Japan cautioned against China’s rapid acceleration of military activity stretching from its southwestern coasts to the Pacific, describing the moves in a new defense report released yesterday as the biggest strategic challenge.
China’s growing military cooperation with Russia also poses serious security concerns to Japan, along with increasing tension around Taiwan and threats coming from North Korea, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in the annual report submitted to the Cabinet.
“The international society is in a new crisis era as it faces the biggest challenges since the end of World War II,” the report said, citing significant changes to the global power balance while raising concerns about an escalation of the China-US rivalry.
Photo: Japanese Ministry of Defense via AP
The security threats are concentrated in the Indo-Pacific region, where Japan is located, and could get worse in the future, it said.
Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Lin Jian (林劍) said the white paper “adopts a wrongful perception of China, unjustifiably interferes in China’s internal affairs, and plays up the so-called China threat.”
Beijing has lodged protests with Japan, Lin said, defending China’s military activities as “legitimate and reasonable.”
He urged Japan to reflect on its wartime past, and “stop hyping tension in the region and China-related issues as a pretext to justify its military buildup.”
Japan has strengthened its military forces on southwestern islands in the past few years and was preparing to deploy long-
distance cruise missiles, as it worries about a conflict in Taiwan.
The presence of Chinese warships in the Pacific has steadily increased and the frequency of their passage off southwestern Japan has tripled in the past three years, including in waters between Taiwan and the Japanese island of Yonaguni, the report said.
It comes days after Japan demanded China stop flying its fighter jets unusually close to Japanese intelligence-gathering aircraft, which it said was happening repeatedly and could cause a collision.
Beijing in turn accused Japan of flying near Chinese airspace for spying purposes.
China’s increasing dispatch of aircraft carriers in the Pacific underscores the country’s attempt to advance its sea power in distant waters, the report said.
The Japanese defense ministry also noted two cases last year in which a Chinese warplane briefly violated Japanese airspace off islands near Nagasaki, and an aircraft carrier’s entry into a zone just outside of Japan’s territorial waters southwest of the Nansei island chain, which stretches from the southern coast of Kyushu to Taiwan.
North Korea poses “an increasingly serious and imminent threat,” the report added, pointing to Pyongyang’s development of missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads and solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missiles that can reach the US mainland.
Russia maintains active military operations around Japan and violated its airspace in September, the report added.
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