HongWu
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China muscles US in Pacific
WITHIN two decades the United States will be forced out of the western Pacific, says a senior Chinese military officer, amid concerns that increasingly militarised great-power rivalry could lead to war.
Senior Colonel Liu Mingfu, at the People's Liberation Army's National Defence University, told Fairfax Media this week that American strategic influence would be confined ''east of the Pacific midline'' as it is displaced by Chinese power throughout east Asia, including Australia.
Colonel Liu's interpretation of one facet of what the new Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, calls ''a new type of great-power relationship'' adds to the uncertainty and anxiety surrounding China's strategic ambitions.
...
Japanese leaders have accused China of locking weapons-guiding radars on Japanese targets - which China denies - while Western military sources say Chinese planes, ships and submarines have challenged Japanese-controlled waters and airspace around the Senkaku Islands.
Some security analysts say Australian political leaders are in public denial about the stakes involved and invidious choices the nation may have to face.
''It's the most dangerous strategic crisis that the US has faced - that the world has faced - since the end of the Cold War,'' said Hugh White, former deputy secretary of the Department of Defence.
China ships in disputed waters, says Japan coastguard | South China Morning Post
Three Chinese government ships entered disputed waters on Friday, the Japanese coastguard said, as the two countries’ soured relationship grew more complex following North Korea’s nuclear test.
Maritime surveillance vessels sailed near the Japanese-controlled Senkaku islands, which Beijing claims as the Diaoyus, around 8.30am, according to the coastguard.
“Japan cannot accept this. This is extremely regrettable,” Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida told a regular briefing Friday, adding that his ministry has already conveyed these sentiments to the Chinese embassy.
The relationship between the Asian giants has cooled over the territorial row, which triggered anti-Japan rallies across China last year.
The protests and an unofficial consumer boycott have stung Japanese businesses operating in the world’s second largest economy.
Some observers have warned diplomatic tensions could degenerate into a military clash, with potentially disastrous consequences for the region.
Japan has said that a Chinese frigate last month locked weapons-control radar onto one of its destroyers on the high seas. It said another vessel had earlier targeted a helicopter, actions Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called “provocative” and “dangerous.”
However, say analysts, Japan must walk a delicate diplomatic tight rope, with pressure to keep China onside as the wider world seeks Beijing’s support for stricter sanctions on North Korea in the wake of its nuclear test.
The U.S. Could Have Prevented the Senkaku/Diaoyu Crisis. Why Did It Not? - Forbes
The Senkaku/Diaoyu island territorial dispute is the greatest crisis in Japan-China relations in 60 years.
Second only to nuclear weapons development on North Korea and Iran, it is the most dangerous potential casus belli in the world today, and it likely to remain so indefinitely.
It is a crisis between and among the Japan, China, and—because of the U.S.-Japan security alliance—the United States, world’s three largest economies, possessing among them the world’s most formidable military arsenals.
The gravity and danger of the Japan-China Senkaku/Diaoyu territorial dispute are such that we would expect all parties concerned to have striven to prevent it escalating into a potentially hostile conflict
Why then, we must ask, did they not? More to the most critical point, why did the United States—which could have vetoed Japanese ‘nationalization’ of the islands, the action that guaranteed a full blown crisis—not do so?
Let me repeat: it was U.S. acquiescence in (if not encouragement of) the Noda government’s decision to nationalize the disputed islands—creating a direct and immediate challenge to China’s claim to sovereignty—that enabled this crisis.
If I may be a bit insensitive, aside from the tragic loss of life, against the enormity of the blunder in this case, the failures of U.S. policies and negligence in Benghazi, or even the naive wrong-footed dealing with the Arab Spring, are as superficial pinpricks against a gaping, life-sapping self-inflicted wound.
But, unlike toward Benghazi, there have been no congressional hearings on this egregious policy blunder. Rather, John Kerry, the erstwhile chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee—where such hearings might have taken place—now occupies the office of U.S, Secretary of State, taking over from Hillary Clinton, who would bear the greatest culpability, ensuring—with the complicity of a Democratic Senate and ever-compliant pro-Obama foreign policy press–a continued cover-up.
