‘China’s planned ADIZ over West Phl Sea to trigger tension’

“The world shares the same understanding that the regional tension should not be raised by Beijing’s unilateral course of action.” -- Itsunori Onodera

By Jaime Laude 

Japanese Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera and his Philippine counterpart, Secretary Voltaire Gazmin, meet at Camp Aguinaldo in Quezon City yesterday. 

MANILA, Philippines -- Visiting Japanese Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera said yesterday that China’s plan to establish an Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) over the West Philippine Sea would further trigger tension as Beijing’s unilateral action would be opposed by other nations in Southeast Asia.
Emerging from a bilateral meeting with Department of National Defense Secretary Voltaire Gazmin at Camp Aguinaldo, Onodera pointed out that an ADIZ over the South China Sea would cause alarm not only to the Japanese government but to the international community as well.
“I think the world shares the same understanding that the regional tension should not be raised by Beijing’s unilateral course of action,” Onodera said.
Japan and China are locked in a territorial row over a chain of islands known as Senkakus in the East China Sea.
Tension has been mounting in the region following China’s establishment of ADIZ over the area, a moved defied by the Tokyo government and the US military.
Beijing recently announced it is also establishing an ADIZ over the South China Sea to further boost its maritime claim in the hotly-contested region against other claimant countries including Brunei, Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines.
“The United States, South Korea, Taiwan and European Union and other countries are expressing strong concern over this. If the new ADIZ will be set in South China Sea or the West Philippine Sea, I think the government of Japan needs to express its concern similarly to what we have stand in East China Sea,” Onodera said.
Aside from several reefs that Beijing has converted into forward naval bases in the South China Sea, it has also established what it calls Sansha City on the Woody Island in the Paracels to manage its supposed territorial waters in the East and South China Seas.
Several Chinese warships have been conducting regular patrols over the two areas. 

As China’s naval operations are continuously being challenged by Japan in the East China Sea, they have remained largely uncontested in the South China Sea and West Philippine Sea.
China has been maintaining warships in Panganiban Reef and Subi Reef in Palawan. 

Only this year, China deployed two maritime surveillance vessels within the vicinity of Ayungin Shoal.

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Japan caught in dilemma over China air defence zone

By Jonathan Soble in Tokyo and Demetri Sevastopulo in Hong Kong

Any Asian country trying to preserve its hold on remote territory coveted by China, the region’s increasingly powerful and assertive giant, faces a daunting challenge.
For Japan, the task of retaining control of the disputed Senkaku Islands is especially fraught – as the delicately orchestrated visit to Tokyo by US vice-president Joe Biden highlighted this week.
On Tuesday, Mr Biden reiterated US criticism of China’s decision to declare an “air defence identification zone” over much of the East China Sea, including the Japanese Senkaku.

But he stopped short of joining Japan in calling for the zone’s removal – disappointing some Japanese officials.
Japan’s unusual security arrangements, under which its defence is largely outsourced to Washington, mean it must read the intentions of two different countries in managing the dispute: China, the adversary that is trying to wrest the islands away, and the US, the "ally" that is supposed to protect them. 

Neither is always easy.
Japanese officials say their biggest worry is that China will strengthen its influence over the islands in steps so gradual that no single move invites a decisive response, but that ultimately adds up to a change of de facto control.
Washington, not surprisingly, is setting the bar for action especially high – it is keen to avoid conflict with China over what many Americans would see as a few inconsequential Japanese rocks.
China has been employing a similar strategy elsewhere, in what one well known Chinese navy officer has dubbed the “cabbage strategy” to wrest control of the Scarborough Shoal from the Philippines – surrounding the area in thin layers until it is eventually enveloped.
“It’s very obvious that they’re doing the same thing they did in the South China Sea,” says one Japanese foreign policy official. 

“First they send fishing boats, then survey boats, and finally the military to guard their national assets.”
The Senkaku conflict flared up in 2012 after Japan’s government purchased three of the islands from their private owner, prompting China to accuse it of hatching its own plot to assert more control. 

Since then, however, Tokyo has been at pains to avoid escalating the dispute.
Before he came to power a year ago, Shinzo Abe had suggested Japan might station soldiers or government workers on the islands, a step that would infuriate Beijing. 

That idea was shelved once he became premier, but some worry that nationalist pressure could mount on Mr Abe if US and Japanese protests fail to deter Beijing.
“He will be accused by some of lacking backbone,” the official said. 

“When it comes to a critical point, we may have to act.”

Another high-ranking Japanese official familiar with Mr Abe’s thinking said Tokyo would have “rejoiced” if Mr Biden had sent a stronger message to China. 

But he added that there was a “common sense” that putting too much pressure on him ahead of his Beijing visit – he arrived on Wednesday – would have been counterproductive.
While the US does not take a position on the sovereignty of the Senkaku, Washington has made clear that they fall under the auspices of the US-Japan security treaty because they are under Japanese administrative control.
But the official said it was clear that China’s strategy was to produce an outcome where “one day in the future, the Japanese assertion of administrative control will appear questionable”. 

