CHINESE WARSHIPS SAIL PAST NORTHERN JAPAN / THE FINANCIAL TIMES

Last updated: July 14, 2013 10:37 am

 

Chinese warships sail past northern Japan

 

By Jonathan Soble in Tokyo and Leslie Hook in Beijing

 

 

Chinese warships have passed for the first time through the narrow strait that divides northern Japan and Russia, Japan’s defence ministry said on Sunday.

The five ships, including a guided-missile destroyer, travelled in international waters through the La Pérouse Strait early on Sunday morning, the ministry said.

The vessels appeared to be returning to China after a week-long military exercise with the Russian navy that took place in the Sea of Japan and was seen as a message of defiance directed at Japan and the US.

 

Ahead of the exercises, Chinese media quoted Yin Zhuo, a retired admiral who advises Chinese politicians, as saying that such manoeuvres in the Sea of Japan would “have a certain level of threat to Japan, which has a dispute with China over the Diaoyu Islands and one with Russia over the Northern Territories”.

 

The Chinese ships could have returned home more directly by travelling southwest, back through the Sea of Japan and into the East China Sea. That made their chosen route on Sunday – which would take them out into the Pacific in a broad swing around Japan – appear all the more provocative.

China and Japan have been embroiled since last year in a tense stand-off in the East China Sea over the Senkaku Islands, known in China as the Diaoyu. Japan administers the uninhabited group, but China and Taiwan both claim sovereignty. Japan also claims islands on the Russian side of the La Pérouse Strait, which were seized by the Soviet Union at the end of the second world war.

 

In recent years, China’s navy has been expanding its scope of operations with more frequent and larger exercises in the South China Sea and Western Pacific. In June, the US confirmed that China was sending ships and aircraft into its exclusive economic zone, which extends 200 nautical miles from US territory, including Guam.

 

China has been boosting its military budget with double-digit increases in spending during most of the past two decades. Chinese navy and missile forces are increasingly able to project their power across the Asian region, a trend that has created growing unease among China’s neighbours, including Japan.

Japan last week sharpened its criticism of what it says is an increasingly belligerent effort by China to assert territorial claims in disputed Asian waters, saying Beijing was using “force” in a “risky” effort to change maritime boundaries.

 

In the first defence white paper issued under conservative Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Japan said China had “attempted to change the status quo by force based on its own assertion which is incompatible with the existing order of international law”.

Last Friday, Hua Chunying, spokesman for the Chinese foreign ministry, said the white paper “maliciously plays up the ‘China threat’”. She added that Japan was trying “to create an excuse for its military build-up”.

Global Times, the state-run newspaper known for its nationalistic bent, went farther, saying the “conflict” between China and Japan was moving toward “strategic hostility”.

  

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2013.