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China Creates Air Defence Zone Over Japan-Controlled Islands, Issues War Threat
cold fjord writes "France24 reports, "Beijing on Saturday announced it was setting up an 'air defence identification zone' over an area that includes islands controlled by Japan but claimed by China, in a move that could inflame the bitter territorial row. Along with the creation of the zone in the East China Sea, the defence ministry released a set of aircraft identification rules that must be followed by all planes entering the area, under penalty of intervention by the military. Aircraft are expected to provide their flight plan, clearly mark their nationality, and maintain two-way radio communication allowing them to 'respond in a timely and accurate manner to the identification inquiries' from Chinese authorities. The outline of the new zone ... covers a wide area of the East China Sea between South Korea and Taiwan that includes the Tokyo-controlled islands known as the Senkakus to Japan and Diaoyous to China. "China's armed forces will adopt defensive emergency measures to respond to aircraft that do not cooperate in the identification or refuse to follow the instructions," according to the ministry. ' The Politico adds, "Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said Saturday the United States is 'deeply concerned'" over the move. Spiegel Online has background on the conflict with Japan and on related regional issues. This announcement follows the recent publication in Chinese state media of maps showing nuclear strike plans against the U.S."
They don't care about the islands, they care about the water around them. They are abundant in fish and oil/natural gas.
SJWs are the new boogeyman. -Me
It's far more than symbolic. Controlling the islands grants access to the large Economic Exclusion Zone around them and the fishing fields, oil/gas resources and any other natural resources..
It's more than purely symbolic. There are extensive undeveloped natural resources in the area which the Chinese would like to control. The islands also lie at a strategic location between the Pacific and the East China Sea, and just north of Taiwan. If the Japanese, Americans and Taiwanese do nothing to abate this, the Chinese will be emboldened to act more aggressively in the area.
Yup. This isn't about the land, this is about the sea around it.
China is a 3rd world country wholly dependent economically on the US...China's economy is only as good as the 'Full faith and credit' of the US Bond's it is based on.
That's about 20 years out of date.
Maybe the war has already been fought and won.
That's how Sun Tzu says to do things. The victorious warrior wins first and then goes to war, while the defeated warrior goes to war first and then seeks to win.
Maybe, maybe not.
US, Japan agree to revise mutual defense treaty for first time in 16 years
Is the U.S. Committed to Defend the Senkakus? Text of Article 5 of the U.S.-Japan Treaty
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Hell, we can fix this in one jiffy.
A bunch of bottom trawlers to wipe out the fauna.
Haliburton and friends to set up some side drilling rigs at the periphery of the military zone and make some very long straws.
Then all you have is some stinking desert.
The free market wins again. No need for the military folk.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Actually it was never correct. China is in fact a second-world country.
Not just this area, China is claiming all the ocean down to the Philippines. China has driven several of the SE Asian countries closer to the U.S. Even Vietnam wants to cuddle closer to the U.S.
Yes and no. Vietnam cuddled up to the U.S., not the other way around. They felt threatened by China. Can you imagine that?
The Philippines told the U.S. to go suck eggs years ago when they closed the U.S. bases. Then the Muslims in the south got armed and pissed, the Philippines decided a bit of military training with U.S. advisers would be acceptable. But China next decided they owned the entire S. China Sea right down the Philippines. The Philippine government then more or less said, "bases, shmases, let's be buddies again like the good old days when you booted out the Japanese."
China brought increased U.S. involvement in SE Asia on themselves.
War never changes.
Nonsense. What struck people at the time about WWI is that, rather than having to kill people onesy-twosey, it could now be done on an industrial scale. Twenty some years later, we developed a weapon that could destroy a modest size city with a single bomb. Later we developed the "super" (as Teller originally called it) and ICBM's, so we could wipe out a substantial portion of the human race within an hour (thus saving on overtime costs if we decided to play global thermonuclear war). Technology marches on.
Amusingly, in a dispute between US fisherman and the Canadian government, lawyers once successfully argued that scallops are not "sedentary species"
Most species of scallops are not sedentary - they swim around. Just because they're bivalve mollusks doesn't mean they live the same way as clams and oysters.