There should be no doubt that the U.S. did in fact sanction Japan’s nationalization of the islands in September last year. In an interview with Asahi Shimbun published on October 31, 2012, the current Japanese ambassador to the U.S. Sasae Kenichiro states that before even approaching and seeking to mollify China, Japan solicited the position of the United States on nationalization and was told that the U.S. “did not oppose.”
We should expect that the “no opposition” policy message was delivered through diplomatic channels, i.e. through Hillary’s State Department, though the policy was almost certainly a product of the normal, often drawn-out and contentious inter-agency “clearing” process, in which—we must assume in this case—the input of the Department of Defense was heavily weighted. But DoD’s position should not have been—and I would guess was not—uncontested. And if it had been strongly contested by the State Department (i.e., in the official position adopted through State’s own internal “clearing” process), I doubt that the “no opposition” policy would have emerged.
The policy must have been violently controversial and contentious within State—pitting, at minimum, the “Chrysanthemum Club” on the Japan Desk against the heralds of the G2 world on the China Desk–for two reasons: 1. It was a sharp break with and effective change in long established U.S. policy toward the sovereignty of the islands; and, 2. There could have been no doubt about the furious reaction and sense of U.S. treachery and betrayal that the policy would engender in Beijing.
As to long-standing U.S. policy, from the end of WWII, and more explicitly from the return to Japan of sovereignty over Okinawa in 1971, the U.S. position had been unambiguous: while the U.S. “acknowledged” Japanese administrative control over the islands, the U.S. “takes no position on the ultimate sovereignty” of the islands. (Until recently the islands were referred to in U.S. diplomatic documents by both Senkaku and Diaoyu in a way that underlined that the U.S. was siding neither with Japanese nor Chinese—or Taiwanese—sovereign claims.)
After a hopeful start in U.S.-China relations, the pinnacle of which may have been the second U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue held in Beijing in May 2010. Then riding high, Secretary of State Clinton headed a U.S. delegation comprising over a dozen U.S. cabinet members and agency heads including Treasury Secretary Geithner, Fed Chairman Bernanke, Council of Economic Advisors Chairwoman Romer, USTR Kirk, and Commerce Secretary (now ambassador) Gary Locke. Jon Huntsman was then U.S. ambassador.
The relationship has seemed to cascade downhill from there, taking an increasingly militaristic, and confrontational tone, as the U.S. announced its defense structure “pivot” to Asia and WWII and Cold War legacy “alliances” emboldened the Philippines—and, indeed, Japan—to push back against or further press their own claims in territorial disputes with China, with Hillary in public fora often offering moral support.
Relations between nations, especially great nations, should be and usually are based on cool calculations of national interests, not on personal feelings or personalities. I cannot help but suspect, however, that China’s leaders’ refusal to be included among Hillary Clinton’s admirers served to harden and bias her attitude toward China in a way that redounded in favor of hard line nationalists in Tokyo.
How else to explain her acceptance—in approving Japan’s nationalization of the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands–of a clearly provocative and unnecessary change in U.S. policy that has served the interests of none of the parties, least of all perhaps the United States?
China Japan Clash Over Islands
Japan has a talent for border disputes derived from its expansionist past, with longstanding, unresolved and bitter territorial conflicts with all of its neighbours - over the Senkakus/Diaoyutai with China and Taiwan; the island of Takeshima/Dokdo with South Korea; and the southern Kurils (aka the Northern Territories) with Russia. All three disputes are volatile because of deep and vociferous nationalisms, although all governments have shown they can control the influence of those atavistic forces - when they want to. All three are potentially soluble through compromise and co-operation given the necessary political will.
The Senkakus/Diaoyu conflict is now deeply militarised - with Chinese, Japanese and US forces all involved in increasingly risky actions. Japan has been rapidly expanding its air, naval and intelligence capacities in the region for more than a decade. China is projecting its military presence around the islands to remind the Japanese government that if your neighbour says there is an argument about your shared fence line, then there is a dispute, and it has to be faced. Chinese ships are showing their colours in Japan's claimed exclusive economic zone (EEZ) near the islands.
While Australia may be an ally of the United States, and the United States an ally of Japan, that does not translate into support for the peripheral interests of Japanese nationalism, whatever the provocation.
...
