On Aug. 26, with an exceptionally large typhoon approaching Japan, Tokyo was facing a political storm: the first violation of Japanese territorial airspace by a Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force spy plane near Kyushu, one of Japan’s four major islands.
The incursion contrasts two precedents set in 2012 and 2017 by Chinese maritime law enforcement aircraft, one by a fixed wing plane and the other by an uncrewed aerial vehicle.
They intruded the territorial airspace of the Senkaku Islands (釣魚台, known in Taiwan and China as the Diaoyutais), far away from Kyushu. Beijing has territorial claims to the islands (as does Taiwan), although they are hardly tenable under international law.
The incursions then conveyed Beijing’s strong political messages of a policy shift and the reinforcement of an anti-Japan approach.
The political motive in the most recent incident remains unknown.
Under international law, an aircraft can be intercepted immediately when it enters another country’s territorial airspace. This is contrasted to the right of innocent passage for surface combatant vessels under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. The difference between the two is that the moving velocity of vehicles determines the feasibility level of interception or neutralization.
There are five possibilities for last month’s incursion.
The first was that it was a mistake, as the aircraft flew on for just two minutes.
Moreover, a Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson said that the government had no intention to violate Japanese territorial airspace, an unusually timid response from Beijing.
However, given the warnings issued prior to the incursion from two Japanese Air Self-Defense Force scramble fighter jets, the incident was surely not a mistake, but a deliberate act.
Most likely, the incursion was aimed at testing Japan’s and the US’ air defense systems through signal intelligence, with a focus on collecting information on radio waves emitted from ground-based radars.
Moreover, the incursion was possibly an attempt to peep into Japan-US air defense coordination, particularly because Kyushu’s Sasebo is home to two of the countries’ major naval bases.
That possibility is reinforced by an incursion into territorial waters near Kyushu on Aug. 31, just five days after the air incident, by a Chinese naval survey vessel.
The second possibility is that the incursion aimed to test Tokyo’s will for defense posture.
That is because Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida had already announced he would step down, making his administration a lame duck.
A democracy is vulnerable during power transitions as the government is unable to make swift and resolute decisions.
Yet, it remains to be seen who underestimated Tokyo to pursue the incursion — the civilian or military leaders.
The third possibility is that the incursion was designed to test Washington’s military response after US President Joe Biden withdrew from the US presidential race, making his administration a semi-lame duck.
It might make sense that Chinese civilian and military leaders are more interested in the military preparedness of US forces in Japan than that of the Japan Self-Defense Forces.
That viewpoint is reinforced by a formation of two Chinese and two Russian bombers that jointly flew through the US air defense identification zone off Alaska in the middle of last month to test the US and other allies.
The fourth possibility is that the incursion aimed to check Tokyo’s and Brussels’ shift toward a “global NATO” against China, as the intrusion came amid visits to Japan by the Italian Minister of Defense, along with the Italian aircraft carrier Cavour and another Italian naval vessel.
That incursion also came in the context of the joint development of next-generation fighter jets among Japan, the UK and Italy. Beijing’s civilian and military leaders surely had growing concerns about the circumstances.
The fifth possibility is that top field-level military leaders — neither the Chinese Communist Party nor the military leadership — would obstruct a policy shift by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) after the National People’s Congress session in March adopted a soft-line approach that emphasizes the importance of international trade and foreign direct investment.
Xi needs to cope with rapidly aggravating domestic economic difficulties amid a serious asset bubble burst.
Until recently, Xi had followed a strong hard-line approach. featuring aggressive arms buildups and the so-called “wolf warrior diplomacy.”
That involves frequent and extensive saber rattling across the first island chain, including Taiwan, the Senkaku Islands and atolls in the South China Sea. Such an internal division and an inside-out approach is a good possibility.
It is premature to determine which possibility among the five is most cogent.
Yet, amid the deepening Chinese economic crisis that questions Xi’s policy failures, his political power appears to have presented a relative decline since the third plenary session of the 20th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party in mid-July and the subsequent Beidaihe Conference, or the informal “Summer Summit” of top communist leaders including retired, but influential party members.
As a result, the fifth possibility is significant, especially because it could operate together with the second, third and fourth possibility.
In any case, the incursion this time poses serious uncertainty and risks for Japan’s national defense, requiring Tokyo to rethink its defense strategy that has put a primary focus on a Taiwan contingency. Tokyo needs to prepare for two or multiple concurrent fronts. Consequently, that means Taipei has to be more self-reliant for national defense with less indirect military assistance from Tokyo through the Japan-US alliance.
Masahiro Matsumura is a professor of international politics and national security in the faculty of law at Saint Andrew’s University in Osaka and a Taiwan fellow at the Taiwan Center for Security Studies in Taipei.
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