I’ve been following this ramp-up for the past few weeks on Japanese news, and it’s getting ridiculous. China is acting like a spoiled child, demanding to have its way. Granted, their media is biased, but they’ve been calling for discussions where China has been calling for complete surrender. And other than a smoke bomb thrown by a couple of Japanese, there hasn’t been any violent protest in Japan against China, whereas hundreds of thousands are violently attacking Japanese interests and people in China. Now, the US Ambassador to China was attacked on his way in, because we’re seen as an ally to Japan.
The most worriesome thing is laid out in the article: with over 1000 Chinese ships on their way to this area, and the Japan Coast Guard outnumbered, will Japan send in the Maritime Defense Force, and with all the armed ships roaming around, will something stupid like an engine backfire trigger a shooting incident? I’m planning to spend a month in Japan next month, and I really don’t like the idea of being a few hundred miles from a battle zone.
I think that there should be a “Disputed Islands Commission” authorized by the UN, with the sole control of all these islands given to Switzerland. Shoot, just have the Swiss buy them all, I’m sure they wouldn’t mind having some tropical islands of their own to vacation in…
It should be interesting to see how the media blames Romney for our ambassador’s car getting attacked if they decide to cover the event at all.
“, I’m sure they wouldn’t mind having some tropical islands of their own to vacation in…”
The Swiss wouldn’t mind the mineral, oil, and fishing rights either, but I don’t think they are going to be offered them. But hey, nice to see such a vote of confidence in the UN on this blog! 🙂
Here’s a novel idea: Let China and Japan form a business partnership and share the resources equally.
As they say, these guys have a history…..
I would genuinely bet on Israel co-developing a gas field with Iran first. Seriously, read about the Rape of Nanking, or any of the other things that Japan has done to China without ever apologizing for.
Never. Going. To. Happen.
Votes of confidence on the UN, here, are going to be rare so glory in it.
They are a long way from war:
Japan is in no way ready to cope with all out war with the Chinese. Neither economically (20 year stagnation using the Obama plan) nor militarily.
So China has the upper hand here.
While I agree with you that the Japanese are in lousy shape economically, militarily they are fairly capable. Their navy isn’t huge, but it isn’t tiny either, and it is reasonably modern and well-trained, their air force is quite good, and has more than sufficient capability to dominate the airspace in the putative battle zone. The Chinese are building fast, but their navy is still largely elderly and their training standards are no match for the IJN, er… JMSDF….
I don’t think that the Japanese WANT a battle, but this is one (for the time being anyway) that they would win. That said, the dynamics are likely to change over the next decade…
Actually the Chinese have been putting so many boats in the water (Type 052C, 052B, 054A, 051C, etc) that it may not be that easy for Japan to gain the upper hand in a naval conflict like this. The Chinese also have nuclear weapons. It is true that the Chinese are much more poorly trained than their Japanese counterparts and have little military naval tradition however. The weakest point in the Chinese armed forces today in my opinion is neither the Air Force which has the J-11, Su-30MKK and J-10 in large quantities, nor their rapidly expanding Navy, but the Army.
Most of what the Chinese have been putting in the water lately (particularly their larger ships) are fairly mixed bags, i.e. lots of weapons, questionable electronics (particularly search radar, crucial for naval conflict), and very, very poor (fuel hungry and unreliable) engines. They will fix this with time (their patrol boats, which have had more time to ‘evolve’, are quite good), but right now, the smart money is on the Japanese. 10 years from now, not so sure….
The Chinese air force isn’t too bad (though I wouldn’t consider the J-11 much good as anything other than target practice, and the J-10’s engine problems make it problematic at best, particularly at the edge of its effective range, which is where the battle would be in this case), but they have limited sensor capabilities, and pilot quality would be a VERY big problem. The biggest issue would be range, as they would be operating far from home (in fairness, so would the Japanese), where most of their aircraft have reasonably limited LOADED combat range. The SU-30 derived aircraft aren’t bad, but there is a big, big difference between the Indian models with Indian pilots, and the Chinese models (note: the difference is in electronics, the Indians have a huge advantage here) with Chinese pilots. As with their navy, this will change with time, but we aren’t in that time yet.
