Washington backs Japan after Chinese snub at naval summit
TOKYO — THE NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Last updated Sunday, Apr. 06 2014, 10:05 PM EDT
Naval honour guards stand as they wait for a review on China's aircraft carrier "Liaoning" in Dalian, Liaoning province, September 25, 2012. (XINHUA/REUTERS)
On his first trip to China as U.S. Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel is finding himself in the middle of a spat that would not be out of place in Mean Girls, a movie about social cliques in high school.
For the first time, China will host the Western Pacific Naval Symposium, a meeting every two years of countries that border the Pacific Ocean. The WPNS, as it is known in naval circles, counts among its members the United States, Australia, Chile, Canada and a number of Asian countries, including China and Japan.
Often at such meetings, the host country organizes an international fleet review, at which the visiting countries can parade their ships and show off some fancy hardware. It can be an eye-popping display of war ships, destroyers and guided-missile cruisers. In 2008, when South Korea hosted the symposium, the United States sent the aircraft carrier George Washington, the guided-missile cruiser Cowpens and the destroyer John S. McCain to take part.
For this year’s fleet review, China, which is hosting the event in Qingdao, invited all the countries in the symposium to take part – except Japan.
“It is so totally high school,” a senior U.S. defense official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the issue publicly. “We were, like, ‘Really? You’re going to do that?’”
So on the eve of Hagel’s trip, which includes a visit to Qingdao, Pentagon officials announced that if Japan could not take part in the review, then neither would the United States. The United States will attend the meeting, the Pentagon said, but no U.S. ships will sail in the fleet review.
“As of this moment, there is no intent to send a U.S. ship to participate,” a Pentagon official said in a carefully worded statement. “WPNS is an important multilateral venue that promotes collaboration among navies in an inclusive, co-operative and constructive forum.”
The United States has been navigating disputes between Japan and China for decades, but in recent months, things seem to be coming to a boil. Late last year, China set off a trans-Pacific uproar after it declared that an “air defense identification zone” gave it the right to identify and possibly take military action against aircraft near the uninhabited islands in the East China Sea known as the Senkaku Islands in Japan and the Diaoyu Islands in China. Japan controls and administers the islands, but China claims them.
Japan refused to recognize China’s claim, and the United States has been defying China ever since by sending military planes into the zone unannounced.
In February, Capt. James Fanell, director of intelligence and information operations with the U.S. Pacific Fleet, said China was training its forces to be capable of carrying out a “short, sharp” war with Japan in the East China Sea. Other U.S. officials noted with increasing concern the buildup of China’s military and what they called a lack of transparency among its leaders.
Into all this arrives Hagel, who will touch down first in Qingdao, the headquarters of one of China’s three naval fleets. Hagel will visit the People’s Liberation Army’s aircraft carrier, the first foreign visitor that China has allowed aboard, a U.S. defense official said. Qingdao is the place the Chinese showed to Hagel’s predecessor, Leon E. Panetta, two years ago.
Now China is showing the Americans its aircraft carrier, which is a step beyond the tour Panetta received in 2012. But one thing has not changed; as was the case with the Panetta trip, reporters traveling with Hagel will not be permitted on the tour and will go instead to a local beer factory.
During a news conference Sunday with Japan’s defense minister, Itsunori Onodera, Hagel sounded exasperated with China.
“I will be talking with the Chinese about its respect for their neighbors,” he said, as he chided China and urged the country to use its “great power” in a responsible way.
“You cannot go around the world and redefine boundaries and violate territorial integrity and the sovereignty of nations by force, coercion or intimidation, whether it’s in small islands in the Pacific or in large nations in Europe,” he said.
Pentagon officials said Hagel had no official plans to raise the fleet review issue during his talks with officials in China, but they allowed that the issue might come up anyway.
Japan’s occupation of China during the Second World War is part of the reason Beijing does not like the idea of Japanese ships’ taking part in the fleet review, Asia experts said. But the experts also expressed alarm over China’s worldwide public relations campaign to increase criticism of Japan. Dozens of Chinese ambassadors have criticized Japan in letters written to global newspapers; in one, China’s ambassador to Britain compared Japan to the evil Lord Voldemort of Harry Potter fame. The shunning of Japan’s fleet, analysts said, is just the latest in the anti-Japan campaign underway in China.
In Tokyo, the U.S. decision to shun the fleet review in solidarity with Japan was greeted warmly, as analysts said it could help to allay growing concerns by Japan about whether the United States had the stomach to stand with Tokyo to face China’s rising military might.
“This is a very positive step toward addressing Japanese concerns,” said Narushige Michishita, director of security and international studies at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in Japan. “The decision is being seen here as a signal from the U.S. that its deterrence still has credibility.”
But “this sort of tit-for-tat shows how the U.S. is being drawn into the escalating row over history that China and Japan have been engaging in,” said Andrew Oros, a specialist on East Asia and an associate professor of political science at Washington College in Maryland. “It may seem irrelevant, but it exposes how surface-level issues illustrate serious underlying problems between the two largest economies in Asia, and the second– and third-largest economies in the world.”
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