China is holding military drills across the East and South China Seas that may further disrupt domestic air travel and add to tensions with neighbors over regional territorial disputes.
China is to begin five days of drills in the East China Sea tomorrow, the Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said on its Web site. Those exercises come while China is holding live-fire drills off Beibu Bay, or the Gulf of Tonkin, near Vietnam and drills in the Bohai Strait that both are to end on Friday.
While the scale of the drills is bigger than in the past, it is a coincidence the annual exercises are being held at the same time, the Beijing News reported yesterday, citing Zhang Junshe (張軍社), a researcher at China’s Navy Military Research Institute.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) has been expanding the reach of China’s navy and using the added muscle to more aggressively assert territorial claims in the region. Chinese and Japanese ships regularly tail one another off disputed islands in the East China Sea, while deadly anti-Chinese riots broke out in Vietnam in May after China set up an oil rig in waters also claimed by that country. The Philippines has sought UN arbitration in its maritime spat with China.
China claims much of the South China Sea, which may be rich in energy and mineral deposits, under its “nine dash-line” map first published in 1947, which extends hundreds of kilometers south from its Hainan Island to equatorial waters off the coast of Borneo, taking in some of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.
In the East China Sea, Taiwan, Japan and China lay claim to the chain of uninhabited Diaoyutai Islands (釣魚台) known as the Senkaku Islands in Japan and the Diaoyu Archipelago (釣魚群島) in China. The US has said it will come to Japan’s defense in any clash over the islands.
With the current drills, “what’s different from the past is that China is doing it in a more high-profile way, which does make China appear to be raising military tensions,” said Suh Jin-young, a professor emeritus of Chinese politics at Seoul’s Korea University. “But in Chinese eyes, the tensions were begun by the US and Japan, and China thinks it’s only conducting what it has been doing annually.”
The current military activity is having repercussions in China. China Southern Airlines said yesterday that its flights in the eastern part of the country might experience large-scale delays because of “special activities.” Airlines last week were ordered to cut a quarter of their flights at a dozen airports, including two in Shanghai, because of “high frequency exercises,” state media reported on Tuesday.
That order was issued a week after the People’s Liberation Army began three months of live-fire drills in six regional military commands, including the one that oversees Shanghai, the Xinhua news agency reported. Some training sessions would be conducted under a “complex electromagnetic environment,” the report said.
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