As for the Chinese army, we agree….they are the weakest of the weak spots, and not likely to improve anytime soon. Good small arms, some interesting vehicles, but terribly weak training and an awful officer corps. Fine for butchering unarmed civilians, not much use against people who can fight back. As to whether that will change….we shall see.
The thing about Japan is they like to make their science fiction a reality. A war with China could mean the rise of RL Gundams.
I’m not sure there will ever be a military need to build a 20m tall man-shaped robot weapon. Maybe if we had a better grasp of Minovsky physics…
However, there are a good many “anime weapons” that do make sense. We’re almost certainly going to see something like “powered combat armor” exoskeletons in battle within a decade or so, though these will be roughly the same size as a human being rather than gigantic. And something like a Tachikoma (AI-directed spider-like combat drone) is just as likely.
Of course, the first side to develop the Buster Machine will win no matter how many giant robots the enemy has.
Wrong. The Jap Navy is the only Navy in the world that could go toe-to-toe with the USN for even 10 minutes. They are, by far, the most capable Navy is all of Asia. And their air forces are equally good.
If this went full-scale war, China would have to resort to nukes to eke out a ceasefire. Their Navy and Air Forces wouldn’t last more than a couple weeks against a sustained Japanese campaign, and maybe less. The fact that they have “lots of ships” means nothing. Iraq had one of the largest armies in the world at the time we invaded them.
Japan couldn’t sustain an occupation of China’s mainland for demographic reasons, but they could beat the hell out of it from the air. Once the Chinese Navy was eliminated it would also be easy to send Battlegroups up the Yangze to shell interior cities too.
And besides having their ass handed to them in a Naval campaign, there would be knock-on effects that would be severely damaging to China’s long-term prospects. One, any war could convince the Japanese that they need to build a nuclear arsenal. Two, excess belligerency would unite China’s periphery even more firmly against them. The last thing they’d want would be a Japan-Vietnam-Thai-Malay-Indian alliance operating under a Jap-Indian nuclear umbrella.
While I agree that the Japanese military is superior to what the Chinese have right now (note: they are rapidly improving, and this advantage will probably disappear over the next decade or so), the idea that the Japanese posess the ability (or even the desire) to attack the Chinese mainland is simply incorrect. Nuclear weapons notwithstanding, Japanese forces are heavily optimized for self-defense (i.e. their aircraft typically are used as interceptors, their ships as area denial vessels, etc.), and thus would be ineffective projecting power. The Chinese navy would be badly bloodied in any general engagement outside of their coastal waters, but if the Japanese attempted to pursue them back to their bases, they would be savaged by short-range Chinese aircraft, missile strikes, and patrol-boats, all of which the Chinese have in very large numbers. As for occupation of China and similar fantasies, the Japanese have a small, highly trained military with almost no capacity for occupying ground, and their constitution (which they take VERY seriously) absolutely forbids this sort of thing. There is a powerful pacifist element in Japanese politics, and while they would tolerate a defensive struggle with China, the idea of going over to the offense once the Chinese attacks were defeated is absolutely not an option. For the same reason, I think that nothing short of a first-use of nuclear weapons by China or Korea (both extremely unlikely) would convince the Japanese to build nuclear weapons. Their own pacifists and most of their putative allies (including the US, but ESPECIALLY every other asian nation, most of which have direct experience with Japanese aggression) would freak out, and I cannot imagine any scenario where such opposition would be overcome.
With that said, your suggestion that a Chinese attack would push most of the peripheral states into a general anti-China alignment is spot on target. That the Chinese refuse to see this is perhaps a tragedy for them, and something of a boon for us.
I think I was clear that I said the Japanese could not sustain any sort of land-invasion of China. Land-size and population demographics alone rule it out.
I think a business partnership makes sense, if they could agree on corporate policy (they might have very different views on overfishing, for example), but Taiwan has a claim too, and China’s stance on Taiwan may complicate things.
