Japan hardens response to China threat
In its Defence of Japan 2011 white paper, published on 2 August, Japan has revealed even more starkly than previously its fear of China.
The white paper defines the main problem as the fact that China is “promoting the extensive and rapid modernization of its military capabilities” while maintaining an almost complete lack of transparency about its growing capabilities and ultimate intentions. The white paper also complains that China is “expanding and increasing its activities in waters close to Japan”. And, perhaps most significantly, it talks about China’s attempts to “acquire, maintain, and protect maritime rights and interests”. It is the “acquire” that is the worrying bit, hinting as it does at an expansionist tendency.
China, naturally, disputes Japan’s interpretation of its military developments. Only a few days before the publication of Japan’s defence white paper, on 27 July, Rear Admiral Zhang Zhaozhong explained (quite reasonably) how the development by China of its first aircraft carrier was an unthreatening and entirely natural development. He pointed out, for instance, that the US, Japan, and India will respectively have 11, two, and three aircraft carriers by 2014 while China will have just one.
But Japan’s point is that this is not the whole story, and Admiral Zhang inadvertently made Japan’s point for it when he asserted: “Since the 1970s, China’s maritime rights have been grossly violated; to safeguard these rights China needs aircraft carriers.” The problem is that China defines its “maritime rights” very differently from its neighbours.
First of all, China’s undisputed maritime Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) extends to 877,019 square kilometres whereas its claimed EEZ, strongly disputed by its neighbours, includes a further 3m sq km. Secondly, China has different ideas about what other states may get up to within its EEZ but outside its sovereign territorial waters (which extend just 12 nautical miles). Divergent opinions on permitted military activities within China’s EEZ led to the April 2001 EP-3 spy-plane incident and the March 2009 incident with the USNS Impeccable.
A third problem is that nothing in China’s recent behaviour is reassuring. This week provides a case in point. On Monday, in what appeared to be an attempt to ease tensions, Beijing published guidelines for disputes in the South China Sea. But at exactly the same time, the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, published a commentary hitting out at its neighbours and at the US for its “trouble-making”.
Amongst the People’s Daily targets was the Philippines, which it lambasted after a report that Philippine navy engineers were building a structure on the Feixin Islet in the disputed Spratly archipelago. The paper said: “What has happened on...Feixin Islet in the past several days shows that what the Philippines says is completely different from what it has done. Manila obviously does not have the sincerity to settle the South China Sea issue peacefully.”
More aggressively, the Chinese Communist Party’s newspaper then went on to warn: “Parties concerned must soberly realize that [China’s policy of ‘shelving disputes and developing together’] does not mean that China will casually let certain countries take advantage of this opportunity to ‘nibble away’ Chinese territories. Any serious misjudgement will inevitably pay a necessary price.”
This is not language that will reassure Japan; and as Japan’s white paper also expressed concerns about 1) America’s “changing” comparative power, by which it meant “reducing” power, and 2) about Russian military expansionism, it is not surprising that Japan is intent on upgrading its own defence capabilities. It is doing this in two ways.
The first is by bolstering its alliance structure, with the United States of course, but with other countries as well. This latter point is an important bone of contention with China, which fears the development of a ‘contain China’ strategy, led by the US and involving key Asian neighbours such as Japan.
In July, Japan participated in a joint US-Japan-Australia naval exercise in the South China Sea. The US Navy sought to play down the exercise as a “low-level” affair on the sidelines of an international defence exhibition in Brunei. But China reacted by calling the joint exercise “inappropriate”. This was the first time that Japan had participated in such trilateral exercises in the South China Sea as opposed to in waters close to Japan, and it is exactly the type of development China was warning about when the foreign ministry issued a statement on 23 June saying: “The Japan-US alliance is a bilateral arrangement created under special historical conditions and should not go beyond its bilateral scope.”
But Japan is determined to develop this strategy. Its latest National Defence Programme Guidelines (NDPG), included in the just-published white paper, state clearly: “Japan will strengthen cooperation with South Korea and Australia through bilateral initiatives and multilateral cooperation involving the United States...”
The second point is that Japan is gradually expanding the scope of its own defence measures from a very strict interpretation of the constitutionally-mandated self-defence posture towards “dynamic deterrence which emphasizes operational use of the defence force”.
The new guidelines state that Japan will develop a ‘Dynamic Defence Force’ to “prevent direct threats to Japan from reaching the country”. This represents an important expansion of Japan’s philosophy of self-defence and would appear to be a direct response to the challenge from China. The guidelines also state: “In order to handle an increasingly challenging security environment, Japan needs to steadily build an appropriate-size defence force.”
Among the priorities highlighted in Japan’s new defence guidelines, the first three of seven seem to be pointing directly at China, they are: 1) ensuring security of the sea and airspace around Japan, 2) response to attacks on an offshore island, [and] 3) response to cyber attacks. [The other four priorities are response to terrorist attack, ballistic missile attack, ‘complex contingencies’, and attack with weapons of mass destruction.]
China has responded to Japan’s 2011 defence white paper by expressing its “strong dissatisfaction”. On 3 August, Foreign Ministry Spokesman Ma Zhaoxu complained: “The Japanese 2011 defence white paper made carping and irresponsible comments on China’s national defence construction.” He also then made the standard reference to Japan’s history of aggression, saying: “I hope Japan can learn from the past, seriously reflect on its own defence policy and do more to deepen mutual trust with neighbouring countries, maintain regional peace and stability, not the contrary.”
But what the white paper shows is that Japan is continuing to shed its post-War inhibitions, moving from a strict doctrine of self-defence to “dynamic deterrence”, and if Beijing were honest with itself it would not have to look far for the motivation.
However much China protests about its ‘peaceful rise’, and points to the relative military insignificance of its first aircraft carrier, the dynamics in East Asia are all pointing in one direction: an arms race coupled with increased multilateral defence cooperation (the ‘contain China’ strategy so feared by Beijing), all fed by a growing mistrust of China. JdeC.