China's Big Balls

China’s response to NBA Hong Kong tweet was a ‘violation of US sovereignty,’ Condoleezza Rice says
Rice’s comments refer to Beijing’s attack on Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey, who in early October tweeted an image that read, “Fight for Freedom. Stand for Hong Kong.”

By Natasha Turak

A Tiananmen Square-type crackdown on Hong Kong would be ‘huge mistake’: Rice

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — China’s heavy-handed response to an NBA general manager’s comments on the turbulent protests in Hong Kong represents a violation of U.S. sovereignty, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said during a panel event in the United Arab Emirates capital on Monday.
“When China says to the NBA, the National Basketball Association, ‘your general manager cannot say something about what’s going on in Hong Kong,’ now that’s a violation of American sovereignty, because Americans have the right to say what they please,” Rice told CNBC’s Hadley Gamble at the annual Abu Dhabi International Petroleum Exhibition & Conference (Adipec).
“And so I think this has become something of a problem between the two countries, it’s not going to go away, it’s certainly not going to go away in Congress, where I think people are holding back on sanctions but worried that they may have to put them forward.”
Rice’s comments refer to Beijing’s harsh response to Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey, who in early October tweeted an image that read, “Fight for Freedom. Stand for Hong Kong.”

Chinese companies promptly suspended ties with the Rockets, and the Chinese Basketball Association terminated its cooperation with the team.

Men walk past a poster at an NBA exhibition in Beijing, China October 8, 2019.

In response to China’s anger, Morey and NBA Commissioner Adam Silver issued apologetic statements and distanced themselves from the Hong Kong comments, drawing a flood of criticism from members of Congress who accused them of putting profits over democratic values. 

With a population of roughly 1.4 billion people, China is the NBA’s most important international market.
Silver later said that Beijing demanded that he fire Morey.
Tensions continue to grip the world’s two largest economies, as stark differences in ideology and political values exacerbate animosity already triggered by a now 16-month-long trade war. Meanwhile, anti-Beijing protests in Hong Kong this week took their darkest turn since they began five months ago, with a protester shot by police and reports of a man set on fire.

In the last week, authorities have arrested a total of 266 people between the ages of 11 and 74, the Hong Kong police said Monday. 

Several pro-democracy lawmakers have been arrested and blocked roads are rampant around the city. 

More than 2,000 people have been arrested since October.
“There is great concern in the United States about what is going on in Hong Kong,” Rice said. 

“There is great concern first of all as to whether or not the promise from Beijing of one country and two systems is really being honored. And this is a conversation that I think governments need to have with the Chinese.”Still, she said, “We can’t tell the people of Hong Kong we’re somehow going intervene in Hong Kong. But we can continue to speak for the rights of those people to protest for their rights.”

Protesters set a shop of Chinese mobile brand Xiaomi on fire during a demonstration.

Protests in Hong Kong began in response to a proposed law that would have made it possible for Hong Kongers to be extradited to China to stand trial. 

That bill has been withdrawn, but the protests have continued. 

Hong Kong currently operates under the “one country, two systems” principle where Beijing gives Hong Kong’s citizens some legal and economic freedoms that it denies people on mainland China.
Among the protesters’ demands are a more representative democracy to choose the city leader, who is currently elected by a small, mostly pro-Beijing group of elites.
The fallout from the NBA controversy comes as both Republican and Democratic lawmakers are increasingly vocal in criticizing China’s trade practices and human rights record. 

It has only deepened distrust between the U.S. and China as the countries’ trade negotiators push ahead with high-stakes talks.
The worst thing China could do, Rice said, is to impose a brutal crackdown like that of the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, when Chinese authorities killed an estimated several thousand pro-democracy protesters in an event whose history is now heavily censored and denied within the country.
“There is also concern as the reaction to the protests becomes more violent, as we’ve seen in the last day, and whether or not the Chinese government in Beijing is going to recognize this is not a flame they can just extinguish,” Rice added. 

“There is going to have to be a reckoning with the people of Hong Kong to help them to see that China intends to respect their system and their rights. I hope it’s not too late.”

