Beijing needs to demonstrate its peaceful intent in regional waters
Trefor Moss calls on China to lead by taking a less aggressive stance over territorial disputes
They said it would be no contest. In the confrontation between rising China and waning Japan over the disputed Diaoyu/Senkaku islands, there could only be one winner.
The trends were pointing in China's favour. Beijing's defence budget is already twice the size of Tokyo's and rising by 10 per cent a year, while Tokyo's military spending has been flat for over a decade. China's strategy would be to exhaust Japan in a deliberate marathon - to build up its forces over time, ratchet up the pressure and widen the capability gap a little more each year - until the Japanese, unable to keep up, would eventually cede the disputed islands to China.
This is no longer the Japan that will bend over backwards to avoid conflict. It has red lines
If that really is China's plan, it isn't working. The Japan Self-Defence Forces are currently engaged in a huge exercise in which they are practising how to defend Japan's far southwestern islands, which include the Diaoyus/Senkakus: 34,000 troops, six navy ships and 360 aircraft are involved. Japan has also put anti-ship missiles on Miyako island, which overlooks the Miyako Strait - a crucial sea lane for Chinese vessels heading towards the Pacific - and is beefing up its coastguard units in the area.
And there's more to come. Next month, Japan is expected to announce that a new unit of marines, which it has been prepping for some time, will be commissioned. This unit will ultimately number 3,000 marines, who will essentially have one mission: to occupy and defend the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands if China threatens to invade, or to recapture them if Chinese forces have already landed.
These are not the actions of a clapped-out country which is struggling to keep pace, and which feels it cannot compete with a larger neighbour. In fact, Japan is sending China the exact opposite message: that it can, and will, defend the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands, with or without American support.
China has always been wary of Japanese militarism, and memories of Japan's brutal invasion in the 1930s and 1940s still run deep. So it is ironic that China's actions - such as big defence spending increases, and repeated incursions into Japanese territorial waters - should be responsible for driving Japan's own push to improve its military capabilities.
