroding Tokyo's claim to administrative control over the area, including the tiny Senkaku islands.
Washington does not take a position on the sovereignty of the islands but recognizes that Tokyo has administrative control over them and the United States is therefore bound to defend Japan in the event of an armed conflict.
Biden will seek to ease the growing tensions in the region during his trip next week, U.S. officials said.
"The visit to China creates an opportunity for the vice president to discuss directly with policy makers in Beijing this issue to convey our concerns directly and to seek clarity regarding Chinese intentions," a senior administration official told reporters.
"It also allows the vice president to make the broader point that there's an emerging pattern of behavior that is unsettling to China's own neighbors," the official said.
The official said it raised questions about "how China operates in international space and how China deals with areas of disagreement with its neighbors."
Biden will not be making a demand on a specific issue but rather will raise the topic as part of talks spanning a range of themes, the official added.
The Pentagon signaled that more military flights into the defense zone claimed by China can be expected.
Colonel Steve Warren, a Pentagon spokesman, told Reuters: "We'll continue to conduct operations in the region, as we have" in the past. 

He declined to offer details on timing.
Japan Airlines and ANA Holdings said they had stopped giving flight plans and other information to Chinese authorities following a request from the Japanese government.

Both said they had not experienced any problems when passing through the zone. 

Japan's aviation industry association said it had concluded there was no threat to passenger safety by ignoring the Chinese demands, JAL said.

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One Place Where the U.S. Can Rest Easy About China’s Influence

By JANE PERLEZ

The bond between China and Pakistan is often called as high as the highest peaks, as deep as the deepest ocean. When things are going well, the proximity phrase — “as close as lips and teeth” — is thrown in, with winces on both sides.

Beware, Daniel S. Markey says in his lively new book, “No Exit From Pakistan: America’s Troubled Relationship With Islamabad” (Cambridge University Press). The sentimental language between Islamabad and Beijing masks a relationship that is not quite so profound. There is little need for Washington, he argues, to fear that China would like to supplant the United States in Pakistan.

China is Pakistan’s leading arms supplier, and the two armies conduct war games and drills together. China, seemingly unconcerned about Pakistan’s rapidly expanding nuclear weapons program, is currently building two nuclear reactors to help meet Pakistan’s desperate energy needs. China also appears to be moving ahead with providing two much larger nuclear reactors, Mr. Markey said in an interview.

The Chinese reactors are not so troublesome to the United States that Washington has protested, Mr. Markey said. That’s because the administration of President George W. Bush sealed a civilian nuclear deal with India in 2005, making it difficult, he said, for the United States to object to the new 1,000-megawatt Chinese reactors on offer to Pakistan. When China sold Pakistan two smaller nuclear reactors several years ago, the United States lodged a weak protest with the Nuclear Suppliers Group, a body that is supposed to control the proliferation of nuclear materials, he said.

“There are smarter and less worrisome ways for Pakistan to get energy,” Mr. Markey said of the new Chinese reactors. “But the Chinese don’t see the reactors as profoundly destabilizing, and there is no push back from the United States.” India complains that the reactors could help Pakistan’s well-established nuclear weapons program.

Mr. Markey, a former State Department official who worked on Pakistan policy during the Bush presidency and is now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has written an insider’s account of how the United States and Pakistan resemble characters in Jean Paul Sartre’s play “No Exit.” They find hell is not a place of fire and devils, but a living room where they perpetually torment one another. It’s a nice metaphor for how Pakistani and American diplomats often confide how they see each other.

Mr. Markey has traveled to Pakistan often, and he knows many of the players in government, business and civil society. He has visited China and concludes that the main connection between Pakistan and China is their joint interest in upsetting India.

Beyond balancing Pakistan against India, China does not — for the moment, anyway — see Pakistan, with its destabilizing radical groups and homegrown Taliban, as “strategically useful,” Mr. Markey says. In the future, China would like to see a stable Pakistan that offers a land route to the Arabian Sea and serves as a steppingstone to Iran and Central Asia.

But that’s a way off. As evidence of Pakistan’s chronic instability: The Chinese-built port of Gwadar on the Arabian Sea remains unused. Building a highway from the port to western China would involve construction across the Pakistani province of Baluchistan, the base of Taliban groups protected by Pakistan’s intelligence agencies and territory too forbidding for even the Chinese.