China Threat

Indonesia & China: The Sea Between
By Philip Bowring

Indonesian President Joko Widodo and Xi Jinping, Yanqi Lake, China, May 15, 2017.

Indonesia has long been cautious in confronting China’s claims in the South China Sea, so its announcement on July 14 that it was renaming a part of the area the “North Natuna Sea” may have come to many as surprise. 

The new name encompasses a region north of the Natuna islands that partly falls within the infamous “nine dash line,” by which China claims the sea stretching fifteen hundred miles from its mainland coast almost to the shores of Malaysia, the Philippines, Brunei, Vietnam, and Indonesia.

China immediately demanded a retraction—which it will not get.
The naming was a reminder of how seriously Indonesia treats its position as the seat of ancient trading empires and location of some of the world’s strategically most important straits—Melaka, Sunda, Lombok, and Makassar. 

Since he was elected in 2014, President Joko Widodo has made maritime issues central to Indonesia’s foreign policy, building up its navy, arresting dozens of foreign ships caught fishing illegally, and taking a quiet but firm stand on sea rights. 

Although not a populist vote-winner, the policy is generally approved, particularly by the military, which since the war of independence against the Dutch has seen itself as the guardian of the integrity of the nation and its internationally recognized status.
The naming also came shortly before the sixtieth anniversary of a pronouncement that has had a profound impact on the whole world. 

On December 13, 1957, the Indonesian government unilaterally declared that it was an “archipelagic state,” claiming sovereignty over all the waters within straight baselines between its thousands of far-flung islands. 

Though the young republic was in no position to enforce it, this was a revolutionary move: at the time, Western powers asserted that territorial seas were limited to three miles, and that otherwise foreign ships, military included, had complete freedom of movement.
Twenty-five years of international negotiation followed, culminating in the 1982 United Nations Convention on Law of the Sea, defining rights and obligations relating to sea boundaries and resources, and rights of “innocent passage”—not endangering the security of the coastal state—through straits and internal and territorial seas. 

It accepted the archipelagic state principle, and made twelve-mile territorial seas and two-hundred-mile “exclusive economic zones,” or EEZs—which give exclusive rights for fishing and exploitation of seabed resources—the global norm. (The United States in practice accepts the Convention, as clarified by a subsequent 1994 agreement, but has never ratified it.)
Although Indonesia has no island disputes with China, its stance on the Natuna waters allies it with the other littoral nations in facing up to China (though the Philippines under Duterte currently appears to prefer Chinese money to sovereignty over its seas). 

Last year, the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague applied the Convention to rule decisively for the Philippines in its claim against Chinese actions within its EEZ, including driving out Philippine fishing boats, and building structures on rocks and shoals that did not have the status of islands. 

In doing so, the court rejected China’s claims to the whole sea and by implication the waters of North Natuna.

Do not imagine that the term “South China Sea” ever implied Chinese ownership. 

It is a Western construction that dates to about 1900. 

Previously, European maps referred to it as the China Sea, and before that as part of the Indian Sea. When the Portuguese arrived there in the early sixteenth century they called it the Cham Sea, after the maritime kingdom of coastal Vietnam. 

Other names at various times include Luzon Sea and (by early Arab traders) the Clove Sea. 

To China it has long been the South Sea and to Vietnamese the East Sea. 

The Philippines now refers to it as the West Philippine Sea.
“Malay seas” is another term that has been applied to it and its immediate neighbors, the Java, Sulu, and Banda seas. 

The South China Sea itself is predominantly a Malay sea, as defined by the culture and language group of the majority of people living along its shores. 

Until European imperialism from the sixteenth century onward gradually snuffed out these trade-based kingdoms and sultanates, they were the region’s principal traders.
Earlier, the Sumatra-based Srivijaya kingdom held similar sway through its control of the Melaka straits and hence all seaborne trade between China and the Spice Islands with India, Arabia, and beyond. 

It was during this era that ships from the archipelago brought the first colonists to Madagascar, leaving a language and genetic imprint that remains to this day. 

They also traded across the Indian ocean to Africa and Yemen.
The first Romans known to have visited China did so by sea via India and the Malay peninsula. 

