Chinese navy powers into new waters

July 17, 2013

By Brendan O’Reilly

Chinese warships have for the first time traversed La Perouse Strait, threading the narrow gap between Japan’s Hokkaido and Russia’s Sakhalin, and entered the open waters of the North Pacific Ocean. After completing week-long joint naval drills with the Russian Navy, the Chinese vessels could have taken a direct route to the south back to their home port of Qingdao. Instead, Beijing is sending a clear signal to Tokyo by sending China’s increasingly sophisticated maritime assets on a circuit around the Japanese home islands.

This decision to take a circuitous route home comes on the heels of another symbolic projection of Chinese naval power. Last week, Chinese craft joined Russian vessels for the “Joint Sea 2013″ exercises in the Sea of Japan, off the Russian Pacific port of

Vladivostok. The two navies conducted three days of joint drills involving logistical collaboration and live-fire exercises.

These maneuvers were almost certainly directed at Tokyo and Washington. Both China and Russia face territorial disputes with Japan, and the two powers are America’s only credible geopolitical rivals.

When sending its contingent to these inaugural Sino-Russian maritime drills, the People’s Liberation Army Navy made another yet historic first by crossing the Tsushima Strait, 65 kilometers wide at its narrowest, between southern Japan and South Korea. In both the Tsushima Strait in the south and La Perouse Strait (some 40 km wide at its narrowest) in the north, more of the narrow waters could fall within Japan’s exclusive territorial waters. However, Japan limits the range of its maritime sovereignty claims in these waterways to three nautical miles (5.6 km) rather than the usual 12 nautical miles in order to allow nuclear-armed America vessels passage through the strategically vital bottlenecks.

In the wake of these displays of Chinese maritime capabilities, the Japanese government has announced a comprehensive plan to identify, name, and “nationalize” roughly 400 minor outlying islands. These small islands – some no more than rocky outcrops in the East China Sea – could be used to clearly demarcate (and perhaps expand) Japan’s territorial waters and exclusive economic zones. The Japanese government maintains that the total size of Japan’s territorial waters is roughly 4.47 million square kilometers – roughly 12 times the size of Japan’s landmass.

This move is almost sure to inspire Chinese anger. The focal point of the recent escalation of tensions between China and Japan was Tokyo’s decision last year to “nationalize” the disputed Senkaku Islands (known as the Diaoyu in Chinese). If any of the minor islands set to be identified by the Japanese government are claimed by China, one can expect another round of intensification in the war of words in the East China Sea.

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