USA loves this "continental shelf" extension past the old 200 mile limit for claiming petroleum resources in the Gulf of Mexico.
Those bullying Yanks - imagine trying to use a provision in the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, just like other countries do.
Who modded this tripe up.
All that fnj has shown is that he has no idea how WW 1 or 2 started. The build up of armies and materials began years before the Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated. Everyone knew war was inevitable, it was only a question of when. It didn't pop up all of a sudden in 1914.
Same with WW2, German military build up and aggressive foreign policy had started 5 years before 1939, if we're only counting German military expansion it was closer to 10. Again, this was no surprise. Remember that it was England and her allies who declared war on Germany.
You really want to check that one.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
There was a war between the two in 1979 regarding Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge (Communist government of Cambodia) made the mistake of attacking battle hardened Vietnam, and the Vietnamese responded by invading and taking over Cambodia. Cambodia's communist government was supported by China, and tacitly by the USA, so China decided to teach Vietnam a lesson for interfering. One positive byproduct of the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia was to stop the genocide of counter-revolutionaries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
You REALLY don't understand atomic weapons. REALLY don't.
If there is a major nuclear exchange between major powers, we won't have global warming, we'll have an instant ice age. Expect 90% casualties among all living humans. (Details, naturally, vary, but none of the scenarios are nice.)
Now if there were a minor war, say between India and Afghanistan, and they refrained from using nuclear weapons on cities, we might only get several degrees of cooling for a decade or so. (This is based on weaponry estimates over a decade old, however, and they were ESTIMATES.) In that scenario the countries north of the equator would be spared most of the cataclysmic results. (Note: most, not all.) If, however, cities were burned, then the projections are several times worse, and widespread recovery of the glaciers is likely in the south within two years, and in the north within the decade.
The reason for this is that nuclear explosions lift soot into the stratosphere, above the level at which rain clouds form, so it takes decades to centuries to settle out. And at that height it acts to cool the Earth. Because of wind currents, the particles tend to remain either north or south of the equator, but over a period of a decade or so will spread out more evenly.
OTOH, this *would* solve the global warming problem. Just not in a very desirable or predictable way. And it wouldn't do anything to solve to acidification of the oceans. (A population crash caused by massive global crop failures, however, would act to solve that.)
And again, please note, this is for a nuclear war between countries that don't have many nuclear weapons. Which describes neither China nor the US. In that case we probably wouldn't see a re-enactment of "On the Beach", but something not too different, only featuring starvation and glaciers is reasonable. (Radiation poisoning is highly over-rated as a quick kill. It takes far too high a dose to be likely even in a maximal exchange. [I'm not counting, here, the induced cancers that show up 15 or more years later.] One should, however, expect the average lifespans of the survivors of a nuclear war, and their descendents for the next three generations, to be around 20 years, due to increased induced cancer, though this would drop off as the more radioactive elements burned out.)
We AREN'T going to invade China, and they aren't going to invade the US. Not unless someone with launch authority really wigs out. (This would be more comforting if we hadn't already had several close escapes. The report is we were once within 30 seconds of the US launching on Russia.)
P.S.: It's still true that only an idiot would get the US into a land war in Asia. This would be more comforting if there weren't so many idiots in positions of power.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Most of the factory workers I read are from the rural areas. They send money back to their villages each paycheck.
Yes, many factory workers are from rural areas. But they do NOT have the same civil rights as "urban" class people. In China, you are assigned a class at birth. This class does NOT depend on where you are born. It is hereditary: you inherit your class from your father. So if your father had a "rural" hukou, then so do you. Even if your family has lived in Shanghai or Beijing for two generations, you will have NO right to attend public school, NO right to medical treatment, and NO right to complain to the courts if the cops beat the crap out of you because you are sleeping on the street since you have NO right to live in many housing districts.
When you consider the number of people affected, the Hokou system is probably the biggest violations of basic human rights in the world today. Yet you hear very little of it in the Western press. The reason for this is that 99% of Chinese that emigrate to the West have urban hukous, and their families benefit from the current system.