Simmering Storm in the East China Sea: Shifting Dynamics in the Great Power Rivalries of East Asia
| Published date | 01 September 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/23477970241261424 |
| Author | Ra Mason,Soul Park |
| Date | 01 September 2024 |
Research Article
Simmering Storm in the
East China Sea: Shifting
Dynamics in the Great
Power Rivalries of
East Asia
Ra Mason1 and Soul Park1
Abstract
The East China Sea (ECS) is one of the region’s most significant and oft-times
under-addressed potential flashpoints. In this article we take a holistic approach
and reexamine the recent actions of East Asia’s two most significant powers, China
and Japan, in relation to this important body of maritime space, as well as those
of the United States (US), as the incumbent regional hegemon. Specifically, we
examine the efficacy of each. This highlights a dynamism in Chinese actions, as
well as elucidating how the US and Japan have come to adopt policies that are of
dubious efficacy as a means of alleviating or nullifying the escalation of unwanted
tensions across the ECS. In so doing, we draw upon two key concepts, immobilism
and confirmation bias, that help us to understand why the US and Japan are failing
to achieve their assumed objectives of regional stability and the maintenance of the
status quo. Ultimately, we argue that a combination of immobilism and confirmation
bias in American and Japanese foreign policy, in response to the greater dynamism
and adaptability of regional great powers such as China, has led to latent changes
in the status quo that risk undermining stability across the ECS.
Keywords
Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, East China Sea, Sino-Japanese relations, US foreign
policy, immobilism, confirmation bias
Introduction
Stretching between the growing maritime power of the People’s Republic of
China (PRC) to the west and Okinawa as the United States (US)–Japan Security
1 School of Politics, Philosophy, Language & Communication Studies, University of East Anglia,
Norfolk, United Kingdom
Corresponding author:
Soul Park, School of Politics, Philosophy, Language & Communication Studies, University of East
Anglia, Norfolk NR4 7JT, United Kingdom.
E-mail: Soul.Park@uea.ac.uk
Journal of Asian Security
and International Affairs
11(3) 320–344, 2024
© The Author(s) 2024
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/23477970241261424
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Mason and Park 321
Alliance’s keystone in the ‘First Island Chain’ to the east, the East China Sea
(ECS) contains the ingredients for a perfect storm. The ongoing territorial dispute
between Japan and China, as East Asia’s two most significant powers, continues
to escalate with the latter—however legitimately or contentiously (Sato, 2017;
Sato & Chadha, 2022)—engaging in a record-setting number of activities in the
ECS this past year (Takahashi, 2024). Yet, despite growing tensions in the region,
amid a broader international scene that has now witnessed the outbreak of two
interstate conflicts, the ECS has received comparatively little concerted scholarly
attention from leading academics and policymakers. Moreover, the existing
literature on its most likely flashpoint, the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands dispute, is
mostly either focused on domestic aspects of this territorial dispute or largely
examined purely in terms of the material balance of power between the competing
sides (e.g., Burcu, 2023; Cho & Choi, 2016; Cooper, 2018; Downs & Saunders,
1999; Duan, 2019; Lim, 2022; Zhai, 2021a).
In our article, we take a more holistic approach and examine the recent actions
of China and Japan as well as the role of the US as the regional hegemon together.
Specifically, we ask the following two-part research question: How have each of
the three key stakeholders—China, Japan and the US—attempted to further their
respective national interests in relation to the ECS? Moreover, why have the US
and Japan come to adopt policies that no longer seem effective or sustainable in
alleviating or nullifying the escalation of unwanted tensions across the ECS?
In answering the former, we focus on the evolution of specific state strategies and
key policy implementations, while the latter is addressed through identifying
broader trends of immobilism and confirmation bias, as detailed below, within
American and Japanese policymaking circles. These serve to reveal the extent to
which, despite best efforts to coordinate coastguard and military operations,
China’s grey-zone tactics in the area continue to pose a particularly significant
challenge in these regards.
We undertake these tasks by first sketching a number of limitations to the
existing literature and then defining the two terms identified above. This highlights
how scholarship on the ECS to date has tended to under-explain or misrepresent
the significance of each of the respective policy trajectories of the key actors,
often over-assigning agency to a monolithic conception of China’s rising power,
as well as underestimating the importance of Japan in affecting the ECS’s current
geostrategic and political status quo (Jacques, 2009). With extensive use of
original foreign language sources, we then map out how China and Japan are
currently acting to change the security status quo across the ECS, with particular
emphasis on their recent policy changes and other actions in relation to the
Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands dispute. Our analysis shows how China continues to
make incremental attempts to unilaterally alter the status quo in its favour,
primarily through the use of grey-zone tactics. Indeed, closer interrogation of the
evidence suggests that these tactics and the issues that they raise have in many
ways become of greater significance than those of the respective conventional
armed forces. At the same time, it reveals how Japan struggles to manage
discrepancies between domestic law enforcement and its heavily circumscribed
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