Japan is not a happy neighbor. While extending a hand to China to bolster trade links and advantages with its out-sized neighbor, it is watching out one eye as the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy runs frigates and submarines ever closer to Okinawa. The latest episode happened just a couple days ago with ten Chinese warships and subs passing through international waters near Okinawa. Just a week before, according to the Financial Times, a ship-based Chinese helicopter came within 90 meters (!) of a Japanese destroyer. One can almost see the Chinese pilot thumbing his nose at apoplexic Japanese sailors, just itching to take out the mosquito of a craft.

The United States Navy’s “Sputnik”moment” came in November 2007 when a Chinese Song-class nuclear attack submarine surfaced 160 feet from the U.S. aircraft carrier U.S.S. Kittyhawk. Sputnik was the Soviet Union’s satellite program in the late 1950s that crystallized American fears of losing the race for outer space. The 1000-foot Kittyhawk, with 4,500 personnel on-board, was being escorted by at least a dozen other naval vessels and two submarines when the Chinese sub had apparently been tracking the carrier group for some time, running on super-quiet electric motors. The Chinese crew revealed its presence to the Americans in waterways near Okinawa. American naval leaders were apoplectic at the Cold War tactic, while the diplomatic corp lodged angry complaints with the Chinese government. Beijing offered it had been ignorant of the submarine maneuvers and suggested the encounter was a coincidence. American military leaders had not considered that any of the 13 Song class subs at the time were as advanced as they apparently were.  The surprise served as a rude awakening to American policy makers that the Pacific Ocean was no longer the pre-eminent domain of its navy.

Ultimately, what’s at stake here for Japan and China are untapped sources of energy and national pride. China’s central government, in other words, has a full mandate from its citizenry to force its collective will onto islands off China’s and Japan’s coast that both countries contend are their territory. At the center of contention are the Diaoyu (Senkaku, for the Japanese) islands, Tianwaitian (Kashi) and Chunxiao (Shirakaba), the latter two of which are characterized more as rock outcroppings than as masses of land that come anywhere close to becoming islands. Nonetheless, all lie nearly equidistant from the shores of both economic powers, which are willing to go the military distance to protect their territorial claims as well as potential oil resource riches.

Though in 2008 the two countries agreed to jointly develop gas fields in the disputed seas, China has signaled through military exercises around the outcroppings that it’s not much interested in detente. A dangerous trend indeed.

Further reading: Globe and Mail

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