Trade spread Buddhism to Sumatra and Java, where by the fifth century it was flourishing to such an extent that Srivijaya attracted Chinese monks, who then traveled on to Sri Lanka and India. 

Chinese traders occasionally visited countries to the south, but did so on “barbarian” ships based out of Champa, Funan (in the Mekong delta), Java, Borneo, or Sumatra. 

Some of these ships were fifty meters long and capable of carrying five hundred people, according to contemporary Chinese sources.
Trade with China boomed during the seventh through tenth-century Tang dynasty, an era of peace and progress. 

As Chinese were barred from going overseas, trade brought large numbers of Indian, Malay, Persian, and Arab merchants to settle in the southern Chinese ports Guangzhou and Quanzhou, and prosperity to the ports of Sumatra, Java, and the Malay peninsula.
It was not until the Southern Song era, when northern China was under Central Asian rule, that Chinese began to participate directly in the trade, and even then it was often not in their own ships. The Yuan dynasty that followed further relaxed restrictions on Chinese participation in trade, but also invaded Java when the King of Singasari in east Java refused to pay tribute to the emperor Kublai Khan. 

The invasion was a disaster. 

What Kublai wanted was political submission that went beyond the so-called “tribute” missions sent by trading states to the imperial court. 

Contrary to what is often assumed, these missions mostly had no political implications. 

They were most frequent at a time when port rivalries were most intense. 

Tribute was a payment to receive preference for trading in China, and it also applied in reverse: Chinese traders visiting the Philippines had to bring gifts for local chiefs in order to be allowed to trade.
Kublai’s imperial ambitions were partly taken up by the Ming dynasty with the despatch between 1405 and 1433 of seven huge fleets under Muslim eunuch Zheng He to demonstrate Chinese power throughout the southern and western seas, demanding local rulers acknowledge the supremacy of the emperor. 

But the voyages had scant strategic value and were too costly to be sustained. 

Nor did they contribute much to the development of China’s trade. 

By then, small settlements of Chinese traders could be found in Java and Sumatra ports, some as a result of purges of Muslims in Quanzhou, but they were still only minor players when, a mere eighty years after the last Zheng He voyage, the Portuguese arrived to conquer Melaka, the Malay Muslim city which was the leading entrepôt of the region.
This was to be the start of more than four centuries of European influence, with Spain, the Netherlands, Britain, and the US following the Portuguese and in time converting commercial presence in the region into economic dominance and political control. 

The Dutch in Batavia (Jakarta) took trade way from Java’s other ports. 

Makassar, a beacon of free trade and religious tolerance, was also subdued by the Dutch. 

After the British took control of Singapore in 1824 and opened it to all comers, the ports of Sumatra and the peninsula—Aceh, Palembang, etc.—slowly faded until almost obliterated.
The role of overseas Chinese in regional trade grew steadily as colonial cities such as Batavia, Manila, and then Singapore offered opportunities for engagement in the local economy as well as regional trade. 

Then the mining and plantation booms of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries attracted hundreds of thousands of Chinese migrants, who formed their own trading networks around the region. 

Meanwhile, the biggest businesses of all were Western-owned. 

Thus by the time of independence after 1945, the once trade-based states of the region saw their commerce in alien hands.
None of this was the doing of China itself. 

It was the work of enterprising Chinese leaving an overcrowded country. 

At no point since Zheng He had a Chinese government been actively involved in the seas that it now claims on the basis of history. 

Any actions it takes now to press those claims against its neighbors have the potential to arouse communal feeling, never far below the surface, against commercially dominant ethnic Chinese communities in those countries. 

The naming of North Natuna is a sign that the world’s largest archipelagic state will stand firm, encouraging the Philippines and Malaysia to do likewise, until China’s bout of arrogance abates and it can treat its 400 million maritime neighbors as equals, acknowledging their seafaring and trading history.

Chinese Aggressions

Japan to Speed Up Frigate Build to Reinforce East China Sea

Reuters

Tokyo -- Japan plans to accelerate a warship building program to make two frigates a year to patrol the fringes of the East China Sea, where it disputes island ownership with China, three people with knowledge of the plan said.

