China-Japan Dispute over flight zone in the Pacific

I've been following this as it falls right over the airspace in which one would have to fly to get to Taiwan. Very glad my wife has no trips planned for a while.

This is nothing new with China, last year they pissed off another US Ally The Philippines when they printed their "new passports" that showed some Philippine islands as Chinese territory.

 

Isn't this another example of standard PRC foreign policy? They've apparently been running around most of this century as if they're all of a sudden the biggest, baddest military and political power in the Pacific Rim, and I'm not surprised that this ADIZ thing took place. Perhaps this is some sort of stunt to rattle their "rebellious province". As for the thing with the passports, that's just crass, but probably par for the course with the current regime in Peking.

 

That would not surprise me in the least, they have never hid their agenda about that democratic island just 90 miles off their coast.

 

It's going to be hard to say no to China without a huge containment effort to back up the negation. The US isn't going to be able to commit the resources necessary to maintain the status quo as China begins spitting out aircraft carriers one after the other for the next two decades.

The obvious answer is to try to bind China and her neighbors together in trade pacts that make the costs of war too high for the Chinese to take that path. This will require the US being willing to take a step back into an overseer role. US military assets in Japan are probably going to be rolled back no matter what due to the cost and political price of maintaining them.

The WWII era is over. The Cold War is over. The Uni-polar US Super Power is over. The US needs a foreign policy now that recognizes the emergence of a new multi-polar world order. Ideally we do this without creating a new Cold War.

 

China would go down on America's dick for a dollar.

 

It was wise for the Administration to advise Commercial Airlines to respect and observe the new flight rules over that airspace. Decades ago, the Soviets shot down a 747 because it flew over and into restricted airspace. Not sure how many of you remember that but "Oops, my bad" doesn't cut it when you have civilians in the line of fire.

 

The problem for the PRC is that aircraft carriers worthy of the name don't exactly grow on trees; they take a long time to build and require a fair amount of trained officers and men. Now, I presume that they could throw resources at their naval aviation program far in excess of ours in any given year, but they're still in the early stages of naval aviation. As I understand it, their fixed-wing experience isn't particularly impressive at this point; they may need far more time to get to where they want to be. You can't buy naval aviators, after all.

I agree that maintenance of the status quo may be problematic. I'd prefer to not get locked into a race of capital ships like the British and German empires were about a hundred years ago.

The presence of trade doesn't mean that someone in the CCP hierarchy doesn't decide that they can keep their trade and pinch off something somewhere. I'd be concerned that an American pullback from Japan would mean a nuclear-armed Japan.

"Finally, those capitalist pigs will pay for the crimes, eh comrades?" Sorry; couldn't resist an old movie quote.

 

The Chinese government has a time bomb on their hands. The population is ageing and they aren't nearly wealthy enough to deal with the huge demographic change that's coming. Can they stay in power based on pure nationalism? I doubt it.

This is a country that has been on the rise for a long time. Unlike Japan, China doesn't have the GDP per capita to survive what's going to befall them. They may steal a few barrels of oil and other raw materials from their neighbors but in the end there are going to be lots of old people who need food and health care and few young people to man the armies, navies and factories needed to enslave their neighbors who are younger and have potentially more flexible governments.

Fear of China is overblown. I'm much more afraid of the US government.

 

The Chinese have started making aircraft carriers. They're not going to stop now. I'm guessing that one of their strategic goals is to be able to project more airpower at sea than the US. Given a couple of decades they have a shot at achieving that goal, although it would be in everybody's interest to avoid that arms race given the costs involved.

BTW, this may be a case of the Chinese being hellbent on winning the last war. We just don't know.

The British controlled many of the resources required to maintain dominance on the high seas. The Germans did not. That's why things wound up where they wound up. It's hard to compete with a major power doing the thing it does best when you do not have parity in resources and your ports are fewer and more easily bottlenecked.

Anybody who rocks the boat in China gets shot. I assume that reality will remain in play for the forseeable future.

And yes, I totally agree on the nuclear Japan sentiments. Counter-balancing the worries a bit are the agreements in place that prevent nuclear weaponization and the fact that nuclear power is perceived to be very dangerous by the Japanese public at the moment.

No idea how things will swing in the future though. Nukes are the weapon of choice in preventing aggression and I suspect a nuclear-armed world is in our future.

 

The Chinese don't really give a fuck about the airspace, they're staking a claim to sovereignty over the islands themselves, which they don't give much of a big fuck about either, but rather the ability to assert exclusive territorial rights over the surrounding waters, which are full of fish and other goodies they'd like to mine.