Once that happens, he adds, “it is easy for China to assume that if the Senkaku are not under Japanese administrative control, the US will have to have second thoughts” about defending the islands.
With few concrete options to respond to Chinese pressure, Mr Abe has been trying to build alliances with other Asia-Pacific countries concerned about the consequences of China’s rise. 

He visited southeast Asia earlier this year, is scheduled to make a trip to India – which has its own border disputes with China – in January, and is expected to visit Australia in 2014.

Japan has been bolstering its coast guard and shifting its military assets toward its southwestern seas, away from the north of the country where they had been concentrated during the cold war against the Soviet Union. 

The latest update of its national defence strategy, due to be announced this month, is expected to continue the trend.
Japan patrols the Senkaku by sea and air 24 hours a day, but the efforts of the Japanese coast guard and military benefit from the presence of the US navy in the region, including in the East China Sea. 

The Japanese official close to Mr Abe said it was important that Japan extend independent efforts to maintain control.
“Of course, Japan wants the US to commit to protect the Senkaku, but at the end of the day the islands are our own territory, so the Japanese government is now attempting to protect them,” he said.

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Safeguarding the Seas

How to Defend Against China's New Air Defense Zone
By Michael J. Green

A helicopter of the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force lifts off from the aircraft carrier USS George Washington during Annual Exercise 2013.

Much of the coverage of China’s November 23 announcement of a new Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) over waters claimed by Japan and South Korea has focused on the reactive and blundering nature of Chinese diplomacy. 

China’s sudden insistence on its right to take defensive action against foreign aircraft in this zone, the argument goes, was either an attempt to play to domestic nationalism or else to respond to Japan’s own increasing assertiveness in the region. 

Either way, the coverage concludes, China underestimated how quickly and vigorously other countries in the region would respond, including with flights directly into that airspace.
The implication of this analysis, which may be tempting to the overstretched Obama administration, is that Beijing made a hasty move that the region will now correct with a little help from Washington. 

Unfortunately for the administration, however, this was not just an ill-conceived slap by Beijing against a testy Japan. 

The reality is that the new ADIZ is part of a longer-term attempt by Beijing to chip away at the regional status quo and assert greater control over the East and South China Seas.
To understand this reality, one must begin the story of the ADIZ before Japan’s nationalization of three of the eight disputed Senkaku Islands in 2012, which is where most assessments start. 

Over three decades ago, China and Japan agreed to set aside their disagreement over the islands and focus on a common problem: the Soviet Union. 

It was China that first nullified the understanding by staking claim to the islands in 1992. 

It was also China that, in 2008, began significantly expanding its maritime patrols in and around those waters. In recent years, the Chinese maritime services have conducted patrols at least once a day near the islands and have crossed Japan’s 12-nautical-mile border around the islands on hundreds of occasions. 

Meanwhile, Chinese navy units have circumnavigated Japan and conducted major military exercises on all sides of the Japanese archipelago. 

In other words, by the time Tokyo purchased some of the Senkaku Islands from private landowners in 2012, Chinese pressure had reached alarming levels for Tokyo.
Both Japanese and Chinese diplomacy on the issue have been inept at times, of course, but the difference is that Japan -- which has effective administrative control of the islands -- is trying to preserve the status quo, whereas China is bent on using coercive pressure to try to change it. 

And Japan is not China’s only target. 

Beijing has also been pressing Manila over the Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea. 

China has increased its maritime and air presence around the contested area and imposed export bans on key products from the Philippines. (This strategy smacks of the same mercantilism China showed when it halted rare earth exports to Japan because of those two countries’ island disputes.)
Unlike the ongoing dispute with Japan, the Scarborough Shoal confrontation going badly for Manila. 

In 2012, Chinese maritime patrol ships finally overwhelmed the tiny Philippine navy and took de facto control of the shoals. 

Filipinos whose families have fished those waters for a millennium are now barred from entering.
Japan’s air force and navy are too strong for China to attempt a similar grab of the Senkaku Islands anytime soon. 

But Hanoi, Manila, Taipei, and Tokyo all sense that, in the Scarborough Shoal, Beijing “killed the chicken to scare the monkey,” as officials from those governments say. 

Most observers would agree that China has every intention of following the same strategy against Japan, just in slow motion. 

Although the smaller powers have remained quiet about the announcement of a new Chinese defense zone, most are privately urging Japan not to back down.
Japan, South Korea, and the United States have stated that they will not let the Chinese ADIZ announcement change their military operations in the area. 

To prove the point, the Pentagon sent two B-52 bombers out of Guam to fly through the new defense zone. Japan and South Korea quickly followed suit with their own patrols. 

The administration’s opening move certainly demonstrated by word and deed that Beijing went too far. 

But if the Chinese announcement comes from a deeper strategy of coercing smaller states and establish greater control in the Western Pacific -- as many governments in the region rightly suspect -- then Washington had better be prepared for a longer-term test of wills with Beijing.
The administration needs to consider the larger context that the rest of the region sees. 

Some of the policies included in the so-called rebalance to Asia will help, including the announcement in October that Washington and Tokyo will revise their bilateral defense guidelines to deal with new contingencies, including from China. 

Other moves have been less helpful. 