Japan previously was building one 5,000-ton class destroyer a year, but will now make two 3,000-ton class ships a year, beginning from the April 2018 fiscal year, the people said, declining to be identified as they are not authorized to talk to the media.
It aims to produce a fleet of eight of the new class of smaller, cheaper vessels, which may also have mine-sweeping and anti-submarine capability.
Naval shipyard operators including Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Japan Marine United Corp (JMU) and Mitsui Engineering and Shipbuilding are expected to bid for the work, the people said.
Japan and China dispute ownership of the Senkakus, a group of islands in the East China Sea.
Senior Japanese military officials have said they are concerned that China may seek to increase its influence in the East China Sea around Japan's southern Okinawa island chain. 

Japan provides military aid to Southeast Asian countries including the Philippines and Vietnam that oppose China's territorial claims in the neighboring South China Sea.

Build-sharing
In a departure from normal procurement practice, Japan's Ministry of Defense said in a report published on Wednesday (15/02) it will require the winner of the eight frigate contract to offer major portions of the build to other bidders.
The change is meant to ensure naval shipyards remain open.
In the past two years, JMU has won contracts to build the larger Aegis-equipped destroyers, raising some concerns among defense ministry officials that rivals could shutter their shipyards, one of the sources said.
"We need to ensure our ability to build naval vessels at home," the person said.
The new ships will cost 40-50 billion yen ($353-$443 million) each, another of the sources said.

Chinese Aggressions

The Navy is planning fresh challenges to China's claims in the South China Sea
By: David B. Larter

U.S. Navy and Pacific Command leaders want to ratchet up operations in the South China Sea by sailing more warships near the increasingly militarized man-made islands that China claims as sovereign territory, according to several Navy officials.
The freedom of navigation operations, also known as FONOPS, could be carried out by ships with the San Diego-based Carl Vinson carrier strike group, which is in the Pacific Ocean heading toward the South China Sea, according to three defense officials who spoke to Navy Times on condition of anonymity to discuss operations in the planning phase.
The military's plans likely call for sailing within 12 nautical miles of China’s newly built islands in the Spratly and Paracel islands, a move that would amount to a new challenge to Chinese territorial claims there that has raised tensions between Washington and Beijing in the recent past.
The plans are heading up the chain of command for approval by President Donald Trump, and set the stage for a transnational guessing game about what the Trump administration wants its Asia policy to be.
For years, the Obama administration curtailed the Navy’s operations around contested areas like the Spratly Islands, an archipelago of uninhabited islands and reefs that China has built up in recent years. 

China has installed military-grade runways on the islands and could deploy surface-to-air weaponry.
U.S. Navy leaders believe that the FONOPS help clarify rights under international law and secure U.S. influence in the region. 

China, however, views the U.S. operations there as a provocative challenge to Beijing’s effort to claim the territory and the fishing rights and any oil or natural gas reserves in the surrounding waters.
“The Trump administration has to decide what it wants to achieve,” said Bonnie Glaser, director of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
“I doubt it it's possible to compel China to withdraw from its newly built islands in the Spratlys. But the U.S. could develop a strategy aimed at preventing more land reclamation, capping militarization and deterring China from using its new outposts to intimidate and coerce its neighbors,” Glaser told Navy Times in an interview.
News of the military’s planned FONOPs in 2017 track with reports in the Japanese press that Defense Secretary James Mattis, in closed-door meetings during his recent trip to Asia, assured Japanese officials that the U.S. military was planning an assertive approach towards China in the South China Sea.

Ships from the George Washington and Carl Vinson Carrier Strike Groups are underway in formation.

'It’s what we do' 

For years, U.S. military leaders such as Adm. Harry Harris, head of U.S. Pacific Command, 
have sought a more aggressive approach towards China in the South China Sea. 

U.S. Navy officials are quick to point out that the U.S. has been operating there for decades and are maintaining the historic status quo.
But Obama specifically prohibited the Navy from carrying out FONOPS in the South China Sea from 2012 through 2015. 

During that time, China put into overdrive its land reclamation and military construction projects around those reefs and islands.
Obama’s policy of caution, intended to please China, made what was once a standard Navy mission seem aggressive.
“What the Navy wants is for them not to be a news story,” said Bryan McGrath, a retired destroyer captain and consultant with the Ferrybridge Group. 

