China’s Senkaku Incursions Are Flying under US Radar

Excerpt

When Chinese J-15 jets locked targeting radar on Japanese aircraft near southern Okinawan islands late last year, it should have been front-page news. Instead, China’s behavior passed almost unnoticed. A similar incident in which the Japanese Coast Guard intercepted two Chinese Coast Guard vessels occurred earlier this month, prompting scant commentary in Washington. The US national security apparatus had its eyes where they usually are: the Taiwan Strait, with an occasional glance toward the Philippines. While there is certainly a risk of Chinese bad behavior in both places, America cannot afford to ignore China’s mounting pressure campaign against Japan in the East China Sea.

The Senkaku Islands have been administered by Japan since 1895 as part of its Okinawa Prefecture, but China claims historical sovereignty based solely on ancient texts, rather than any modern history. The contest here is not really about a cluster of uninhabited islands, but what they confer—a 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ), rights to the continental shelf, and the natural resources that lie beneath.

Tokyo argues that the maritime boundary should be established by a median line between the two countries. Beijing, of course, rejects their approach and claims a continental shelf stretching to the Okinawa Trough—almost to Japan’s shore. In 2008, the two governments reached a consensus on the joint development of the seabed, but a deal was never finalized, and China has drilled on its own ever since, adding platform after platform near the contested median line. But this behavior is not merely “first-come-first-served”; China is pilfering natural gas from fields that straddle the boundary, and the rigs it has established double as forward-deployed militarized nodes, complete with military-grade surface radars and surveillance equipment that monitor Japanese forces.

The United States administered the Senkakus after World War II and returned them, along with Okinawa, to Japan in 1972. When Tokyo nationalized three of the islands in 2012, Beijing seized the moment to launch a Coast Guard presence that has never been withdrawn. American policy is consistent: the United States takes no position on sovereignty but recognizes Japan’s administration of the islands, meaning that Article 5 of the US-Japan mutual defense treaty, which states that an armed attack on Japanese territory will be treated as an armed attack on both nations, applies. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth reaffirmed exactly that in early 2025.

RADM (Ret.) Mark Montgomery is a senior fellow and the senior director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation (CCTI) at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Follow Mark on X: @MarkCMontgomery. Johanna (Jo) Yang is a policy analyst at the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where she works on issues related to nation-state cyber threats, allied cybersecurity posture, critical infrastructure protection, and US cyber and national security policy. Follow Jo on X: @JohannaYang.