China Poses 'Greatest Strategic Challenge' to Security: Japan

Beijing on Campaign to Change Status Quo by Force, Says Tokyo in Defence Review

- Walter Sim

TOKYO - China's repeated intrusions into Japanese territorial airspace and waters, coupled with a series of dangerous maneuvers, mark a relentless campaign to change the status quo by force, Tokyo asserted in its annual defence review released on July 15.

Such actions mean China poses "an unprecedented and the greatest strategic challenge" to Japan's security — a descriptor that was first adopted in 2022 in revised National Security Strategy documents. This demands a response rooted in "comprehensive national power", the Defence Ministry said in its White Paper, which has been chronicling security developments yearly since 1976.

The release of the 538-page document comes days after cannon-equipped Chinese Coast Guard ships again entered Japanese waters near the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu islets on July 9.

That same day, a Chinese JH-7 fighter-bomber flew within 30m — roughly the length of a basketball court — of a YS-II Japanese intelligence-gathering aircraft over the East China Sea. The following day, a JH-7 again came close to a YS-II plane, this time within 60m.

Japan's Defence Ministry released photographs that show that the JH-7 might have been equipped with air-to-air missiles, and stressed that such "abnormal" encounters carry a significant risk of accidental aerial collisions.

Beijing retorted that its actions were legitimate and, instead, criticised Japan for entering China's air defence identification zone (ADIZ). China in 2013 unilaterally declared an ADIZ that encompasses overlapping areas with Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

These incidents come just a month after China's unprecedented simultaneous deployment of two aircraft carriers in the Western Pacific, accompanied by Chinese J-15 fighter jets' "unusually close" encounters with Japanese P-3C patrol planes.