“The real value in them is that they happen with such frequency that they just become part of the background noise.”
“The more it became a big deal, the more it looked like what we were doing was retaliatory or vindictive. It’s not.” McGrath said. 

“It’s what we do. We say, ‘This is international water and we will proudly sail in it, steam in it, or fly over it to protect our right to do so and others’ rights, as well.”

Making the point, a Navy official pointed to a recent freedom of navigation operation by the cruiser Port Royal aimed at excessive claims made by Sri Lanka, which demands ships transiting its coast obtain prior permission. 

The Port Royal made that transit Jan. 24 under the right of innocent passage, a terms that allows warships to pass through the territorial waters of another country without permission on the condition that the ship not carry out any military operations such as launching helicopters, shooting guns or lighting off any sensitive surveillance equipment.
“FONOPS are a regular, normal and routine occurrence,” the Navy official said.

Likewise, Navy officials sought to downplay the San Diego-base Vinson’s return to the region.
"There is nothing new about U.S. Navy aircraft carrier strike groups deploying to the western Pacific,” said U.S. 3rd Fleet spokesman Cmdr. Ryan Perry.
“Our strike groups have patrolled the Indo-Asia-Pacific regularly and routinely for more than 70 years and will continue to do so. Regional security, stability and prosperity depend on it,” Perry said. 

It is unclear when Vinson and its strike group will enter the South China Sea.
The group includes the destroyers Wayne E. Meyer and Michael Murphy, and the cruiser Lake Champlain. 

Joining Vinson is Carrier Air Wing 2, which is composed of Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron 4; Helicopter Maritime Strike Squadron 78; Strike Fighter Squadrons 2, 34, 137, and 192; Carrier Airborne Early Warning Squadron 113; Electronic Attack Squadron 136; and Fleet Logistic Support Squadron 30.

USS Carl Vinson

Trump’s campaign last year repeatedly accused China of devaluing its currency to disadvantage U.S. goods in international trade markets.

Trump pushed relations to near-crisis levels before his inauguration by taking a phone call from the Taiwanese president, something that no U.S. president has done since the 1970s.
Furthermore, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told lawmakers he’d be open to blockading China from their Spratly Islands claims.
But in recent days the temperature has lowered significantly. 

In a phone call Thursday with Xi Jinping, Trump expressed his commitment to America's existing "One China" policy in regards to Taiwan, which does not officially recognize Taiwan as independent from mainland China. 

Chinese officials were also pleased with a letter from Trump to Xi expressing his desire to have a constructive and mutually beneficial relationship.
Other signs that Trump is seeking a "constructive" relationship with China include the appointment of Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, a friend of Xi’s, as ambassador to China. 

And Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her daughter also visited the Chinese Embassy in Washington to celebrate the Chinese New Year. 

Sina Delenda Est

The Senkaku Islands have become the site of renewed Chinese aggression

By Emma Graham-Harrison in Ishigaki

Part of the disputed Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea.

The Chinese flotilla arrived at the start of August, more than 300 fishing boats escorted by 15 vast coastguard ships, some of them armed. 

They circled the Senkaku Islands for a week, drifting into and out of Japanese territorial waters as Tokyo’s own coastguard played cat and mouse with the intruders.
Then they were gone, but the message they left behind was clear. 

China had upped the stakes again in a simmering territorial dispute that has made the southern tip of Japan’s island archipelago one of the most dangerous places in the region.

Japan accuses China of threatening Pacific peace

Ishigaki Island does not look like a frontline. 

Japan’s own tropical idyll, it is a sleepy place of pineapple fields and mango orchards, where thousands of tourists potter along white sand beaches and scuba dive in crystal clear seas. 

Yet this tiny dot on the edge of the Pacific is the closest Japanese town to the uninhabited Senkaku Islands, once inhospitable home to a tuna processing factory, now abandoned but key to lucrative fishing grounds, oil and gas fields and a strategic shipping route.
Under other circumstances the rocky outcrops – their name means sharp pavilions – would have only a unique species of mole as their sole claim for international attention. 