It was not lost on China or Japan, for example, that U.S. service chiefs testified in front of Congress that planned defense budget cuts would leave the armed forces unable to fulfill their current missions or security commitments; that U.S. President Barack Obama threw the decision about honoring his redline in Syria to Congress; or that senior U.S. officers in the Pacific continue trying to calm the waters by speaking of a new strategic partnership with China and naming climate change as their greatest security concern in the region.
More immediately, the disconnect between Washington and Tokyo this week over whether commercial flights should recognize the ADIZ and file flight plans with Beijing (Tokyo says no and Washington says yes) was a poor case of alliance management and an embarrassment for Tokyo during a serious security problem. 

Whatever the merits of each side’s respective policies in terms of strategic signals and airline safety, the two will have to work as one in the future.
The Obama administration needs to stick to a disciplined message of resolve and reassurance. 

And that would mean accurately assessing Beijing’s strategic intent. 

Confrontation with China is far from inevitable, and the potential areas for productive U.S.-Chinese cooperation remain vast. 

Vice President Joe Biden will no doubt emphasize the positive in U.S.-Chinese relations when he travels to Beijing this week. And that makes sense. 

But he should also leave no doubt that the United States is prepared to work with regional allies and partners to ensure Beijing understands that its attempts at coercion will not work. 

Then, when he is in Tokyo and Seoul, he should take time to listen carefully to what those allies think is at stake in the troubled East and South China Seas. 

Their problem is our problem, not just because we are allies but also because this moment could determine how China uses its growing power.

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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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China air zone divides US and its allies

The U.S. capitulation undermines Japan, Washington’s most important ally in Asia.

By Demetri Sevastopulo in Hong Kong

When US B-52s roared their engines above the Senkaku Islands last Tuesday, the Japanese government viewed the move as a loud and clear message to China over its controversial new East China Sea air defence zone.
The right-leaning Yomiuri, Japan’s biggest daily newspaper, went as far as to claim that “China’s diplomatic isolation is becoming complete”.

But the mood shifted on Friday when the US urged its commercial airlines to comply with China’s “air defence identification zone” (ADIZ).
“The signal the US is sending to China and the region is confusing which is not a good thing,” said Chikako Ueki, an Asia security expert at Waseda University.
“The message had been that you cannot change the status quo by force... The key question is whether the US is going to be the defender of freedom of the sea and air, the so-called global commons, as it says.”
With US vice-president Joe Biden arriving in Japan on Monday for a scheduled visit, Ms Ueki said it was “important that the US sends a clear signal to China and to the region”, adding that the mood in Japan was now very negative towards Beijing.
From Washington to Tokyo to Seoul, countries with stakes in the Pacific expressed dismay when China unveiled its ADIZ without consultations. 

While many nations use ADIZs as aerial early warning systems, China’s zone covered the Japanese Senkaku and overlapped with Japan’s ADIZ.
The US statement on commercial airlines made clear that Washington did not accept China’s requirements for the ADIZ, but it went down badly in Tokyo, particularly because the government last week forced JAL and ANA to reverse course after the Japanese carriers started providing China with flight plans for the ADIZ.
Some experts have suggested that the move could be interpreted as the US caving in to China, and in doing so undermining Japan, Washington’s most important ally in Asia.
“On the surface, it looks like they have done that,” said Robert Manning, an Asia expert at the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security. 

“Biden is going to have to answer for it. The Japanese are not particularly happy about this.”
But Mr Manning said Washington may have felt compelled to prioritise commercial safety to avoid an accident like the one in 1983 when the Soviet Union shot down a Korean Airlines flight that breached its airspace.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe played down the US statement, saying that Washington had informed Japan through diplomatic channels that it had not advised US airlines to comply with the Chinese zone. 

A Japanese foreign ministry spokesman said Tokyo did not believe that the US had asked its commercial airlines to provide the Chinese with flight plans.
Jeff Kingston, a professor of Asian studies at Temple University, said Mr Biden would have his “work cut out . . . to smooth Abe’s ruffled feathers”.
He said the US vice-president would need to encourage Mr Abe not to respond to China’s move by paying a visit to the Yasukuni Shrine, a controversial memorial to Japan’s war dead that infuriates China.

But he added that while Mr Abe has protested at the Chinese move, privately the nationalist Japanese leader – who is scheduled to unveil a new defence programme later in December – may have welcomed the new ADIZ.
“I am sure that Abe privately gave a very big thank you to [Chinese President] Xi Jinping because this has put wind in his sails,” said Mr Kingston.
While Washington has come under some criticism for the statement on commercial aviation, Mr Kingston said the US had been put in a “tricky position” as it has its own ADIZ, even if the rules are different from China’s.
“You don’t want to reinforce the narrative in China that the big bad west is trying to keep us down,” he said.

Many also point out that China is forcing airlines flying through the zone to file flight plans, even when their final destination is not mainland China.
A spokesman for South Korea’s defence ministry said that the US had not talked to Seoul about the advice given to US commercial airlines on compliance with the Chinese air defence zone.
James Kim, an analyst at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul, said that the US, South Korea and Japan risked “undermining each other’s position on these issues by sending mixed messages”, adding that all sides of the dispute appeared to be “testing how far the other side is willing to go”.
Gary Li, a senior analyst at IHS Maritime in Beijing, said the US was “not necessarily pulling the rug out” from under Japan and South Korea – whose airlines are also not complying with the Chinese ADIZ – but that the move “definitely makes the Chinese position stronger”.

