Blackstone
Brigadier
For a change, I agree more than disagree with yet another China threat article from James Holmes. The portion he got right is China's ECS ADIZ is about sovereignty, and works in conjunction to China's maritime actions around Diaoyu islands. What he and history-challenged, empire building neocons like him conveniently left out is Diaoyu isles were sovereignty Chinese territory taken by Imperial Japan in 1895 through a war of aggression. US held the islands after WW2, but the Nixon administration illegally gave them to Japan in 1971 for geopolitical reasons.
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Chinese maritime strategy is a misnomer, methinks. It should be strategies, plural. China may harbor the same goals in, say, the East China Sea that it does in the South China Sea. Namely, it may aspire to wrest physical control—a.k.a. sovereignty—from its neighbors throughout a given expanse and the airspace overhead. The Chinese Communist Party’s word would become law. Others would obey.
The aggregate result, should these strategies work: de facto sovereignty for China within Asia’s first offshore island chain, backed up by the armed might of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
But Beijing is treading disparate pathways toward that end. Indeed, its approach in the East China Sea is a geospatial inverse of its approach in the South China Sea. Exhibit A: last month Chinese air-traffic controllers warned the crew of a U.S. Air Force B-1B bomber that the aircraft had entered “Chinese airspace” and should begone forthwith. In reality, the bomber was transiting China’s air-defense identification zone (ADIZ), declared to great fanfare back in 2013.
Coastal states commonly erect such zones to monitor air traffic heading toward their shores, but China’s ADIZ represents a thinly veiled grab for sovereignty over the airways. It’s an airborne counterpart to the “nine-dashed line” inscribed on China’s map of the South China Sea. Beijing claims the right to regulate not just flights bound for China, but any aircraft transiting the zone—even if well out to sea and parallel to the mainland coastline. It claims to regulate overflight over geographic features administered by other Asian governments, notably the Japan-administered Senkaku Islands.
And party spokesmen have taken to blurring the language they deploy to describe the ADIZ. They increasingly refer to it as territorial airspace, where foreign aircraft may pass only if they desist from all military activities. That’s entirely fitting in the airspace over China’s territorial sea, which extends twelve nautical miles offshore. Beyond the twelve-mile limit, however, no coastal state has the right to dictate what aircrews may or may not do. That’s the avian commons, a domain where virtually untrammeled freedom prevails.
The Obama administration and friendly governments thus rejected Beijing’s ADIZ unequivocally, and for good reason. China has a way of using wordplay to redefine and expand its political and strategic prerogatives. Defenders of the commons must debunk attempted sleights of hand early and often. The Trump administration appears set to embrace the same approach as its predecessor. The U.S. Air Force aviators reminded the air-traffic controllers that they were conducting lawful operations in international airspace, seventy miles offshore. They refused to deviate from their flight path.
Good. Assent to China’s demands for the sake of comity, and creeping encroachment will proceed on the surface beneath. If airspace belongs to China, so must the sea and land below. QED. Rebuff China’s demands aloft, and it will have a hard time redefining its ADIZ as national territory. The sea below will remain a commons as well.
As noted before, China’s South China Sea strategy is an upside-down cousin to its East China Sea strategy: Beijing started by claiming the sea and its archipelagos, and projected its supposed jurisdiction skyward. If the sea is part of Greater China, goes the logic, then so is the wild blue yonder above. That’s why party officialdom uses the language of “innocent passage” for the South China Sea commons. It insists that foreign ships and aircraft forswear all military activities there—the way they must within coastal states’ territorial waters.
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