– China, Growing Superpower

Japan to list China as major threat
James Brooke NYT

TOKYO Reflecting growing wariness between the two giants of Asia, an advisory panel to Japan's prime minister will recommend that China be viewed as a potential military threat for the first time, a newspaper here reported Wednesday.

Since the end of World War II, Japan has regarded its main military threat as coming from the north, Russia, and from the west, North Korea. But now, according to the report in Japan's leading business newspaper, Nihon Keizai, the 10-member advisory panel to Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi will recommend that China, to the southwest, be regarded as a potential military threat.

Although China has about 10 times Japan's population, its traditional dominance of Asia was in remission in the 20th century, hobbled by civil war and Japanese rule, then by half a century of communist economic policies.

With the recent market-oriented economic boom, China's economy is expected to surpass that of Japan in 15 years. Already it is investing heavily in military spending. “While the Russian military capability in the Far East has dropped dramatically in the last 15 years, conversely, China has gone on a big spending boom,” Lance Gatling, a U.S. defense consultant, said Wednesday. “They are looking at a deep-water navy, more offensive weapons, reconnaissance satellites.

“The panel will not call it directly a military threat, but the concern about a conflict between Taiwan and China is quite real, and Japan is concerned about getting drawn into that.” Japanese and American officials this week discussed the possibility of permitting U.S. and Japanese military flights to an island that is almost halfway between Okinawa and Taiwan. A Washington-based defense expert visiting Tokyo said Japan was considering the request, along with a proposal to build a port on the island, Shimoji Shima, that would be able to berth Japanese ships equipped with antimissile batteries. In recent years, Japan has used the missile and nuclear program of North Korea as justification for its growing partnership with the United States in developing a missile defense. This has allowed Japanese military planners to avoid talking about China. Japanese officials hope to avoid getting drawn into any conflict between China and Taiwan, a former Japanese colony that Beijing regards as a breakaway province. However, the East China Sea is seeing a rise in direct tensions. Boatloads of Chinese nationalists have tried to land this year on the Senkakus, about 160 kilometers, or 100 miles, northwest of Shimoji Shima, an archipelago claimed by both nations. In addition, China has started laying a seabed gas line toward an area that Japan claims as its exclusive economic zone. While military tensions appear to be on the rise, booming trade with China is credited with pushing much of Japan's economic recovery. With Toyota recently announcing a $500 million investment in China, China is expected to displace the United States this year as Japan's top trading partner. However, this economic bonanza could be threatened by widespread anti-Japanese sentiment in China.

The New York Times