Some of the most fascinating details in Mr. Markey’s account throw light on China as a moderating influence in spats between Pakistan and the United States. When relations between Washington and Islamabad reached a low after the United States killed Osama bin Laden, Beijing counseled Pakistan to moderate its anger and rejoin the Americans at the negotiating table. China has also advised Pakistan to take it easy in the disputed region of Kashmir, and it supported an initiative during the rule of Gen. Pervez Musharraf for talks with India, Mr. Markey reports.

“An exclusive, narrow alliance with an isolated Pakistan, particularly one at odds with the United States, would not be China’s preferred way to achieve either its short-term or long-term goals,” Mr. Markey writes.

It sounds as though Pakistan is one place where the United States does not need to fret about China gaining ground.

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U.S. looks to Asian nations to build militaries as bulwark to China

AP

Military muscle: A Ground Self-Defense Force member launches a hand-held anti-tank rocket during an annual live-fire exercises at the Higashi Fuji range in Gotemba, Shizuoka Prefecture, in August
WASHINGTON – U.S. lawmakers voiced bipartisan support Tuesday for the Obama administration’s strategic pivot to Asia but stressed the need for partner nations to strengthen their military capabilities and contribute more to their own defense.
Members of the House Armed Services Committee plan to step up scrutiny of U.S. military policy in the fast-growing region, where despite budget pressure, Washington wants to increase its presence as it draws down forces in Afghanistan.
Lawmakers said they plan a wide-ranging examination of U.S. force deployments and how to optimize security relationships. 

They plan a series of five hearings between now and early 2014, mostly focused on the growing military power of China. 

Topics will include its capabilities in space, the modernization of its navy and air force, and maritime disputes.
Congress does not set U.S. policy but it can influence it and controls the purse strings. 

The lawmakers said part of the committee’s intent is to explain to the rest of Congress and the American public about the strategic importance of the U.S. remaining engaged in the Asia-Pacific, where it has been the dominant force since World War II. 

Some in Asia, however, are voicing doubts about Washington’s staying power in the region as it grapples with political divisions at home and crises in the Mideast.
“The biggest thing for us is presence. If we have presence there it’s the greatest stability you can have in that region,” said Republican Rep. Randy Forbes, one of six lawmakers briefing reporters on the upcoming hearings.
Democratic Rep. Adam Smith said the committee would look at how the U.S. can guarantee its alliance commitments with nations like South Korea and Japan, while building on its many other relationships in the region.
“One of the keys to making this work is partner capacity,” he said, citing as an example U.S. counterinsurgency support for Philippine forces fighting Islamic rebels. 

“What other options are out there to build capacity in forces so it doesn’t all fall on us?”
Republican committee Chairman Howard “Buck” McKeon supported a more active role for Japan’s military in response to assertive behavior by China.

Japan has the region’s second strongest military after China but it remains constrained by its pacifist Constitution.
“It’s incumbent upon us to do all we can to build up and strengthen our partners so they can bring more to the table when they are needed,” McKeon said.

Democratic Rep. Colleen Hanabusa said the U.S. needs to be more mindful of historical conflicts between its allies like South Korea and Japan, and recognize that Washington won’t be able to solve them.
“They have got to, on their own, decide that this is either a conflict they can park on the side for a little or resolve. We are not going to be able to resolve history,” she said.

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Wall St. elites reason it's time for a 'de-Americanized world,' China's news agency says

FoxNews.com

The Yuyuan garden, one of the most popular tourist destinations in town, is crowded by holiday goers on the first day of a week-long National Day holidays in Shanghai, China, Tuesday, Oct. 1, 2013. This year marks the 64th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China.

China’s official news agency is calling for a “de-Americanized world,” in a blistering editorial characterizing the United States as a “meddling” and “hypocritical” nation that introduces chaos into the world for its own ends.
“As U.S. politicians of both political parties are still shuffling back and forth between the White House and the Capitol Hill without striking a viable deal to bring normality to the body politic they brag about, it is perhaps a good time for the befuddled world to start considering building a de-Americanized world,” writes the Xinhua News Agency.
“Meanwhile, the U.S. government has gone to all lengths to appear before the world as the one that claims the moral high ground, yet covertly doing things that are as audacious as torturing prisoners of war, slaying civilians in drone attacks, and spying on world leaders.
“Under what is known as the Pax-Americana, we fail to see a world where the United States is helping to defuse violence and conflicts, reduce poor and displaced population, and bring about real, lasting peace.”
Xinhua is a state-controlled media agency that reports directly to the China’s ruling Communist Party.
The article, published Sunday, specifically references how, “the world is still crawling its way out of an economic disaster thanks to the voracious Wall Street elites,” as perceived failed policies in Iraq.
“Such alarming days when the destinies of others are in the hands of a hypocritical nation have to be terminated, and a new world order should be put in place, according to which all nations, big or small, poor or rich, can have their key interests respected and protected on an equal footing,” writes Xinhua.