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Japan Takes Airspace Issue to U.N. Agency

By MARTIN FACKLER

NIIGATA, Japan — Seeking broader international support for opposing China’s claims to airspace over the East China Sea, Japan has asked the United Nations agency that oversees civil aviation to look into whether the newly created Chinese air defense zone could endanger civilian airliners, the Foreign Ministry said Saturday.
The ministry said that it submitted a proposal for the agency, the International Civil Aviation Organization, to examine whether China’s move could threaten the order and safety of international aviation in the area. Though the organization can make only nonbinding recommendations, Japan appears to be hoping that the heightened international scrutiny will force China to back off its declared intent to control the airspace with military measures if necessary.
China’s new “air defense identification zone” covers a broad section of sea that includes Japanese islands, and overlaps with a zone claimed by Japan since the late 1960s. 

Japan views the zone, which China declared last week, as a new move to gain control of the Senkaku islands.
China has said its new zone would not affect civilian air traffic, and was aimed instead at stopping Japanese military aircraft from entering airspace that it says rightfully belongs to China. 

However, China says that all aircraft, including commercial flights, must submit a flight plan before entering the zone.
While the United States military continues to fly into the zone without notifying China, Obama administration officials said Friday that they were advising American airlines to comply with the Chinese requirement in order to ensure their safety.

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China’s gradual expansion in the East China Sea poses a challenge for Japan

By Chico Harlan

Rocking the boat: Ships from China's State Oceanic Administration, the Japan Coast Guard and boats carrying members of a Japanese nationalist group sail in Japanese territorial waters around the Senkaku Islands. In the foreground, a Japan Coast Guard cutter stays between a Chinese vessel at left and a boat carrying the Japanese citizens.

TOKYO — When a half-dozen Chinese patrol vessels entered Japanese waters 14 months ago, Japan’s then-prime minister called an emergency meeting.
The Chinese ambassador in Tokyo was summoned for a tongue-lashing.
A Japanese government spokesman described an “invasion” of “unprecedented scale.”
The vessels eventually backtracked, but the episode signaled the first stage of China’s fundamental maritime strategy — one in which it forges into new areas, withstands the initial fury, and turns groundbreaking gambits into commonplace activity.
In most cases the strategy has worked.
Chinese boats now cut through waters around Japan-administered islands almost weekly, drawing complaints from Tokyo but not alarm.
For Japan, China’s piecemeal advance through contested territory represents perhaps its greatest defense challenge since the end of World War II.
Although several Asian nations have tried to curb China’s expansionist ambitions, some experts feel Japan is best-equipped: led by a competent prime minister, powered by a reviving economy and backed militarily by the United States.
But despite ongoing upgrades to its aircraft and patrol boats and increased coordination with Washington, Japan has yet to find an answer for its increasingly powerful neighbor.
Officials here say China continues to push boundaries, sending fighter jets closer to Japanese shores and last week drawing up a new air defense identification zone, or ADIZ, over the East China Sea.
None of China’s moves, by design, has been provocative enough to spark an armed skirmish.
That partly explains why deterring China has been so vexing for others in the region.
In the South China Sea, China has backed the Philippines away from several contested reefs and shoals by sending waves of increasingly powerful vessels to the area.
Several Japanese officials and security experts say China is now duplicating that strategy in the East China Sea, but with more intensity, because of the frequent use of aircraft.
China is trying to “unilaterally alter the status quo by coercive measures,” Fumio Kishida, Japan’s foreign minister, said in a news conference Friday.
Chinese officials portray their moves as responses to Japanese provocations, particularly Tokyo’s purchase in September 2012 of three contested islets from a private landowner.
But Japanese officials say China’s ambitions at sea go back well before September 2012, and they point to a several-year trend of Chinese activity in the East China Sea.
In 2004 Japanese scrambles against Chinese aircraft occurred roughly monthly, according to Ministry of Defense statistics. By 2007 they happened almost weekly.
This year they’re happening more than daily.
Two months ago a drone was spotted for the first time above the islets.
A Japanese Defense Ministry press official said that its origin hasn’t yet been identified, but “if you take its flight path into consideration, it is possible to suspect it is a drone of China.”
The trend “testifies to a long-term increase in Chinese military activity in the maritime domain,” a foreign ministry official said, requesting anonymity to discuss the situation.