I barely know anything, but here’s my take: China’s stance on Taiwan weakens China’s hand in the island dispute. China wants to unify with Taiwan peacefully, using Hong Kong’s one country, two systems model (if necessary), and pissing off Taiwan over the island *and* also using force against Japan, a fellow democracy, won’t help China’s cause.
Neither China nor Japan are even remotely interested in a co-dominium of any sort because both firmly believe that the islands belong to them and them alone. Legally, China doesn’t have a leg to stand on (this is pretty common with most of their claims on disputed islands, though this certainly doesn’t stop them), but the drive for resources, coupled with the rise of a strongly aggressive nationalist faction within the leadership (particularly the military) is driving this process to what is likely to be a very, very ugly conclusion. Japan has its own problems with ultranationalists, and the current (very weak) government really isn’t in much of a position to back down.
China’s position on Taiwan doesn’t help matters, but if I might, let me suggest that Taiwan is simply the first example (and the largest) of China’s long-standing goal of ‘reclaiming’ lost lands. In the case of Taiwan or the various disputed islands, we can laugh it off for the most part, but high on the list of territory to be reclaimed is much of Siberia (you know, the part with all the resources) and a non-trivial chunk of India. They (the PRC) are not quite ready to step up to open conflict over these more ambitious property claims, but that time is coming. What we are seeing with these islands may be the foreshadowing of a very dark future….
Give politicians more military toys than their neighbors to play with and eventually they’ll start to play
China has territory disputes with all of it’s neighbors. I’ve been waiting for India to blow up for quite a while. I wonder why Tokyo felt the need to buy the islands from the private owners?
It may just be a combination of opportunity and necessity. Namely, that the “owners” were selling their claim. If a Chinese entity had bought the claim, that probably would have weakened the Japanese effort.
That makes sense.
One wonders how this will affect Japanese relations with South Korea. The japanese have their own island disputes with the Koreans, but it is possible that this incident will provide the impetus for them to resolve those issues and forge an alliance of sorts with the ROK.
“So far, Washington is bending over backward to appear neutral. That may send just the wrong message to a Chinese leadership”
Bit like that message to Saddam over Kuwait.
It also contrasts with our shift of military forces to that area of the world.
Neither China nor Japan are even remotely interested in a co-dominium of any sort because both firmly believe that the islands belong to them and them alone.
King Solomon could solve this.
If China was seriously mad at Japan they would cutoff their Rare Earth exports to Japan like they did when Japan seized one if their fishing boats for fishing in Japanese waters.
This is China’s opportunity to show the world in general and Asia in particular how strong their military, a message to other nations with islands China claims to get in line. Also its a great way to distract their own citizens from the meltdown that is starting in the Chinese economy. It will be interesting to see Japan’s response, and Russia’s as well.
I think they were talking about cutting off REEs over at Zero Hedge along with dumping Japanese bonds or using some strange WTO call provision.
Why would the Chinese (who are suffering economic issues right now that could potentially undermine support for the government) dump Japanese bonds, which would in turn cause them to take a significant financial loss? The stakes are too low to use weapons like that (see my comment to Thomas regarding REE) at this time. Now, if the stakes go up….things change….
/shrug
I was merely pointing out the discussion was in the news.
An interesting idea (cutting off rare earths), but for such a limited goal? A step like this would merely encourage other states to open (or in the case of the US reopen) their rare earth mines (these aren’t all that rare, actually), and thus undercut a crucial chinese advantage in service of a very lmited aim.
As far as their military, it would be a good showcase IF THEY KNEW THEY WOULD WIN, which they do not. Even if they did win, it might do more to solidify an anti-China axis (with American support) than anything else. China’s resources are not unlimited, and giving your enemies a good reason to align against you isn’t an effective way to lmit the strain on those resources, especially with a sputtering economy.
Of course nations often do irrational things, so you never know…
Dunn has been blogging about the power struggles in Asia for a while now. He did an analysis awhile back about how often China fights wars and the average was around 40 years, so they are due.
