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Amid Tensions Over Air Defense Zone, China’s Reaction Is Subdued
After Challenges, China Appears to Backpedal on Air Zone
(about 7 hours later)
BEIJING — China appeared to soften the rules it had issued for its new air defense zone, raising no objection on Wednesday to flights by two American B-52 bombers and Japanese airliners that ignored Beijing’s demands to file advance flight plans and saying only that it had monitored the planes.
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.
The subdued initial response came just days after China warned of possible military action if planes did not comply with the rules for flights through a large stretch of airspace it now says it controls over the East China Sea.
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.
The unarmed B-52s flew through the newly declared zone overnight Monday, and Japan’s main civilian airlines passed through Wednesday without notifying the authorities in Beijing. Japan Airlines and All Nippon Airways said they initially complied with China’s demands, but after a request from the Japanese government of Shinzo Abe, the conservative prime minister, they reversed their position.
But by imposing a new air defense zone over the islands last weekend, Beijing may have 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 press for a decisive resolution of the longstanding dispute.
Offering more temperate remarks compared with the earlier bellicose statements of China’s Defense Ministry, a Foreign Ministry spokesman on Wednesday said Beijing would differentiate its reactions.
On Wednesday, hours 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 said in explaining why China had refrained from implementing the regulations against the B-52s.
“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.
He rejected a suggestion at a news briefing that the lack of enforcement on a first test by the United States made China look like a “paper tiger.”
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.
In Tokyo, a Japanese official said the Chinese ambassador had told Japan’s Foreign Ministry that the new air defense zone rules were not intended to affect civilian flights and would not endanger their safety. The official, who is with the Transportation Ministry, declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue.
“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.
In a sign of the sudden seriousness of the issue, the new American ambassador to Japan, Caroline Kennedy, criticized China’s creation of the air defense zone in her first speech since assuming her post two weeks ago, saying “it only serves to increase tensions in the region.”
China does appear determined to escalate the issue of the uninhabited islands, known as Diaoyu in China and the Senkaku in Japan, 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.
Tensions in the region have escalated since China published a map of a new “Air Defense Identification Zone” on Saturday that overlapped with an air defense zone of its archrival, Japan, increasing the possibility of an encounter between Japanese and Chinese aircraft and heightening tensions over islands in the East China Sea that both countries claim.
Beijing is especially frustrated that its previous, more cautious steps to convince Japan of the seriousness of its claim to the islands has not prompted Japan, which administers them, to negotiate in earnest.
The disputed islands in the East China Sea are known as the Diaoyu by China and the Senkaku by Japan. The Chinese Ministry of Defense, which had released the coordinates of the new zone, said Wednesday that it had monitored the flight path of the two B-52s and said that they flew about 125 miles east of the islands.
“Japan always has the backing of the United States and shows unbelievable arrogance to the Chinese proposal to have talks on a bilateral basis,” said Zhu Feng, a professor of international relations at Beijing University and one of China’s more moderate voices on Japan. “Japan’s arrogance is unacceptable.”
By sending the B-52s to the area, the United States, a treaty ally of Japan, directly entered the dispute for the first time.
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.
But China did not seem perturbed by the potential for added strains in the relationship with the United States over the new zone.
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. American officials complained that some Japanese leaders had made nationalist gestures that antagonized China, worsening the tensions. And the Obama administration dodged requests by Japanese leaders to take a clearer stance in their favor.
A senior Chinese analyst, Shi Yinhong, who sometimes advises the Chinese government, acknowledged that the new air zone had worsened the already poisonous relations between China and Japan, and represented a test of wills between the United States and China.
That hesitation seems to have largely vanished since China pronounced it was expanding its hold on the region’s airspace.
The Chinese action comes on the eve of a visit by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to China, Japan and South Korea, a trip that was supposed to be dominated by economic issues but will now most likely be consumed by the fallout from new air defense zone.
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.
The relations among the three countries — including between the United States’ two main Asian allies in the region, Japan and South Korea — were fraught even before Mr. Biden’s expected arrival. But Mr. Biden will now also be faced with the reality that Beijing is determined to show what kind of major power relationship it wants with the United States, namely one in which China is regarded as an equal.