Japan’s military limited
If China has been increasing its maritime presence for more than a half-decade, Japan has had to catch up. Until several years ago Japanese leaders almost never described China as a threat.
Through 2010, Japan’s Self-Defense Forces were positioned primarily to defend against a Russian invasion from the north.
Japan’s reversal has been swift. A new defense strategy three years ago reorganized troops, placing more emphasis on perimeter islands.
Japan is now updating that strategy, and initial recommendations call for the introduction of a Marines-like unit and the eventual use of unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, for surveillance.
The Defense Ministry’s budget request for 2014 calls for upgrades to surveillance equipment and the purchase of new patrol aircraft.
Though China’s announcement last week of its air defense identification zone threw a spotlight on the airspace above the East China Sea, much of Japan’s spending was already geared to aircraft upgrades.
The Air Self-Defense Force budget is set to rise 7 percent in 2014.
Japan has some of the world’s most modern technology for surveillance and deterrence, military experts say. But its problem would come if ever there was an armed conflict, barred by its pacifist constitution from having key offensive weapons like long-range missiles or traditional aircraft carriers.
Japan’s largest ship, the Izumo-class destroyer, can only carry helicopters.
“That’s definitely a weakness,” said Masashi Nishihara, president of the Research Institute for Peace and Security in Tokyo.
Before taking office one year ago, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe talked about removing some of the restrictions on the military.
But that would require contentious constitutional revisions, and Abe, in office, has instead channeled his energy into patching up relations with others in the region who were ignored by his predecessors.
Abe has visited every member of ASEAN in what some experts say is an attempt to isolate China.

War of words
For countries on the periphery, China and Japan have been hawking dueling narratives about their conflict. Military expert Li Jie told China’s Global Times that the United States and Japan had been “defiant” in refusing to cooperate with the Chinese edict that all aircraft in the new aerial zone relay flight information to Beijing.
A separate editorial in the China Daily said Beijing has every right to adopt an “internationally common practice.”
Japan, meantime, has said it’s taking a stand against a “unilateral” move, and that other countries should share Japan’s concerns about freedom of navigation in international airspace.
In the short term, some experts in Tokyo say, China’s announced aerial zone might have backfired, drawing strong rebukes from the Australia, South Korea and the European Union and prompting a flyover of U.S. unarmed B-52 bombers.
But the real test for China’s strategy comes after the initial shock has waned.
“For the time being, things seem to be quite favorable to us,” said Narushige Michishita, an associate professor at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in Tokyo.
“But the question is how long this will last. China has been creating a gradual fait accompli, step by step, which is a pretty smart tactic. We make a big deal of this now, but we’ll forget about it after a while.”

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Paper Dragon

US forces operating 'normally' in China air zone. Japan and South Korea both disregarded the ADIZ, showing a united front after US B-52 bombers entered the area.
AFP

Beijing — US military chiefs have insisted they will not change their operations despite China scrambling fighter jets to monitor American and Japanese aircraft in Beijing's newly declared air defence zone.

But the State Department said US commercial airlines should observe China's demand to be given notice of aircraft entering the zone, while stating that compliance "does not indicate US government acceptance of China's requirements".
China flew warplanes into its air defence identification zone (ADIZ) on Friday, Chinese state media said, nearly a week after it announced the zone, which covers islands at the centre of a dispute between Beijing and Tokyo, raising regional tensions.
The Xinhua report indicated that Japan and the United States are continuing to disregard China's demands that aircraft submit flight plans when traversing the area in the East China Sea or face unspecified "defensive emergency measures".
"We have flights routinely transiting international airspace throughout the Pacific, including the area China is including in their ADIZ," Pentagon spokesman Colonel Steve Warren said on Friday.
"These flights are consistent with long-standing and well-known US freedom of navigation policies that are applied in many areas of operation around the world. I can confirm that the US has and will continue to operate in the area as normal."
Compliance by commercial flights "does not indicate US government acceptance of China's requirements for operating in the newly declared ADIZ," the State Department said in a statement.
Japanese airlines, under pressure from Tokyo, stopped following China's new rules on Wednesday, after initially complying.
In its evening edition Saturday, the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper said Japan's two biggest airlines were unlikely to change their stance even after the US announcement that commercial airlines should observe China's demand.
Japan Airlines said it had "no plan to change our stance at the moment" while All Nippon Airways said it would follow instructions from the transport ministry, the daily reported the two companies as saying.
Chinese air force spokesman Shen Jinke said Friday that several combat aircraft were scrambled to "verify the identities" of US and Japanese aircraft entering the air defence zone, according to Xinhua.

The Chinese planes, which included at least two fighter jets, identified two US surveillance aircraft and 10 Japanese aircraft including an F-15 warplane, Shen said.
Japan and South Korea both said Thursday they had disregarded the ADIZ, showing a united front after US B-52 bombers also entered the area.
Despite the scrambling of jets referred to in China's state media, Japanese Defence Minister Itsunori Onodera on Saturday said there were no "peculiar developments".
"We do not recognise there have been peculiar developments that we should disclose such as one where aircraft suddenly came close as the Chinese side announced yesterday," he said.
"We have been making our utmost efforts to be vigilant and we will continue," he added.
Onodera also called on China to use "common sense" over the air defence zone.
"It is important for both sides to respond in a calm manner," he said, according to the Kyodo news agency. "We want (China) to deal with this issue according to common sense in the international community".
Beijing is facing considerable internal pressure to assert itself. 