But their location, and competing claims of ownership from China and Japan have made them a potential flashpoint for war and focus of extreme anxiety from Tokyo to Washington.
Beijing’s maritime ambitions have been thrown into sharp focus by its extraordinary creation of a chain of islands from previously open seas over the past few years. 

It has shored up ambitious claims to swaths of ocean far from the Chinese coastline with the frantic construction of artificial islands that has seen runways, radar and guns appear on what were submerged coral reefs just five years ago.

Ishigaki Island in Okinawa.

Its strategic plans for the East China Sea have drawn less attention, perhaps because developments have not been so dramatic. 

But the prospect of tensions escalating into hostilities is real.

It faces in Japan a more powerful rival than any farther south, and one that has the US as a protector, bound by treaty to come to Tokyo’s aid if its territory is attacked. 

Relations between the uneasy neighbours are so strained that they have not even got a hotline set up for military communication in a crisis, despite years of talks aimed at establishing one.
The issue is so pressing that when new US defence secretary James Mattis visited Tokyo last week, confirming America’s commitment to defend the islands was top of the foreign minister’s agenda.
“Secretary Mattis made clear that the Senkaku Islands are in the territories under the administration of Japan,” Fumio Kishida said after the meeting. 

Few tourists visiting Ishigaki notice the trouble that is brewing in paradise, but those who live on the island have seen a slow escalation in tensions transform their town and lives, particularly those of the fishermen chased away from the Senkakus by Chinese boats.
“What is frightening for us is that when we go there, the Chinese government ships aggressively approach us, they are much larger than our fishing boats and we are afraid of collisions,” said Manabu Namisato, 53, who has been fishing for three decades.
Four years ago a Chinese coastguard ship around 150 times the size of his 10-tonne tuna fishing vessel nearly rammed him on the high seas. 

“I don’t know if they are coming towards us intentionally or not,” he said, but the memory still unnerves him. 

“If that boat had hit me I wouldn’t be here today.”
The fishermen have been warned for their own safety to stay away, but don’t need to be told. 

“It’s not that we don’t want to go there, it’s that we can’t go there. We have agreed to talk to you, because we are afraid the situation may get worse.”
The fleet that arrived last August was exceptionally large, but comes after years of regular incursions – and the government fears another influx this summer.
From Ishigaki to Tokyo, Japanese fear that the aggressive coastguards and the fleets they shepherd to the Senkakus are part of a plan from Beijing to bolster China’s claim to the islands by establishing de facto control of the area’s fishing ground.

A shopping arcade in Ishigaki. 

“There is possibility the Chinese government will use this fact that our fishing boats are not going there,” admitted an official from the ministry of foreign affairs, adding that the argument would have little standing under international law.
Still, rising numbers of Chinese boats flooding into the area each year have put Japan in a difficult position. 

It does not want to look weak but fears using military force would give China a long-awaited excuse for further confrontation.
“If we send ships in the Chinese government will use this to further escalate the situation and we don’t want that,” the official added.
Both sides claim history is on their side, although Japan is the only country ever known to have citizens living on the islands – for two decades last century. 

China’s claim is also slightly undermined by its timing, with the first objection to Japanese ownership claims lodged only after publication of a UN report locating deposits of oil and gas nearby.
There has already been a sharp rise in tensions since 2012 when Japan nationalised the islands. 

The move warded off a planned sale to Tokyo’s then mayor, a hardline nationalist apparently hoping to develop the islands, which would certainly have inflamed sentiments in China.
But Beijing saw, or chose to see, aggression where Tokyo felt it was defending an uneasy status quo. Soon violent protests broke out around China, with Japanese cars, shops and factories vandalised, several firms shutting down production and tour trips abruptly cancelled.
At sea, everything changed. 

Chinese coastguard ships now regularly sail towards the islands, often escorting fleets of fishing boats. 

And where once the Chinese boats would stray into Japanese waters perhaps once every couple of years, there has been such a regular pattern of two or three monthly violations in recent years that it is hard not to see a schedule.
Japan says China now has a fleet that includes repurposed naval ships, the largest coastguard patrol in the world, and arms on many vessels. 