I’ve been following this ramp-up for the past few weeks on Japanese news, and it’s getting ridiculous. China is acting like a spoiled child, demanding to have its way. Granted, their media is biased, but they’ve been calling for discussions where China has been calling for complete surrender. And other than a smoke bomb thrown by a couple of Japanese, there hasn’t been any violent protest in Japan against China, whereas hundreds of thousands are violently attacking Japanese interests and people in China. Now, the US Ambassador to China was attacked on his way in, because we’re seen as an ally to Japan.
The most worriesome thing is laid out in the article: with over 1000 Chinese ships on their way to this area, and the Japan Coast Guard outnumbered, will Japan send in the Maritime Defense Force, and with all the armed ships roaming around, will something stupid like an engine backfire trigger a shooting incident? I’m planning to spend a month in Japan next month, and I really don’t like the idea of being a few hundred miles from a battle zone.
I think that there should be a “Disputed Islands Commission” authorized by the UN, with the sole control of all these islands given to Switzerland. Shoot, just have the Swiss buy them all, I’m sure they wouldn’t mind having some tropical islands of their own to vacation in…
It should be interesting to see how the media blames Romney for our ambassador’s car getting attacked if they decide to cover the event at all.
“, I’m sure they wouldn’t mind having some tropical islands of their own to vacation in…”
The Swiss wouldn’t mind the mineral, oil, and fishing rights either, but I don’t think they are going to be offered them. But hey, nice to see such a vote of confidence in the UN on this blog! 🙂
Here’s a novel idea: Let China and Japan form a business partnership and share the resources equally.
As they say, these guys have a history…..
I would genuinely bet on Israel co-developing a gas field with Iran first. Seriously, read about the Rape of Nanking, or any of the other things that Japan has done to China without ever apologizing for.
Never. Going. To. Happen.
Votes of confidence on the UN, here, are going to be rare so glory in it.
They are a long way from war:
Japan is in no way ready to cope with all out war with the Chinese. Neither economically (20 year stagnation using the Obama plan) nor militarily.
So China has the upper hand here.
While I agree with you that the Japanese are in lousy shape economically, militarily they are fairly capable. Their navy isn’t huge, but it isn’t tiny either, and it is reasonably modern and well-trained, their air force is quite good, and has more than sufficient capability to dominate the airspace in the putative battle zone. The Chinese are building fast, but their navy is still largely elderly and their training standards are no match for the IJN, er… JMSDF….
I don’t think that the Japanese WANT a battle, but this is one (for the time being anyway) that they would win. That said, the dynamics are likely to change over the next decade…
Actually the Chinese have been putting so many boats in the water (Type 052C, 052B, 054A, 051C, etc) that it may not be that easy for Japan to gain the upper hand in a naval conflict like this. The Chinese also have nuclear weapons. It is true that the Chinese are much more poorly trained than their Japanese counterparts and have little military naval tradition however. The weakest point in the Chinese armed forces today in my opinion is neither the Air Force which has the J-11, Su-30MKK and J-10 in large quantities, nor their rapidly expanding Navy, but the Army.
Most of what the Chinese have been putting in the water lately (particularly their larger ships) are fairly mixed bags, i.e. lots of weapons, questionable electronics (particularly search radar, crucial for naval conflict), and very, very poor (fuel hungry and unreliable) engines. They will fix this with time (their patrol boats, which have had more time to ‘evolve’, are quite good), but right now, the smart money is on the Japanese. 10 years from now, not so sure….
The Chinese air force isn’t too bad (though I wouldn’t consider the J-11 much good as anything other than target practice, and the J-10’s engine problems make it problematic at best, particularly at the edge of its effective range, which is where the battle would be in this case), but they have limited sensor capabilities, and pilot quality would be a VERY big problem. The biggest issue would be range, as they would be operating far from home (in fairness, so would the Japanese), where most of their aircraft have reasonably limited LOADED combat range. The SU-30 derived aircraft aren’t bad, but there is a big, big difference between the Indian models with Indian pilots, and the Chinese models (note: the difference is in electronics, the Indians have a huge advantage here) with Chinese pilots. As with their navy, this will change with time, but we aren’t in that time yet.