ANZUS alliance defenders like to boast of the seat at the Washington table the alliance is said to bring. The test is whether that seat comes with a voice that articulates Australia's independent interests in tough times. Now is one of those times, and if Australia does not find its own voice it may find itself drawn by default into support for the ugliest part of Japan's political culture.
Beijing's hawks buoyed by Xi Jinping's rise
...
In an apparent sign of escalating militarisation in the dispute, the Chinese navy's use of weapons-targeting radar last month was considered highly threatening by Japanese military commanders because it could signal preparations for a missile attack.
A defence ministry official in Tokyo said that in both radar incidents, Japanese commanders took "standard evasive manoeuvres", like changing course, but did not engage their weapons systems.
The Japanese destroyer was targeted "for several minutes" on Jan 30 by a Chinese frigate about 3km away, the official said, while a ship-based Japanese military helicopter was locked onto 11 days earlier.
The Jan 30 incident occurred in international waters about 100km north of the disputed islands.
Since Japan nationalised the islands last September, China has taken increasingly intense measures to challenge Tokyo's control, with Chinese jet fighters and warships replacing unarmed coast guard-type planes and vessels in several of the latest encounters.
...
As China's defence spending has risen rapidly to become the world's second-biggest (though still well behind the US'), its armed forces have acquired an increasingly powerful array of weapons and equipment.
...
Air force Colonel Dai Xu is prominent among those calling for military action to secure China's offshore claims.
With China challenging Japan in the East China Sea, and US ally the Philippines, and Vietnam in the South China Sea, he has argued that a short, decisive war, like China's 1962 border clash with India, would return maritime territory and resources stolen by Japan and the colonial masters of South-east Asian countries when China was weak, and deliver long-term peace.
Colonel Dai, a researcher at Beijing University's China Centre for Strategic Studies, asserts that the US, despite its Asian alliances, would not risk war with China over these territorial disputes.
"Since we have decided that the US is bluffing in the East China Sea, we should take this opportunity to respond to these empty provocations with something real," he wrote in a commentary last August in the Global Times, an often nationalistic tabloid published by the CPC's mouthpiece, the People's Daily.
"This includes Vietnam, the Philippines and Japan, which are the three running dogs of the United States in Asia," he said.
"We only need to kill one, and it will immediately bring the others to heel."
WITHIN two decades the United States will be forced out of the western Pacific, says a senior Chinese military officer, amid concerns that increasingly militarised great-power rivalry could lead to war.
Senior Colonel Liu Mingfu, at the People's Liberation Army's National Defence University, told Fairfax Media this week that American strategic influence would be confined ''east of the Pacific midline'' as it is displaced by Chinese power throughout east Asia, including Australia.
Colonel Liu's interpretation of one facet of what the new Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, calls ''a new type of great-power relationship'' adds to the uncertainty and anxiety surrounding China's strategic ambitions.
...
Japanese leaders have accused China of locking weapons-guiding radars on Japanese targets - which China denies - while Western military sources say Chinese planes, ships and submarines have challenged Japanese-controlled waters and airspace around the Senkaku Islands.
Some security analysts say Australian political leaders are in public denial about the stakes involved and invidious choices the nation may have to face.
''It's the most dangerous strategic crisis that the US has faced - that the world has faced - since the end of the Cold War,'' said Hugh White, former deputy secretary of the Department of Defence.
China ships in disputed waters, says Japan coastguard | South China Morning Post
Three Chinese government ships entered disputed waters on Friday, the Japanese coastguard said, as the two countries’ soured relationship grew more complex following North Korea’s nuclear test.
Maritime surveillance vessels sailed near the Japanese-controlled Senkaku islands, which Beijing claims as the Diaoyus, around 8.30am, according to the coastguard.
“Japan cannot accept this. This is extremely regrettable,” Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida told a regular briefing Friday, adding that his ministry has already conveyed these sentiments to the Chinese embassy.
The relationship between the Asian giants has cooled over the territorial row, which triggered anti-Japan rallies across China last year.
The protests and an unofficial consumer boycott have stung Japanese businesses operating in the world’s second largest economy.
Some observers have warned diplomatic tensions could degenerate into a military clash, with potentially disastrous consequences for the region.
Japan has said that a Chinese frigate last month locked weapons-control radar onto one of its destroyers on the high seas. It said another vessel had earlier targeted a helicopter, actions Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called “provocative” and “dangerous.”
