Manila, Tokyo unleash verbal broadsides at Beijing over recent aggression

SEOUL, South Korea — Two key U.S. allies in Asia are escalating their complaints over China’s behavior in the neighborhood.

In separate briefings Tuesday, the Philippines called China the “biggest disrupter of peace” in the region, while Japan lambasted Beijing as “a threat to our safety.” The comments come in the wake of maritime clashes in waters west of the Philippines and the first-ever breach of Japan’s sovereign air space by a Chinese military aircraft Monday.

The protests are emblematic of strong concerns among democratic capitals in the Indo-Pacific about Chinese aggressive territorial claims in and over the South China and East China seas. Those concerns have proven a boon for the Biden administration as it seeks to build a united front against China in the Western Pacific.

But the complaints do not alter some fundamental economic realities: China’s strong trade and investment linkages with Southeast Asia may offset the diplomatic and media flak it is taking for its various territorial disputes.

Speaking on the sidelines of a conference at Indo-Pacific Command in Hawaii, Philippine Defense Minister Gilberto Teodoro called China “the biggest disrupter of international peace in the ASEAN region,” a reference to the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

He spoke a day after two Philippine Coast Guard vessels had called off a resupply mission to a disputed post in the Spratly Islands in the face of a reported 40 Chinese vessels. According to the Philippine Coast Guard, the Chinese force include six warships.

“We need a collective consensus and a strong call out against China,” Mr. Teodoro said. “We are struggling against a more powerful adversary.”

The U.S. Embassy in Manila has consistently criticized Chinese behavior in the bilateral clash and U.S. warships have conducted “freedom of navigation operations” off Chinese air-sea bases in the South China Sea as a way to contest Beijing’s claims to control a broad swath of the South China Sea, one of the world’s most strategic and heavily trafficked waterways.

Some Philippine commentators have expressed frustration that fellow members of ASEAN are reluctant to raise their voices against China in the dispute.

But ASEAN, a 10-nation grouping of disparate regional states, is largely based around trade and economic ties; indeed, several ASEAN states themselves have frontier disputes with fellow ASEAN members. The grouping does not have any corresponding security framework, and many ASEAN nations are strongly tied to China’s massive markets.

In 2023, trade volumes between China and ASEAN, reached $911.7 billion, making them each other’s largest trade partners for four consecutive years. China is also a major investor in the region, via its Belt and Road Initiative an infrastructure-building movement. Belt and Road projects in the region include a recently completed port in Cambodia that some fear serves as a de facto Chinese naval base.

In Japan, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi, the top government spokesman, condemned in a news conference what he called an “unprecedented” intrusion Monday, when a Chinese Y-9 spy plane briefly breached Japanese airspace between 11:29 a.m. and 11:31 a.m. In response, Japan scrambled fighter jets near the uninhabited Danjo Islands southwest of Nagasaki.

“The violation of our country’s airspace by Chinese military aircraft is not only a serious violation of our country’s sovereignty, but also a threat to our safety, and we consider it utterly unacceptable,” Mr. Hayashi said.

Some military analysts say the probes on the edges of sovereign air space are designed to test an adversary’s airborne reaction times, but according to Tokyo media, no such intrusion into uncontested sovereign Japanese air space by a Chinese aircraft had previously been recorded. Under international law, a state has sovereignty above its physical land and maritime territories, with that space extending 12 nautical miles from its coastline.

Mr. Hayashi declined to speculate on Beijing’s motives, but did mention Tokyo’s concerns at regional Chinese military activities.

“Although we refrain from giving a definitive answer as to the intent and purpose of the Chinese military aircraft’s actions, its military activities in recent years near Japan have tended to grow and are becoming increasingly active,” he said, saying the Japanese government was still trying to verify details of the incident.

In July, a Japanese destroyer intruded into Chinese territorial waters in what appears to have been a navigational error.

China disputes a range of maritime territories — islands, islets and shoals — with the Philippines and Japan in, respectively, the South China and East China seas. At stake are not simply territorial ownership rights, but fishery and underwater resources, as well as the control of key waterways.

Some of the contested territories in the South China Sea are inhabited by communities of fishermen. More ominously, they are increasingly being garrisoned by troops emplaced on outposts by claimants including not only China, which maintains the largest presence on artificially built-up islands, but also the Philippines and Vietnam.

All sides so far have managed to keep confrontations inside the military “gray zone,” below the threshold of armed conflict. Even so, the risk of sudden escalation is clearly on the rise — escalation which could compel Manila or Tokyo to call on their separate mutual defense treaties with the U.S., potentially dragging Washington into a direct struggle against Beijing.

At sea, the disputes are playing out largely between the coast guard forces of all sides, backed by naval forces, and with the intervention of “Maritime Militia” — centrally commanded Chinese fishing fleets. In the skies, the disputes take the form of patrols that fly close to — but usually do not intrude into — sovereign air space. Recently in the Philippines, Chinese tactics have included alleged flare drops in the path of Philippine aircraft.