AMAC Exclusive – By Ben Solis
On January 8, the Chinese military announced two days of live-fire drills off the coast of Ningbo and Zhoushan in the East China Sea – just a few miles away from Japanese territory and a U.S. military installation on Mageshima Island – in Beijing’ latest act of aggression. But President Joe Biden appears to have been lulled into a false sense of security that shows no sign of abating following recent conversations with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
While the Chinese government called the drills part of a “routine” military exercise, their proximity to important Japanese and American assets cannot be ignored. Japanese leaders have also warned of escalating hostility from Beijing in recent months.
Tensions have been particularly hot over the Senkaku Islands, an uninhabited but strategically important group of islands located northeast of Taiwan which are claimed by both China and Japan.
According to a report from Sankei Shimbun, a conservative Japanese daily newspaper, Xi indicated his intention to take control of the Senkaku Islands during a rare trip to Shanghai’s Chinese Coast Guard Command Office last November.
“We will never let even 1 millimeter of our territory be taken,” Xi reportedly said, reiterating the motto of his presidency: “Make steps only forward” (a dictum taken from Mao). Xi also demanded that China’s Coast Guard inspect Japanese fishing boats, provocative behavior that will further sour bilateral relations.
Xi’s comments set off “red lights flashing in the Tokyo headquarters of Japan’s government,” according to Sankei Shimbun – particularly as 2023 marked a new record in the number of times Chinese Coast Guard ships entered the disputed Senkaku waters.
Many Japanese leaders believe that Xi’s hostile intentions toward the Senkaku Islands are part of a broader effort to isolate Taiwan and deprive Japan of a location from which to stage a rapid deployment of forces in the event of a Chinese invasion.
A blockade of the waters around Senkaku under the pretense of a sovereignty dispute would also allow China to regularly sail between the remote Yonaguni and Iriomote Islands in Japan’s Okinawa Prefecture, where major U.S. and Japanese air bases are located.
On December 29, just over a month after his reported comments on the Senkaku Islands, Xi also urged Chinese diplomats and ambassadors gathered in Beijing to think of themselves as a “diplomatic iron army… with an attitude of readiness to fight and a firm will to defy strong powers.”
As Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov, a renowned Chechen historian of the Soviet Union, wrote in his book The Origins of Partocracy, the term “diplomatic iron army” is one coined by Mikhail Suslov, a Soviet Politburo member during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras.
Meanwhile, the Chinese military has also ramped up its incursions into Taiwanese waters and airspace. In total, China deployed more than 1,700 military planes around Taiwan in 2023 – a dramatic spike from 972 in 2021 and just 380 in 2020. Additionally, 61 Chinese missiles landed in the Taiwan Strait or surrounding Taiwanese waters last year.
But despite clear signs of mounting aggression from Beijing, President Biden has seemed placated by Xi Jinping’s proclamations of peace.
On January 1, Xi and Biden exchanged pleasantries commemorating the 45th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic ties between the United States and the communist country. In a statement the following day, a spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry characterized the U.S.-China relationship as “consistent and clear” and defined by “mutual respect, peaceful coexistence, and win-win cooperation.”
“Enormous confidence is beaming from this statement,” retired Lieutenant Colonel Dr. Hiroto Watanabe, a former Japanese military intelligence official, told me, adding that Xi has “accelerated the destabilization of the region in the last three years and ambushed Hong Kong, but his focus is on Taiwan.”
The Biden administration has seemed to back down from its hostile rhetoric toward Beijing following meetings between Biden and Xi in San Francisco last November. In a readout of that meeting, the White House noted that the two leaders had agreed to work together to combat “climate change” and resume “high-level military-to-military communication.”
The apparently warm feelings emerging between Biden and Xi are of great alarm to U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific witnessing China’s aggression first-hand. A Pew Research poll from December found that 76 percent of Japanese citizens view China’s power and influence as a major threat, along with 66 percent of people in Taiwan and 64 percent in South Korea.
Another former Japanese military officer, retired Vice Admiral Fumio Ota, told me that Biden, as opposed to former President Donald Trump, had wholly abandoned a “maximum pressure policy” when it comes to China. Several South Korean officials with whom I spoke also said that they were troubled by Biden’s optimism about China, further saying that Biden should direct the U.S. military to drill as much as China as a matter of deterrence.
But even as America’s allies are raising the alarm, Biden appears content to believe Xi’s assurances of peace over hard evidence of looming conflict.
Ben Solis is the pen name of an international affairs journalist, historian, and researcher.