However, say analysts, Japan must walk a delicate diplomatic tight rope, with pressure to keep China onside as the wider world seeks Beijing’s support for stricter sanctions on North Korea in the wake of its nuclear test.
The U.S. Could Have Prevented the Senkaku/Diaoyu Crisis. Why Did It Not? - Forbes
The Senkaku/Diaoyu island territorial dispute is the greatest crisis in Japan-China relations in 60 years.
Second only to nuclear weapons development on North Korea and Iran, it is the most dangerous potential casus belli in the world today, and it likely to remain so indefinitely.
It is a crisis between and among the Japan, China, and—because of the U.S.-Japan security alliance—the United States, world’s three largest economies, possessing among them the world’s most formidable military arsenals.
The gravity and danger of the Japan-China Senkaku/Diaoyu territorial dispute are such that we would expect all parties concerned to have striven to prevent it escalating into a potentially hostile conflict
Why then, we must ask, did they not? More to the most critical point, why did the United States—which could have vetoed Japanese ‘nationalization’ of the islands, the action that guaranteed a full blown crisis—not do so?
Let me repeat: it was U.S. acquiescence in (if not encouragement of) the Noda government’s decision to nationalize the disputed islands—creating a direct and immediate challenge to China’s claim to sovereignty—that enabled this crisis.
If I may be a bit insensitive, aside from the tragic loss of life, against the enormity of the blunder in this case, the failures of U.S. policies and negligence in Benghazi, or even the naive wrong-footed dealing with the Arab Spring, are as superficial pinpricks against a gaping, life-sapping self-inflicted wound.
But, unlike toward Benghazi, there have been no congressional hearings on this egregious policy blunder. Rather, John Kerry, the erstwhile chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee—where such hearings might have taken place—now occupies the office of U.S, Secretary of State, taking over from Hillary Clinton, who would bear the greatest culpability, ensuring—with the complicity of a Democratic Senate and ever-compliant pro-Obama foreign policy press–a continued cover-up.
There should be no doubt that the U.S. did in fact sanction Japan’s nationalization of the islands in September last year. In an interview with Asahi Shimbun published on October 31, 2012, the current Japanese ambassador to the U.S. Sasae Kenichiro states that before even approaching and seeking to mollify China, Japan solicited the position of the United States on nationalization and was told that the U.S. “did not oppose.”
We should expect that the “no opposition” policy message was delivered through diplomatic channels, i.e. through Hillary’s State Department, though the policy was almost certainly a product of the normal, often drawn-out and contentious inter-agency “clearing” process, in which—we must assume in this case—the input of the Department of Defense was heavily weighted. But DoD’s position should not have been—and I would guess was not—uncontested. And if it had been strongly contested by the State Department (i.e., in the official position adopted through State’s own internal “clearing” process), I doubt that the “no opposition” policy would have emerged.
The policy must have been violently controversial and contentious within State—pitting, at minimum, the “Chrysanthemum Club” on the Japan Desk against the heralds of the G2 world on the China Desk–for two reasons: 1. It was a sharp break with and effective change in long established U.S. policy toward the sovereignty of the islands; and, 2. There could have been no doubt about the furious reaction and sense of U.S. treachery and betrayal that the policy would engender in Beijing.
As to long-standing U.S. policy, from the end of WWII, and more explicitly from the return to Japan of sovereignty over Okinawa in 1971, the U.S. position had been unambiguous: while the U.S. “acknowledged” Japanese administrative control over the islands, the U.S. “takes no position on the ultimate sovereignty” of the islands. (Until recently the islands were referred to in U.S. diplomatic documents by both Senkaku and Diaoyu in a way that underlined that the U.S. was siding neither with Japanese nor Chinese—or Taiwanese—sovereign claims.)
After a hopeful start in U.S.-China relations, the pinnacle of which may have been the second U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue held in Beijing in May 2010. Then riding high, Secretary of State Clinton headed a U.S. delegation comprising over a dozen U.S. cabinet members and agency heads including Treasury Secretary Geithner, Fed Chairman Bernanke, Council of Economic Advisors Chairwoman Romer, USTR Kirk, and Commerce Secretary (now ambassador) Gary Locke. Jon Huntsman was then U.S. ambassador.
