By J. Michael Cole
The East China Sea has already seen a number of surprises in 2014.
No sooner had we bid farewell to a year of rising tensions in the East China Sea than 2014 was bringing us more action over the islets at the center of the dispute — only this time, things got a little strange.
We begin with news that the controversial Air-Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) extension declared by Beijing on Nov. 23—which people who worry about such things worried would increase the likelihood of war with Japan—was actually declared … in 2010.
According to a Mainichi Shimbun report on Jan. 2, senior officers from the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) informed their Japanese counterparts — in secret, mind you — during a conference in May 2010 that China had already set up an ADIZ that incorporated the islands, but had yet to make the announcement public.
The Mainichi, which got a hold of the secret minutes taken at a meeting of Japanese government officials and PLA staff at the China Foundation for International and Strategic Studies in Beijing, writes that the zone was almost identical to that described in the November 2013 bombshell.
Perhaps the Hu Jintao regime at the time didn’t feel confident enough it could declare the ADIZ and get away with it, or felt that it lacked the means to enforce it once it was announced. But that was then, and this is now. A much more self-confident Xi Jinping is now in office, and China is a lot less reluctant to flex its muscles than it was back then. Or perhaps the PLA has a stronger voice today and prevailed upon the civilian leadership, as there indeed are signs that perhaps not everybody in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was on the same page on the issue.
Read the full story at The Diplomat