The most dangerous flashpoint in the South China Sea could be a Japanese warship, not a disputed isle.
Last month, Japan’s defense ministry
of about $51 billion for fiscal 2017. At the top of its security worries: China’s maritime aggression.
Japan has reason to worry. In both the East China Sea and South China Sea, Tokyo faces an increasingly assertive China that looks determined to become an unfettered maritime powerhouse—and is beefing up its naval capabilities accordingly.
China’s moves threaten to disrupt Japan’s economy and erode its sense of security. The South China Sea is
, but it offers the cheapest, most direct way for energy supplies from the Persian Gulf (and
from elsewhere) to reach northeast Asia. As a nation with few natural resources, Japan has a clear interest in keeping sea routes open.
With that in mind, Japan is strengthening alliances, spending more on defense, and letting its position be known.
“I am seriously concerned with the continuing attempts to change unilaterally the status quo in the East and South China Sea,” Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe
at an ASEAN summit in Laos this month.
Vulnerable to disruption
China has been rapidly militarizing in the South China Sea in recent years. That has included establishing bases on artificial islands built atop reefs. Some
Beijing wants to turn the sea into a “Chinese lake,” and that it is not far off from
of bases in the sea that would help it exert more control over the vital waterway.
The South China Sea is the one of the world’s chokepoints for oil and natural gas.
of Japan’s energy supplies pass through the sea,
including Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and, increasingly, Iran.
also passes through, as does corn, wheat, and barley from Australia and the Black Sea region.
That makes Japan’s economy vulnerable to disruptions, should China ever block shipments through that route, whether in peacetime or in some future conflict.
And conflict isn’t out of the question. China still resents Japan’s wartime atrocities during World War II and believes Tokyo has yet to express enough remorse for its sins. This week
in northeast China focusing on the disposal of Japan’s abandoned chemical weapons in China. According to the Pew Research Center, 81% of Chinese
, up from 70% a decade ago. Meanwhile, 86% of Japanese hold unfavorable views of the Chinese, from 71% a decade ago.
It’s hardly surprising, then, that Japan is wary of China potentially controlling a waterway as important as the South China Sea. The building of militarized artificial islands by China in the sea’s Spratly archipelago seems to be a step in that direction. As Yoji Koda, a former vice admiral in the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force,
in January:
These man-made islands, when fully completed, would provide China with strong footholds in the Spratly Islands for controlling most of the sea lines of communication and for monitoring foreign naval and air activities.
Joining forces against China
One way Japan can help deter this is by backing, assisting, or even joining the US Navy’s “freedom of navigation” operations, with which the US asserts its right to sail through certain waters under international law, even if other nations warn it not to. In May, for instance, the USS William P. Lawrence
the Spratly archipelago’s Fiery Cross Reef, where China has built a militarized island.
China has warned that such operations are “
” and could
” Yet nations have the right to make “innocent passage” through even territorial waters, which extend out 12 nautical miles from a coast, as per the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).
In July, an international tribunal
under UNCLOS that invalidated China’s sweeping claim to most of the South China Sea. That claim is based on Beijing’s dubious “
,” which the tribunal decided had no legal basis. China responded by vowing to ignore the ruling and
the tribunal.
Last week, Japanese defense minister Tomomi Inada,
the Center for Strategic & International Studies think tank in Washington,
with freedom-of-navigation operations. If the world condoned attempts to change the rule of law, she said, the consequences could extend well beyond the South China Sea.
“In this context, I strongly support the US Navy’s freedom-of-navigation operations, which go a long way to upholding the rules-based international maritime order,”
(pdf).
Inada indicated that Japan’s Maritime Self-Defense Force would participate in “joint training cruises” with the US Navy in the South China Sea, as well as unilateral and multilateral exercises with regional navies.
Lu Kang, a spokesman for China’s foreign ministry,
this week, saying Japan’s actions regarding the sea “makes one feel disappointed to the point of despair,” and adding that “China is unwavering in its determination to safeguard its territorial sovereignty and maritime rights and interests.”
An editorial in the Chinese state-run Global Times also
. It suggested that joint US-Japan patrols would be the “gunboat diplomacy of the 21st century,” and that China should respond with military deployments to the Spratly archipelago. If the joint patrols intensified, it said, then China should establish an Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) over the South China Sea, focused on intimidating Japan in particular.
Inada did not say whether Japan would join the freedom-of-navigation operations in some fashion. This summer China
Japan would “cross a red line” by doing so, and hinted that the act might lead to military conflict. Given the World War II history and nationalistic sentiment in China, that might be more than just a bluff.
Yet Inada’s comments show Japan might be moving in that direction anyway—meaning the most dangerous flashpoint in the South China Sea could prove to be a Japanese warship, not a disputed islet or shoal.
“Japan’s naval operations may generate far more dangerous scenarios, like direct conflicts between the two navies,” Zhang Baohui, director of the Centre for Asian Pacific Studies at Hong Kong’s Lingnan University,
. “China has done nothing directly against US operations but Japan is a different story. We cannot rule out scenarios of Chinese ships ramming Japanese ones or Chinese ships blocking their passage.”
Even closer to home
...