The relationship has seemed to cascade downhill from there, taking an increasingly militaristic, and confrontational tone, as the U.S. announced its defense structure “pivot” to Asia and WWII and Cold War legacy “alliances” emboldened the Philippines—and, indeed, Japan—to push back against or further press their own claims in territorial disputes with China, with Hillary in public fora often offering moral support.
Relations between nations, especially great nations, should be and usually are based on cool calculations of national interests, not on personal feelings or personalities. I cannot help but suspect, however, that China’s leaders’ refusal to be included among Hillary Clinton’s admirers served to harden and bias her attitude toward China in a way that redounded in favor of hard line nationalists in Tokyo.
How else to explain her acceptance—in approving Japan’s nationalization of the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands–of a clearly provocative and unnecessary change in U.S. policy that has served the interests of none of the parties, least of all perhaps the United States?
China Japan Clash Over Islands
Japan has a talent for border disputes derived from its expansionist past, with longstanding, unresolved and bitter territorial conflicts with all of its neighbours - over the Senkakus/Diaoyutai with China and Taiwan; the island of Takeshima/Dokdo with South Korea; and the southern Kurils (aka the Northern Territories) with Russia. All three disputes are volatile because of deep and vociferous nationalisms, although all governments have shown they can control the influence of those atavistic forces - when they want to. All three are potentially soluble through compromise and co-operation given the necessary political will.
The Senkakus/Diaoyu conflict is now deeply militarised - with Chinese, Japanese and US forces all involved in increasingly risky actions. Japan has been rapidly expanding its air, naval and intelligence capacities in the region for more than a decade. China is projecting its military presence around the islands to remind the Japanese government that if your neighbour says there is an argument about your shared fence line, then there is a dispute, and it has to be faced. Chinese ships are showing their colours in Japan's claimed exclusive economic zone (EEZ) near the islands.
While Australia may be an ally of the United States, and the United States an ally of Japan, that does not translate into support for the peripheral interests of Japanese nationalism, whatever the provocation.
...
ANZUS alliance defenders like to boast of the seat at the Washington table the alliance is said to bring. The test is whether that seat comes with a voice that articulates Australia's independent interests in tough times. Now is one of those times, and if Australia does not find its own voice it may find itself drawn by default into support for the ugliest part of Japan's political culture.
Beijing's hawks buoyed by Xi Jinping's rise
...
In an apparent sign of escalating militarisation in the dispute, the Chinese navy's use of weapons-targeting radar last month was considered highly threatening by Japanese military commanders because it could signal preparations for a missile attack.
A defence ministry official in Tokyo said that in both radar incidents, Japanese commanders took "standard evasive manoeuvres", like changing course, but did not engage their weapons systems.
The Japanese destroyer was targeted "for several minutes" on Jan 30 by a Chinese frigate about 3km away, the official said, while a ship-based Japanese military helicopter was locked onto 11 days earlier.
The Jan 30 incident occurred in international waters about 100km north of the disputed islands.
Since Japan nationalised the islands last September, China has taken increasingly intense measures to challenge Tokyo's control, with Chinese jet fighters and warships replacing unarmed coast guard-type planes and vessels in several of the latest encounters.
...
As China's defence spending has risen rapidly to become the world's second-biggest (though still well behind the US'), its armed forces have acquired an increasingly powerful array of weapons and equipment.
...
Air force Colonel Dai Xu is prominent among those calling for military action to secure China's offshore claims.
With China challenging Japan in the East China Sea, and US ally the Philippines, and Vietnam in the South China Sea, he has argued that a short, decisive war, like China's 1962 border clash with India, would return maritime territory and resources stolen by Japan and the colonial masters of South-east Asian countries when China was weak, and deliver long-term peace.
Colonel Dai, a researcher at Beijing University's China Centre for Strategic Studies, asserts that the US, despite its Asian alliances, would not risk war with China over these territorial disputes.
"Since we have decided that the US is bluffing in the East China Sea, we should take this opportunity to respond to these empty provocations with something real," he wrote in a commentary last August in the Global Times, an often nationalistic tabloid published by the CPC's mouthpiece, the People's Daily.
"This includes Vietnam, the Philippines and Japan, which are the three running dogs of the United States in Asia," he said.
"We only need to kill one, and it will immediately bring the others to heel."
