China’s is turning its aggressive South China Sea tactics on Japan

Ben BrimelowBusiness Insider

China actively wants to change the status quo in the Pacific and poses a more immediate threat to Japan.

Russia has also been building up its Pacific fleet to be a formidable force in the region.

Most of Japan’s response has been geared towards Japan’s acquisition of more military equipment and systems.

China and Russia are sending aircraft and naval vessels into Japanese territory, and the two countries show no sign of slowing down.

• China’s aggressive activity in the South China Sea is well documented. It has disputes with five different countries over a number of islands and waters that they claim to control. Comparatively, the East China Sea — where this conflict with Japan has been unfolding — has been much more calm.

At the center of China and Japan’s feud is the Senkaku Islands, a group of uninhabited islands under Japanese control, but claimed by China who call them the Diaoyu Islands.

• Richard Weitz, a senior fellow and the director of the Center for Political-Military Analysis at the Hudson Institute, told Business Insider that the Chinese “want to enforce their claims” by forcing foreign planes to acknowledge China’s capability to control airspace and the waters of contested territory.

Weitz said Russia is more interested “in monitoring US military activity in the country.” Its conflict with Japan also concerns the Kuril Islands, which were historically part of Japan and were taken by the Soviet Union in the last days of World War II.

• For now, there does not appear to be any coordination between China and Russia as they flex their muscles in the Pacific. That could change, Weitz warned, if the US interferes and drives the two powers closer together.

With a resurgent Russia to its north, a nuclear armed North Korea to its west, and an increasingly capable and powerful China to its Southwest, Japan could become boxed in. China kicked 2018 off with an incursion into the contiguous zone of the Senkaku Islands on January 11.