China's state media called Friday for "timely countermeasures without hesitation" if Japan violates the zone but it shied away from threatening Washington.
Washington has security alliances with both Tokyo and Seoul, and analysts say that neither China nor Japan -- the world's second and third-biggest economies, and major trading partners of each other -- want to engage in armed conflict.
The Communist Party seeks to bolster its public support by tapping into deep-seated resentment of Japan for its invasion of the country in the 1930s.
Such passions are easily ignited, and posters on Chinese social media networks have urged Beijing to act.
China's rules covering the zone require aircraft to provide their flight plan, declare their nationality and maintain two-way radio communication -- or face unspecified "defensive emergency measures".
Both Japan, which denies that there is a dispute over the islands, and Washington have ADIZs of their own, and China accuses them of double standards -- though China's zone includes a rock that is disputed between Beijing and Seoul, as well as islands controlled by Japan and claimed by China.
The European Union added its voice to the criticism of the zone, with its top foreign affairs official Catherine Ashton saying it "contributes to raising tensions in the region".
The Yomiuri Shimbun on Saturday reported that the United States and Japan would issue a joint statement demanding China scrap the air zone during a visit to Tokyo by US Vice President Joe Biden next week. Biden will meet Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Tuesday.

B-52 diplomacy

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Face-off

Like a teenager on a growth spurt who doesn’t know his own strength, China has underestimated the impact of its actions. 

The Economist

THE announcement by a Chinese military spokesman on November 23rd sounded bureaucratic: any aircraft flying through the newly designated Air Defence Identification Zone (ADIZ) in the East China Sea must notify Chinese authorities in advance and follow instructions from its air-traffic controllers. 

America’s response was rapid. 

On November 26th Barack Obama sent two B-52 bombers to fly through the new zone without notifying China. 

This face-off marks the most worrying strategic escalation between the two countries since 1996, when China’s then president, Jiang Zemin, ordered a number of exclusion zones for missile tests in the Taiwan Strait, leading America to send two aircraft-carriers there.
Plenty of countries establish zones in which they require aircraft to identify themselves, but they tend not to be over other countries’ territory. 

The Chinese ADIZ overlaps with Japan’s own air-defence zone (see map). 

It also includes some Japanese specks of rock called the Senkaku islands, as well as a South Korean reef, known as Ieodo. 

The move is clearly designed to bolster China’s claims. 

On November 28th Japan and South Korea sent aircraft into the zone.

Teenage testosterone
Growing economic power is bound to go hand-in-hand with growing regional assertiveness. 

That is fine, so long as the behaviour of the rising power remains within international norms. 

In this case, however, China’s does not; and America, which has guaranteed free navigation of the seas and skies of East Asia for 60 years, is right to make that clear.
How worrying China’s move is depends partly on the thinking behind it.

It may be that, like a teenager on a growth spurt who doesn’t know his own strength, China has underestimated the impact of its actions. 

The claim that America’s bombers had skirted the edge of the ADIZ was gawkily embarrassing. 

But teenagers who do not realise the consequences of their actions often cause trouble: China has set up a casus belli with its neighbours and America for generations to come.
It would thus be much more worrying if the provocation was deliberate. 

The “Chinese dream” of Xi Jinping, the new president, is a mixture of economic reform and strident nationalism. 

The announcement of the ADIZ came shortly after a party plenum at which Mr Xi announced a string of commendably radical domestic reforms. 

The new zone will appeal to the nationalist camp, which wields huge power, particularly in the armed forces. It also helps defend Mr Xi against any suggestions that he is a westernising liberal.
If this is Mr Xi’s game, it is a dangerous one. 

East Asia has never before had a strong China and a strong Japan at the same time. 

China dominated the region from the mists of history until the 1850s, when the West’s arrival spurred Japan to modernise while China tried to resist the foreigners’ influence. 

China is eager to re-establish dominance over the region. 

Bitterness at the memory of the Japanese occupation in the second world war sharpens this desire. 

It is this possibility of a clash between a rising and an established power that lies behind the oft-used parallel between contemporary East Asia and early 20th-century Europe, in which the Senkakus play the role of Sarajevo.

Seas of troubles
Tensions are not at that level. 

Japan’s constitution bans it from any military aggression and China normally goes to great lengths to stress that its rise—unlike that of Japan in the 1920s and 1930s—will be peaceful. 

But the neighbours are nervous, especially as the establishment of the ADIZ appears to match Chinese ambitions in the South China Sea.
Chinese maps show what is known as the “nine-dash line” encompassing all the South China Sea. 

In the wake of the global financial crisis, perhaps believing its own narrative of Chinese rise and American decline, it began to overreach in its dealings with its neighbours. 

It sent ships to disputed reefs, pressed foreign oil companies to halt exploration and harassed American and Vietnamese naval vessels in the South China Sea. 

These actions brought a swift rebuke from America’s then secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, and China appeared to back off and return to its regional charm offensive. 

Some observers say that the government is using the ADIZ to establish a nine-dash line covering the East China Sea as well. 

They fear China’s next move will be to declare an ADIZ over the South China Sea, to assert control over both the sea and the air throughout the region.
Whether or not China has such specific ambitions, the ADIZ clearly suggests that China does not accept the status quo in the region and wants to change it. 

Any Chinese leader now has an excuse for going after Japanese planes. 

Chinese ships are already ignoring Japanese demands not to enter the waters surrounding the disputed islands.
What can be done? 

Next week Joe Biden, America’s vice-president, arrives in China. 

The timing may be uncomfortable, but it is fortuitous. 