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.
“This is the first time since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 that it has expanded its strategic space beyond offshore waters,” said Mr. Shi, a professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing.
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.
“That’s why Washington made such a harsh and firm reaction,” he said. “This represents America saying ‘no’ to China’s aspiration in the Western Pacific.”
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 new defense zone carried the hallmarks of President Xi Jinping’s tougher foreign policy that has alternated between trying to position China as a good neighbor to other Asian countries (except Japan) and making bold strategic moves, Mr. Shi said.
The Chinese action also stirred the first official negative comments about China in South Korea since President Park Geun-hye took office earlier 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.
“This is a negative development for a strong great power relationship,” between the United States and China, he said, referring to the strong American pushback.
“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.”
But Mr. Xi took the long view, he said, and knew there would be torturous turns and vicissitudes as China’s power grew.
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 their country can live up to its promise of standing up to Japan.
The creation of the defense zone was designed to challenge Japan directly, another Chinese analyst, Zhu Feng, said.
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.
“Japan always has the backing of the United States and shows unbelievable arrogance to the Chinese proposal to have talks on a bilateral basis over the islands,” said Dr. Zhu, a professor of international relations at Beijing University. “Japan’s arrogance is unacceptable.”
“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 with more than two million followers, on his microblog.
One of the goals of creating the defense zone, Dr. Zhu said, was to force Japan to negotiate with China over the ownership of the islands, which are administered by Japan. Chinese officials say the islands are rightly China’s because they say Japan grabbed the territory during the start of its imperial expansion in the late 1800s. The Japanese say they peacefully annexed the islands, which they say were empty and unclaimed.
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.”
On social media, China’s Internet community unleashed a barrage of nationalist commentary, congratulating the government for its initial tough stand against Japan and warning that Beijing should live up to the promise of the new air defense zone in confronting the Japanese.
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.
“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 investigative journalist with more than two million followers on his Tencent microblog.
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, but he added that the Chinese president was patient and strategic.
The People’s 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 the zone required strong warning and defensive capabilities. Otherwise, he said, its creation was just “armchair strategy.”
Martin
Fackler contributed reporting from Tokyo, and Choe Sang-Hun from Seoul, South Korea.
In Washington on Wednesday, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel called the Japanese defense minister, Itsunori Onodera, to discuss the security situation in the East China Sea. “Secretary Hagel assured Minister Onodera that U.S. military operations will not in any way change as a result of China’s announcement,” said Carl Woog, the Pentagon’s assistant press secretary.
In Japan, the flight of the B-52s was welcomed, and a senior Foreign Ministry official, who declined to be named per usual diplomatic protocol, said the United States and Japan had worked closely on what to do in response to the Chinese zone.
According to the official, the Japanese foreign minister, Fumio Kishida, spoke with Secretary of State John Kerry on the phone Tuesday night, and Mr. Kerry described the situation as “an extremely dangerous act by China,” and said that “the U.S. supports Japan’s position.”
The Japanese government appeared confident that China would not interfere with civilian flights. A defense ministry official, who asked not to be named, said the government had told Japanese airlines that it would guarantee their safety, though it was not taking unusual actions such as sending fighter escorts.
South Korea, which has recently developed friendlier relations with China, also said it could not accept China’s new claims of control.
The coordinates announced by China overlap with South Korea’s air defense identification zone. Yoo Jeh-seung, the deputy defense minister for policy of South Korea, said Seoul would not recognize China’s declaration.
“The issue of the air defense identification zone is making the already difficult regional situations even more difficult to deal with,” South Korea’s foreign minister, Yun Byung-se, said during a defense forum in Seoul on Wednesday.
“We see competition and conflict in the region deepening,” he said. “Things can take a dramatic turn for the worse if territorial conflicts and historical issues are merged with nationalism.”
Reporting was contributed by Martin Fackler from Japan, Austin Ramzy from Taipei, Taiwan, Chris Buckley from Hong Kong and Thom Shanker from Washington.
