China’s military is building a large military base on islands about 300km from an islet chain at the center of a territorial row with Japan — that is also claimed by Taiwan — Kyodo News reported yesterday, citing unidentified Chinese sources.
The base on the Nanji Islands in Zhejiang Province is designed to enhance China’s readiness to respond to a potential military crisis and strengthen surveillance over an air defense identification zone it declared in the area in November last year, the news agency said.
Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga declined to comment on the report.
The dispute over the Diaoyutai Islands (釣魚台) — known as the Senkakus in Japan — clouds ties that remain fractious even after Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) met Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Beijing last month.
Encounters between Chinese and Japanese ships and planes have raised the potential for a confrontation.
Several landing strips have been paved on the main Nanji Island, Kyodo reported. The islands are about 100km closer to the disputed territory than the main island of Okinawa, which hosts about three-quarters of the US bases in Japan.
Li Jie (李傑), a senior researcher at the Chinese Naval Research Institute, said that China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) already has a military presence and a radar system on the islands.
“It’s a strategically important location because of its proximity to the Diaoyu[tai] Islands, it can provide support to the East China Sea air defense zone and it’s a major naval point on the Chinese coastal defense lines,” Li said. “It’s unarguable that China would like to enhance the existing military presence there.”
Suga told reporters in Tokyo yesterday that his government was analyzing the information it had on the Chinese military.
“China has rapidly increased its activities in surrounding waters and airspace, and we will continue to watch these movements,” Suga said.
Xu Guangyu (徐光宇), a retired PLA major general and senior adviser at a Beijing-based research group the China Arms Control and Disarmament Association, said it was “absolutely normal” for the Chinese military to maintain or upgrade its facilities on the Nanji Islands.
“China has military bases in several strategically important coastal islands and the Nanji is one of them. The Japanese media is only singling out the Nanji and making a big fuss, this can be misleading,” Xu said.
In April, Japan began construction of a surveillance center on Yonaguni in the Ryukyu Islands to monitor activity around the disputed islands.
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