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Worries Over China's Ambitions Mark Southeast Asian Meeting

Japan, the U.S. and the Philippines urged their Asian allies to push for the rule of law in resolving territorial disputes with China at a regional summit in Brunei.
By TOKO SEKIGUCHI And ABHRAJIT GANGOPADHYAY

Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, left, chatted with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on the way to an Asean dinner Wednesday in Bandar Seri Begawan.

BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN, Brunei—Japan, the U.S. and the Philippines urged their Asian allies to push for the rule of law in resolving territorial disputes with China at a regional summit here Wednesday, underscoring the extent to which security issues can still overshadow broader economic and trade relations in the region.
Security quickly came to the fore at the gathering of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations annual summit and meetings with Asia-Pacific powers, following a separate international gathering on economic and trade issues in Indonesia earlier this week involving many of the same countries. 

China's growing commercial and naval power in recent years has unnerved many smaller countries in Asia, and has also prompted the U.S. on several occasions over the past few years to urge all nations in the region to ensure the free navigation of shipping through the South China Sea, one of the world's busiest shipping lanes.
Worries over China's longer-term ambitions were again on the minds of many of the delegates at the two-day Asean and East Asia Summit meetings, which will also include leaders and officials from Russia and Australia, and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. 

Mr. Kerry is attempting to ease concerns sparked by the partial government shutdown in Washington that caused President Barack Obama to scrap his plans to attend the summits.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe encouraged Southeast Asian leaders to present a united front in negotiating territorial rights in the South China Sea, which are claimed in whole or in part by China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei, and where relations between Beijing and the Philippines in particular have grown increasingly testy in recent months.
"We're very concerned about changes in the status quo brought on by force in the South China Sea," Mr. Abe said, reiterating what he had separately told Vietnamese and Indonesian leaders earlier in the week when they met on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting.
Vietnam previously has complained about Chinese fishing vessels interfering with oil exploration in its waters, while the Philippines is angered by a growing Chinese presence at Scarborough Shoal off the coast of its main island Luzon, and which Manila claims is within part of its territory. 

Its president, Benigno Aquino III, also pressed the idea of establishing firm guidelines on how to resolve the competing claims over the South China Sea, known as the Code of Conduct, and the Philippines earlier this year filed a case with the United Nations challenging the legality of China's claims.
Describing the expanse of water as "this sea known by many names"—a nod to the sometimes rancorous arguments on what to call it—Mr. Aquino said that "our development as a region cannot be realized in an international environment where the rule of law does not exist."
The U.S.'s Mr. Kerry, meanwhile, speaking in a meeting with Asean, agreed. 

"A finalized Code of Conduct, in which all parties abide by a common set of rules and standards, is something that will benefit the entire Asia-Pacific community of nations—and beyond," he said.
China's Premier Li Keqiang said during Asean-China talks that the two sides shouldn't let the South China Sea issue get in the way of the broader relationship between Beijing and the Southeast Asian trade bloc, but it also subtly reminded other countries that in its view, the dispute is a matter for the contestants alone.
Security analysts such as Ian Storey at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore, though, have suggested that the tensions between Japan and China could prove a potentially more destabilizing flashpoint than the South China Sea.
Political ties between Asia's two largest economies have been strained for over a year since Japan nationalized the Senkaku Islands and maintains they have always been Japanese territory. 

The Chinese contest their ownership and continue to send patrol boats to area waters despite Japan's repeated protests. 

The Japanese government acquired the islands from private Japanese owners during the country's previous administration.
During his nine months in office, Mr. Abe has yet to sit down with his Chinese counterpart, while in China, consumer boycotts have occasionally been launched against Japanese products.
In addition, Mr. Abe, while characterizing the relationship as "one of the most important" for Japan—China is Japan's biggest trading partner—and insisting he's open to dialogue, hasn't toned down his criticism against China's growing military might.

"We have an immediate neighbor whose military expenditure is at least twice as large as Japan's and second only to the U.S. defense budget. The country has increased its military expenditure, hardly transparently, by more than 10% a year" over the past two decades, Mr. Abe said in thinly veiled reference to China during a speech at the Hudson Institute in New York last month.

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