Mr Biden and Mr Xi know each other well: before Mr Xi became president, he spent five days in America at Mr Biden’s invitation. 

Mr Biden is also going to South Korea and Japan.
America’s “pivot” towards Asia is not taken very seriously there: Mr Obama is seen as distracted by his domestic problems. 

Mr Biden could usefully make clear America’s commitment to guaranteeing freedom of navigation in the region. 

Japan and South Korea, who squabble over petty issues, need to be told to get over their differences. 

As for China, it needs to behave like a responsible world power, not a troublemaker willing to sacrifice 60 years of peace in north-east Asia to score some points by grabbing a few windswept rocks. 

It should accept Japan’s suggestion of a military hotline, similar to the one that is already established between Beijing and Washington.
The region must work harder to build some kind of architecture where regional powers can discuss security. If such a framework had existed in Europe in 1914, things might have turned out differently.

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Tony Abbott refuses to back down over China comments

"We are a strong ally of Japan, we have a very strong view that international disputes should be settled peacefully and in accordance with the rule of law..." -- Tony Abbott 

By Mark Kenny, Philip Wen

PM Tony Abbott

Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop: "Australia opposes action by any side that we believe could add to the tensions or add to the risk of a miscalculation in disputed territorial zones in the region."

Tony Abbott has refused to take a backward step in a deepening diplomatic spat with Beijing, declaring "China trades with us because it is in China's interest to trade with us".
The unapologetic comments came after Beijing issued an arrogant warning to Canberra to "correct" its public statements which were seen as siding with Japan over disputed territory in the East China Sea.
An escalating series of diplomatic gestures by both sides have strained relations this week after Australia called in China's ambassador on Monday.
Canberra demanded an explanation from China for its unilateral decision to declare an expanded air defence zone over disputed waters and islands claimed by both Japan and China.
Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop defended the government's position on Thursday, arguing Australia has a key stake in the region and therefore opposes "action by any side that we believe could add to the tensions or add to the risk of a miscalculation in disputed territorial zones in the region".
Later in the day, Mr Abbott went further, stressing strategic ties.
"We are a strong ally of the United States, we are a strong ally of Japan, we have a very strong view that international disputes should be settled peacefully and in accordance with the rule of law and where we think that is not happening, or it is not happening appropriately, we will speak our mind," he said.
Beijing announced the expansion at the weekend, along with the instruction that civil aircraft would be required to lodge flight paths and seek permission before traversing the newly declared air defence identification zone.
The highly provocative act brought an immediate response from the US, which dispatched as many as four military aircraft, including two B52 long range bombers, to fly through the zone as a way of demonstrating that the Chinese annexure would be ignored.
With Australia's ambassador to Beijing, Frances Adamson, away on leave, China hauled in Justin Hayhurst, the deputy head of mission at Australia's Beijing embassy, to remonstrate.
Beijing also issued a series of statements complaining that Australia had taken sides and that it should act quickly to "correct" its position, if it wanted the relationship with China to remain healthy.
The new air defence zone came just days after Ms Bishop signed a joint communique with the US at the annual Australia-US ministerial consultations in Washington opposing “unilateral or coercive change in the status quo” in the East China Sea. 

It also follows a tri-lateral agreement signed with the US and Japan in Bali last month.
“It's certainly a slap in the face for the diplomatic position that Australia, the US and Japan have been taking on this issue,” Rory Medcalf, the director of the international security program at the Lowy Institute, said.

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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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China, Australia spat over Air Defence Identification Zone highlights 'troubled relations' in region

China's decision to establish an ADIZ is unhelpful, disturbing and cannot be ignored.

By Catherine McGrath
Japanese Maritime Defence Force Murasame Class destroyer JMSDF Murasame (left) and US Navy Arleigh Burke Class destroyer USS Preble sail in company with HMAS Sydney as the three warships participate in officer of the watch manoeuvres in the Pacific Ocean during the lead-up to Exercise Pacific Bond 2013

There is no doubting this is an important week in the rocky history of relations in north Asia and tensions over the disputed islands in the East China Sea.
The turning point came last week when China announced it was establishing an Air Defence Identification Zone (ADIZ), with Japan and the United States quick to react.
Then came Australia. Foreign Minister Julie Bishop called in the Chinese Ambassador for a dressing down and Beijing responded by calling Australia's behaviour irresponsible and mistaken.
Australia's language on China is getting tougher under this Government but arguably so are the strategic circumstances it is dealing with.
From Australia's perspective, China's decision to establish an ADIZ is unhelpful, disturbing and cannot be ignored.

The spat comes at a crucial time because tensions in the East China Sea are as high as any moment in the post-cold war era.
"China is not pleased," Professor Jingdong Yuan, a pro-China activist from the University of Sydney, said.
Professor Yuan believes Australia's decision to call in the Chinese Ambassador was a step too far and that by taking this position Australia can no longer be seen as impartial.
But as far as Australia is concerned China should understand that the timing of its decision is going to be questioned.
Australian Strategic Policy Institute executive director Peter Jennings believes Australia had to say something.
"The application of the ADIZ has not been helpful and is a diplomatic misstep on the part of Chinese," he said. 