In response Japan has expanded its own coastguard, taking the Ishigaki fleet alone to 16 boats stationed at a newly extended pier.
There are daily patrols to the Senkakus, a trip of five or six hours each way, with teams on standby to show up in greater force. 

“Right now our current policy is to exceed the Chinese vessels around Senkaku, so if they are showing up with three or four, we want more, if they show up with six or seven we want more,” said Hiraki Odagi, spokesman for the Japanese coastguard.
The boats have cannons, and some of the sailors bear arms, but their missions are shrouded in military secrecy. 

“I’m only at liberty to say we had more than the number of Chinese vessels,” Odagi said.
China’s air force is also testing Japan’s defences, with Japanese fighter jets now scrambled twice a day on average to warn incoming aircraft away from the air space over the islands. 

There were 22 scrambles in 2008, but 644 last year.
Some in Ishigaki, alarmed by China’s encroachment on the islands, feel Japan should have done more to assert its control over the islands decades ago, when China had less money, less military power and less international clout.
“I now think that the Japanese government should have done something,” said Yoshitaka Nakayama, mayor of Ishigaki, who is calling on the government to push ahead with plans to deploy a unit of the Japanese military, formally known as the self-defence force, to the island. 

“Meanwhile China has become a superpower… and if we continue to put this issue on the shelf and not do anything then China will become even more powerful.”
Even a small harbour, or pier, on the main Senkaku island where fishermen could take shelter in bad weather might persuade more to risk a trip to the area, while reinforcing Japanese claims, he says. But years of pleas have fallen on deaf official ears, and Nakayama fears Tokyo’s caution could pave the way for disaster.
“The situation I am worried about is this – a Chinese ship or fishing boat would come to the island, and fishermen land on the island. Then Japanese police and coastguard officials would go on the island to remove them. Then the Chinese will give a reason to deploy warships to the island, saying ‘we need to protect our citizens’.”
The dispute goes to the heart of concerns about China’s growing ambition, as it looks to project power across a region once dominated by America. 

And while its expansion in the South China Sea has caused alarm around the world, Japanese officials point out that East China Sea, where the Senkakus lie, is even closer to China’s shoreline and on the path out to the Pacific.
In Ishigaki many believe a stronger position is the only way to ward off disaster, with a bullishness that carries a disturbing echo of China’s own uncompromising stance.
“I think the Japanese government has prioritised the relationship with China, including economic ties,” said Yoshiyuki Toita, secretary general of the Yaeyama Defence Association which brings together more than 100 people on Ishigaki and its surrounding islands to campaign and study.
“If we just worry about temporary economic loss and give in, China may create a military facility in this area, so there will be more national security loss than economic loss. Japanese people should understand that and we should raise awareness about issues of territorial claims.”

Chinese aggressions

1 DMZ (demilitarised zone between North and South Korea): Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions keep tensions high in a heavily militarised peninsula
2 Kuril islands held by Russia, claimed by Japan as part of its ‘northern territories’: The Kuril Islands were seized by Soviet forces during the second world war. Failure to resolve the resulting territorial dispute has soured relations between Moscow and Tokyo.
3 Sea of Japan (between North Korea and Japan): Pyongyang fired a series of ballistic missiles into the sea off its coast last summer, after the US and South Korea agreed to deploy a new anti-missile system. The area has seen a history of disputes between Jaopan, Russia and South Korea.
4 Taiwan Strait (between Taiwan and China): China was angered by a controversial Trump phone call, warning Washington its right to the island was ‘non-negotiable’.
5 Senkaku islands (East China Sea): It may prove a global flashpoint as armed Chinese coastguard vessels invade.
6 Paracel islands (South China Sea): Woody Island is the largest of the Paracels, which have been under China’s control since 1974. Beijing has installed missile launchers while the US wants to enforce freedom of navigation.
7 Scarborough shoal (South China Sea): There has been a five-year dispute between the Philippines and China over ownership of the territory near Luzon island.
8 Spratly Islands (South China Sea): China has built a runway with capacity for military planes and is using dredgers to build artificial islands. Vietnam disputes China’s ambitions.