As for the Chinese army, we agree….they are the weakest of the weak spots, and not likely to improve anytime soon. Good small arms, some interesting vehicles, but terribly weak training and an awful officer corps. Fine for butchering unarmed civilians, not much use against people who can fight back. As to whether that will change….we shall see.
The thing about Japan is they like to make their science fiction a reality. A war with China could mean the rise of RL Gundams.
I’m not sure there will ever be a military need to build a 20m tall man-shaped robot weapon. Maybe if we had a better grasp of Minovsky physics…
However, there are a good many “anime weapons” that do make sense. We’re almost certainly going to see something like “powered combat armor” exoskeletons in battle within a decade or so, though these will be roughly the same size as a human being rather than gigantic. And something like a Tachikoma (AI-directed spider-like combat drone) is just as likely.
Of course, the first side to develop the Buster Machine will win no matter how many giant robots the enemy has.
Wrong. The Jap Navy is the only Navy in the world that could go toe-to-toe with the USN for even 10 minutes. They are, by far, the most capable Navy is all of Asia. And their air forces are equally good.
If this went full-scale war, China would have to resort to nukes to eke out a ceasefire. Their Navy and Air Forces wouldn’t last more than a couple weeks against a sustained Japanese campaign, and maybe less. The fact that they have “lots of ships” means nothing. Iraq had one of the largest armies in the world at the time we invaded them.
Japan couldn’t sustain an occupation of China’s mainland for demographic reasons, but they could beat the hell out of it from the air. Once the Chinese Navy was eliminated it would also be easy to send Battlegroups up the Yangze to shell interior cities too.
And besides having their ass handed to them in a Naval campaign, there would be knock-on effects that would be severely damaging to China’s long-term prospects. One, any war could convince the Japanese that they need to build a nuclear arsenal. Two, excess belligerency would unite China’s periphery even more firmly against them. The last thing they’d want would be a Japan-Vietnam-Thai-Malay-Indian alliance operating under a Jap-Indian nuclear umbrella.
While I agree that the Japanese military is superior to what the Chinese have right now (note: they are rapidly improving, and this advantage will probably disappear over the next decade or so), the idea that the Japanese posess the ability (or even the desire) to attack the Chinese mainland is simply incorrect. Nuclear weapons notwithstanding, Japanese forces are heavily optimized for self-defense (i.e. their aircraft typically are used as interceptors, their ships as area denial vessels, etc.), and thus would be ineffective projecting power. The Chinese navy would be badly bloodied in any general engagement outside of their coastal waters, but if the Japanese attempted to pursue them back to their bases, they would be savaged by short-range Chinese aircraft, missile strikes, and patrol-boats, all of which the Chinese have in very large numbers. As for occupation of China and similar fantasies, the Japanese have a small, highly trained military with almost no capacity for occupying ground, and their constitution (which they take VERY seriously) absolutely forbids this sort of thing. There is a powerful pacifist element in Japanese politics, and while they would tolerate a defensive struggle with China, the idea of going over to the offense once the Chinese attacks were defeated is absolutely not an option. For the same reason, I think that nothing short of a first-use of nuclear weapons by China or Korea (both extremely unlikely) would convince the Japanese to build nuclear weapons. Their own pacifists and most of their putative allies (including the US, but ESPECIALLY every other asian nation, most of which have direct experience with Japanese aggression) would freak out, and I cannot imagine any scenario where such opposition would be overcome.
With that said, your suggestion that a Chinese attack would push most of the peripheral states into a general anti-China alignment is spot on target. That the Chinese refuse to see this is perhaps a tragedy for them, and something of a boon for us.
I think I was clear that I said the Japanese could not sustain any sort of land-invasion of China. Land-size and population demographics alone rule it out.
I think a business partnership makes sense, if they could agree on corporate policy (they might have very different views on overfishing, for example), but Taiwan has a claim too, and China’s stance on Taiwan may complicate things.
