Hallucinating Chinese arm chair generals high on the polluted air of Beijing openly talking of war on TV talk shows
WATCH Chinese television these days and you
might conclude that the outbreak of war with
Japan over what it calls the Senkaku and China
the Diaoyu islands is only a matter of time. You
might well be right. Since Japan in September
announced it would nationalise three of the islands that had been privately owned, China,
which has long contested Japans sovereignty
over them, has also started challenging its
resolve to keep control of them. So both
countries are claiming to own the islands and
both are pretending to administer them. China this week announced its intention to map them
thoroughly. Something has to give. Since then China, too, has become more assertive
over the islands. Already, in his speech to the
Communist Partys five-yearly congress in
November, Hu Jintao, its outgoing leader, had
declared Chinas ambition to build itself into a
maritime power, the first time this had been stated so explicitly. Nor is it clear that his
successor, the less wooden Xi Jinping, who will
be named president in March, shares his
predecessors habitual caution in dealings with
America. He will surely see no benefit in
compromising with Japan, which is despised by many Chinese. And, with little or no military
experience, he will want to appear a strong
commander-in-chief. It is against this backdrop that televised military
punditry is booming in China. On current-affairs
programmes, armchair warriors pontificate
about the Diaoyus. Newspapers propagate a
uniformly jingoistic analysis of the increasing
likelihood of armed conflict. They are not making it up. Last month a small
aircraft of Chinas State Oceanic Bureau flew into
what Japan considers its territorial airspace over
the Senkakus. Flying too low to be detected by
Japans land-based radar, it was spotted too late
for a scramble of eight F-15 fighter jets to prove effective. Since then, Japan has deployed
Airborne Warning and Control Systems (AWACS).
On January 7th Chinese patrol ships spent more
than 13 hours near the islandslonger than ever
before, said Japanese officials. On January 10th,
when two Japanese F-15s scrambled to intercept a Chinese plane flying near the islands, China
scrambled its own fighter jets. Now the Japanese air force is weighing whether
to fire warning shots if Chinese aircraft come into
its airspace, for the first time since 1987, when
the former Soviet Union intruded. For General
Peng Guanqian of the Chinese Academy of
Military Sciences, interviewed on a Chinese web portal, this would amount to the first shot of
actual combat. China should then respond
without courtesy, he said. The Japanese press
reported that America had also warned Japan
against firing shots.
A widely read, if shrill, Beijing newspaper, Global Times, has argued that Japan might not be
deterred and we need to prepare for the
worst. Japan, it said, had become the
vanguard of an American strategy to contain
China. The implication was that China should
also be ready to take on America, which has made clear that its security treaty with Japan
covers the disputed islets.