"They should not be surprised that countries like Japan, US and Australia have made comments that they are going too far.
"It doesn't mean Australia is taking sides.
"Saying nothing would not be conducive to managing a set of troubled relations in the region," Mr Jennings said.
"The move by China was unhelpful and came at the wrong time. It has created a new tension which no one needs right now. Lower key strategies would have been more useful to adopt at this time." 

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop talked of the need to invigorate the Australian-Japan relationship

China watching Australia's relationship with 'closest friend' Japan
China is also concerned about Australia's growing closeness to Japan under the leadership of Prime Minister Tony Abbott.
While Labor was in power, relations with Japan took a back seat to a focus on growing ties with China, even though Japan and Australia share a very close strategic and defence relationship.
The Abbott Government has made it clear it wants to strengthen ties with Japan it believes have been left behind in recent years.
It is a delicate repositioning because of existing regional tensions and the Abbott Government emphasises the move will no be at the expense of China.
At the East Asia Summit meeting in Brunei in October, Mr Abbott, after his meeting with Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, described Japan as Australia's "closest friend in Asia".
Immediately China started to take notice.
Foreign Minister Julie Bishop is due shortly to travel to China. 

She has already been to Tokyo.
In a Canberra speech in early November, Ms Bishop talked of the need to invigorate the Australian-Japan relationship but emphasized that would not take anything from the relationship with China.
"The relationship with Japan has not had sufficient recognition in recent years as much of the rest of the world shifted focus to China and the extraordinary size and speed of its growth," Ms Bishop said.
"Of course China's rise must be and will be embraced; it is in every nation's interest for China to become even more than it is today.
"However, Australia's friendship with a rising China does not come at the expense of close and longstanding friendships."
There is nothing in these statements for China to complain about, but it is watching Australia to see how this develops.
Australia meantime hopes China understands reinvigorating ties with Japan should not be seen as threatening.

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Japan, South Korean military planes defy China's new defense zone

BY TETSUSHI KAJIMOTO AND JU-MIN PARK

Japanese and South Korean military aircraft flew through disputed air space over the East China Sea without informing China, officials said on Thursday, challenging a new Chinese air defense zone that has increased regional tensions and sparked concerns of an unintended clash.
The move came after Tokyo's close ally Washington defied China's demand that airplanes flying through its unilaterally announced zone identify themselves to Chinese authorities, flying two unarmed B-52 bombers over the islands on Tuesday without informing Beijing.
Tensions have ratcheted up since Beijing's weekend announcement of the zone that includes the skies over islands at the heart of a feud between Japan and China, and its demand that planes flying in the area first notify Chinese authorities.
Japan and the United States have sharply criticized the move, which some experts said was aimed not only at chipping away at Tokyo's control of the Senkaku islands, but also at challenging U.S. dominance in the region.
The United States does not take a position on the sovereignty of the islands but recognizes Tokyo's administrative control and has assured Japan that the U.S.-Japan security pact covers them.
The developments are expected to dominate U.S. Vice President Joe Biden's visit to Japan, China and South Korea next week.
Also on Thursday, China rejected South Korea's demand for the repeal of the zone, but appeared to soften its demand that commercial aircraft tell its military authorities of any plans to transit the area. 

Japan's two biggest airlines have already begun defying that order.
"The East China Sea Air Defence Identification zone is not aimed at normal international flights. We hope that relevant countries' airlines can proactively cooperate, so there is more order and safety for flights," China's Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang told reporters.
Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said naval ships and patrol planes have been operating in the East China Sea and would continue to do so.
"They are carrying out surveillance activity as before in the East China Sea, including the zone," Suga told a news conference, adding there has been no particular response from China. 

"We are not going to change this (activity) out of consideration to China," he added.

BEIJING REJECTS SEOUL'S DEMAND
A South Korean official also said a navy reconnaissance plane had flown over a submerged rock in the area claimed by both Beijing and Seoul, and that the flights would continue.
The Ieodo rock is controlled by South Korea, which maintains a maritime research station built on it.

Asked about the South Korean flight, Chinese spokesman Qin only said that Beijing was aware of it.
South Korea's reaction to Beijing's weekend declaration has been somewhat muted, reflecting its efforts to forge closer ties with China.
On Thursday, however, Seoul's vice defence minister told a senior Chinese military official that the move to impose the new rules created military tension in the region and called on Beijing to rectify the zone
"The Chinese reaction was that they will not be accepting the (South) Korean side's demand," Defence Ministry spokesman Kim Min-seok told reporters after talks between Vice Defence Minister Baek Seung-joo and Wang Guanzhong, the deputy chief of general staff of the Chinese People's Liberation Army.

Asked if China would heed Japanese calls to revoke the air defence zone, China's Defence Ministry spokesman Yang Yujun said Tokyo had implemented its own zone in 1969 and blamed it for raising tensions with its double standards.
Japan says it only requires planes headed for its territorial air space to notify authorities, not those merely transiting through its air defence identification zone.

In the ongoing war of words, the policy panel of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's Liberal Democratic Party approved a resolution on Thursday demanding China rescind the new air defence zone, saying the unilateral move reflected "unreasonable expansionism". 

But the resolution dropped a more inflammatory reference to "premodern and imperialist expansionism" contained in an earlier draft.

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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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