I barely know anything, but here’s my take: China’s stance on Taiwan weakens China’s hand in the island dispute. China wants to unify with Taiwan peacefully, using Hong Kong’s one country, two systems model (if necessary), and pissing off Taiwan over the island *and* also using force against Japan, a fellow democracy, won’t help China’s cause.
Neither China nor Japan are even remotely interested in a co-dominium of any sort because both firmly believe that the islands belong to them and them alone. Legally, China doesn’t have a leg to stand on (this is pretty common with most of their claims on disputed islands, though this certainly doesn’t stop them), but the drive for resources, coupled with the rise of a strongly aggressive nationalist faction within the leadership (particularly the military) is driving this process to what is likely to be a very, very ugly conclusion. Japan has its own problems with ultranationalists, and the current (very weak) government really isn’t in much of a position to back down.
China’s position on Taiwan doesn’t help matters, but if I might, let me suggest that Taiwan is simply the first example (and the largest) of China’s long-standing goal of ‘reclaiming’ lost lands. In the case of Taiwan or the various disputed islands, we can laugh it off for the most part, but high on the list of territory to be reclaimed is much of Siberia (you know, the part with all the resources) and a non-trivial chunk of India. They (the PRC) are not quite ready to step up to open conflict over these more ambitious property claims, but that time is coming. What we are seeing with these islands may be the foreshadowing of a very dark future….
Give politicians more military toys than their neighbors to play with and eventually they’ll start to play
China has territory disputes with all of it’s neighbors. I’ve been waiting for India to blow up for quite a while. I wonder why Tokyo felt the need to buy the islands from the private owners?
It may just be a combination of opportunity and necessity. Namely, that the “owners” were selling their claim. If a Chinese entity had bought the claim, that probably would have weakened the Japanese effort.
That makes sense.
One wonders how this will affect Japanese relations with South Korea. The japanese have their own island disputes with the Koreans, but it is possible that this incident will provide the impetus for them to resolve those issues and forge an alliance of sorts with the ROK.
“So far, Washington is bending over backward to appear neutral. That may send just the wrong message to a Chinese leadership”
Bit like that message to Saddam over Kuwait.
It also contrasts with our shift of military forces to that area of the world.
Neither China nor Japan are even remotely interested in a co-dominium of any sort because both firmly believe that the islands belong to them and them alone.
King Solomon could solve this.
If China was seriously mad at Japan they would cutoff their Rare Earth exports to Japan like they did when Japan seized one if their fishing boats for fishing in Japanese waters.
This is China’s opportunity to show the world in general and Asia in particular how strong their military, a message to other nations with islands China claims to get in line. Also its a great way to distract their own citizens from the meltdown that is starting in the Chinese economy. It will be interesting to see Japan’s response, and Russia’s as well.
I think they were talking about cutting off REEs over at Zero Hedge along with dumping Japanese bonds or using some strange WTO call provision.
Why would the Chinese (who are suffering economic issues right now that could potentially undermine support for the government) dump Japanese bonds, which would in turn cause them to take a significant financial loss? The stakes are too low to use weapons like that (see my comment to Thomas regarding REE) at this time. Now, if the stakes go up….things change….
/shrug
I was merely pointing out the discussion was in the news.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/china-state-researcher-could-dump-074358546.html
An interesting idea (cutting off rare earths), but for such a limited goal? A step like this would merely encourage other states to open (or in the case of the US reopen) their rare earth mines (these aren’t all that rare, actually), and thus undercut a crucial chinese advantage in service of a very lmited aim.
As far as their military, it would be a good showcase IF THEY KNEW THEY WOULD WIN, which they do not. Even if they did win, it might do more to solidify an anti-China axis (with American support) than anything else. China’s resources are not unlimited, and giving your enemies a good reason to align against you isn’t an effective way to lmit the strain on those resources, especially with a sputtering economy.
Of course nations often do irrational things, so you never know…
Dunn has been blogging about the power struggles in Asia for a while now. He did an analysis awhile back about how often China fights wars and the average was around 40 years, so they are due.
http://thedignifiedrant.blogspot.com/
China’s economy may be worse than we think.
A classic ploy of authoritarian governments is starting a war to distract the populace from economic travails.