Chinese Aggressions

How China is Eroding Japan's Control Of Its Sea
By Ralph Jennings

This photo taken on Dec. 23, 2016 shows Chinese J-15 fighter jets on the deck of the Liaoning aircraft carrier during military drills in the Yellow Sea, off China's east coast. 

China sent four maritime police ships this week into a Japanese-controlled tract of sea that’s claimed by both countries. 

Beijing’s State Oceanic Administration described that mission, the second in less than a week, as “cruising in the seas around Senkaku Islands.” 

The sea is the East China Sea and Senkaku a chain of eight uninhabited islets. 

Japan functionally controls the islets and the waters around it.
But China says it’s all theirs, and this year it has made these cruises a standing routine aimed at eroding Japanese control. 

It may already have taken a step toward that goal, per some views.
By way of background, Beijing officials are trying in general now to lock in claims to lands and seas it disputes with other countries. 

Chinese say other countries stepped on them in history so they should use their world third-ranked military to get what they believe is due. 

One such tract happens to be the East China Sea zone near those islands and encompassing four nearby undersea oil fields also disputed by Japan.
Japan has logged an average of 10 sightings per month this year, through August, of Chinese government vessels near the islets, coast guard data from Tokyo show. 

The islets sit near prime fishing grounds in a geopolitically strategic waterway. 

Numbers have gone higher in the past, for example 28 sightings in one month of 2013, over the five years China has been sending over its vessels to assert sovereignty. 

But before this year there were also months when just four or five vessels showed up.
This year’s data point to an unwavering month-to-month pattern of passage around the islets that sit 410 kilometers west of Okinawa.

China's Ambassador to Japan Cheng Yonghua. Japan summoned China's ambassador on August 9 after the country's ships were spotted near disputed East China Sea islands for a fifth straight day. 

Japan normally parries Chinese ship movement by ordering the vessels to leave followed by diplomatic protests.
But China is effectively eroding Japan’s control, some scholars argue. 

Chinese ship movement has stopped Japanese from accessing the islands themselves, says Yun Sun, East Asia Program senior associate at the Stimson Center think tank in Washington. 

Access might allow the Japanese activists to reach the islands or someone to build on them. 

In 1996 activists build a lighthouse on one islet. 

Others have simply made landfall.
“By regular patrol of the surrounding area, China believes it has successfully established a new status quo,” Sun says. 

Stopping access to the islands would help China establish “evidence of exercise of sovereignty,” she adds.
Officials in Beijing believe Chinese people discovered, named and fished the rugged islets first. 

But the United States held them from World War II through 1972, when it gave them to its staunch post-War ally Japan. 

China already resents Japan for what it sees as lack of penitence over its occupation of mainland Chinese territory from 1931 through 1945.
Taiwan also claims the uninhabited islands but seldom takes action. 

Perhaps to show favor, in 2013 Japan opened 4,530 square kilometers of water to Taiwanese fishing boats but not to the Chinese.
China ultimately seeks sovereignty over the islets and more of the waters around it, Sun says.
Over the past five years, "Beijing has not only sought to create an overlapping administration of the disputed areas, but also taken constant, though incremental, measures that would shift the balance of control in the disputed areas to its favor," University of New South Wales associate International and Political Studies Professor Zhang Jian says in a July paper posted here.
How? 

By inciting "concern and protests" in Japan over patrols such as 23 Chinese marine surveillance vessels that showed up in August last year and 851 Chinese fly-overs in 2016, Zhang writes.
Japan at least will struggle to tighten any grip as long as its maritime police and self-defense forces keep busy chasing Chinese ships and planes away.
Beijing will sustain “regular” movement of vessels to avoid “compromise” over the islands, says Alexander Huang, strategic studies professor at Tamkang University in Taiwan. 

“China will have everything to lose if it softened the position,” he says, because Japan would concede nothing. 

“If China scales down the patrol in the region or if China leaves the region for a period of time, the Japanese maritime police and maritime self-defense patrol will come back to the Senkakus," Huang says.