Beijing’s Tokyo tirade and the dangers of the past
Tense relations between China and Japan seem to be rapidly spiraling out of control
Beijing and Tokyo are locked in verbal warfare over China’s threats to invade Taiwan. The dispute erupted nine days ago when Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi warned that an attack by Chinese forces on the island would represent an “existential threat” to her country.
Naval activity has increased around the tiny Senkaku Islands and rocky outcrops, which lie about 105 miles east of Taiwan and 254 miles west of Okinawa, a crucial United States military base. Administered by Tokyo, these islands are also claimed by Beijing and Taipei.
As tensions mount, the Japanese military should not be underestimated. Last week, Breaking Defense asked Philip Shetler-Jones of the Royal United Services Institute which of the United States’ “allies are most critical to deterrence and stability” in the region.
“Japan would be the outstanding one for me, followed by Australia,” he replied. “I would say it has, perhaps after China, still the most capable navy in the region.
“It’s gradually dispensing with the post-World War II constraints and taboos flowing from constitutional interpretations. It’s [also] a huge economy. So when defense spending rises from 2% to three or four percent or whatever, it makes an enormous difference,” he said.
“They’re able to translate that money into capability because they also have industrial power, high-tech companies, and heavy industry. They’re strong in many areas,” Shetler-Jones, from the London-based defense think tank, added.
China boasts the largest surface armada in the world, including carriers.
Victory and defeat:
- Japan’s brutal, full-scale invasion of China in 1937, following its conquest of Manchuria six years earlier, still scars the Chinese psyche today.
- Yet by 1945, Japanese cities were wastelands after two atomic blasts leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The horrors of World War II were finally over.
Delve deeper: Still, the seeds of Japan’s maritime power were planted in 1894 at the Battle of Yalu in the Yellow Sea when the Imperial Navy shattered the Qing dynasty’s North Sea fleet. The remnants were left “bottled up in the Bohai Sea.”
Big picture: Fast-forward into the 21st century, and China’s naval wing of the People’s Liberation Army boasts the largest surface armada in the world, including three aircraft carriers. But it has not fought a major engagement since that Yellow Sea humiliation.
Between the lines: “While often overshadowed by China’s fleet, Japan’s Maritime Self-Defense Force is a technologically superior and highly professional navy,” Steve Balestrieri, a former US Army Special Forces member, wrote in the National Security Journal in July.
China Factor comment: It would be a massive mistake to underestimate the Japanese fleet. But it would be an even greater tragedy if the war of words between Beijing and Tokyo escalated into conflict.